Peter J. Bellis

Bio: Peter J. Bellis is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Scrutiny & Critical practice. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 11 citations.

Melville's Confidence-Man: An Uncharitable Interpretation

Abstract: TN Book Three of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine defines the means and goals of Scriptural exegesis by invoking the concept of interpretive "charity." Charity, "the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one's self and of one's neighbor for the sake of God," requires that any apparent ambiguities or inconsistencies in God's Word be clarified and reconciled: "what is read should be subjected to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced." 1 For Augustine, then, the interpreter's task is to recover or reconstitute the preexisting and essential unity of the Biblical text. As a number of recent critics have shown, literary scholarship has long taken such clarity and integrity as its standard: a text may be shaped by authorial intention or interpretive context, organic form or generic convention, but it is always assumed to be a self-consistent whole. What, however, is our "charitable" critical practice to make of a text that calls the very notions of charity and self-consistency into question, a text that problematizes interpretation itself? This is precisely what Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man does, and critical commentary on the novel exemplifies the scholarly desire to "recover" a text's formal and/or thematic unity, even if this means reshaping it in the image of one's own interpretive ideal.2

Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence

Abstract: In pairing these citations, I wish to highlight a crucial tension in mid-nineteenth-century US culture between social responsibility and suspicion. Lydia Maria Child’s statement reflects both a fervent desire to help the suffering and an awareness of the myriad cultural authorities who warned that to act on such impulses might do more harm than good. At the same time, the “sucker” epigram points to the pervasiveness—and the appeal— of trickery despite all efforts to circumvent or expose it. In the kinds of public amusements that P. T. Barnum and his competitors presented, the suspicion of duplicity could be a source of fun—that is, if we take as proof the popularity of their enterprises despite widespread knowledge of the many attendant deceptions. Americans, however, tended to see the intrusion of artifice into their acts of benevolence as troubling, even malignant. The possibility that one might be tricked into aiding the unworthy often occasioned an anxious interrogation of charitable practices.

Toward An Ethic of Failure in Thr ee Novels by

Abstract: Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to illuminate Melville’s opposition to the missionaries’ work of civilizing and Christianizing the South Seas islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates that layers of existence—in fact, real human lives—are denied when the story of human relations is framed as a narrative of progress. This thesis concludes by proposing that Melville reworks the idea of failure as a potential strategy against the totalizing narrative of advancing rationalism. INDEX WORDS: Herman Melville, Typee, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Ethics, Morality, Charity, Rationalism, Civilization, Conversion, Reform, Missionaries, Failure TOWARD AN ETHIC OF FAILURE IN THREE NOVELS BY HERMAN MELVILLE