Marcos Norris
Dr. Schaak
Genre Seminar
May 7, 2009
Ageless Manhood and Existential Maturity: the Attribution of Dialogue
in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Critical attention to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has dealt primarily with the attribution of dialogue and the nada prayer recited by the older waiter. Traditionally, the narrative has been understood as the story of an old man in despair, a middle aged waiter whose ripening age incites sympathy for the old man, and a naive, young waiter who unsympathetically forces the old man out of the cafe in order to leave work and return home to his wife. As Steven K. Hoffman writes, “the tale renders a complex series of interactions between three characters in a Spanish cafe just prior to and immediately after closing: a stoic old waiter, a brash young waiter, and a wealthy but suicidal old man given to excessive drink” (91). Or, as Beatriz Penas Ibanez states, “the basic conflict is generational...[it] is about three different generations represented by the old customer, the older waiter, and the younger one” (88). The generational gaps between the characters has been central to the story’s interpretation and assumptions concerning the nature of maturity (namely, that wisdom accompanies age) has directed how critics have dealt with the illogical sequence of dialogue occurring in the third conversation between the younger and older waiter in the original 1933 version of the story. That the conflict over dialogue attribution has dominated critical discussion of the story for the past fifty years and its resolution, in my view, plays a considerable role in the how the text is to be interpreted, requires that we first expound the details of this long-standing debate.
The first two conversations between the younger and older waiter introduce ambiguity for the reader as the text simply fails to specify who says what. The first line of both dialogues is attributed to “one waiter” (288)--an equivocal, and rather provocative, appellation that fails to establish each line’s speaker and foregrounds the ensuing confusion that plagues the waiters’ third conversation. The first line of the third set of dialogue is similarly designated by an equivocal “he said” (289). As we later learn, it is the younger waiter who is married, allowing us to attribute the line: “He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me” (289), of the third dialogue to the younger waiter. Using this reference point, we can trace the conversation backwards to discover that it is the older waiter who reveals the details surrounding the old man’s previous suicide attempt (supposing we adhere to a traditional, metronomic reading of dialogue that designates a new speaker with a line indentation). If we read forward from our reference point, however, it’s discovered that the younger waiter is apparently the one who disclosed information about the old man’s attempted suicide. The original version of the story read as follows:
Younger Waiter: “He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”
Older Waiter: “He had a wife once too.”
Younger Waiter: “A wife would be no good to him now.”
Older Waiter: “You can’t tell. He might be better with a wife.”
Younger Waiter: “His niece looks after him.”
Older Waiter: “I know. You said she cut him down.” (289)
That the older waiter declares it is the younger waiter who said “she cut him down,” contradicts the earlier part of the dialogue when the younger waiter asks, “Who cut him down?” (289). “This discrepancy,” says Ken Ryan, “seemed to go unnoticed for nearly twenty-six years, until February 1959, when articles by F.P. Kroeger and William Colburn sparked the conflict. In 1965, Charles Scribner Jr. emended the original text, thus ‘correcting’ the inconsistency” (78). The emendation changed the following lines:
Original Version (1933-1964):
“His niece looks after him.”
“I know. You said she cut him down.”
Emended Version (1965-):
“His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down.”
“I know.”
While the emendation cleared up the inconsistency, it also, according to Warren Bennett, “traded one kind of question for another kind: since Hemingway did not correct his own story during his lifetime, does that make the old text Hemingway’s story and the new text his publisher’s story? Should the critic use the old text or the new text?” (“Characterization,” 71). Bennett’s query intimates an equitable challenge: that Hemingway, putatively, a master craftsmen of literature, allowed the apparent mistake to go uncorrected (let alone made such an unfortunate slip in the first place), brings into question the validity of the emendation and summons readers to reconsider the credibility of the original text. Thus, the emendation seems to have only compounded the debate, pitting those who supported the change against those who opposed it. Critics from both sides have sought, in one way or another, to explain away the inconsistency, since.
In an article published five years after the emendation, Bennett suggested that regardless of the textual change “it is still possible to determine that the older waiter is the one who knows about the old man’s attempted suicide” (71) because the dialogue reflects the generational disparity between the two waiters. He writes, “The structure of the story is based on a consistent polarity: ‘despair,’ characterized by depth of feeling and insight into the human condition, in opposition to ‘confidence,’ characterized by a lack of feeling and, therefore, a lack of insight” (71). The older waiter’s “nihilistic concept of life” (71) enables him to identify with the old man which, in turn, is reflected by his empathetic comments; similarly, the confident naivete of the younger waiter is reflected by his insensitive and, often, cruel remarks.
Bennett suggests, for example, that the younger waiter is identifiable by his crass use of the word “kill,” noting that he says the old man “‘should have killed himself last week’” (72, Bennett’s emphasis) when addressing both the older waiter and the old man, clearly establishing “that it is the younger waiter who asks for further information: ‘What did he want to kill himself for?’...Consequently, it is the older waiter who knows the history of the old man and speaks the first line of dialogue in the story: ‘Last week he tried to commit suicide’” (72). The older waiter, who, according to Bennett, views life as “a net of illusions” (75), while empathizing with the old man, expresses his intellectual worldview in the condescending, ironic comments he makes to others. “Since verbal irony is employed,” says Bennett, “we must look to the text for hard evidence of which waiter employs it as a mode of speaking, and that evidence is in the scene with the bodega barman. It is the older waiter who uses verbal irony; he even thinks ironically” (73). When the barman asks what the older waiter will have to drink he replies “Nada” (291), alluding back to his nihilistic rendition of the paternoster moments before. Kept awake by the nothingness, or void of meaning, he perceives in the universe, the waiter mischievously remarks, “it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it” (291)--displaying ironical insight which, according to Bennett, is too sophisticated for the naive, philosophically inept youth.
In his 1976 article, Harold Hurley similarly argues that structural patterns are identifiable because of the waiters’ generational disparity, noting that the older waiter shares an “unspoken bond” (84) with the old man, recognizing him “as a fellow-sufferer [and] is reluctant to close, because he [the older waiter], too, needs the light, cleanness, and order that the cafe provides against the dark” (84). The younger waiter, again characterized as naive and self-involved, is “unconcerned with the old man and...is simply concerned with going home to his wife” (84). On top of this, Hurley also notes that the “attributions of the first and third exchanges...reveal a simple pattern: the younger waiter asks the questions and the older waiter provides terse answers” (83), indicating that Hemingway employed “the ‘one waiter said’ tag to refer to the older waiter” while “‘the waiter’ is used seven times to refer exclusively to the younger waiter” (84). Based on his assumptions about age and maturity (e.g. his assumption that the older waiter, unlike the younger waiter, has reached an advanced stage of mental and emotional development that allows him to view the old man as a “fellow-sufferer”) along with what he calls “explicit identifying tags” (85), Hurley concludes that Hemingway delineates “the waiters as distinct character types. As such, the dialogue of the disputed...speech should be read in a way consistent with the characters as revealed elsewhere in the story” (85).
Bennett addressed the problem again in 1979, this time with a more direct approach, arguing that manuscript evidence clears up “many of the questions about the original dialogue sequence” (613) and establishes the older waiter as the speaker who first reveals information regarding the old man’s suicide attempt. To preserve the “ethics and efficacy” (616) of Scribner’s editorial change, Bennett proposes that the “discovery of the pencil manuscript...reveals how the illogical dialogue sequence may have occurred; it shows evidence of two mistakes, one by a typist or typesetter, and one by Hemingway himself” (616). The many insertions and effacements evident on the manuscript along with the “thickness and texture of the pencil point” (617) in some places in contrast with the “smaller and tighter [marks of a] sharp pencil” (617) in others, demonstrate, for Bennett, that Hemingway was a “fallible human being...[writing] in a hurry” (624) and simply misplaced the line: “You said she cut him down.” The occurrence of this costly mistake, Bennett writes, “pictures not Hemingway the slow perfectionist, hovering over each word and detail” (624) but Hemingway the fervent artist, whose unfortunate sloppiness sneaked into publication.
David Kerner, in “The Mauscripts Establishing Hemingway’s Anti-Metronomic Dialogue,” notes Hemingway’s deliberate tendency to break conventional writing standards and demonstrates the generous use of anti-metronomic dialogue in his other works. Kerner, and other critics, have proposed that the lines: “He’s drunk now” and “He’s drunk every night” (289), along with the lines: “He must be eighty years old” and “Anyway I should say he was eighty” (289), of the waiters’ third conversation, are examples of Hemingway’s use of anti-metronomic dialogue. Because the second line of each pair is little more than reconfirmation of the preceding line, critics propose that each of the sets be viewed as belonging to a single speaker. For example, if the younger waiter begins the third conversation, saying “He’s drunk now...He’s drunk every night,” and we attribute the lines: “He must be eighty years old...Anyway I should say he was eighty” to the older waiter, then the younger waiter becomes the speaker who reveals the old man’s attempted suicide, the inconsistency of the waiters’ third conversation evaporates, and (ignoring the use of anti-metronomic dialogue) the text is shown to be without error. As Kerner concludes, “the authority of [the] manuscript is left intact after close examination of the forty other passages of anti-metronomic dialogue in the manuscripts Hemingway saw through the press” (396).
