Step Right Up A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy James M. Miranda May 2015 © 2015 James M. Miranda. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Step Right Up by JAMES M. MIRANDA has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Patrick O'Keeffe Assistant Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT MIRANDA, JAMES M., Ph.D., May 2015, English Step Right Up Director of Dissertation: Patrick O'Keeffe The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “The Genuine Fake: A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction” and a book manuscript titled, Step Right Up. “The Genuine Fake: A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction” presents a historiographical survey of the phenomenon of the “confidence man” in American culture and fiction. The essay positions the confidence man as a central figure in an ongoing national identity discourse. It looks to American fiction, beginning in the antebellum period and continuing up through the modern and postmodern age, as a means of deciphering certain cultural shifts in attitude with regard to authenticity and imitation. Step Right Up is composed of short stories that attempt to participate in, subvert, and distort certain elements of this discourse. The stories regularly dissect the prevailing mythos of the “self-made man” in America. Through their experimentation with voice, form, point-of-view, and language, they are fraught with cultural and individual notions of what constitutes the genuine and the artificial in the contemporary American landscape. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………3 The Genuine Fake: A Look at the Long Con of American Fiction……………………….5 Introduction……………………………………………………………………….5 The History of the Confidence Man and 19th Century American Fiction………...7 Truth, Artifice, and the Con Man in Mid- to Late-19th Century Fiction…………10 The Evolution of the Confidence Man in 20th Century American Literature……24 Step Right Up and Appealing to the Confidence of the Reader….………………53 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...69 Step Right Up…………………..………………………………………………………...71 Sobreático………………………………………………………………………..71 We Knew Horses………………………………………………………………...91 Losing Weather…………………………………………………………………107 The Shot………………………………………………………………………...126 Barium…………………………………………………………………………..146 The Healing Properties of This Place…………………………………………..157 By Sea or Breeze or Bird……………………………………………………….177 All In……………………………………………………………………………202 Razing Rice Terrace…………………………………………………………….220 Step Right Up…………………………………………………………………...245 5 THE GENUINE FAKE: A LOOK AT THE LONG CON OF AMERICAN FICTION It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible. -J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye Introduction In Saul Bellow’s afterword to J. R. “Yellow Kid” Weil’s biography Con Man: A Master Swindler’s Own Story, he quotes Weil as saying, “I was of a very fragile constitution, unfit for the heavier sort of manual labor. I knew I could not toil like other men. How was I to live? My power lay in words. In words I became a commander” (332). Weil managed to bamboozle his “marks”—mainly those of America’s upper-crust business class—out of eight million dollars over the course of his long career. Through some combination of his own unique acumen for the trade, his intuition when it came to human psychology, and sheer longevity, Weil achieved that rare paradox status of American idol: that of the “reputable criminal” or the “genuine fake.” The confidence games that he orchestrated were incredibly intricate and layered, often strung out over a long period of time, and relied heavily upon the nature of the mark’s own dubious moral character—on the notion that the victim was implicated in his/her own brand of baroque fleecing. The old maxim, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” encompasses the basis by which the confidence game operates, and in this complicated and symbiotic relationship 6 (between the con man and his mark, and the implied contract that they enter into), in America’s simultaneous fear and fascination with the phenomenon of the con man, lies a fruitful paradigm for dissecting and understanding some of the ways that American fiction has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. For the purposes of this introduction I’d first like to examine the historical rise of the confidence man phenomenon in antebellum America and the ways in which this phenomenon developed alongside class tensions and anxieties that arose in the new industrial landscape. I’ll then explore the way these anxieties may have manifested themselves, both diegetic and extra-diegetic, in some examples from mid- and late- nineteenth century fiction. Then I’d like to look at the evolution of the confidence man in the early twentieth century—specifically at how the confidence man, at one time reviled and feared, became an adaptable model for a generation (and beyond) of “self-made” men and women, and how the legacy of this model impacted the writing of fiction prior to the modern and postmodern age. The rise of and national intrigue surrounding the American confidence man—an ongoing intrigue—had a profound impact on not just the content of the literature that flourished in its wake, but also on the way that fiction writers changed previously inherited approaches to their craft, on the breadth of narrative tools at their disposal, and on writers’ attitudes toward the their own shifting culture. Finally, I’d like to place my own writing within the context of this tradition and speak briefly about how the stories in Step Right Up utilize inherited and improvised narrative approaches to gain the confidence of a reader. 7 I. The History of the Confidence Man and 19th Century American Fiction The rise of the confidence man in the United States betrayed the logical underbelly of a new economic culture on the make. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of industrialization, men and women (though mostly young men) were, for the first time, leaving their homes in rural towns and hamlets, leaving behind the families and communities that had so rooted them and their forefathers, to seek new lives and fortunes in the cities. Karen Halttunen has done extensive research on this mass migration and its impact on popular culture in her study, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870. She notes the preponderance of so-called “advice literature” that pops up around this same time: manuals penned by moral- reformers, clergy, and educators in an effort to guide these young men who would be lacking the moral and social guidance of their native communities. These included such titles as William A. Alcott’s Young Man’s Guide (1833), which went through some twenty-one editions by 1858, and Daniel Eddy’s Young Man’s Friend: containing admonitions for the erring; counsel for the tempted; encouragement for the desponding; hope for the fallen (1854)—books that sold thousands of copies. As Halttunen notes, “Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece. The seducer—whether rake or pimp, gambler or thief— begins his assault on the innocent youth by winning his confidence through an offer of friendship and entertainment” (2). What the guides offer are first an introduction to the various brands of duplicitousness that might challenge these young men upon their 8 entering the city, a description of the telltale signs by which they might earmark bearers of such guile, and specific methods/practices by which these young men might build characters resistant to ruinous temptation. Alcott, in his Young Man’s Guide, in a section entitled “On Books and Study,” even takes up the place of the novel in such a regimen: As to NOVELS it is difficult to say what advice ought to be given. At first view they seem unnecessary, wholly so; and from this single consideration. They interest and improve just in proportion as the fiction they contain is made to resemble reality; and hence it might be inferred, and naturally enough, too, that reality would in all cases be preferable to that which imitates it. But to this it may be replied, that we have few books of narrative and biography, which are written with so much spirit as some works of fiction; and that until those departments are better filled, fiction, properly selected, should be admissible. But if fiction be allowable at all, it is only under the guidance of age and experience;—and here there is even a more pressing need of a friend than in the cases already mentioned (68). This passage is indicative of the generic fear of social artifice and imitation that runs through these advice manuals. It’s also an early marker (from an unlikely popular source) of a larger cultural shift in aesthetic attitude that encompasses not just the advent of literary realism, but also the ways in which technology and migration and shifting modes of capital came to inform such aesthetic movements. Simmering just below the surface of this innocuous “advice” about reading material and self-education, one sees the simultaneous draw and repulsion of the Janus-faced confidence man—the “spirit” that Alcott speaks of belies the ephemeral line dividing the counterfeit from the original.