Su Yigua is the author of "Pale Green Moon", "Tiramisu", "Snake Palace", "The Fifth Sneeze", "Old Girlfriend", "King's Blood" and other short story collections, as well as novels such as "Sunspot", "White Mask", "Others", "Double Eye Typhoon", "Sweet Spot" and so on. He has won the Chinese Media Award, the People's Literature Award, the Novel Selection Award, the Novel Monthly Hundred Flowers Award, and the Yu Dafu Literature Award. Many of his works have entered the annual ranking of the Chinese Novel Society. His "Sunspot" was adapted into the movie "Burning Heart of the Sun".
Source: Literary controversy. Author authorized sharing.
Fiction Fiction
Who cuts constantly, who cares about the chaos?
Take McCullers' Family Dilemma, for example
Whisk a melon
Family Dilemma is not McCullers's most famous novel, I chose it to be the universality of its subject matter. Because the family's difficulties are everyone's, although there are hundreds of families, the core of its "hardship" is that everyone "knows the heart". That's why I chose it.
This short story is small and about the ordinary days of a family of four. The time is within three or four hours from Thursday evening to bedtime. In these few hours, the beauty, crisis, and fun of the family are intertwined like braids, and it is difficult for the reader to get out of McCullers' deep insight into the carefully combed twists and turns, and we are entangled in the depths of the vortex of this home;
At the beginning of the novel, McCullers tells us that things are not good: Martin leaves work "early" and "takes the first express train" and rushes home; the snowy night is desolate; his wife is troubled; the nanny is resting; the children are young. The reader's heart immediately hangs.
As we approached Martin's home, the situation intensified quietly: the lights were on in every room of the house; in front of the house, a trolley in the way was pushed away by Martin; in the living room, only two children were playing on their own, pulling up the Christmas light line and using electrical sockets. The child whose mother is unaccompanied is dangerous and happy; in the kitchen, on the table where even the tablecloth is not laid, is the dinner that the young child refuses to eat: because the wife makes toast with chili powder as cinnamon powder; in this section, the wife's dereliction of duty, the child's innocence and happiness, is vividly written, and a real and credible home has come out.
Let our wives, who are already intensely worried, hide upstairs and drink. When she saw her husband, she hurriedly hid the wine, pretended to be relaxed and waddled, and self-respectedly fake and fluttery to imitate the faint British accent of a star because of the loss. The husband Martin was very patient, but the tone of disappointment still aroused his wife's sensitive counterattack; Martin had to appease his wife, curb his anger, and hurry down to cook for the whole family. In this gap, McCullers shows the background of the family's troubles and the causes of his wife's alcoholism. As soon as the reader is lenient, he immediately learns a frightening consequence of his wife's alcoholism; then we see her self-correction and failure; at this point, Martin's historical anxiety is really painful, and we all receive: the premonition of disaster threatens him.
Martin went to cook dinner in the kitchen while accompanying the children. The vivid depiction of small life not only builds the authenticity of the novel, but also completes people's "love" for home. But McCullers wouldn't end there, and his wife went downstairs drunk and began to provoke, fighting with Martin for the child's trust. The aggressiveness and self-sadness of the wife, the anger of the husband and the psychology of protecting the calves, make the scene dialogue full of tension, the child is afraid to cry; the frustrated and tired father, it is easy to coax the child upstairs.
Next, we see the wife's despair and shame intertwined, and we see the impatience and boredom of being a husband, and the magnanimity that accompanies it. When he had put his wife to bed again, imagining her feeling of self-humiliation when she woke up tomorrow, imagining the destructive power of the work environment brought to him, the hatred in his heart had re-inflated.
McCullers' braids were once again added to the children's bouquet. A small deciduous tooth that is about to be replaced gives the family life scene infinite vitality. The father was in a halo of small blessings at home; the child was innocent and happy, and Martin thanked God for arranging for the child to be unharmed. Taking care of the little ones to bed, he tiredly went back to the kitchen to make dinner for himself. But the thought of how his grown-up child would face his alcoholic mother made him lose his appetite completely, and he even saw the tragic prospect of his own child drowning in the river. His anger soared again.
By the time he could go upstairs to rest, "somber and angry as a lump of iron pressed against his heart" he dragged his "heavy" steps upstairs.
Like folding a fan, the writer opened another fold. The wife fell asleep, "quiet breathing sounded softly in the room", the wife's "underwear was messed up on the chair", the husband picked up her "tight pants and silk bra", this night, he "carefully examined his wife" for the "first time" inherited to his daughter", "beautiful forehead" and "delicate nose", the wife "chest is very high", "waist is very thin" "curves are beautiful", the boy's high cheekbones, pointed chin, derived from the "beautiful and beautiful" mother. Martin stared at his wife, all resentment gone, and he was careful not to wake her up from the bed, but by the moonlight he glanced at her again, "his hand reaching over to the body beside him."