Ironically, varying critical attempts to make sense of the conflict have not resolved the ambiguity of the first two conversations, nor has support for or against Scribner’s 1965 emendation adequately demonstrated, for the reader who expects standard grammatical conventions to be employed, either the clarity of the third dialogue or legitimate reason to rewrite Hemingway’s original creation. That the inconsistency occurred as an integral part of his writing process, appearing in the original manuscript and afterwards preserved in “the Delaware typescript, the magazine story, and the short story collections, and because,” says Ryan, “Hemingway did not see fit to change it in his lifetime” (88), readers ought to entertain the possibility that the inconsistency was intentional and “consider whether or not Hemingway may have perceived the ‘error’ as actually strengthening the story” (88). Ryan continues,
Those still intent on seeing ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ published in its emended form have a responsibility to consider whether what they perceive as an error--and others perceive as creative genius--may have been seen by Hemingway as contributing to the story’s effect...Hemingway may have liked the way the confusion clouds the identities of the two waiters despite the difficulty it presents to the reader. (89)
Indeed, cloudiness and confused identities are more in line with the ambiguity that, in spite of critical efforts, persists in the first two conversations, and the overtly intentional “one waiter” tags introducing each of those dialogues uphold the possibility that Hemingway also intended for ambiguity to cloud the third conversation.
The first two conversations demonstrate Hemingway’s assiduity when writing as well as, in light of conflicting interpretive options, the breakdown of discrete character identities. Assuming the basic premise that the younger waiter, inexperienced and optimistic, is over-confident and naive, and the older waiter, disillusioned and calloused, has developed a wiser, albeit nihilistic, outlook on life, the first conversation could be interpreted as follows:
Younger Waiter: “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
Older Waiter: “Why?”
Younger Waiter: “He was in despair.”
Older Waiter: “What about?”
Younger Waiter: “Nothing.” (He was without good reason).
Older Waiter: “How do you know it was nothing?”
Younger Waiter: “He has plenty of money.” (288) (People with plenty of money don’t have any reason to despair).
We can make sense of the conversation differently if we switch the roles of the speakers:
Older Waiter: “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
Younger Waiter: “Why?”
Older Waiter: “He was in despair.”
Younger Waiter: “What about?”
Older Waiter: “Nothing.” (In light of his later rendition of the paternoster, the older waiter could here be referring to nada (“Nothing”), or the meaninglessness of life).
Younger Waiter: “How do you know it was nothing?” (Misunderstanding the older waiter).
Older Waiter: “He has plenty of money.” (His despair is not caused by material want. The reply could also be sardonic, suggesting that “plenty of money,” or the exploitation of wealth, exposes the corruption and emptiness it belies).
In the same way, the second conversation, occurring immediately after the waiters view a prostitute and soldier passing in the street, is open to conflicting interpretations:
Older Waiter: “The guard will pick him up,” one waiter said.
Younger Waiter: “What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?” (“what he’s after”--sex with the prostitute, in the eyes of a young man who, according to Ryan, is “preoccupied with sex” (83), is worth the consequences of being caught by the guard).
Older Waiter: “He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes ago.” (288)
The passage could also be read as follows:
Younger Waiter: “The guard will pick him up,” one waiter said.
Older Waiter: “What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?” (“What does it matter” could be a fatalistic response, alluding to the futility of sexual pursuits in a meaningless world; it could also suggest the very opposite: in light of life’s ultimate meaninglessness, one becomes intent on making the most of what he or she has, which, in the soldier’s case, is
ephemeral pleasures and meager indulgences).
That Hemingway follows these introductory conversations, open to conflicting interpretive glosses, with a third conversation whose length (nearly three times as long as the first two conversations combined) and nettlesome absence of dialogue attribution, makes for an entropic narrative sequence that Hemingway, undoubtedly, knew would bemuse his readers, forcing them to not only confuse speakers but also to reconsider whatever character development they had formed in their minds to that point; including the line: “I know. You said she cut him down,” disrupting either the reader’s tracking of the dialogue or previous interpretation of who first revealed the old man’s attempted suicide, at the end of this insidiously long sequence, brings into clear sight the evidence of design and Hemingway’s deliberate confusing of the waiters’ identities.
Breaking down the distinctions between the older and younger waiter brings into question their generational differences, repudiating the assumptions that have guided past decades of critical debate. What has interestingly gone unnoticed--that the waiters are never described as young or old but “younger” and “older”--betokens the possibility that these two waiters may very well differ but a year in age. The waiters could be twenty-one and twenty-two or even fifty-eight and fifty-nine, for example. Unlike the “old” man, whom Hemingway generously pins down with a fixed descriptor, the two waiters are free to roam and may even, theoretically speaking, be “older” than the “old” man. In the fourth and final conversation between the waiters, the possibility of their shared youthfulness is evident. The text says:
“You have youth, confidence, and a job,” the older waiter said. “You have everything.”
“And what do you lack?”
“Everything but work.”
“You have everything I have.”
“No. I have never had confidence and I am not young.”
“Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up.” (290)
While the older waiter may lack confidence, he cannot get away with denying his age. Dismissing the older waiter’s claim, “I am not young,” as “nonsense,” the younger waiter points out the peculiarity of his colleague’s comment while alluding to their generational affinity. This point is reaffirmed later when the younger waiter sarcastically says to the older waiter, “You talk like an old man yourself” (290). Thus, it appears quite possible that both waiters are young.
Forcing readers to struggle with the dialogue attribution and, consequently, the identities of the waiters, Hemingway opens the text to interpretive possibilities. In doing so, he exposes the inadequacy of a single interpretation to account for the text while incorporating an interpretive option--facilitated by his own views of age and maturity as revealed elsewhere in his works (for our purposes, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” in particular)--which, until now, has failed to be recognized by critics. What is particularly relevant to our discussion from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is Hemingway’s presentation of manhood and of what, in his view, constitutes a courageous life.
Vacationing on an African safari, Francis Macomber and his wife, Margot, are led on a hunting excursion by Robert Wilson, the brutish “white hunter” (8), who, until the story’s denouement, serves as Macomber’s antithesis and foil. Like the manly Wilson, whose livelihood depends on his ability to “kill anything” (9), Hemingway disdained the “great American boy-men” (26) because he couldn’t stand their indiscreet display of insecurities and childlike timidity, embodied in the thirty-five year old Macomber whose “bloody” (8) cowardice, inability to “keep his wife where she belongs” (19), and garrulous need to talk over “emotional trash” (8), proved “that some [men] stay little boys for so long...Sometimes all their lives” (25).
Recognizing Macomber’s boyish immaturity, Ben Stoltzfus, in “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories,” argues that Margot “is a controlling mother figure who wants Francis to be compliant and achieving, [and] punishes and humiliates him when he fails to meet her expectations” (208). Similarly, Bennett Kravitz explains that “according to the terms of their unwritten agreement, Margot must punish Francis every time he fails at the game of life. In this case, his failure consists of the cowardice he demonstrated during the lion hunt” (86). Though Macomber is accomplished, “very wealthy” (18), knowledgeable “about cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books...about hanging onto his money, [and] about most of the other things his world dealt in” (18), as a generally competent and experienced adult male, he “confirms his emasculation through an infantile rejection of responsibility” (112), which, according to Susan Catalano, is finally conquered by Macomber when he “asserts [his] masculinity through the hunt--the paradigm of masculine control” (112).
Only after facing death does Macomber realize his responsibility to life and his call to manhood. As Stoltzfus writes, “The lion symbolizes death, and facing death reduces Macomber’s life to its simplest terms: to run or not to run, to be or not to be a coward” (214). Cowering in the lion’s presence, seeing life in its most graphic and unadulterated form, Macomber is forced to confront the same philosophical disturbances that appear to haunt the old man and the older waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Expounding the existential relevance of these two stories, Stoltzfus explains,
Sartre views death--his own, as well as God’s--as the essential clue to facing life and living it authentically. It is this one ‘capital’ possibility, always in view from the outset, from which all other possibilities derive their status of radical contingency. What dread, or despair, or alienation reveal to every man is that he is cast into the world in order to die there. To live with death as the supreme and normative possibility of existence is not to reject the world or to refuse participation in daily events. On the contrary, it is a refusal to be deceived. To accept death is to heighten the capacity for living, and that in turn leads to a heightened sense of authentic personal existence. Macomber, during his short and happy life, learns this lesson. He confronts nothingness. (211)
The nihilistic fallacy of the old man and the older waiter is that, in the face of nada, they have jettisoned their responsibility to live life courageously. Like Macomber, who runs “wildly” (17) from the lion and seeks refuge, the alcoholic old man and the older waiter find safe havens in the clean, well-lighted comfort of Spanish cafes.
Macomber overcomes his nihilistic shortcomings in the midst of hunting “huge, black” (22) buffalos. Facing death, he is again exposed to the sheer force of existence and “For the first time...really felt wholly without fear” (24). “Francis’s transition from coward to brave hunter,” says Kravitz, “makes it clear that he is no longer afraid of life” (86). Indeed, Macomber grabs life by the horns, stares death in its “wicked little eyes” (27), and achieves “a heightened sense of authentic personal existence.”
Accounting for Macomber’s “absolutely different” (25) state, Wilson explains, “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good...Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ Damned fine, eh?” (25). Boldly entering the hunt after reprimanding his once emasculating wife (26), speaking in a tone and terseness that now resembles Wilson’s, Macomber engages life, “fills meaninglessness with a new essence” (Stoltzfus, 206), and becomes a man by fulfilling his existential responsibility. The middle-aged Macomber conquers nada by making the most of his life--a right of passage having little to do with his “twenty-first birthday” (25).
