Paper balls, knives and cemeteries| Huang Yuning

Poster for the movie The Count of Monte Cristo (1998).

1.

The whole story begins with a news that Dumas saw in the newspaper: a shoemaker is about to marry a beautiful and wealthy widow, which arouses the jealousy of his friends, so he is framed as a royalist spy and imprisoned. After his release from prison, he spent ten years waiting for revenge, and after several successful attempts, the shoemaker was finally stabbed to death by the enemy. This is gossip, but it is also history. In Dumas's eyes, gossip and history are "the nails that allow me to hang novels on."

How to hang is the core problem that the author wants to solve. The historical background should be large enough and chaotic enough, and an era that can make people go straight to the clouds or die at any time is the most suitable magic for fate. Dumas chose 1814, when the royalists, Napoleon, the revolutionaries, and the various forces formed an undercurrent over Paris. The shoemaker's reinvented sailor, Don Taisi, is full of spirit and unaware of danger, and this starting point makes room for the long and ups and downs of growth that follow.

The most complex conspiracies often begin with the simplest driving force: jealousy. Dumas used only four chapters to lay out the motives. The accountant Tanglar found a place in the cracks of history where a nail had been inserted: he remembered that Dontés had detoured around the island of Elba on the way back from the merchant ship, handed a letter to the Emperor Napoleon, and was entrusted with carrying another letter to Paris and to napoleon's cronies. In order to complete the conspiracy, he found a group of people and horses with their own strengths and ghosts. The overall situation is controlled by Tanglar, Andense's love enemy, the "Catalan" Fernan, is best suited to play the role of the executor who is overwhelmed by love - Tanglar's various false and real statements are designed to induce him, both positive encouragement and reverse agitation, after sending the ladder to hand the knife, half of it is handed back. After all these routines were performed, he turned his words sharply, saying that he could not wrongfully accuse people, casually kneaded the letter into a ball, threw it into the corner, and then lifted his feet and left. He knew that at this point, there was nothing more to save Fernan from the trap. So we saw: "Tanglar took twenty or so steps, and when he looked back, he saw that Fernan was rushing over to pick up the letter and carry it in his pocket. ”

Neighbor Caderous did not have a clear appeal, but the people around him lived a good life. At first, it was only part of the "evil of mediocrity", until he found himself deeply involved in the whirlpool of conspiracy that he realized that he had lost other options. Dumas also needed a key pawn: acting prosecutor de Villefort. Villefort had no motive to harm Dontès, and Dumas made up for it in time—Villefort suddenly discovered that a familiar figure had dangled in the case, and that Dontès's connector in Paris was his father. If the matter is revealed and others know that his father is still serving the former emperor Napoleon, then his political career will also be abandoned.

The conspiracy thus forms a solid logical closed loop. Villefort, while pretending to appease Dontés, ordered him to be thrown into the Prison of Fort d'Iv.

Those dazzling modern narrative concepts, whether the story arc or the character setting, must remember Dumas's love. Man-made is not designed for design, and events are not high-rise buildings that arise out of thin air. Characters and characters must contain each other, characters and events must be completed with each other, and nails must be firmly knocked into the most appropriate position.

2.

Dumas was very good at spending money. It is said that he was chased by one hundred and fifty creditors. This may not be a bad thing for literary history, because Dumas directly turned the inadequacy of income into a driving force for the industrialization of writing. He serialized "The Count of Monte Cristo" in the newspaper, accurately calculating the frequency and proportion of suspense, enjoying the thrill of controlling the reader's adrenaline and the rhythm of the story. He trained himself to write long dialogues, to write with a loud voice, half to make the story more live, and half for the cost of the manuscript, which was calculated according to the number of lines, and the price of others was thirty sus per line, and the top Dumas was three francs.

Dumas also invented a rather advanced way of creating. He had a habit of hiring assistants, not to copy and write secretarial work, but to be a partner in the true sense of the word. One of the most famous was named Auguste Mackay, and it is said that both The Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo are credited to Ma Kai. How much credit this merit is now difficult to conclusively examine, the most likely working mode is that Dumas is responsible for determining the theme and story outline, and Ma Kai is responsible for finding materials, writing the first draft, and finally polished by Dumas and published. Dumas's role is not fundamentally different from that of contemporary cultural creativity, especially the manipulator and soul of the popular literature and film and television industries. Of course, Mackay was not reconciled to this, he and Dumas had a court dispute over copyright, and finally Dumas paid 140,000 francs to buy out Ma Kai's labor, and the latter gave up the right to sign all works. The price was not fair, for the mere copy of the Count of Monte Cristo cost so much more than that amount that Dumas was able to take half a million francs out of it to build a "Château de Cristo" and to name his workshop "Château de Vieux", where Dantes had been imprisoned for fourteen years.

3.

When I was a child, I stood in the position of the reader and only followed dumas's plot line forward. When re-reading, I tried to stand in the author's shoes and wondered if Dumas suddenly played a trick at the moment when Dontés had to pretend to be a corpse, was carried out of prison by the jailer, and was about to be freed, and raised the hearts of him and us readers to the throat again. Writing this, Dumas used only one sentence: the sea is the graveyard of Château d'If.

