"Letterhead from Extinct Animals" and other "Animal Letters" series
Author: Chang Li
Photo: Wang Tianyu
Edition: Gengyun Beijing United Publishing Company September 2020
Dolphins that commit suicide.
A peacock fish that converges.
Peacocks for beauty and beauty.
We live in an "anthropocentric" world. Because humanity is the victor of this ancient planet, although this is not the whole history. "Man" was born when our ancestors emerged from the vast group of animals, and in order to form a recognizable distinction, only other animals were referred to as "animals" from then on. Children's writer and scholar Chang Li's "Animal Letters" broke the boundaries and created "animal letters", expanding the meaning of "sublime" and "beautiful" with imagination between biological laws and humanistic care.
The fusion of "literature" and "science"
The first time I read The Animal Letter, I was reminded of the many debates in history about the relationship between "literature and science." Many literary writers and scientists have thought deeply about it, including many experimental writers who have carried out experiments in their own ways, such as William Wordsworth and his chemist friends Humphrey David, Coleridge, Zola, etc.; some scholars have found that the organizational structure of "The Origin of Species" is deeply influenced by Dickens's novels; science fiction writer Adous Huxley once called out in Literature and Science: "Writers and scientists, let us move forward together, Advancing deeper and deeper into the ever-expanding unknown. Specific to popular science writing, over the years, the concept of "making popular science become warm" can be said to have become the consensus of the domestic science community.
Using value pursuit and aesthetic pursuit to correlate fragmentary and specific knowledge is originally the inherent need of human beings. Among the many forms of "beauty", literature naturally becomes the easiest one for popular science writers to approach. Unfortunately, at present, such explorations in China are mostly carried out among writers with scientific professional backgrounds, and how literary writers can give full play to their strengths to respond to Huxley's initiative is obviously still a difficult problem; at the same time, whether scientific professionals can find an aesthetic home for their works and enhance the artistry of their works In addition to scientific and beautiful writing, whether they can find suitable and interesting writing styles from more literary genres and techniques is also a point worth considering.
Animal Letters answers this question brilliantly—it responds to many of the value inquiries of "natural science" in a variety of authentic "pure literature" forms outside the genre of "scientific beauty"; and confirms that as an art form, "literature" is closely related to the propositions that science cares about, and the ultimate value retracement of the two intrinsic values.
Beginning with the preface, Animal Letters already implies that this is a literary and scientific adventure, and reveals the value orientation of the work.
In his preface, the author Chang Li claims that the animal doctor Doolittle visited him late at night and requested that 64 animal letters be translated into Chinese. Interestingly, Dr. Doolittle is a literary figure by the American writer Hugh Loftin, who is both a doctor and a good writer of literary writing, and the object of his appeal, the Chinese writer, is a doctor of literature from the science department. Here, Chang Li transforms his identity into a "translator", telling the reader that the text he reads is actually a "translation" that has undergone two translations—by Doolittle into English, and by Chang Li to translate the English version of the letter into Chinese work.
In the process of this transformation, there are two key points, one is that the two media characters have a dual background of "science + literature", and the other is that it contains a literary technique: blurring the boundary between the real world and the fictional world, the real author is often transformed into a story character, and the letters brought by the story characters are translated and published in the real world, and the fiction is anti-real, and the two construct bonuses to each other - this is a game that many literary writers enjoy tirelessly. In terms of value disclosure, the work captures the dual connotation of the English word "doctor" and emphasizes it. Literary works featuring doctors are usually not satisfied with writing "fur diseases", they will explore some unsolved social problems that touch the cornerstone of culture, and are destined to add a special sense of compassion to the work. However, in the main text of "Animal Letters", the fusion of literature and popular science writing is deeply developed through the application of a variety of "literary form techniques".
Take "intertextuality" and "irony" as the method
The "literary formal technique" of Animal Letters is first of all "intertextuality". Animal Letters uses many classic literary texts: a parody of Tao Yuanmingzi in "Letter from the Panda to His Son", Zhang Dai's prose at the end of "White Sturgeon's Self-Titled Epitaph", "The Merchant of Venice" in "Black Swan to the Dutch Explorer William Fleming", Echoing William Blake's famous "Tiger" in "The Bengal Tiger Waiting for answers", borrowing Humbert's famous fragmented thoughts "Light of Life, Fire of Desire" in "The Love Letter of the Male Sturgeon"... These are only writers who can directly refer to names and corresponding texts. This set of books can be described as a carnival for literary lovers, and the more familiar the reader is with the classic literary works, the richer the pleasure obtained when reading.