That the older waiter of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” identifies with “those who like to stay late at the cafe...[and] need a light for the night” (290) (redolent of a child’s night-light), shows that he, like the old man, escapes to the anesthetic environment of “a clean and pleasant cafe” (290) and nurses the bottle, in order to disengage the nothingness “he knew too well” (291). Mockingly reciting the paternoster, the older waiter ironically scorns a “Father” he purportedly doesn’t believe in, evincing a rebellion and petulance that resembles a child’s temper tantrum.
Contrastingly, the younger waiter, like the courageous Macomber who anxiously anticipates the hunt (26), engages life with “all confidence” (290), seeking to make positive use of the dwindling night hours wasted in the empty cafe. Desiring to return home to his wife, the younger waiter says, “I want to go home to bed” (290)--evoking his sexual potency and symbolic dominion over life. That the old man no longer has a wife and the older waiter, ostensibly, spends his nights alone in “his room” (291), in contrast, suggests their sexual impotence, symbolizing an “infantile rejection of [their existential] responsibility.” Purposefully utilizing the “capacity for living,” the younger waiter accepts “death as the supreme and normative possibility of existence,” and, through an avid “participation in daily events,” regards every passing moment with the utmost significance. In response to the older waiter’s objection to closing early, the younger waiter replies (portraying the respective existential, not generational, maturation of himself, the older waiter, and the old man) that an extra hour is “More to me than to him” (290).
Thus, while the waiters are certainly “of two different kinds” (290), placing them in a fictional world destabilized by suggestive ambiguity and a rather insidious dialogue conflict, Hemingway opens their identities to numerous interpretive glosses, one of which, considered in this paper, challenges a history of critical review and the erroneous proverbial assumption that wisdom accompanies age.











Works Cited
Bennett, Warren. “Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. March 1970: 70-79. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=0000101156&site=ehost-
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Bennett, Warren. “The Manuscript and the Dialogue of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. January 1979: 613-24. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=0000100765&site=ehost-
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Catalano, Susan M. “Henpecked to Heroism: Placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American Renegade Tradition.” Hemingway Review. Spring 1998: 111-117. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1998057644&site=ehost-live>.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Hoffman, Steven K. “Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction.” Essays in Literature. 1979: 91-110. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1979111393&site=ehost-live>.
Hurley, Harold C. “The Attribution of the Waiters’ Second Speech in Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’ Studies in Short Fiction. 1976: 81-85. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1976110394&site=ehost-live>.
Ibanez, Beatriz Penas. “A Hemingway-Vallejo Analogue.” The Hemingway Review. Spring 1994: 87-96. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. live>.
Kravitz, Bennett. “‘She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not’: The Short Happy Symbiotic Marriage of Margot and Francis Macomber.” Journal of American Culture. Fall 1998: 83-87. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1999056158&site=ehost-live>.
Ryan, Ken. “The Contentious Emendation of Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Hemingway Review. Fall 1998: 77-91. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2003530627&site=ehost-live>.
Stoltzfus, Ben. “Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway’s African Stories.” Comparative Literature Studies. 2005: 205-28. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. April 17, 2009. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2006872259&site=ehost-
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Pimps, Hoes, and the American Dream

Marcos Norris
Dr. Schaak
Studies in Drama
December 3, 2008
Pimps, Hoes, and the American Dream: Female Commodification and
Gender Dynamics in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
At the heart of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is the struggle between the livelihood of its characters and the challenges of an increasingly impersonal capitalist commerce. Miller's protagonist, Willy Loman, is a representative American type whose belief in the American dream--"to come out number one" (101) in a nation whose early frontier promised boundless socioeconomic possibilities--eventually thwarts his success as a salesman, destroys his family, and ransacks his soul. Riding "on a smile and a shoeshine" (101), Willy incorrectly adheres to a retrograde model of industry based on personal relationships and being well liked, which, as symbolized by the "towering angular shapes" (5) immuring his home, has been replaced by the "cut and dry" (59) austerity of twentieth-century capitalism.
Miller critiques the American dream in its capitalist context by portraying the damaging effects economic influences have in the lives of his characters. Nilsen writes that "Miller's critique can be summed up as follows: capitalism is inhuman in its glorification of private property and its exclusive orientation toward profitmaking. Human beings are sacrificed to economic interests in ways that are not only immoral, but even criminal in nature...Conformism rules, turning people into mere cogs in the machine of production" (146,147). Preoccupation with capital gain and material possession, within a predominantly male-centric society, infiltrates the American mentality and results in the devastating dehumanization of women as commodities: material possessions with market value. Female commodification and its effects on gender dynamics leads to the decay of male-female relationships and mingles the false-idealism of the American dream with flagitious images of prostitution and economically-driven procurers, or pimps.
Willy's reminiscences of his older brother Ben embody the idealism which is the driving force in his pursuit of the American dream. Ben's perennial statement that "when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one...and by God, I was rich" (37), is repeatedly referred to by Willy and reinforces his capitalistic perspective and entrepreneurial desire to conquer the world. Ben's capitalistic idealism percolates through generations of the Loman family, finally culminating in the identities of Willy's sons, Biff and Happy.
Moments before Willy's death, he is caught up in a phantasmagoric interaction with Linda, Happy, and the image of his deceased brother, Ben. The text reads, "BEN. Yes, and it does take a great kind of a man to crack the/ jungle. (LINDA takes HAPPY to stairs.)/ HAPPY. (Arm around LINDA.) I'm getting married, Pop, don't for/get it. I'm changing everything. I'm gonna run that department/ before the year is up. You'll see, Mom" (98). Happy's empty promise of marriage (a motif as equally ubiquitous in the text as Ben's perennial promise of the American dream) is strangely associated with socioeconomic success and capitalistic pursuits. This mingling of marriage and capitalism is used by Miller to demonstrate the effects capitalism has on American identity, particularly in terms of female commodification and its role in gender dynamics. Over the course of this paper, I will show how female commodification has increasingly permeated the perspectives of each generation of the Loman family, evincing the economically-driven dissolution of gender dynamics inherently present in the pursuit of the American dream.
Because Ben is significantly older than Willy, deserting the family for Africa when Willy was only "Three years and eleven months" (34) in search of their father (who had decamped to Alaska), Willy assumes filial deference to a brother he views more as an authority than as an equal. Constantly pursuing Ben's validation, Willy interacts with his older, superior brother in much the same way that Happy imploringly seeks validation from Willy. This parallel conspicuously emerges, indicating each generations' desire to fulfill the ideals and expectations of the previous generation, when Willy says, "we're gonna rebuild the entire front stoop right now! Watch this, Ben!," and, a moment later, Happy says "I lost weight, Pop, you notice?" (36). The generational bestowing of values and Willy's desire that his children "know the kind of stock they spring from" (34), promotes the family's ensuing capitalist perspective and perpetuates a related, commodified view of women.
During their first and only meeting as adults, Willy reveals to Ben that their mother had "died a long time ago" (32); Ben apathetically responds, "That's too bad. Fine specimen of a lady, Mother...I'd hoped to see the old girl...Heard anything from Father, have you?" (32,33). Learning of his mother's death for the very first time, Ben shows few signs of sadness or regret, fails to console his brother, and flippantly moves on to the next subject. Later, Linda accusingly asks Ben, "Where've you been all these years? Willy's always wondered why you...," and is cutoff before uttering the cold truth of his abandoning and its lasting effects on Willy and the family. The economic pursuits of Ben and his father led each of them to disavow the same woman (both mother and wife), demonstrating the immoral ways in which "Human beings are sacrificed to economic interests." Linda's later protestations of Ben's inappropriately rough treatment of Biff are apathetically dismissed, causing Linda to withdraw "her hand coldly" (35) upon Ben's departing salutation. Shortly after, "BEN laughs lustily" (36) in response to Linda's continuing protestations, symbolizing his lusty (a word suggesting phallic potency and bestial passion), male dominance over women. Thus, inherent in Ben's generation is both a marginalized and chauvinistic view of women, as well as, a preoccupation with capital gain.
Willy's objurgatory demand that Linda "Stop interrupting!" (47) when she attempts to contribute to a family conversation, demonstrates Willy's own inferior view of women and a superior, dominant view of himself. Linda timidly "agrees she should [stop interrupting], puts hand over mouth" (47) and diffidently resigns in obsequious submission. Sharply undermining Willy's statement, "You're my foundation and my support, Linda" (11), is his pejorative "hand over mouth" refusal to let her speak and the dominating, disrespectful manner in which he interacts with her.
It is Willy's interactions with the other females in the text, however, that glaringly display his licentious, commodified view of women. Visiting Charlie at his office, Willy is met by the receptionist, Jenny and says, "Jenny...Jenny...Good to see you....How're ya? Workin'?--or still honest?" (66), implying her possible dishonest involvement in prostitution, or "Workin'" the streets. Willy's vulgar comedy, however distasteful, dwindles in comparison to his marital infidelity and prostitute-like treatment of his paramour, aptly named "WOMAN" (a title which both objectifies and devalues her worth as a nameless individual).
