Faulkner’s critique emerges because he constructed the novel as an extended allusion to Melville’s Confidence Man. The allusion indicates still further that he was thinking about Gatsby at the time, Fitzgerald’s take on the con man, and he adored Melville. Faulkner’s earliest publications were in a New Orleans magazine named after a con man, The Double Dealer, and so the reference demonstrates further that Faulkner was critiquing the current state of American literature. The Confidence Man takes place on April Fools’ Day aboard the steamship, Fidele, as it meanders down the Mississippi River. The date of the boat trip suggests that a joke or game is being played in the novel. In the first chapter, a placard announces that an imposter may be aboard the ship and promises a reward if captured. The novel’s loosely connected chapters suggest the shape-shifter is aboard and that he plays a different character in each chapter. Some scholars see the mysterious confidence man as Satan and others as a Christ figure, or some amalgam of the two. Ultimately, the novel plays out as an extended allegory about trust, and each conversation told pulls apart the confidence that the passengers have in justice, religion, and politics.
Melville did not invent the idea of the confidence man, but he was the first to use the figure as an extended conceit about American attitudes. The phrase “confidence man” entered into the public lexicon in 1849. An article appeared in The New York Herald detailing the arrest of a man “known as the ‘confidence man.’” He would ask “after a little conversation” if the susceptible new acquaintance would have confidence to trust him with his watch until tomorrow. The bewildered mark would hand over his watch and the confidence man would walk away laughing. He was the newest version of the popular late eighteenth-century aristocratic rogue figure who stole for the fun of it and because of unseen character flaws.34 The confidence man is not simply another manifestation of the ubiquitous trickster figure who appears in some form across all cultures. Gary Lindberg has shown that the confidence man “inhabits a modern, highly differentiated, literate society” who “tells us less about the universal human condition than he does about the peculiar qualities of American society that gave rise to him, like the theme of confidence itself.” He points out that unlike the unruly and clownish trickster figure, “The confidence man, on the other hand, does not provide an outlet for unruliness, nor does he disrupt the social bounds.” He represents culture rather than breaks it apart, and “his message is that the boundaries are already fluid, that there is ample space between his society’s official rules, and its actual tolerances.”35 The confidence man demonstrates play, the fluidity built into modern social structures and boundaries that already exist prior to his arrival on any scene.
The idea of the confidence man was closely associated with Chicago by the end of the nineteenth century because of the city’s wide space between its rules and tolerances. Chicago appeared to the American public as filled with hustlers, those underworld men and women who made money by conning others out of their money. But while novels and film series like Fritz Lang’s serial The Spiders (1919–1920) would depict the criminal underworld as a place of fun and revelry for the criminals, the confidence man does not take part in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque.”36 His masquerade does bear some resemblance to the costuming associated with carnival, but the difference is that his costume does not appear to be costume. Instead, he appears merely a part of modern life that is already organized around artifice and theatricality. Some of Chicago’s legitimate businessmen and owners of corporations were swindlers in suits because they could sell their products to unsuspecting marks, through salesmanship, advertising, or just plain Chicago boosterism. Nelson Algren most famously called Chicago “The City on the Make,”37 but he was repeating Jane Addams, who referred to the city this way in her 1895 book, Democracy and Social Ethics.38 David W. Maurer wrote in his 1940 encyclopedia of confidence knowledge, tricks, and games that in “New York and especially in Chicago, there were hordes of short-con workers.”39 He declares without naming names that many of the fixers who set up shop in saloons in Chicago still operate and one in particular still “wields” considerable influence.40 Chicago, for Maurer, had grifting on a much larger scale than anywhere else, and he repeatedly hints that many of the extremely wealthy in Chicago began as cons and grifts and that by the turn of the century, Chicago, the center of the Midwest, easily adapted to the long con. New York may have had confidence men, but Chicago was built up after the Columbian Exhibition with a confidence game.
Faulkner shows how fluid the idea of a Chicago artist is, and by extension an American artist, by suggesting that all artists onboard the Nausikaa are confidence men. In doing so, Faulkner shifts his initial criticisms of Anderson, Taft, and the Chicago scene from a straight parody to darker, more unsettled ideas about fake artistry and the business of writing for profit and reputation. Melville’s characters say one thing and then by the end of the passage insist with complete confidence that the opposite is true. The multiplicity of meanings contradict each other at best and form impenetrable paradoxes at worst. Faulkner, like Joyce in Ulysses, uses Melville’s methods to allow meaning to emerge from the reader, who is also participating in the confidence game by simply reading. His use of Melville’s slippery language games to form the plot of the ambiguous Mosquitoes anticipates the more masterful work of the same plot devices in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Each of the characters may be a confidence man suggesting that the artist is, for Faulkner’s purposes, always going to be a confidence man or a mark, and the line between the two becomes increasingly blurry.
