Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

28
Herman Melville
and underneath, masks, further masks; and under all masks there is
more than a chance that there is nothing at all. 6 Th e confi dence-man
takes leave of Egbert with
a grand scorn . . . leaving his companion at a loss to determine
where exactly the fi ctitious character had been dropped, and the
real one, if any [italics added], 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 exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.” (p. 253)
Melville’s “if any” glosses Shakespeare more nihilistically than Jacques’
speech will perhaps sustain; but if we accept Melville’s “pointed
meaning” rather than Shakespeare’s, masquerading becomes a matter
of simple survival: without masks one would be “naked [in] the street”
(p. 263), as the cosmopolitan says to the barber in a satanic understatement:
one would not exist at all.
Th e satirical result of this mode of being is the ethical world of
Th e Confi dence-Man: the world of the “Wall street spirit” (p. 45), where
capitalism, philanthropy, and religion are confi dence games in which
the market falls when confi dence wanes. 7 When the confi dence-man
asks the barber why he contentedly deals in impostures—wigs, false
moustaches, cosmetics, hair dyes—and the barber replies, “Ah, sir, I
must live,” the implications of his answer reach down into the book’s
ontology, so that in this matter “all the trades and callings of men are
much on a par” (p. 264). Because character is really role, it is no exceptional
accusation against the confi dence-man to say that “he makes
dupes,” since “many held in honor do the same; and many, not wholly
knaves, do it too” (p. 101); nearly all men are included in the further
observation that “he is not wholly at heart a knave, I fancy, among
whose dupes is himself.”
Th e “Emersonian” philosophy of Egbert and Winsome is doubtless
ethically repellent, and parts of it are clearly false, and other parts,
though true, are rationalizations as well, but at least its inconsistency
principle begins to fi t the data of life that the book presents; and in
that correspondence is Egbert’s protection from the confi dence-man;