Willy visits his paramour in cheap motels and promises to bring her new stockings. When the two are disrupted by Biff's visitation, Willy forces "WOMAN" to leave as she adamantly demands her promised payment of "two boxes of size nine sheers" (87). The surreptitious meetings between the two, closely resemble a man's visitation of a brothel, for the woman says, "I've been sitting at that desk watching all the salesmen go by, day in and day out. [just as prostitutes "day in and day out" await the visitation of their clientele] But you've got such a sense of humor, and I think you're a wonderful man," lavishing Willy with the false-flattery characteristic of brothel women. When scheduling their next meeting, Willy "slaps her on [the] rear" (27) and instructs her to "keep your pores open!" (27), indicating her role as a sexual object and the exchange-value of beautiful skin. The woman admits to her degradation when she says, "You know you ruined me, Willy? You ruined me! From now on, whenever you come to the office, I'll see that you go right through to the buyers. You ruined me. (Crosses to him. Hugs him.)" (85). The woman's affection for Willy, dialectically mingled with her ruin, manifests in her promise that whenever he comes to the office (their place of business), she'll send him "right through to the buyers" (her bosses)--an image which parallels the business interactions of pimps and prostitutes.
At one point in the text, Willy's conversation with his wife subtly transforms into a conversation with "WOMAN." Preceded by several portending, unified laughs between Linda and "WOMAN", as Willy simultaneously speaks with his physically-present wife and the reminiscent apparition of his paramour, Linda's place in the dialogue is superseded when "WOMAN" says, "Me? You didn't make me, Willy. I picked you" (27). Immediately, Linda seems to disappear from Willy's consciousness, but his conversation enigmatically continues in much the same way; soon after, Linda rejoins the conversation saying, "You are, Willy. The handsomest man" (27,28), without ever disrupting the continuity of his dialogue. Miller unites Linda with Willy's paramour by demonstrating their interchangeability in this scene. Like "WOMAN," Willy views his wife as a sexual object who, unfortunately, has a lesser exchange-value; unlike "WOMAN," who receives "two boxes of size nine sheers" when they meet, Linda is constantly "darning [a] pair of her silk stockings" (28). Thus, Willy treats females like commodities and regards his own wife with the disrespect and disdain of a common whore. Thus, Biff's words ring true when he says to his mother, "He always, always wiped the floor with you. Never had an ounce of respect for you" (40).
Like their father, Biff and Happy pursue the capitalistic idealism of the previous generation. According to Diane Hoeveler, "Willy's materialism and philandering find expression in" Happy who "Like Biff...has heen warped by Willy's belief in success at any price. His promiscuity and insensitivity reach their pinnacle in the "celebration" dinner when he deserts his father for a woman he has just picked up--an event that parallels what Willy did to Biff in that Boston hotel room" (635). Thus, the destructive effects of capitalism, culminating through generations of influence, are epitomized in the American perspectives of Biff and Happy. Biff, who is "too rough with the girls," and Happy, who believes "they broke the mold" (48) after making his mother, reflect their father's chauvinistic disrespect for women, as well as, an objectified view of his wife and their mother, Linda.
As pointed out by Hoeveler, Happy's "promiscuity and insensitivity reach their pinnacle in the "celebration" dinner," when he sexually solicits a girl who, in his own words, "ought to be on a magazine cover" (74). Suggestively straddling his chair (an action redolent of Ben's lusty bravado), Happy asks the girl, "You don't happen to sell, do you?" (74)--an equally suggestive question which, when coupled with his opinion that "She's on call," solidifies his suspicion that she's actually a call-girl, or prostitute. Happy's statement, "Strudel's comin'" and his admiration of its mouth and "Oh God!..the binoculars" (73), reflect his view that women are sexual commodities he can purchase with champagne, "company money" (74), and socioeconomic stature (e.g. he says that "Biff is one of the greatest football players in the country" (75) and calls himself a graduate of West Point).
Earlier on, while reminiscing with his brother, Happy says, "Sometimes I sit in my apartment...all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then...it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely" (15). Herein, Happy despondently acknowledges the failures of American capitalism and associates "plenty of women" with both private property and commodity ownership. Because of his commodified view of women and the possibility of female ownership, he regards them with the same economic dispensability with which he regards bowling. He says, "The only trouble is, it gets like bowling, or something--I just keep knockin' them over and it doesn't mean anything" (16, 17). Happy's "over-developed sense of competition" (17) and desire "to come out number one"--a byproduct of the American dream and Ben's challenging assurance that "it does take a great kind of a man to crack the jungle"--leads Happy to sleep with his company executives' fiances, who willingly acquiesce, proving (at least in his own eyes) that "There's not a good woman in a thousand" (76).
Linda's condemning accusation, "Did you have to go to women tonight? You and your lousy rotten whores!" (90), attests to Happy's commodified view of women and the dissolute exploitation of gender dynamics. The American dream, envisioned by Willy as the boundless socioeconomic possibilities of an early American frontier, pervades every generation of his family and eventually destroys their livelihood. Economic preoccupation and the “cut and dry” austerity of twentieth century capitalism, perniciously warps the American mentality and results in the dehumanization of women as commodities, the pestilent degradation of male-female relationships, and a fall of a society that once promised a better quality of life.










Works Cited
Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Death of a Salesman as Psychomania.” Journal of American Culture. 1978: 632-37. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. November 5, 2008..
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Dramatist Play Service, 1975.
Nilsen, Helge Normann. “From Honors at Dawn to Death of a Salesman: Marxism and the Early Plays of Arthur Miller.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature. March 94: 146-56. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. November 5, 2008..

Good Job You Handsome Boy!

The bilious sot, all-too-familiar with the ailments of drink, steadied himself and called out haphazardly, “What’s a guy gotta do to git a drink around here?!” Showing little sign of having heard the order, Charlie poured out number eight, another Black Butte, while printing the man's tab. Distracted by Jack’s entrance, Charlie averted his eyes as he dropped the drink and check together, saying assertively, "There you go, bud."
"Naw holdsh it, boy!" slurred the man, as his tarnished face crinkled disapprovingly, "Whats the fuck--am I supposed ta do withish?," he finished in a tone both jocular and derisive, forcibly catching Charlie's eyes as he lifted the bill, paper and hand crinkled angrily, shaking in protestation. Breaking through his facile humor, Charlie fastened in on the man’s glazed and overtly enlarged pupils, confidently leaned over the bar top in a bulldog-like stance, his left palm flat and his right forearm pressed parallel with the length of the bar so that his shoulders curled robustly forward, and challengingly barked, "It means you're done."
"Noo I'm not!" the man sputtered vociferously, his eyes widening as he rose to the challenge.
"Pay your tab and get the fuck out of my bar; you're done," snapped Charlie, taking back the Black Butte with experienced composure and austerity. Chagrined by Charlie’s youthful contumacy and convicted of an aged man's freedom to unrestricted intoxication, the codger spit out several brash epithets, leapt up from his seat and defiantly slammed the barstool backward to the ground.
Before the stool’s reckless clatter abated, its antagonist was whisked away, as though victim to a savage torrent, Jack’s youthful strength and machismo vibrating as he tumbled the man to the front door, finally shoving him to the harsh pavement outside.
"What's the matter with you?!...Old piece of shit!," he barked disdainfully. A harsh wind ripped by, forcing Jack back inside, slamming the door closed behind him. Upon reentering, Jack was inundated by a thick mixture of alcohol, bravado, cackling, and the indulgent applaud of thirsty guests--some tipsy, others shit-faced, all twenty-something and horny; the typical Friday night herd.
"Old piece of shit," laughed Charlie as he leaned over the bar top and pounded fists with Jack in convivial gratitude, “How ya been, man?”
Cutting short Jack’s reply, a vivacious young tart chimed in, “I am so glad you got rid of that old guy; he was really fuckin’ creepy and he smelled like shit; that was really impressive, by the way...I sure wouldn’t mind being roughed around like that...," she said lustily, unashamed of such a trite, poorly delivered one-liner. As Jack took a seat next to her, she leaned toward him and groped his knee with unexpected familiarity. Flashing her eyes seductively, she slowly pulled away her hand, turned, and left for the restroom. Jack returned the stranger’s affection with a wry smile.
"How 'bout that Black Butte?," Jack said as he turned toward Charlie and hinted at the previously removed glass. Charlie, understanding, succumbed with a jovial nod.
“Geez baby, what was that all about?,” Amy said from behind Jack. She was dressed in full uniform, obviously flustered, yet radiant and beautiful.
"Oh hey, baby! Ah, just some loser...he slammed down his barstool so, I don't know, I just got rid of 'im...old bastard wouldn't behave himself."
“I really wish you wouldn’t do stuff like that; it scares me.”
"Oh stop it. That old fart couldn’t hurt a fly if he wanted to.”
"I know, I know; I still wish that you would be more careful, though, you never know who you might come across; you don’t know, he could have had a knife, or even a gun, or something.”
“Oh, come on, it was just a drunk old man; anybody could have seen that. He gets worked up like that every Friday night; it's like clockwork, you know? and you've got to admit it's worth a laugh."
“I’m just saying...you never know. There’s only so much you can tell about a person.”
“Anyways," Jack said, changing the subject, "you haven’t given me a hug or kiss or anything yet; I’ve missed you.” Tugging Amy in close to his body, he kissed her on the lips, “How’s your night been?”
“Oh, it’s been okay; it’s been really freakin’ busy; I think I’ll need to have a drink or two...” Amy paused and smiled, “or maybe three or four tonight.” Both laughed.
“Well, y’know, if you’re in the mood, I think I can get one for us tonight,” Jack said with an air of secrecy and caution, lifting his brow and biting his lower lip with an importuning nod.
