허먼 멜빌의 『사기꾼』에 나타나는 외양의 균열

The Rupture of Appearance in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: With Lacan and Žižek’s Speculation on “Minimal Difference”

This essay investigates Herman Melville’s epistemology of subjectivity and the world, revealed in his representations of “appearance” in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Unlike his previous work Moby-Dick, engaged significantly in Kantian philosophy despite the author’s cautioning against Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the transcendental truth, The Confidence-Man shows the author’s striking turn from his previous metaphysical, hierarchical, and binary frame of truth/appearance, embracing the latter as a new embodiment of truth, as implied in the subtitle of the work: “masquerade.” However, Melville’s recognition of appearance differs from postmodern simulacrum because his portrayal of “appearance” features its own inconsistency “immanent” in it. In order to explore pertinently the complexity of Melville’s epistemological implications of “appearance” in The Confidence-Man, this study is largely indebted to Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic arguments of “minimal difference,” commonly emphasized in their theories of (1) the inner disparity of eye/gaze, (2) the difference between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation, and (3) the logic of signifiers. This study helps recognize the author’s insightful perception of subjectivity and the world entangled with ideology as a veil covering the uncomfortable but undeniable real of antagonism and the relation of nonrelation.