In addition to directly parodying paragraphs, the author will also secretly quote some famous literary images. Taking "White Sturgeon Self-Titled Epitaph" as an example, not only does it directly use Zhang Dai's "Self-Titled Portrait", but readers can also see the image of the spirited young "Ranger" in "White Horse". "Good long river, good river, good drink, good food, good archery, good pipa, good diving, good surfing, good nostalgia, good grand swimming", here are many images that readers with experience in reading classical Chinese literature are very familiar with, when the words rivers, drinking, food, pipa, huaigu and other words are combined, it is difficult not to think of "Su Kansai Han, copper pipa, iron plate, singing "The Great River Goes East"" The classic evaluation of Su zi in the "Blowing Sword Continuation" and Su Shi himself.
In fact, we will never think of just a specific article or a certain poet, the Warring States Assassin, the Tang Legend Hero, all the Rangers in the fictional world and the real world, Su Xin and all the nostalgic words and authors behind them, and even the time-space environment and related images that gave birth to these characters, are all in the reader's association network; at the same time, the words "diving and surfing" also hook up with modern sports fashion, realizing the intertextual writing method "On the one hand, let the reader realize the common characteristics between the texts. On the other hand, be aware of the qualities of "different qualities between texts" function.
And when we read at the end, "Self-help the Lord is incompetent, and is blessed to be blessed." Empty long ten thousand pounds and only fish meat, the fish yes useful or useless? At that time, the bitterness of all the "zero remnants" in ancient and modern China and abroad was taken as a painful footnote to the extinct species of white sturgeon: those who loved to read Goethe thought of "The Troubles of Young Werther"; those who loved to read Russian literature thought of Luo Ting and Mei Shijin; those who loved to read "Dream of the Red Chamber" were "poor to live up to Shao Guang, and there is no hope in the country and home." Sentences such as the world's incompetence first, ancient and modern are incomparable" naturally flowed out of the heart; as for readers familiar with history, it is inevitable that they would be saddened by all the scholars and students like Zhang Dai in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties who were depressed and mixed up in this life.
In addition to the intertext, Animal Letters uses irony in many places. For example, the tree frog chapter uses the ironic writing method of the whole article. On the surface, the letter writer seems to be an incomparably humble and sincere tree frog, but the repeated superposition and inconsistencies of this set of humble words remind the reader of the letter writer's substantive hypocrisy and good at playing with rhetoric. Readers who lack reading experience do not have to worry, the author revealed this in the popular science content on the right page - some tree frogs are easy to attract female frogs because of their loud singing, but they are also easily preyed by predators, and other tree frogs choose a silent "leak picking" strategy. The letter writer on the left page is the success of the strategy, and this letter is ostensibly a tribute to the Frog King, but in fact it is a triumphant letter of show-off. Readers of this set of books need to remind themselves repeatedly to "read" the information on the left and right sides, and must not fully accept the letter writer's statement, in literary terms, they can hide a lot of "unreliable narrators".
Expression and reflection inside and outside art
Animal Letters has a multi-voice network structure in which we can hear explanations of different species and members of the same species about their evolutionary strategies and ways of living. The author gives the whale barnacle the restless adventurous soul of the Romantic poet Ulysses, and in the next page, he also admires the lone singer Bigwing Whale, who disdains "hitting the charts", and reveals that the reason why the Bigwing Whale could not compete this year was that it was entangled in some whale barnacles. The big-winged whale likens these little whale barnacles to "coughing"—turning a page and changing perspectives, the story seems to be broken and unbroken, but the original hero Ulysses has become a big trouble for the survival of another creature. You know, coughing is not fatal to the tall and lonely singer, but it is more fatal than it is.
At the same time, the ambiguity of literature itself also makes the interior of some individual works have a two-fold opposite sound. In the "Letterhead from extinct animals", The Dunn's fish teach the "shark boys" what the real overlords are as the overlords of the ancient sea, on the one hand, they shamelessly declare with the power of biting rocks that they should "treat all sentient beings equally, and all the life in the sea is my food", but finally because of environmental upheavals and digestion can not keep up with the ability to hunt and become extinct, the survival strategy of the Deng's fish seems to have failed, and it should accept the ancient admonition of the king and the loser to keep silent with his tail between his legs; but on the other hand, The hunting aesthetic of his letter makes it seem as if he travels through time and space to hear his thunderous voice, to see a tragic king in bronze armor who comes and goes alone and denounces sharks as "hordes of murderous and treacherous little ones". It has images of warriors who died for glory in Homer's Epic, shadows of King Lear, a late-twilight hero who is powerless to return to heaven, and the eastern-style soldier-transporting creed abandoned by the hot weapon era in Akira Kurosawa's Shadow Warriors, and the shadow samurai who tried to lift the banner "Its speed is like the wind, its slow as the forest, the invasion is like fire, and it is not moving like a mountain" banner. In such a complex aesthetic experience, the reader must have a deeper feeling about the demise of the species of Dunn's fish.