"Oh!--you mean the one that was--that would be incredible, actually,” her eyes flashed, “I’ve really been in the mood lately; Oh good baby! I was hoping...," a grin of slightly embarrassed excitement overtook her expression as she leaned forward and pecked Jack on the cheek, "Sounds like a date! I better get back to my tables, though. Good job you handsome boy!"
On her way back to the dining room, Jack watched as Amy passed the girl returning from the restroom. The two of them, he thought to himself, appeared empty, or hollow, and there was something wonderfully masochistic, something depraved and relentless in their demeanors.
“They look like a pair from the Bunny Ranch,” he murmured to himself.
The girl approached closer and reclaimed her seat, again using Jack’s leg for leverage.
"So,” Jack said with deliberation, “you were hoping to get beat up tonight, were ya?"
"Yes sir, I am, but you shouldn’t be so confident, I can put up quite the fight," she responded playfully.
“Well, in that case, I might need some back up, don’t ya think?”
Not understanding, “No offense, but yeah, I really think you will, you kinda look like a pussy.”
“Haha, that’s good to hear; the more the merrier, right? Whateya drinkin’?”
“AMF.”
Jack leaned forward, grabbing Charlie’s attention, and called her a drink. At this moment, the lights in the bar deeply lowered, blanketing the cigarette haze in its pall, shadow and smoke mingling to thicken the Happy Hour dim. Their visages now skewed in darkness, each appeared more attractive in the other’s eyes. Within a moment, Charlie dropped the AMF between them, and it, like so many other barriers, seemed imbued with dark, superficial beauty.
“So, what’s your name muscle man?”
“It’s Jack.”
“Ooo that’s manly, I should have guessed,” she replied teasingly.
“Okay, smart-ass, and what might your name be?”
“It’s Daisy,” she said, attempting a southern accent.
Jack joined in with an equally poor attempt, “Wayall, I thank its a beautiful nayme for a beautiful gayal.”
“Why, thank ye, I thank so too,” she extended her wrist daintily. Jack lightly cradled her fingertips toward his face and kissed the back of her hand. The two of them laughed.
“You know, it’s funny, when I was in elementary school the kids would quack at me because my name reminded them of Daisy Duck, and I hated it, oh God, I hated it. Can you believe that? I used to think it was so ugly.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“You know, I’m not sure, it’s just such a timeless name and its unique, too.”
“Well, it’s definitely unique.”
“Don’t be a dick.”
“I was being serious, I think unique is beautiful; one of the most beautiful things in the world, in fact.”
“Wow, somebody wants to get laid tonight,” she replied mockingly, mollifying the insult with a seductive grin. Jack lifted her hand, still clutched in his own, and gave it another kiss.
“You have no idea,” he said in a low, depraved tone.
Curious to see her husband’s advancement, Amy returned to the bar and peered, with much difficulty, through its murky vicinity. With deliberate scrutiny, she noted her husband’s smile, the imposing closeness between he and Daisy, and what looked like Daisy’s hand resting comfortably upon his mid-thigh. The expression on Amy’s face at this moment was ambivalent, evincing the same hollowness Jack had noticed minutes before, but oddly curtailed under a wry, effusive grin. Amy returned to this spot several times throughout her shift, the expression on her face intensifying as the night went on. Three hours later, five drinks each, her shift was over and she returned to the bar for the final time that night.
“Here you go Charlie,” she said, handing him his tip-out.
“Damn girl, I usually have to take some clothes off to get this kind of money!”
“Oh you’re so cute, come here,” Amy replied with motherly condescension. “Mmmmwhah,” she kissed him on the lips and gave him three soft, playful slaps on the cheek.
“Have a good night sweetie,” he said tenderly.
“Thanks Charlie, I’ll see you next Friday.”
Amy wrapped up her apron and approached Jack from behind. “Hey there,” she said, smiling at Daisy, as she leaned over her husband’s shoulder and whispered quietly in his ear.
After carefully listening, Jack responded clumsily, under the weight of his alcohol, “Haha, yeah, of coursh. That sounds perfect.”
“Alright, I’m gonna go then.”
Pulling on her coat, Amy walked briskly toward the exit. Seconds later, she was gone.
“Who was that?,” said Daisy.
“That--that wush--my date for the night,” a goofy smile overtaking his expression.
“What about me?,” Daisy said in a whining, juvenile tone, cutely pouting out her bottom lip, “I’ll be too lonely without you!”
“Hey, you’re comin’ too, baby; like I said, the more the merrier!”
Certain of Jack’s mendacity, Daisy rapped out with purgative surrender, “Fuck, at this point, I’m down for anything! I can’t even feel my toes, I’m so drunk!”
With drunken humor, Jack brought his fingertips together connivingly. “My plan has worked,” he said, devilishly breaking into laughter.
“Oh God, you must think I’m such a slut!,” Daisy said, rapidly loosing control, “but, you know what? I’m glad I’m a slut--that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little slut!,” she went on with drunken garrulousness, “Everybody thinks so, they’re just too afraid and too stupid to say it! And I know, because I’ve been around and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed about the bar defiantly, wildly eyeing her drunken companions, as she laughed out with thrilling scorn, “Sexy--God, I’m sexy!”
Unable to contain his laughter, Jack keeled over the bar top ferociously, Daisy belligerently toppled to his side, and Charlie dropped the check between their giggling faces.
“Hehe, good call Charlie!,” Jack said, attempting to regain his poise. “You wanna get outta here, Daisy?”
“More than anything,” she replied seriously, subdued.
Jack reached for her face, wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck, and kissed her impetuously. Once pulling away, Daisy, for the first time, noticed Jack’s wedding ring.
“Are shyou married?,” she said with sudden surprise.
“Yeah?,” he replied dubiously, “I thought you knew. I don’t see why it should make a difference now, though.”
“Oh, don’t worry, it doesn’t; I just didn’t know.”
Jack pulled her in tightly and kissed her. “Let’s get outta here.”
“Where do you wanna go?,” she drawled out, her head collapsing backward in euphoria.
“Hey, thank you Charlie; I’ll be seeing ya,” Jack said as he put down sixty dollars and emerged from his seat.
“Hey, no problem man, have a great night.”
“You know I will,” he said loudly, embracing Daisy as they both staggered away.


Stumbling through the hallway, mouths locked passionately together, the two groped and clawed with bestial vigor.
“Room 6B, this is the one,” Jack said, gasping for air. After a few clumsy failures, still fastened to Daisy with frenetic zeal, Jack successfully ran the key-card and the two stumbled into the room. Taken aback by the crimson glow of the television, Daisy flipped on the light switch and stepped away from Jack.
“Oh my God!,” she blurted, genuinely startled, “What the fuck!--who the fuck!--What’s the matter with you?!--What the fuck is going on?” She turned and slapped Jack cruelly across the face. “I’ve gotta get out of here--What’s the matter with you?! What’s the matter with you?! God! You fuckin’ perverts!,” she wailed out, tears welding in her eyes, as she ran into the hallway. A gust of wind chased after Daisy, slamming the door closed as it whisked by.
“What the fuck just happened?!” Amy interjected. She lie in the bed nude, flushed pale with ghastly stupefaction, a joint dropping from her mouth as she uttered the words.
“I have no idea,” Jack replied, staring blankly at his wife.

Here's the Latest Paper

Marcos Norris
Studies in Drama
Dr. Schaak
Sept. 17, 2008
Coagulated Context and Absurd Ambition: the Dramatic Form
of Shakespeare's Hamlet
Reputedly, and in its most general terms, Elizabethan dramatic tragedy often features human life and society as subject to the arbitrary influences of chance and fate. Aristotle's concept of hamartia, within this tragic framework, consisting as anything from the protagonist's mistaken identity, to a pernicious incident or character foible, is acted on by the forces of evil immanent within the dramatic world. Whatever the causal element (hamartia), the subsequent fatal process leads to a terminus which grotesquely outweighs and ironically reflects the initial conflict.
Audiences have inveterately regarded Hamlet as one whose pensive assiduity and scrupulous rumination of his Father's murder, disable his initiative to avenge. For the greater part of the play, he vacillates between fervor and diffidence, audacity and pusillanimity, without ever taking action. Thus, it is generally conceded that Hamlet's plot and tragic form is oriented around the prince's idle posturing (his hamartia), which suspends Claudius' demise and enables the forces of chance and fate to exploit the fragile infrastructure inaugurated by ghost Hamlet's insidious disclosures of regicide. I believe this interpretation, however plausible, inaccurately grants the play a consistent development of character and plot, thereby failing to acknowledge its greater complexities and a more accurate reading.
As a dramatic work lacking omniscient narration or a stable figure trustworthy of interpretive guidance (e.g. a Grecian chorus), Hamlet provides audiences only with the actions, interactions, dialogue, and soliloquies of the involved characters. Thus, interpretation of both individual characters and the interrelationships which form plot, is strictly limited to one's grasp over the images of context created through the performance; and, as the reader will see, the trustworthiness of such images, in a drama whose characters evince plethoric perfidy, is less than certain.
Naturally inclined to identify with a play's protagonist, audiences may be prone to trust the protagonist's judgments and interpretations of the dramatic world. Those interpretations, however, as explained by Christopher Prendergast in "Derrida's Hamlet," are "assembled, or rather disassembled, in an overarching category that Derrida calls spectrality, the spectral nature of all our constructions" (44). He explains
that the essential point about Hamlet is not--as in the standard view--that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well; he is unable to act not because of a contingent psychological infirmity, but because the sheer lucidity of his thinking corrodes the ground of all possible action in a world dominated by an instrumental logic of ends and means. Hamlet...sees into the nature of things...to something askew in the world itself, something radically and incorrigibly out of joint. (44,45)
Ironically, it is the "sheer lucidity of his thinking" which disables Hamlet's ability to formulate a lucid interpretation of the world. As I will soon expound, the inconsistent, conflicting, and untrustworthy development of character and plot in Hamlet, elicits a tension which borders on the absurd, for, Hamlet's lack of initiative stems from a determination to discover purpose and order in a world which indefatigably evinces entropy and protean perceptions of context.
