Melville's debt to Milton: Inverted satanic morphology and rhetoric in the confidence-man

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003 by Urbanczyk, Aaron

Milton, perhaps inadvertently, insinuates rhetoric is intrinsically diabolical and infernal, a notion very congenial to the pessimistic author of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The serpent claims his powers of reason, speech, and persuasion were a result of partaking freely of what God had expressly forbidden (i.e. the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge). The serpent tells Eve that after he ate the fruit he perceived

Strange alteration in me, to degree

Of Reason in my inward Powers, and Speech

Wanted not long, though to this shape retain'd.

Thenceforth to Speculations high or deep

I turn'd my thoughts, and with capacious mind

Consider'd all things visible in Heav'n,

Or Earth, or Middle, all things fair and good. (9.598-605)

This inward "Power" of the spoken word is grounded in the classical understanding of rhetoric. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given situation the available means of persuasion" (1.2.26). Satan, by his powers of speech, constantly exploits all available means to attain his desired results, from both his fallen peers, his enemies (e.g. directions to earth from Uriel), and finally, his chosen victim, Eve. Throughout Paradise Lost, Satan's only victories are rhetorical, not martial, while the rhetoric employed by the emissaries of heaven is completely ineffective-in the case of Raphael's admonitions to Adam and Eve about the danger of temptation-and too late to be of any great use-the encouragement of Michael to Adam after the fall has occurred. God the Father and the Son, clearly omnipotent beings who presumably could employ powerful and persuasive rhetoric to assist Adam and Eve and confute Satan, refrain from doing so in Paradise Lost-they fail to offer any rhetorical "counter-argument" to Satan's rhetorical wiles.

Melville seemingly borrowed from Milton the insight that the primordial origin of the persuasive power of rhetoric is Satanic. In Paradise Lost, the spoken word is fecund, generative, and creative for God (he spoke and the world was created); yet it is coercive, manipulative, and destructive among angels and humans. Melville very much took this as the paradigm for constructing the social fabric of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, as it is a novel the "action" of which is exclusively conversational. From the beginning of the day until its end, the Fidele is filled with characters who are eitherduping or being duped through deceitful rhetoric. The "Confidence-Man" most resembles Satan when his rhetorical powers are at their peak. When Mark Winsome, the philosopher, and Egbert his pupil strike up a conversation with Frank Goodman (the Cosmopolitan), Winsome makes some passing remarks on the subject of the rattlesnake. Goodman, upon hearing these words from Winsome, seems to become much like the serpent described: "[The Cosmopolitan] seemed so to enter into their spirit-as some earnest descriptive speakers will-as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described" (190). Henry F. Pommer (82) has argued this description of the Cosmopolitan is taken from Paradise Lost IX, 496-525, where Milton describes the movement of the serpent (Satan):