"The Trickster's Masquerade" was Herman Melville's last published novel, and this year it was finally translated into Chinese for the first time, after most of Melville's short and short stories had been translated into Chinese. Each of Melville's novels is full of rich research and interpretation dimensions, especially in The Trickster's Masquerade, where the words, metaphors, and secret writing make people have different opinions about the author's real intention. It may be one of Melville's more pessimistic views of the human world, but the difference is that this time his novel takes the form of humor.
It is obvious to all who read this book that the whole of The Trickster's Masquerade is divided into two parts, with the dividing point beginning with chapter 24. The source of the story still comes from Melville's rich experience of life at sea in his early years, allowing people of all kinds, occupations and classes to appear in the story. At the time of writing the novel, Melville was in a state of literary publishing despair, and due to the influence of Moby-Dick, readers had become very uninterested in the work of a writer named Melville (of course, most people did not even know the name), and Balcony Tales had sold very poorly the previous year.
This led publishers to withdraw plans for a book called The Trickster's Masquerade, and even magazines refused to serialize the story. According to these realistic conditions, Melville's novel can only be written to himself, which is probably also the reason that Melville, who has put down all the burdens of readers, wrote a lot of things in the novel that he had not written before, including the allusions and evaluations of American writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Allan POE, and James Cooper. Although written in a very obscure and illegible way, it may be considered some of Melville's ill-fated mockery of literary circles.
Since it is a book for himself, then Melville can not care about the plot and narrative, according to his original vision, "Liar's masquerade" is no end, the book of crooks can constantly change the image of the ship cheating, chapter after chapter of the story will float forever with the line.
The general plot of the novel is as follows: on April 1, April Fool's Day, a strange man boarded a steamer named Loyalty, and when he boarded, he held up several boards, on which were respectively written "Love does not count evil", "Love is patient and good", "Love is patient", "Love is believing" and so on. Then, the stranger boarded the ship and began to change into different identities, deceiving passengers of different identities and classes on board. (Different Melville researchers have different views on this, some believe that the liar is always a person, others believe that the liar is not only a person but a group, according to the attitude and values of some liars before and after the novel.)In the first half of the novel, we see a number of mundane minor deceptions, such as his masquerading as a lame black man to amuse onlookers by getting them to drop a few coins, as a man smoking cigarettes to get close to businessmen, as an investor in a shelter to defraud investors, and even succeed in getting money out of a miser's pocket.
The fundamental reason for the success of the scammers in the first half of the scam is the use of trust, compassion and interpersonal relationships between people, and sometimes the process of cheating is entirely a debate, such as the scammers find a female passenger reading the Bible in the cabin, telling her that they can't get along with the world, after talking about the topic to solve the problem of trust at the core, The swindler asked the female passenger to give him $20 to prove that she fully trusted him, and he got $20. When the swindler pretended to be the philanthropist of the orphanage for orphans and widowed parents, he successfully aroused the pleasure of the gentleman's heart by outlining the beautiful blueprint created by doing good deeds, and thus obtained a banknote from the gentleman.
In fact, the description in the novel shows that both in terms of the amount of defrauded and the attitude of the deceived, these can only be regarded as "small deception", such as the gentleman just said, although the philanthropist in the guise of the liar has spoken a bunch of beautiful and touching words, but the gentleman has been skeptical of his words, but, in the other side of a bill can show some generous conditions,
The gentleman made this choice, after all, even if cheated there is not much money. Even before chapter 24, The Trickster's Masquerade has begun to provide us with an atmosphere of philosophical reflection, that is, trust, sympathy, and fraternity have formed a relationship with money, and without money it is impossible to prove the existence of the former, but when the amount of money reaches a certain level, the former seems to be something that can be abandoned. After chapter 24, the "great deception" of these qualities of love and trust begins to truly appear in front of the reader.
The second half of the Trickster's Masquerade can be seen as an ironic form of narrative constructed by Melville, constituting a "great deception" without end. The difference from the first half of the story is that in the first half of the story, the liar has been using people's trust and fraternity (although they are not real) to defraude money, as if to warn people about the reliability of trust, if only so, the Liar's Masquerade is definitely not a Melville novel.
What elevates the whole novel to another literary level is the special meaning contained in this second half. In the second half of the story, the trickster appears as a "world wanderer" and calls on people to believe in goodness, emphasizing the importance of trust in this world. But in one farcical scene, we can say that people are fooled again, and the fooling is even more endless.
This deception is directed to the unworldly part (in which Melville again shows himself as a blasphemer). One of the most memorable is a man named Charlie whom the World Rover meets in The Happy Companion. The World Rover and Charlie had a wonderful conversation as they tasted the wine and exchanged ideas.
Charlie drank wine, published his understanding of happiness, "What is happy?" It means to live together "(Melville's original text uses a semantic trick here; according to the translator's note, the original text of" jolly "is" Conviviality ", the prefix "con-" means "common", and the suffix "-vivality" means "life"), "but bats live together, Have you ever heard of the jolly bat? ...
The reason is that bats live together, but they don't live together in a friendly way. Bats are not born to be friendly, but humans can do that." With Charlie's words, the world wanderer claims to have found a soulmate, and the two men offer philosophical prose about what they see, what is truly valuable in the world, and how wonderful a scene of harmony and trust would be.
When the conversation was very happy, the world traveler suddenly turned and said that he had a secret, that is, he needed money urgently, and he was short of fifty dollars. Suddenly, Charlie's attitude changed dramatically. "Go to hell, Sir! Beggar, liar! - I have never done this in my life, "but immediately, the world rover changed a" magic ", he took fifty dollars from his own body around Charlie, and suddenly, Charlie resumed his cordial attitude. "Return, return, return, O my former friend! And take this as a sign of your return: 'Dear Frank. '"
What makes this scene more meaningful than just dramatic irony is that the con man's deception has actually succeeded. He's like a demon betting that he can find falseness in everyone, and then succeeding at it with a skill of deception, and in these stories, the con men swindle passengers out of nothing but fun. In the comic and metaphorical rhythm of the narrative, the con man takes something of value from people in another way.
As the novel nears its end, the liar's attitude actually changes, he becomes more and more serious, and Melville's pessimistic attitude in the novel reaches its peak. At the end of the story, the conversation with the world Traveler is an old man who is reading the Bible in the middle of the night.
At this time, the day of April Fool's Day has passed, the World Traveler and the old man begin to discuss the truth of the Bible passages, the contradiction between trust and fear of others, and the World Traveler says a sentence that would be considered deviant in Melville's time. "I've seen many Bibles on ships, in hotels... Though very old, it has always been a benchmark of truth...
However, in my opinion, the world places too much trust in this book, and it hardly deserves that trust." The old man responded by saying, "But the traveler, of all people, needs to believe that this book can protect them."
In this dialogue, when we recall the previous story, we will find that it is not just a novel satirizing morality, but a novel subverting the belief in divinity. Melville constructs the opposite of an ideal future in a final paragraph, where the lights go out, the old man and the con man go dark, and the author reminds us that the story might go on - what's next?
Is the liar really getting serious, and is his conversation with the old man also a hoax, a negation about negation? Where will he lead the wayfinding old man in the dark? Can we only continue to dream of lofty and harmonious visions of the world, knowing that they will always hang unrealized at the end of the horizon, knowing that they are empty concepts and false? Melville ends up with one of the most suspenseful endings in the history of literature, more so than any open ending in popular fiction, because it's the whole world that's on the brink.