Over the course of this paper, I will seek to confirm the "spectral," or unstable, nature of the dramatic world, and then explain how the work's uniting of protagonist and audience within a shared disposition make cohesive interpretation of that world an utter impossibility.
The initial context of the drama is cloaked by one giant pall of deception: the throne has been usurped through regicide at the hands of Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, whose hasty and incestuous marriage to Gertrude (the widowed queen) shortly followed. This odious and carnal circumstance of siblicide, regicide, incest, greed, and deception, is unknown to the state of Denmark, Hamlet, and, ostensibly, everyone other than Claudius. There is certainly "something rotten in the state of Denmark" (1:4:90), but as the drama advances and the plot complicates, "something radically and incorrigibly out of joint" emerges. Everyone is indefatigably deceiving everyone: Polonius spies on Laertes and Hamlet; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are constantly masquerading on behalf of Claudius; Ophelia, Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes all play a role in the conspiracy against Hamlet; and Hamlet, who becomes aware of Claudius' regicide, surreptitiously uses the information to his advantage, deceiving nearly every other character in the play.
As these deceptive layers pile up, the audience is faced with the equally layered paradox, that character identity and a plot which is character-oriented can only be identified through the roles played within the performance. In other words, the role of Hamlet (and every other character) is multi-layered: it is both the fictitious role performed by an actor, and, within the dramatic world, the identity (fictitious or veridical) Hamlet attempts to convey to others. Therefore, the characters within the dramatic world share with the audience the abstruse task of distinguishing between perfidious masquerades (such as those mentioned above) and true expressions of identity. To some degree, all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely performers.
The drama evinces, therefore, a myriad of character-based images which often conflict (e.g. Hamlet doesn't apprehend context the same as Laertes, Gertrude, or Claudius). Thus, a variety of dramatic worlds, as perceived by each character, coexist simultaneously within the constructs of the drama. It seems apt, then, that Denmark is notorious for its drunkenness (1:4:10-20), for, as one heavily intoxicated, we are faced with a whirlwind of questionable images and conflicting perceptions of context.
It is the ghost who establishes, for most of the play, a semi-stable image of plot development. In compliance with (and perhaps an allusion to) the biblical maxim that two or three witnesses are necessary to establish an otherwise debatable verdict (Deuteronomy 17,19), Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus simultaneously witness the ghost. This anchor is only semi-stable because, as Hamlet himself says to the ghost, "be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/ Be thy intents wicked or charitable,/ Thou com'st in such a questionable shape" (1:4:40-44), and earlier on, Horatio had disagreed with Marcellus and Barnardo's description of the ghost (1:2:235-239). Thus, it seems, that even while the ghost is ontologically verified, there are differing opinions regarding its ontological nature. As Patrick Colm Hogan notes,
The ghost tells the story of how Claudius murdered him to gain the throne. The idea is plausible, but we are uncertain about the nature of the ghost...he claims to have departed life, neither for heaven or hell, but for purgatory. This claim does not entirely resolve the issue. Indeed, it may confuse things further. Shakespeare's Catholic audience members may have taken the ghost's assertion as perfectly reasonable. But the Protestants could have seen this as evidence that the ghost was untrustworthy, that he was lying in his reference to purgatory, a non-existent place, a Catholic fiction. (51)
Figuratively speaking, then, protagonist and audience alike, inhabit a boat which is subject to the whims of an entropic and indeterminable ocean. Stability of plot, or coagulation of an otherwise fluid context, is fatuously achieved by putting trust in an ontologically-ambiguous and morally-questionable anchor--the ghost.
Hamlet's contention that "Denmark's a prison" (2:2:243), affirms his inability to perspicuously interpret and define the world around him. He is unable to take action against Claudius because he is fettered by his unique ability to see "into the nature of things." In response to Hamlet's claims of incarceration, the discussion follows:
Ros. We think not so, my lord./ Ham. Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing/ either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me/ it is a prison./ Ros. Why, then your ambition makes it one: 'tis too narrow/ for your mind./ Ham. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count/ myself a king of infinite space--were it not that I have bad dreams./ Guild. Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very/ substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream./ Ham. A dream itself is but a shadow./ Ros. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a/ quality that it is but a shadow's shadow. (2:2:248-262)
In the context of this discussion, the ambitious first "dream," or mentally construct, what they then strive to accomplish, indicating, that their actions reflect their perceptions of the world. These perceptions, Hamlet explains, are irreducibly subjective, for "there is nothing/ either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Therefore, "A dream [a constructed perception of the world] itself is but a shadow." Thus, the very nature of the universe, as empirically perceived, is "of so airy and light a quality" that purpose and meaning are "but a shadow's shadow." The reason Hamlet seems to vacillate between fervor and diffidence, audacity and pusillanimity, in his plot against Claudius, moves beyond the question of the ghost, into a realm where interpretation of the universe per se, is in question. Hamlet's perceptive acuity "corrodes the ground of all possible action" because he is unable to discover purpose and order in an all too shadowy world.
An interesting shift takes place when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern present Hamlet with a band of players. Entreating one to perform, Hamlet is dumbfounded by the player's astonishing rendition of Hecuba, "The mobbled queen" (2:2:499). As he consequently confesses in soliloquy, "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!/ Is it not monstrous that this player here,/ But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force his soul to his own conceit/ That from her working all his visage wann'd,/ Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,/ A broken voice, and his whole function suiting/ With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!/ For Hecuba!" (2:2:544-552). Perplexed by the player's ability to "force his soul to his own conceit" and credulously adopt a fictional identity, Hamlet sardonically contemns his own impotence, saying, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to her,/ That he should weep for her? What would he do/ Had he the motive and the cue for passion/ That I have? He would drown the stage with tears...and amaze indeed/ The very faculties of eyes and ears./ Yet I...unpregnant of my cause...can say nothing--no, not for a king,/ Upon whose property and most dear life/ A damn'd defeat was made" (2:2:553-567). Herein, Hamlet perceives the artistic power of dramatic performance, and realizes his own ability to adopt a fictional identity and impose a false-reality on the world around him. By doing so, he may apprehend a stable context and redeem that which is "radically and incorrigibly out of joint." To be more specific, Hamlet realizes his ability to "force his soul to his own conceit" and cloak reality with fiction, thereby mollifying its indeterminacy with a perspicuous, albeit facile, semblance of the world.
Hamlet's subsequent play with a play, then, takes on a curious form; for, while the performance is redolent of Claudius' murder, there is one particularly striking difference: regicide is committed by "one Lucianus, nephew to the King" (my italics, 3:2:239). Thus, it seems plausible, that while the performance is used to "catch the conscience of the King" (2:2:601), Hamlet also uses it to dabble with the creative powers he discovered through the performance of Hecuba. In other words, Hamlet uses the dramatic performance in order to blur the distinctions between reality and fiction, thereafter instigating a real-life dramatic performance of his own. Unable to take action before this point, we subsequently see Hamlet playing the role of avenger/usurper of the throne.
From this emerges Hamlet's most profound quality: the prince is paradoxically united with the audience as a spectator of himself. As Hamlet later says to Laertes, "Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet./ If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,/ And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,/ Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it" (5:2:299-232). Thus, in acting out his own false-reality, Hamlet takes on a dual-existence: he is both the performer of his fictitious identity, and a passive spectator who "from himself be ta'en away." Thus, audience and protagonist alike, are faced with the convoluted task of distinguishing not only between the veridical Hamlet and his adopted fictitious identity, but also between the false-reality and the already indeterminable dramatic world.
The implications of this dynamic become appallingly clear upon the third appearance of the ghost. At this point in the play, both the ghost's existence and the veracity of his story, have been purportedly established through the candid confession of Claudius (3:3:40). Thus, when the ghost reappears and is unseen by Gertrude (3:4:133), the trustworthiness of Claudius' confession, is severely undermined. For, it is quite possible, that the ghost in this instance, is a manifestation of Hamlet's false-reality, a mere hallucination induced by his fictitious role. Likewise, because it too was unseen by anyone other than Hamlet and the audience, Claudius' confession is just as likely a manifestation of false-reality.
Therefore, all possibility of lucid interpretation breaks down, as Hamlet and audience meld into one. Hamlet's dual-existence and the dynamic it brings to the drama, makes for a multi-layered and enigmatic performance. Within one play exists, the real-life actors' performance of Hamlet, the undefinable identities portrayed by the characters of the dramatic world, and the question of whether those performances and portrayals actually exist. Therefore, establishing any cohesive interpretation of Hamlet, requires one to pick and choose which images are falsities, and which, if any, are legitimate. Thus, the dramatic form of Hamlet, besides exhibiting a whirlwind of questionable images, entropy, and protean perceptions of context, is one, which, because of its complexities, is entirely uninterpretable.


Works Cited
Hogan, Patrick Colm. "Narrative Universals, Heroic Tragi-Comedy, and Shakespeare's Political
Ambivalence." College Literature. Winter 2006: 34-66. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Sept. 1, 2008
.