McCullers handled the emotional hierarchy sharply and delicately. The troubles and love and pain of the family are so tight and stubborn, which is the common dilemma of human families. McCullers tells us that as long as you have a home, you have no escape.
The influence of a novel is not in the size of the subject matter, but in the clamping power of its tentacles. Who else can escape that mental pain of constant cutting, chaos, and humanity? In my reading experience, in the expression of family difficulties, McCullers's "clamping" points directly to the human heart. In fact, such a writer must also be subtle and precise in dealing with other subjects. This is the pincer twist of good fiction on our souls.
One might say that the subject matter is average, mainly a matter of skill. There are certainly skills, but that is the retrospective recognition of the creator by posterity. We can also borrow and copy, but with creative skills, as long as it is not original, we have to bear the depreciation of second-hand and third-hand goods. My grasp is that the real skill is the shortest distance between the writer and his goal of writing. It's natural, like a gift bag from God. In other words, you get the goal, and you naturally have to figure out how to get there most effectively. Here, the invisible foot of the sky and the sea can be regarded as the writer's own legislation. If you succeed, you will be the skill of being posthumously recognized. So, more important than learning skills, I think it may be – where the goal is.
The order of the novel world, every writer tries to establish, everyone is working hard, but everyone knows that the "legal principle" of the novel world order is the same as the real world, and there is no difference, so the difficulty occurs, because the truth is here, and the difficulty is also here. You may be burned by creative passion to "talk to yourself", "I am the peak" or something, but the reader will not forget that the relationship between the reader and the writer is the relationship of "one more fight"; they are always calmer than the author. What's more, you may encounter not only calmer than you, but also more worldly eyes than you. Therefore, naïve people should not write novels, or the hearts of those who write good novels are basically not naïve. Zweig said of Balzac that he "was able to incorporate and expel all insights and values into himself."
There are too many secrets in the hills of the novel. For example, why is the narrative tone of "many years later..." so fascinating, and what kind of fictional reality and reading reality are revealed to the sense of distance from time? Why is the first sentence of a good quality novel full of magic, high-quality readers, like melon farmers, a flick of watermelon, know whether this melon is worth eating? Why the names of fictional characters, so magical. As soon as you even see those names, you know if unfolding is a mediocre work, a successful character name, what kind of novel holographic information is loaded? For example, Kafka uses K instead of character names, why do you imitate it, it is funny and sympathetic?
The hills of the novel are full of mysteries. But the novels themselves, which often seem to be frank and innocent, without any sense of conspiracy, and we read them like that—think of McCullers's Family Dilemma, how ordinary, as you usually see. People mistakenly think that novels can be used by anyone, which is simpler than cooking. So that the new learner writer set off, the inner scenery is beautiful, thinking that the future is a horse and a flat river, the most meandering, do not know that it is actually the world of the dangerous Dodge Peak, until the experience is gradually enriched and the wisdom grows, only to find that when he was young, he thought that the usual, jumping rough reading of the area turned out to be the pen "step by step and careful old calculation". You think it's really a cool autumn?
Fiction is like woody plants, in the usual sense, how deep the roots are and how lush the leaves are. It is said to be a one-to-one relationship. If the branches suddenly flourish and the wind blows down, it is generally transplanted and cannot withstand the ultimate wind. Only a one-to-one ratio has power. Of course, there is also a root system that is particularly developed and thick, and the viewer knows that they don't even care how many branches and leaves, they rush to the deep and strong root system - it emits a dazzling spark, and does not need the foliage to flaunt. Roots have enough energy to respond to life and illuminate the past and the future. It was enough. Of course, in terms of perception, the most pleasing thing is that Ye Mao's roots are both deep and deep.
Just casually flipped through a new journal, a short story, is a smart writer, sensitive enough, can stay in an accurate position, understand the material characteristics of the novel, but also try to tap the invisible value of the novel root, there is content, there are views, there is emotion, but, the whole article down, is not able to stimulate the spark of our reading, the whole article is a little bit of light, but it is not even a climate. Then, it's over — there's nothing wrong with that, it's boring. The tiredness that has accumulated before the cover-up will come gently in retaliation, leaving us sleepy, but it does not matter, the chaotic and depressed brain will soon delete it completely, and the bird will pass without a trace. The question, then, is: what is the meaning of such reading and writing. However, this is really the difficulty of the novel, yes, the people watching the kicks on the stage are shouting, how to get it! Can't score a goal with such a simple point? - Yes, the novel is that thing, and there is even no goalkeeper at all, but in the foggy mud and grass, it is really difficult to find the shiny "spider silk" that the god of art hangs down for us who are trekking hard, and we just can't shoot the ball beautifully into the door of the art heaven.
There are too many hallucinations. Burgess, a novelist and musician who wrote "Clockwork Oranges," said that truly great tunes, which come from heaven or nothingness, will also be recruited. We don't know what strange inner force works to weave such great melodies and tunes, and it's admirable and confusing—I think Burgess is also talking about the mystery of the novel.
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