Early in the novel, Fairchild reveals his knowledge of American con games. Major Ayres announces, “All Americans are constipated,” and tells the group, including Fairchild, about his scheme to put salts “in a tweaky phial, a phial that might look well on one’s night table: a jolly design of some sort.”41 He declares that “All Americans will buy it. Now, the population of your country is several millions, I fancy; and when you take into consideration the fact that all Americans are con—.”42 Ayres’s promotional rhetoric matches that of Fairchild’s and suggests that Americans, in general, are easy targets for such advertising. Taliaferro interrupts him before he is able to repeat the word “constipated” and the shortened word “con” stands in its place. Americans are both constipated and cons, simultaneously uptight and willing to game anyone out of their money. Fairchild adds an additional feature to the jar to contain the salt. He suggests as a design: “The American flag and a couple of doves holding dollar marks in their bills, and a handle that when you pull it out, it’s a corkscrew.”43 He indicates that the best way to sell to Americans is to tie together patriotism, religion, and capitalism while acknowledging that the patriots yearn for something illegal: liquor. The combination sets up all Americans as alternately con men and marks, advertisers and buyers.
Faulkner provides clues that Fairchild is acting the part he plays for the benefits he gains from it. When the Semitic man points out that he is a Midwestern booster, Fairchild replies, “Oh well, we Nordics are at a disadvantage.”44 Faulkner then adds a third person observation that suggests that it may be the Semitic man who is at a disadvantage because Fairchild may be pretending to be naïve for gain. Fairchild continues to suggest that he is not smart enough to con anyone when he follows with: “We’ve got to fix our idea on a territorial place. Though we know it’s second rate, that’s the best we can do.”45 The exchange could be a very traditional con game, where the con acts the part of the rube in order to fleece the mark who has been made to feel smart and in control. Fairchild will tell one industrious story and version of his education to “the nephew” who is about to go off to Yale,46 and another one, that disparages the same, to the Semitic man, which further suggests that he is playing the part of an ill-educated Midwesterner to his advantage.
Confidence men steal and to do so, they must steal other people’s forms and identities. In the novel, the artists steal from others in order to create their arts out of stolen forms, which F
aulkner implies is a con game. Dawson Fairchild steals stories from those he grew up with and around him. Mrs. Maurier’s nephew Gus steals a rod from the engine room for his sculpture, stalls the yacht’s engine, and forces the yacht to run aground on a sandbar. If the yacht cannot sail, the party is no longer a sailing expedition. The nephew metaphorically steals the form of Mrs. Maurier’s party from her to complete his sculpture. Even Gordon, the sculptor, steals classical forms for his sculpture and Mrs. Maurier’s likeness for his final piece of art. American artists, then, are all cons that steal forms that will help them sell their work.
Faulkner suggests that Gordon, too, is predatory in that he resembles a hawk, a predatory bird. He turns on Mr. Taliaferro with “a face like that of a heavy hawk, breaking his dream.”47 For a moment, “The Hawk’s face brooded above him in the dusk remotely.”48 And finally, “Gordon’s hawk face brooded above them, remote and insufferable with arrogance.”49 Pat, Mrs. Maurier’s niece, points out this dark aspect of the sculptor quite simply by telling him: “You are black.” Then, “her voice fell and he suggested Soul?” She replies quietly, “I don’t know what it is.”50 Just as Fairchild’s personality as a simple and naïve Midwestern artist should be read as posturing, a con that helps sell books, so too should Gordon’s dark aggression be read as a part played to sell sculpture. The adjectives the niece uses to describe Gordon—Black and Hawk—further connect Gordon to Taft because his Black Hawk sculpture is widely considered to be his masterpiece. Gordon is both artist and sculpture, artist and product being sold. Faulkner shows that the characters and their models, Anderson and Taft, both play at being artists and, in doing so, sell quite successfully, which, Faulkner names a con game.
Faulkner had become quite interested in money since moving to New Orleans. When Faulkner moved to New Orleans, his tone about money shifts from that of the high-minded criticism in The Mississippian to glee when he writes to his mother that the notoriously underpaying Double Dealer will pay him for his work. Faulkner writes to his mother from New Orleans in early February 1925: “I am like John Rockefeller—whenever I need money I sit down and dash off ten dollars worth for them. I sold them 30.00 worth and the Double Dealer 10.00 already yet, as Mrs. Friedman would say. They know that someday I’ll be a ‘big gun’ and they are glad to get it.” The idea of receiving money makes him think of shopping and Chicago: “New Orleans is quite the place even though it isn’t as big as Chicago. The stores keep almost everything you’d need.”51 When he writes to his Mother in late March 1925 that he and Anderson made up the Al Jackson stories, the news is not that they created great art, but that “we are going to sell it and buy a boat with the proceeds.”52 He had joined the ranks of the double dealers.