Prendergast, Christopher. "Derrida's Hamlet." Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary
Criticism. 2005: 44-47. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Sept. 1, 2008 .

Marcos Norris
Studies in Drama
Dr. Schaak
Sept. 4, 2008
Response to Hamlet
Dramatic tragedy, as I have initially understood, is a work of prose, performed by actors on stage, wherein Aristotle's concept of hamartia has persisted as a fundamental quality. Hamartia refers to an action or character foible which, in heroic tragedy (notably the Grecian works of Sophocles) perniciously leads to death and destruction, while in later tragic forms (e.g. ironic tragedy), the pernicious action or character foible is acted on by those subjugated and mollified forces of evil inherent to society and human nature. In both forms, the consequential terminus drastically outweighs the initial crime.
Understanding Hamlet's tragic form, I must admit, is difficult upon my first reading. What is Hamlet's character foible? I'm unsure if it's clear; Hamlet evinces a lack of initiative because of his own conflicting and capricious intentions; inclined to assiduity and pensive considerations, he vacillates between fervor and pusillanimity, revenge and suicide, confidence and uncertainty. His pensive pall, however, instantly dissipates the moment he discovers a "rat," Polonius spying from behind an arrays, and swiftly stabs through, killing him. With celerity and temerity, under the impression that the "rat" was actually Claudius, Hamlet abandons his desired prerequisite of certainty and succumbs to the deceptive image.
The entire play thus far has displayed Hamlet struggling with the trustworthiness of images. He considers the possibility of his ghost-father being but the apparition of a perfidious devil; he is transfixed by the deceptive powers of role-playing, when viewing a Player's performance of Hecuba; he even reconsiders his love for Ophelia, once realizing the self-decieving powers of youthful lust. His rash murder of Polonius, in contrast, undermines the suggestion that Hamlet's inactivity was caused by a scrupulous search for validity. In fact, I think a closer reading of the play expands our attention from the deceptive forces working against Hamlet, to the deceptive forces working on every character, and ultimately, the audience. Everyone is indefatigably deceiving everyone. Polonius spies on Laertes and Hamlet; Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are constantly masquerading on behalf of Claudius; Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all conspire in their plots against Hamlet; while Hamlet, transformed by an ethereal disclosure from his supposed Father, convinces everyone of his madness; Even initiative per se, is but a shadow of a shadow.
After the murder of Polonius, the ghost reappears and is unseen by Gertrude. What is the audience to do? In the first scenes of the play, the ghost was established as real through the reputedly biblical maxim that three witnesses (Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus) establish an otherwise debatable verdict. Is Hamlet mad? The ghost merely an apparition? Did Horatio and Marcellus somehow share in the hallucination? Why wouldn't the ghost appear to Gertrude? Is he deceiving Hamlet? Gertrude? Is Gertrude deceiving everyone by ignoring the ghost? unlikely. This enigmatic event aught to rid the audience of stable interpretations. I've lost my grip on the play, and haven't any sensible interpretive options.
Hamlet is challenging my understanding of dramatic tragedy; perhaps, the text calls for a new definition.

This is actually pretty interesting if you make it to the end.

Marcos Norris
Professor Pothen
World Literature
May 15, 2008
A Poetic of Fiction in
The Kalevala and Haroun and the Sea of Stories
In order to develop what I believe may be extracted from The Kalevala and Haroun and the Sea of Stories to develop a poetic, or theory, of fiction, I will draw heavily from T.S Eliot's Tradition and The Individual Talent. In this text, Eliot argues that individual talent is manifested in artists who have a comprehensive knowledge of the history of their artistic tradition, understand their individual place and significance within that history, and create mimetic works of art which both assimilate and grow forth from the canon, while, in turn, because of the works' contributions to the canon, reshape its entire form and how the artist will understand it. Following this development, I will briefly attempt to explain how the canon and individual works of fiction relate to the artist and the empirical world in a similar way.
According to Eliot, a literary work must cohesively relate to tradition in order to have value. He says that "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (2320, Norton Anthology of British Literature). Textual "meaning" exists, according to Eliot, only if the text is expressive of all generations "of the literature of Europe from Homer" (2320). In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the Water Genie describes to Haroun the nature of the Sea of Stories, in a description that closely resembles the model of the canon given by Eliot. Rushdie writes,
He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity...these were the Streams of Story...each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here. The Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. (72)
Like Eliot's model, literary works, or stories, must relate cohesively to the rest of the canon, much like a current of water relates to the entire ocean; although a current may be distinguishable, it flows, and in some ways is indistinguishable, from the rest of the ocean. The literary canon, like the Sea of Stories, is a comprehensive organism, which takes on (figuratively speaking) a substantive form capable of growth and mutation. As Eliot explains,
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is compete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (2320)
Thus, Haroun's father, The Ocean of Notions, is a true artist and storyteller, who embodies the whole of literature and creates individual works of legitimate talent. Similarly, one may apply this artistic process to shamanism in The Kalevala, or to Lonnrot's own artistic process. Lonnrot was aware of the Finnish oral traditions, and created The Kalevala as a text which sprang forth from the tradition, and, in turn, reshaped the tradition and the manner in which artists will understand it. Likewise, the shamans in the text have an intrusive knowledge of primordial origins, or "the literature of Europe from Homer," so to speak. Their shamanic creations, in turn, affect the entire nation and shape how each citizen apprehends his or her place in history.
What causes the great conflict in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, is that tradition is neglected. Iff, Haroun's travel-guide and war companion, on observing the dark poison which has polluted the Sea of Stories, laments, "It's our own fault...we are the Guardians of the Ocean and we didn't guard it. Look at the Ocean, look at it! The oldest stories every made, and look at them now. We let them rot, we abandoned them, long before this poisoning. We lost touch with our beginnings, with our roots, our Wellspring, our Source. Boring, we said, not in demand, surplus to requirements. And now look, just look! No colour, no life, no nothing. Spoilt!" (146). This excerpt remarkably resembles what seem to be the mocking criticisms of Eliot, when he writes, "One of the facts that might come to light...is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects in his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poets differences from his predecessors...we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed" (2320). As we see in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-shud creates the anti-stories, shadows whose eyes are the direct opposite of the humans from which they are projected, in order to annihilate the Sea of Stories. As pointed out by Eliot, it is the anti-story, or "individual" creation, that is polluting the literary tradition.
Thus, in accordance with Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and to a lesser extent, The Kalevala, suggests that a fictional work ought to be created by way of an artist's comprehension of the literary canon, and creative ability to contribute uniquely to the reformation of the canon.
In this final segment I will attempt briefly to explain a P2C2E (A process too complicated to explain[a referent to the text]), in order to develop how I believe the literary artist, the empirical world, and the fictional mimesis all flow into one another, and share, what may be apprehended as, truth. Borrowing once more from Eliot, he continues his definition of individual talent, writing, "my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in poetry, and those which become important in the poetry play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality" (2323). Thus, the poet, or literary artist, should not limit his or her creation to a mere expression of personality. In fact, in my opinion, the literary artist cannot do this. Like the shaman, the artist acts as a medium wherewith the artist's "impressions and experiences" unify and flow through, to a shaman-like expression.
It seems to me that all human beings experience existence through their perceptual sensations (e.g. the five senses), perceiving the world and developing a sense of reality, through their many relational-ties (e.g. feeling the ground, breathing the air, sight, movement, etc, etc, etc, the list is endless). As these perceptual relationships "combine in peculiar and unexpected ways," assimilating and formulating ideas about existence, most of us adopt language and begin to use it and develop our use of it in our experience of existence. For this reason, our very ability to think, feel, see, and interpret anything about existence, becomes rooted, limited, and defined by an apprehension of language, based on the dynamic of our life experience thus far. Therefore, our very means of existence is the language-based interpretation of our relational sensations (P2C2E?).
In this way, every person is a text or a story.
In the same manner a text is considered rich and legitimately individual, so too, human-texts are considered rich if they flow from a comprehensive apprehension of their own generation and human history. I wouldn't doubt that most of the world's "richest" people have a keen understanding of history, their generation, and themselves. And so the artist, a human-text, who comprehensively understands the canon of literature, is a work of art in his soul. Thus, the reciprocal-determinism evinced in the interplay of tradition and individual talent, also includes the influences of the artist's soul. So here's my grand formula: artist, individuals, empirical world, mimetic fiction and any other form of art, God, and any other existence-based relationship conceivable, all flow through one another in a great web of relationships, influencing and being influenced, in a continual organic metamorphoses, as a form of literature (P2C2E?). Once conceiving existence in this way, it is no longer difficult for me to tangibly understand that in the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh. Works of fiction, express an artist's language-based relationship to the universal-text. This is why an understanding of tradition, contributes so beautifully to works of art.

This is a GOOD paper

Marcos Norris
Major Literary Figures
Dr. Schaak
May 5, 2008
Socialized Identity and Commodification: Nineteenth-century
Americanism in Melville's The Confidence-Man
Published in 1857, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, relates the tale of one man's day-long masquerade on board a Mississippi riverboat. Appearing first as a Black cripple, the confidence-man undergoes continual metamorphoses, embodying numerous and diverse avatars, as he perfidiously exploits, through his tactful legerdemain, countless passengers for their money and their trust. In an article titled "At the Limits of Identity: Realism and American Personhood in Melville's Confidence-Man," Rachel Cole suggests that by "Constantly changing his profession, his temperament, even his skin color, the confidence-man lacks a stable identity," and that "In the confidence-man's case...depth [a stable identity] is indistinguishable from the preferential appreciation offered him by others. Underneath his surface lie the feelings of people outside of him, to such an extent that it becomes implausible to describe him as having a self at all." (384, 386). In other words, because of the inconsistency of those characteristics (race, profession, temperament, etc.) which normally evince a person's identity, the confidence-man "represents the possibility that personhood [identity] might be irreducibly social" (386). Over the course of this paper, I will expound the socially-based nature of identity as presented in The Confidence-Man, and then explain how a capitalist social-dynamic in America contributes to the development of that identity.