Previously, the author deliberately made the protagonist and the reader mistakenly believe that the body would be buried in the "graveyard" in the mouth of the jailer. We thought that the cemetery was the real cemetery, but we did not expect that in The Château de Iff, the sea was the cemetery. In other words, as soon as Dontese successfully escaped from prison, he was bound to a thirty-six-pound iron ball and thrown into the sea. He had to survive in the sea, while also calculating the time it would take for the jailers to discover the truth and escape their re-pursuit. When we come to the author's side, we will find that this is the decisive moment of a good story. Our sympathy, anxiety, the accelerated secretion of adrenaline, the extraordinarily strong sense of substitution, fatalism, and absurdity all peak with the moment Dantese was thrown into the sea by the jailer. Generation after generation of novelists, those craftsmen who make up stories, build frameworks, deliberate details, fall on the poor and fall into the Yellow Spring, and look for what Tang Taisi suddenly has to face the vast sea, that moment.

For this decisive moment, Dumas needed to ambush something early. First, he had to casually explain that the prison was built on an island, but this information did not have any direct connection with the cemetery. Second, he had to let Dontés ignore this possibility in his careful plan, but instinctively grasp a knife in his right hand when playing a corpse, which could help him cut the rope on his foot in the sea. In the earlier episodes, we must not forget that Dontese was born as a sailor, which laid the most solid foundation for him to finally escape from danger in the sea.

In the whole "Count of Monte Cristo", Dontés's escape from prison is actually heavier than the revenge later. Not only does it constitute the biggest plot twist in the entire novel, but it also sets the highest technical difficulty (the escape room in the enclosed space requires careful logical deduction). More importantly, once these difficulties are overcome, the character is solidly established, his character transformation (death in the innocent era, rebirth of the cold earl) is natural, and his emotional connection with the audience becomes unbreakable. You imagined that you would fly with Don Taisi over the cage and escape from the heavens, and from then on, his joys and sorrows would not be able to be substituted by you.

The "jailbreak" story type has never gone out of fashion. Despite the constant technological innovation, the routine has remained quite stable. The tunnel discovered by Dumas, in the American drama "Prison Break", still has to dig again. As for the bridge section of the shroud bristle to "borrow the corpse to return the soul", which generation of story craftsmen have never tired of it. Stephen King didn't mention the Earl of Monte Cristo when he wrote The Shawshank Redemption, so he made up for it in the adapted film script: Andy and Red were in the prison library, and Red joked about "The Count of Monte Cristo" and claimed that the book should fall under the category of "education", and the two reached a tacit understanding. The alliance and teacher-student relationship between them is the same as that of Dontes and Father Faria.

4.

Dontese's revenge is a big project. There are several enemies, and each one is developed. Some are rich and some are in power, and Dontés's personal emotions are entangled in it, constituting a key variable. From the preliminary investigation to the various breakdowns, Dontese must take every step correctly to have a chance of winning:

patience. After escaping from prison, he obtains the treasure, laying the material foundation for revenge. But Dontés remained stationary and did not strike until nine years later, when the time was ripe. Dumas needed to arrange a full content for these nine years, so that Dontés could sort out all the relationships, especially their respective weaknesses, the joints that were tied to each other.

Find openings on an almost airtight relationship network that fits to tear. The least guilty of the four enemies was her neighbor, Caderus, who was well suited to be used by Dontés to inquire into the news and investigate the background; Madame Tanglar had an affair with de Villefort and gave birth to an illegitimate child. Of course, the privacy of the two enemies involved in this way became a card in the hands of Don Taisi, and he waited for the key moment to play out. Later, Dontés bought the villa where the two of them had once met, and hosted a feast in it, staging one of the most important group scenes in the second half of the novel. The choice of this location alone is enough to make the parties tremble with fear. Buried deeper in Albert's body. It was the child born of Dontès's old lover Mercer Tess marrying his enemy Fernand. Once this opening is torn, it not only establishes the entry in one fell swoop, directly into the network of nemesis, but also – from a more subtle level – it is also a kind of stress test of Dontese's psychology of the self. After all, it was about Mercer Tess, and once this opening was torn open, the prospect was inevitably blurred with flesh and blood.

Before entering the game, Dontese also needs to complete the construction of his new role. He threw money to buy two horses from the Tanglar family, and gave them back to Mrs. Tanglar, plus a diamond. This action skillfully hurt Tanglar's face, and at the same time planted a foreshadowing in the social circle of Paris, and the mysterious and rich reputation of the Count of Monte Cristo began to spread widely. Then, he added a momentary stroke of righteousness to this image, ordering his servants to stop the horse that was running out of control and save the wife and children of the prosecutor de Villefort. In this way, the whole of Paris was enchanted by the legend of the Count. At this point, everything is under the control of Dontese, and he has since stood on a solid logical basis in the collection of nets, liquidations and even belated trials in the gorgeous scenes.

Next, the direction of the characters and events maintains the character of the Count of Monte Cristo to exceptional perfection. His plans for revenge are seamless, and every step is expected. More importantly, Dontese did not directly hand blade the enemy. His main means of revenge is to use the nodes of this network of relationships to gain insight into the ulterior stains of the other party and the contradictions between them, so that they are forced into a cocoon and bound to themselves one by one. And the innocent people involved in it, Dontaisi basically made a proper arrangement. Dumas's popular storytelling rule of "good and evil will be repaid" is still enshrined in Hollywood to this day - where superheroes go, even if they go to heaven and earth, guns and bullets, you can't see a shot that hurts the innocent. However, compared to the blunt and crude avoidance, Dumas insisted that all intentions should be realized by strategy, and disdained the abuse of coincidence, and the means were much more clever.

Author: Huang Yuning

Editors: Andy, Qian Yutong

Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.