It is worth mentioning that Chang Li also buried the writer's thoughts on the act of artistic creation itself in "Animal Letters". In the letter "The Sultan of the Northern White Rhino to the Painter Li Xingming", he borrowed the mouth of the Northern White Rhino and asked in a poetic style: "Is it because what you wrote is my life?" Or was it because you wrote it down that I was able to live? A new life? This is exactly the question Keats once asked in the Ode to the Ancient Urn of Greece. Keats's poem is a representative work in the history of literature in which writers have a high degree of self-consciousness about the characteristics of creative activity and its significance, and it emphasizes that the greatness of art lies in its ability to capture short-lived beauty and fix it in the art form, withstand the wear and tear of time, and stimulate the imagination of generations of audiences.
There is a great contingency in biological evolution
History chooses group portraits, conventions, laws, and leaders; literature favors small people, losers, abnormalities, irrationality, and pursues all rare but beautiful possibilities. "Animal Letters" is both a popular science work and a real literary work, and it does show the concern and preference for the above things that all excellent literature has.
In many voices, in opposing views, the author is not neutral. Perhaps it is precisely because the writer stretches his gaze as long as possible, measured by a sufficiently long evolutionary yardstick, sees the great randomness of the ambush in the events of evolution and demise, knows death and then talks about life, and tries to find for human beings, especially for children, the value of more kindness and applause in the so-called "civilized" world, and the morality of short individual life that is more worthy of embrace.
The authors know that the cause of species extinction in the evolutionary process is not at one end, and sometimes even very accidental external causes (such as the disaster caused by a cat to the Stephens Island Wren). Whether it is light and drifting like ammonites, or powerful and dangerous like tyrannosaurs, although they have all struggled to survive and reproduce, they may still die out for some reason one day. That's why Chang Licai chose to side with the mammoth that is advancing in a peaceful and evolutionary way, sincerely and unpretentiously praising "the most powerful force in the world is goodness."
In the confrontation between conformism and change risks, in the confrontation between patriarchal authority and child-oriented and new forces, the author also gives his own answer. In fact, the leatherback turtle grandmother who strictly abided by the ancestral precepts could no longer answer the questions caused by the emergence of human beings, and could only weakly adhere to the empty law of "the law of the ancestors is immutable". They have indeed lived for more than a hundred million years, but for the earth, on the scale of the evolution of all things, it is only a fleeting moment, and the real crisis is in front of them; the alien wrens are doomed to die because of the cat that appeared by chance, and if the little wren is not allowed to go out and see the vast world, wouldn't it be regrettable for the rest of his life? The mother of the fallen noble Nautilus was anxious about the competition for survival all the time, teaching her children to stay slim and run forward like ammonites instead of sinking.
However, the "other people's child" ammonite died during the Cretaceous mass extinction because it could not continue to live in the shallow seawater environment that underwent great changes, and the Nautilus escaped the disaster and survived the disaster because the larvae sank heavier into the deep sea – these stories all legitimately convey the values of modern civilization based on respect for the true characteristics of living things.
Protecting the scarce "Beauty for Beauty' Sake"
It is not difficult to guess that the value meaning that this book gives to the animal way of living is essentially the expectation of human beings, and the selection of the part that transcends ordinary utilitarian life as the object of aria in the thousands of paths is the inherent requirement of literature.
The same is the proposition of love and courtship, and the author chose the female peacock perspective when writing the peacock. Here Chang Li depicts a female peacock with a super-utilitarian attitude, which claims that her love "does not count parasites, does not consider branches and branches, does not care about love enemies, and does not care about merit." However, it praises the male peacock as a "male god", but in fact it is obsessed with "beauty" itself and the beautiful self. In this female peacock we can see the shadow of the beautiful teenager Naxos and the Pygmalion, who is obsessed with the beauty of his creation, and we can also touch the afterglow of the fingertips of the literary artists and painters under the aestheticism of the 19th century. After introducing the scientific community's controversy over whether animals will use pure "beauty" (rather than the possible reasons behind beauty that are conducive to reproduction) as the criteria for mate selection, Chang Li asks the reader: Do you believe that there are creatures that are "beautiful for beauty's sake"? It now seems that this situation, if it exists, would not have been very frequent, and would have been more difficult as a universal event— but there is still such a "possibility" that "literature" will always choose to protect this beautiful (or perhaps called rare but "sublime").
