The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's the Confidence-Man and Billy Budd

The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd by Craig Stensrud Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2011 © Copyright by Craig Stensrud, 2011 DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH The undersigned hereby certify that they have read and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance a thesis entitled ―The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd‖ by Craig Stensrud in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Dated: August 31, 2011 Supervisor: _________________________________ Readers: _________________________________ _________________________________ ii DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DATE: August 31, 2011 AUTHOR: Craig Stensrud TITLE: The Dirty Work of a Telltale: Narrative Ethics in Melville's The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd DEPARTMENT OR SCHOOL: Department of English DEGREE: MA CONVOCATION: October YEAR: 2011 Permission is herewith granted to Dalhousie University to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions. I understand that my thesis will be electronically available to the public. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author’s written permission. The author attests that permission has been obtained for the use of any copyrighted material appearing in the thesis (other than the brief excerpts requiring only proper acknowledgement in scholarly writing), and that all such use is clearly acknowledged. _______________________________ Signature of Author iii For Isaac Stensrud, who came into this world, wide-eyed and bum-chinned, to reaffirm for me the primacy of our curiosity, but also to remind me that we can't let our quests get in the way of an occasional nap. iv Table of Contents Abstract...............................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgements............................................................................................................vii Chapter 1 - Introduction ......................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 - Face Values: Accountability in a Confidence Culture....................................17 Chapter 3 - Losing Human Expression: Narrative Violence in Billy Budd.......................60 Chapter 4 - Satanic Irony: The Ironic Ethics of The Confidence-Man..............................90 Chapter 5 - Best Done by Indirection: Towards a Theory of Narrative Ethics................118 Chapter 6 – Conclusion....................................................................................................145 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................149 v Abstract In Melville's final two works of fiction, The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, narration itself is presented as an ethical act. Drawing primarily on the theory of Emmanuel Levinas, this thesis explores the ethical dynamics of intersubjective narrative exchanges as they are portrayed in these novels. Both novels depict unethical exchanges in which characters attempt to narrate accounts of their interlocutors in such a way as to render the alterity of these others comprehensible. This model of narration is based on an ideological confidence in self-sufficiency that precludes ethical communication. Against this violent mode of narration, Melville's ironic narrative technique in these novels suggests a model of ethical narration that maintains the alterity of the other and appeals for communication with a plurality of other voices. vi Acknowledgements Dr. Jason Haslam was instrumental in bringing this project to completion. His mix of insightful comments, kind words of encouragement, stern lectures, and sarcastic asides struck the perfect balance to keep me pushing through the many frustrations of thesis- writing. Dr. Haslam's dedication to his students' development and success is well known, and, indeed, he always made me feel as though my project was a priority rather than a burden. Dr. Bruce Greenfield and Dr. William Barker provided valuable comments and feedback that helped to improve this thesis, and did so even as deadlines were pressing. Poor Jessica Kronlund lived with me for the duration of my time in the MA program, and somehow managed to respond to my neuroses with encouragement, faith, and love. Jessica, I promise that now—finally—we can talk about something else. Many thanks to Judy, Kirk, and Michelle Stensrud for running up their phone bills making sure that I was taking care of myself and keeping on track. Finally, many of the ideas contained in this thesis grew out of discussions with my peers from the Dalhousie English MA class of 2011. Thanks are due to these classmates for helping to make such a challenging year into one of the funnest and most rewarding of my life. vii Chapter 1 Introduction Herman Melville's final two works of fiction, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and Billy Budd, Sailor, are marked by a heightened self-reflexivity: the meta-fictional observations always present in the author's work become even more central, a culmination of the ―increasing focus on textuality‖ that Peter J. Bellis argues ―marks a subordination of thematic (external) issues to the process of [. .] representation‖ in Melville's fiction of the 1850s (13). Indeed, Melville's interrogations of the nature of narrative representation become a vehicle for his thematic explorations, embodying what Bellis describes as Melville's ―indirect but powerful response to a political and cultural impasse [ . .], a crisis of representation‖ (13). It is my contention, however, that Melville considered this ―crisis of representation‖ primarily as a crisis of communication. Kenneth Dauber offers an excellent analysis of Melville's conception of authorship, arguing that the increased focus on the difficulty of communication in his later work marks the author's own frustration about and insistence upon communicating with an increasingly indifferent readership.1 There is an on-going debate between critics who believe that Melville's work represents an ―insistence on the 'sovereignty' of the individual‖ embodied in ―uncompromisingly individualistic novels‖ (Samson 230), and those who argue that Melville's work represents ―a devastating parody of self-reliance‖ (Adamson 91) that insists that the individual's efforts to overcome what Ahab describes as a social ―moral inter-indebtedness‖ (Moby Dick qtd. in Adamson 91) will always result in Ahabian monomania. This debate points to the centrality of the tension between the 1 See Dauber (192-228). 1 rights of the individual and the needs of society in Melville's fiction.2 As I argue, however, Melville's concern with communication becomes central to his social critique, which is, at its core, an appeal for the reconsideration of intersubjective ethics. For Melville, the intersubjective encounter serves as a microcosm of social structures, but to posit the interpersonal exchange as microcosmic is not to give priority to his critiques of given forms of social organizations: on the contrary, Melville consistently judges socio-political theories on the basis of the ethics of the models of selfhood—and, by extension, intersubjectivity—that they produce. This interconnection between social ideology and conceptions of selfhood is made clear by William V. Spanos in his analysis of The Confidence-Man. Spanos offers a genealogy of ―antebellum American optimist thinking‖ that links a confidence in this assimilatory power of selfhood to the teleology of American exceptionalism by tracing the ―imperialism‖ of American thought from the Puritans' teleological view of history through to the Emersonian idealization of self-reliance (170), demonstrating the mutual dependence of American imperialist models of self- and nation-hood. Similarly, in her reading of the novel, Wai Chee Dimock argues that The Confidence-Man presents a vision of ―the hero of individualism, the imperial self‖ (182), which, she argues, is modelled on the free- market ideology of nineteenth-century American capitalism (176-214). Both critics point to the ethical failures that result from these ideology-inscribed ―imperialistic‖ models of selfhood, and their analyses have contributed to this project's vision of the inter- connectedness of ideology, social structure and intersubjectivity. Throughout this study, however, I will look to the broader philosophical context of the nineteenth-century to 2 Wai Chee Dimock offers a book-length study of the opposition between society and the individual in Empire for Liberty. See also Bellis (1-15). 2 supplement the decidedly American emphases of Spanos and Dimock's analyses. Source studies underline the eclecticism of Melville's tastes; he read widely, by no means constraining himself to the literature and philosophy of America, or of the English- speaking world, for that matter.3 Furthermore, records indicate that Melville's insatiable philosophical curiosity led him to spend hours debating and discussing philosophy with his acquaintances, conversations through which he gained some familiarity with currents in philosophy that he may not have encountered

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