Melville’s prose is always a sight to see, and readers used to his “spiky writerly thrill[s]” should find new excitement in The Confidence-Man on this point. I’ll take a sentence almost at random—a random one I marked, at any rate, but not marked for this purpose. A mute holds a slate on which he inscribes phrases exhorting charity, then a barber hangs a sign over his door reading “NO TRUST”:
An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than the contrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke any corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of being a simpleton.
So much hedging! “[I]n a sense,” “as it seemed,” and “to all appearances” all serve to qualify the narrator’s statement to a point approaching meaninglessness. “[N]ot less intrusive” is typical of another kind of hedging the narrator does throughout, inverting thought after thought with logical if not grammatical double negatives. The final clause takes that practice even further by phrasing matters effectively as “failing to gain ill repute”; notably, the instrument also becomes the subject of that clause, relegating what would normally be both subject and agent of the verb “gain” to indirect object status and general (but not grammatical!) passivity.
In a sense, what the narrator, or Melville, gives with one hand he takes away with the other, by and large, it would seem.
Sentences like this one are, first of all, omnipresent throughout the book, but more important they are a microcosm of the action as well, as far as it goes. The dialogues are similarly hem-and-haw, give-and-take, hedge-and-bend, convince-and-connive, underhand and slippery. The actual language of the book combines with its action to keep the ground continually shifting underneath, and submerge pretty effectively Melville’s intentions. Lots of things can still be excavated, but truly, as soon as you think you are getting somewhere, those sands will shift again.
You make really interesting points here – when I read The Confidence Man I processed this kind of hedging as just a lot of raw verbiage to get through, like I was making my way through a thicket of words, bushwhacking for the meaning. (Other Melville I’ve read has a lot of words too, but they seemed less obstructive than in Confidence Man). But yes, it’s true that the slipperiness of the language here reflects the slipperiness of the confidence man himself…intriguing!
“[B]ushwhacking for the meaning”! I love that, that’s so Melville. That’s what I’ve been doing, more or less successfully, for months. It’s great fun.