However, Faulkner’s depiction of Anderson as a booster for the region and sentimental seems disloyal to the new guild he had joined because of Anderson’s generosity, and this reportedly hurt Anderson deeply, especially because he had gone out of his way to help the young writer develop his craft and get published. These attacks can be seen as stemming from the fact that Faulkner was not yet successful. He would have been acutely aware of the wide gulf that existed between the legend of Sherwood Anderson and who he actually was: remarried and quite savvy at selling his books commercially. Neither Faulkner nor Anderson ever published the Al Jackson stories together or separately, but Faulkner did incorporate them into the Mosquitoes. To a young Faulkner who relished the opportunity to make any money off of his writing, Anderson must have seemed a rather shrewd Chicago businessman. Anderson’s advice to Faulkner, to lie and embellish, must have also seemed directly from the tales of corrupt Chicago businessmen he heard about and saw traveling through Mississippi looking for promising deals. Faulkner’s criticisms of Anderson and the Chicago art world need to be balanced against the young writer’s desire and admiration for those writers who had figured out how to make money from their writing. The Al Jackson stories they spun on the park bench would have seemed to Faulkner as a coded discussion of how to spin gold and riches out of a swamp, something that Anderson and the slightly older generation of Chicago writers figured out how to do and Faulkner wished to learn.
Faulkner’s cameo appearance in the novel is as “a little kind of black man” who “was a white man and kind of shabbily dressed” and named “Faulkner.”53 He writes himself into the novel to show that he wants to be considered a confidence man too, because Melville’s confidence man is always both black and white, which signifies his inability to be fully pinned down morally by the reader. Faulkner in the novel tells the niece he “was a liar by profession,”54 just as Anderson taught him to be. T. J. Jackson Lears notices of Faulkner, “But he was no plain speaker, no icon of authenticity; in fact he was a poseur throughout his life. Faulkner epitomized the artist as confidence man, who realized how much art (and life) could be constituted through the creation of convincing narratives.”55 When Faulkner wrote “Centaur in Brass,” somewhere around 1930 or 1931, he writes of Snopes as having “neither the high vision of a confidence man nor the unwrecking courage of a brigand.”56 The line is a compliment to those visionaries, Anderson and Taft and others like them, whom he wrote about at length as confidence men in Mosquitoes.
The Mosquitoes maps Faulkner’s struggle with what he sees as the best-selling, yet sentimental and propagandistic, art coming from Chicago’s artists. He wishes to sell books and admires the showmanship of artists like Lorado Taft and Sherwood Anderson who have successfully capitalized on the idea of creating a new American art form out of lying. On the other hand, he mocks them for embracing those same values and not standing in aesthetic opposition to the ideology of capitalism that has no place for the artist as a new, creative, and redefining force. Faulkner holds some hope by presenting stealing as a subversive activity that artists can engage in to run the ship aground. But that impulse is hastily sketched and rather inconclusive at this stage of Faulkner’s thinking because the novel ultimately ends in what many scholars have deemed an unsatisfying way. A mocking female voice speaks out from the “remote buzzing” of metaphorical mosquitoes and tells Taliaferro to “treat ‘em rough.”57
Sanctuary, gangsters, and Ulysses
In late 1925 or early 1926, Faulkner wrote his first gangster story, “The Big Shot,” while simultaneously working on Mosquitoes.58 The story introduces the bootlegger Popeye who is arrested for running a stop sign while delivering a carload of whiskey to Dal Martin’s house, a political boss and contractor in Memphis. The story’s main focus is on Martin’s desire for Dr. Blount, a wealthy and important citizen, to include his daughter in the upcoming debutante ball. He bribes Blount with the promise of building an art museum in his grandfather’s honor. Blount agrees and then quickly begins to regret his decision. Martin and Giovelli, the supplier of the bootleg whiskey, pull strings to get Popeye out of the consequences of his arrest. He returns to transporting alcohol and runs over Blount’s daughter while delivering more whiskey to the Martin house. The police corruption and Martin’s promise of the art museum, reveal that there is no upper lit world and the forces of law, politics, and culture are completely intertwined with those of the underworld.
Faulkner explains in the story how this level of corruption came to the South:
Since the South waked up about twenty-five years ago, our cities have been aping Chicago and New York. And we’ve done it, better than we thought. But we are blind; we don’t realize that you can ape only the vices of your model, that virtue is accidental even with those who practice it. But there is still a kind a hearty clumsiness to our corruption, a kind of chaotic and exasperating innocence.59
The South “waked up” during the reconstruction of their train lines, which had been heavily damaged by the North as a military tactic during the Civil War. Faulkner’s grandfather, William C. Falkner, was one of the investors who helped charter the Ripley Railroad Company in Spring of 1871 that would connect the small town of Ripley to Middleton, from where one could then go on to Memphis and then
Chicago.60 The Illinois Central Railroad took over the Mississippi line in 1872 and further connected small towns in Mississippi with Chicago, through Memphis and to New Orleans. Illinois Central had a stop in Oxford and the line allowed people and goods to easily move between Chicago and Oxford, creating a physical link between the two cities that woke up the small town. The connection was also an artistic and intellectual one because new forms and ideas in books and people’s heads could move easily from the North to the South and the South began to import the classical forms so exalted in Chicago in the years after the Fair. Louis H. Sullivan designed the New Orleans Union Station for the Illinois Central Railroad, at the terminus of the main line from Chicago. It was designed in the ornamental Chicago School style and Frank Lloyd Wright, then Sullivan’s head draftsman, did much of the final work on the project. The building opened on June 1, 1892, a monument to the importation of Chicago to the South.61 Faulkner would have taken the train home to Oxford from this station many times and Anderson would have understood and explained the significance of the architecture to him.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 19