Despite his mutable temperament and ever-changing appearance, the confidence-man, for the most part, is traceable throughout the narrative. For the greater part of the novel, the inconsistent confidence-man is, ironically, identifiable by his consistent garrulousness, financial importunities, and inveterate attempts to gain other's confidence. It's not until the arrival of Charlie Noble that the lines of distinction are blurred, and the reader loses sight (at least momentarily) of who's who.
In a chapter aptly titled, "Opening with a Poetical Eulogy of the Press, and continuing with Talk Inspired by the Same," Melville delineates a lengthy and convivial conversation between Charlie Noble and Frank Goodman (the confidence-man), who, with equally inspired geniality, engage in a manipulative game, wherein both are attempting to dupe the other "with Talk Inspired by the Same." The two, persistently importune one another to drink more wine and smoke more tobacco, substances which "tends to impair self-possession," for the obvious purpose of gaining the upper-hand (204). Throughout this conversation, Melville refrains from providing, what would be, helpful textual signifiers of who is speaking, and abandons the reader to unsuccessfully distinguish, in the midst of pure dialogue, between two seemingly identical voices. Cole remarks, "In the end, the only thing that distinguishes Charlie Noble from Frank Goodman...is that Charlie loses his confidence game. Beaten to the punch when Frank asks him for a loan, Charlie loses his poise, leaps to his feet, and turns--literally, according to the narrator--into a snake" (388). Thus, having "Beaten [Charlie] to the punch," the confidence-man exposes his own perfidious purposes, as well as, those of Charlie; as the text says, "Out of old material sprang a new creature. Cadmus glided into the snake" (216). Exposed as a snake, the animal form with which Satan deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden, Charlie Noble, besides sharing the confidence-man's garrulousness, geniality, and good-natured appearance, also shares his deceitful ploys.
At this point in the text, the active-passive, deceiver-dupe dynamic that has marked the narrative-line thus far, dramatically transforms into something which looks more like, deceiver-deceiver. Cole notes, "Nearly everyone on board the Fidele manipulates trust, not just the limited number of passengers usually identified with the title character. The widow and the miser, with their respective airs of innocence and poverty, are deceivers. So too is Thomas Fry, who earns his few pennies by pretending to be a veteran, though readers never recognize him as an instance of the confidence-man" (387). Thus, the distinctions between the passengers and the confidence-man are disrupted, and the masquerade expands to include not only the many avatars of the confidence-man, but also the other passengers on board.
Soon after his conversation with Charlie Noble has ended, Frank engages with a mystic (who, at one point, also identifies with a snake), and his disciple, Egbert. Both come on the scene, sporting the garrulous and convivial markedness with which we previously identified Charlie and Frank, in a succession which starkly resembles the novel's appearance and reappearance of the confidence-man's succession of avatars. In the midst of a conversation that turns out to be a whirlwind of confusion, Frank convinces Egbert to role-play as Charlie, and, for a time, they mutually pretend to be hypothetical friends. As if the previous confusion between Charlie and Frank weren't enough, the reader is now faced with distinguishing between Frank and Charlie, Egbert and the mystic, Egbert and Charlie, Frank and Egbert (pretending to be Charlie), and even between present-Frank and past-Frank (as well as, the man who lies beneath both these characters). Ending the conversation, unable to dupe the fictitious Charlie, Frank
turned on his heel, leaving his companion at a loss to determine where exactly the fictitious character had been dropped, and the real one, if any, resumed. If any, because, with pointed meaning, there occurred to him, as he gazed after the cosmopolitan, these familiar lines: "All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players,/ Who have their exists and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts."" (263)
In this scene, the traditional signifying characteristics of identity (race, profession, temperament, etc.) are demolished, as signifiers topple into signifiers, and human identity is reduced to socially-based avatars.
As Peter J. Bellis explains, "From the outset of the novel, physical appearance and textual evidence are played off against each other as a basis for identifying the self. Each is in turn cited as the ground for the other, in a whirl of references and cross-references that ultimately calls the possibility of all self-knowledge into question" (557). Like actors in a play, human beings enter and exit various milieus (or stage-settings), and adopt various avatars (or costumes), identifying not according to an interior stabilized self, but according to the audience's reception and interpretation of the actor's corresponding roles. Therefore, when a person enters a social-context, his or her identity is appropriated through other people, and the interior-self which traverses through the ever-shifting contexts, is reduced to a blank-canvas, upon which the succession of contexts successively paint redefinitions of identity. As Cole explains,
Many readers have described the confidence-man as an amalgam--not one man but many. It seems more accurate, however, to say that he represents not a series of avatars but something those avatars have in common. That common quality, advantage, is not a positive characteristic (like race or temperament or geographical provenance, or any other quality with which advantage might be associated, and on which it might be based), but the state of not having any characteristics or of being able to relieve oneself of one's characteristics at will. This state, the confidence-man's personhood, exists at the limits of identity. He represents the point at which being someone--someone distinct from others--merges with because it depends upon, the state of being no one in particular." (390)
Thus, identity, as presented in The Confidence-Man, is both existent and non-existent, socially derived, and the blank-canvas upon which self-definition is painted by social-relations.
In his discussion of Marxism and The Confidence-Man, Rick Mitchell argues that "For Melville the steamboat represents a microcosm of contemporary America. Constantly in flux as it prepares to land in the next port, and the next one, where it embarks and disembarks passengers [like actors on stage], the riverboat is also a liminal space which, in The Confidence-Man, is conducive to strange, ephemeral interaction where instability and deception is the norm" (52). As an American microcosm, Mitchell (and arguably Melville), invites us to apply the novel's socially-based image of identity not only to the riverboat's inhabitants, but also to the American nation, as a whole. Thus, Mitchell moves us from a discussion of the nature of identity, into a discussion of the capitalist nature of American social dynamic (wherein American identity is realized).
Mitchell explains that "Beginning with the mid-nineteenth century a particularly strong emphasis is placed on a thing's exchange-value, what it is worth on the market, rather than on its useful functions, or its use-value. And exchange-value begins to define not only commodities, but also people" (56). With the industrialization of America, capitalism comes to a peak and percolates American culture, leading, insidiously, to the simultaneous commodification of both economic-exchange and people.
Mitchell continues, "According to Marx, commodities take on human-like qualities as people become more thing-like, since both people and commodities now exist on the same line of equivalence. That is, their value is no longer based on their use-value, but on exchange-value, or what they are worth on the market" (56). Because of a fervent preoccupation with capital gain, the distinctions between person and product are blurred, and American identity, because it is socially-based, takes on a commodified form and is valued according to its economic worth. Mitchell explains that
If a diamond, 12 washing machines, 300 hours of labour of one person, and 2 hours labour of another each have the same dollar value, they are equivalent. Thus, in this incredibly unnatural and alienating form of exchange which we consider perfectly natural, man and commodities become interchangeable in a world where [according to Marx] 'man is no more himself than he is exchange value and commodity. Encompassed by objects that function and serve, man is not so much himself as the most beautiful of the functional and servile objects.' (56)
The novel evinces a strikingly similar model; masquerading as "the man in grey," the confidence-man propagates his "prospectus of the World's Charity," and in a paragraph where "tax" appears twelve times, explains that through a simple and moderate increase in taxes, his organization could accumulate "the sum of eleven thousand two hundred millions; which would warrant the dissolution of the society, as that fund judiciously expended, not a pauper or heathen could remain the round world over" (60). Here, "the man in grey" equates world peace, the redemption of mankind, and the well-being of every society on earth, with "the sum of eleven thousand two hundred millions." This credulously proposed solution, characterizes human beings as "thing-like": a commodity to be bought and sold, thus, reducing the decadence of society to an item of particular exchange-value.
In another of his masquerades, the confidence-man converses with Pitch, a character who contemns the labor of boys, pertinaciously contending that "Machines [are] for me. My cider-mill--does that ever steal my cider? My mowing-machine--does that ever give me insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker--all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested, too; no board, no wages: yet doing good all their lives long...The only practical Christians I know" (144). Pitch's colloquialisms reveal the manner in which he interchanges man and machine; in accordance with Marxism, Pitch dismisses men as insufficient and costly machines, while he personifies machines as "The only practical Christians I know."
Melville's The Confidence-Man, then, microcosmically defines the American as a protean social-creation subject to the game of confidence; which, in the context of mid-nineteenth century America, is a game of commodity trade and socioeconomic advancement. Masquerading, on a stage enveloped and circumscribed by a culture of commodification, the socially-based identity with which Americans are ascribed will, for this reason, be invariably commodified. In these terms, it rings true, as in the words of Pitch, that "Abolitionism, ye gods, but express the fellow-feeling of slave for slave" (141). In this way, The Confidence-Man, rather than being a tale of one man's perfidious perusal on board a Mississippi riverboat, is, instead, the tale of an entire nation's masquerade, driven and identified, by their socioeconomic fetters.