The 19th-century novel that was the farthest ahead of its time

Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, which I hadn't read in more than 30 years I think, still, from initial chapters, seems like a novel far ahead of its time, totally breaking the 19th-century expectations for narrative, naturalism, and social realism. Melville's earlier novels, though perhaps somewhat exaggerated and romantic, were in the vein of realism and adventure, and the earliest would today probably have been packaged as memoir. Moby-Dick seems for a while to be realistic as well, and it has many trappings and accoutrements that make it seem not just realistic but a work of scholarship - the chapter on knots, for example - techniques that Melville pioneered or even invented and that have influenced many writers since then: think how Sebald uses interspersed photos to make his fantastic novels such as Austerlitz seem as if they must be real and accurate, documentary. But of course Moby-Dick is full of elements that are far from realistic: the entire team of secret oarsman kept below-deck throughout most of the voyage, for example: not possible except on symbolic level. Melville pushed the boundaries of realism much farther, however, in The Confidence Man, and in doing so managed to turn away the few readers who stayed with him through M-D: they had no idea what he was up to, and even today, after more than 150 years of experimental and postmodern fiction of every sort, fiction filled with freaks and grotesques, with spirits and dybbuks (from Bulgokov to Singer to Gorky - to cite a few disparate examples), it's still hard to make sense of TCM. Like all of Melville's novels, it's set aboard a ship - in this case a Mississippi steam, the Fidele, which we soon realize is not meant to be taken literally as a steamer - it's in some sense the ship of humanity, carrying aboard it all sorts of people, every race, creed, nationality, and disposition. M focuses the first few chapters on some very odd and disturbing characters, notably a man who is deaf and mute and looks like a weary and impoverished traveler and walks around on the deck with a slateboard on which he writes various epigrams about "charity" - and it abused and attacked by fellow passengers. Then we meet a black man who is severed deformed, sits on the deck almost like a dog, with bent legs, and begs for pennies (he catches pitched pennies in his mouth) and speaks in a highly exaggerated black Southern dialect - and another passenger, a man with a wooden leg - accuses him of being a fraud, not really disabled (maybe not even black?). There is a bit of a hint that these characters may all be different versions, or visions, of the eponymous Confidence Man, but that's not yet developed. If the Fidele is Melville's vision of our world, it's a very cruel world, full of distrust and mockery and chicanery.