Of course, we cannot deny material desires. The author's Arctic fox is the image of some people who are willing to pretend to be clowns to fill their stomachs, performing upside-down onions wandering in the snow, following the polar bears, and taking away the leftovers of their handouts. But wait, look at the last sentence: I am pleasing to you, and I am pleasing to God's lovely and poor clown.
Our traditional aesthetic system is stingy to praise such images that are condescending and enjoying material. The Book of Rites and Bows has clouds that "give only food that does not eat, so that Si Ye!" The Corpse Zi records that "(Confucius) was too stealing the spring, thirsty and did not drink, and his name was also evil", and even the unruly Zhuangzi once mocked The Huizi who was a scavenger rat with the comparison of the bird chick who was "not a liquan and did not drink". When "beauty" can only go in one direction, it is difficult to write statements such as "I am the clown of God, the clown of God, so I like to joke" ("Nijinsky's Diaries"), and we will not want to make stories or documentaries such as Chaplin's "Circus" and Fellini's "Clown", let alone let such clown rigger images occupy the position of "spiritual teacher" such as "fool" in "King Lear". In fact, the popular science page tells the reader that the female fox ran from Norway to Canada in just 76 days to forage, running more than 3,000 kilometers – as the author puts it, this is a wandering clown and a hero in the epic. The introduction of such images in the work not only enriches the literary library, but also reminds the reader to think about the world in multiple dimensions — again, we should have a little more imagination about how to define "sublime" and "beautiful".
In the story of the encounter between the earth sloth and the primitive humans, the author chooses to see the footprints of the two creatures in the ancient land of Pevin as a possible friendship (perhaps just a moment of staring at each other), a possible peaceful and warm hover in the ancient cruel competition for survival, rather than the imprint of war.
"Writing lamentations for the losers"
The value orientation of "Animal Letters" is also reflected in its choice to "write lamentations for the losers". Take, for example, a letter written by the last Carolina parrot to a keeper, in which we can see a soul who consciously "chooses" death—it has long thoughts and sorrows for its dead partner, and has voluntarily given up the possibility of living. This parakeet has a unique social habit, some of which are replenished and gathered around the victims after they are killed, and often become new victims. This, of course, could just be their evolutionary strategy, which has helped them through a long period of time and is now invalid – not so affectionate, or is there really so much affection? We don't know. It's just that the author chose between two possibilities to believe in the spiritual life of animals. To mourn such affection and grief is not to mourn those who have the character of "sacrificing their lives for love" and choosing jade. Neither they nor they may be able to become the "victors" of the competition for survival, a group of "out-of-the-ordinary" people, and may be interpreted behind them as low-minded, cowardly, and have no sense of responsibility, but literature has its own scale, and the square inches of the word "literature" can accommodate all kinds of different "braves" to hold this last resting place for people. "Lamenting the Losers" is actually a literary way to choose a special interpretation, record and preservation of various evolutionary routes.
Readers will find that there will always be a flash of humanity behind extinct and endangered animals. These letters do reflect on many problems in the development of human society through animal affairs.
The sound of "get rid of some stupid humans by the way" was too pleasant for the lions—they confidently created standards to divide the merits of men, thinking that they were not in the calculations of the god of death, but not knowing that at the feast of death, the carrion-eating crows were the only winners.
The desperate letter from the endangered American bison to Don Biles, chief of indian Comanche, is even more significant: "I was born on the prairie, and the wind of freedom blew through my long mane, and the hot sun shone on my horns." I was born where I could breathe freely, and I will die in a place where freedom will not die. The strong impact we feel at this moment is the compassion that literature gushes in the face of the strong culture swallowing the weak culture.
In a way, the book reflects on "anthropocentrism" from beginning to end, but does this mean the author's disgust and despair for humanity? The answer is "no". As a member of the Blue Planet family, what kind of position human beings need to put themselves is the answer that the author is really trying to find.
In addition to bringing readers intellectual satisfaction, excellent popular science works should also guide readers to explore and inquire about the possible position of these fragments of apparent knowledge in civilization, and accept the new life experience to interrogate, wash and update our value system. And as Wordsworth said in the LyricAl Ballads, precisely because "poetry", or "literature", "is the higher spirit and free breath of all kinds of knowledge", literary writers should go deeper into the object of their observation, alongside the scientists, and then "lend out their sacred souls to assist science in becoming flesh-and-blood beings like life, and welcome this existence that has been created"—"The difference in the world is the difference in the eyes". And we need to find the value worthy of human beings from the jagged and diverse paths. From this point of view, this is also the enlightenment brought by "Animal Letters" to literary writers and popular science writers. (Wang Shuainai)