Works in this issue
《Ecstasy Overview》
Liu Ting
Author of this issue
Young writer, author of the novel "Booker Village Letter", essay collection "Hometown" and so on.
Special Guest: Xu Gang
Associate Researcher, Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Memories and dreams are probably the eternal themes of the novel. I don't remember on what occasion, Wang Zengqi Wang Lao once said, "A novel is a memory." His work is constantly validating this. But for most people, there are times when memories aren't that reliable, they're a bit like the structure of a dream. And with regard to dreams, readers familiar with Freud's famous essay "Creative Writers and Daydreams" will not be difficult to understand the important connection involved here. Is it real or illusory? Or is everything in a trance, everything is shadowy? This is the common doubt brought by memories and dreams, which is also the direct experience of reading Liu Ting's novel "Outline of Trance".
Originally, I thought that this was a legendary story similar to "Yang Envy Goose Cage, Illusion in Illusion" constructed in a two-layer "nested" way of dreaming in a dream, and everything was hazy and trance-like, making it difficult to distinguish between reality and reality. Unexpectedly, the ending was reversed, and the introduction of parallel universes and wormhole elements added a bit of science fiction to the novel in vain. But that has nothing to do with science fiction. In the novel, He Yun's vertigo and trance can certainly be attributed to the long-term residence under the epidemic, but more from the strangeness brought about by moving. Behind this strangeness, we can witness the disappearance of those anchored familiarities, and the passage of time makes everything look different. Life is like this, and the disappearance of familiarity will always make people deeply uneasy. Those memories that you don't want to recall, those lingering nightmares, will also meet you at this time. Again and again, we will fall into trance, meet countless "I" in the torrent of time, full of joy and utter fear, and sigh for those vain souls.
Zhang Hui
Ph.D., Chinese Min University
The story is set in the trance moment when people's sense of reality has not yet returned to place when the epidemic has just been unsealed, and the writer has designed an exquisite puzzle game based on this scenario, and the stories that occur between different narrative layers invade each other and deny each other in real logic, because there is no longer a hard real layer as a basis, the distinction between true and false is impossible to start. The "trance" that constantly appears in the novel expresses the constant state of vertigo that the characters feel after losing their orientation to reality.
Behind the absurd style of the novel is a rather realistic "into the city" story and a "middle-aged" narrative. He Yun, a foreigner, rose to the ranks of Beijing through education, but he no longer faced the world of fierce confrontation between city and country, tradition and modernity, encountered by the city-goers in the literature of the new era. For He Yun, a "new Beijinger," his circle of life in Beijing is still an urban-rural interface that can be measured by an old electric car. The new "into the city" story is not so much a process of receiving intense shocks and realizing self-transformation, but rather a protracted experience in a personal life, a trance of perched in the gap between tosses and turns, not knowing where to wake up, and gradually giving up the helplessness of grasping reality and truth from the once solid experience. The appearance of huang Yao, a college classmate, is like a wormhole that bursts into ordinary life from a distant depth, he digs a gap in He Yun's memory, and in the depths that have been covered with dust and dead leaves, the stones and minerals still reflect the colored light, whether it is the impulse to call the heavens in the summer rainstorm, or the belief that "all roads are the way back", they together remind the era when the path of the heart and the map of the starry sky can coincide.
However, if He Yun's memories of spring are regarded as "dreams" and "dreams within dreams", it is not difficult to find that every time he "wakes up" comes from the inquiry of his son in "reality", the spring of memories and the autumn of reality, the contrasting structure of the illumination of youth experience and the vulgarity of reality seems to have become the inherent meaning of the "middle-aged" narrative. How the novel form highlights the problem while avoiding damage to the openness and growth of the text may be a problem that all writers need to constantly think about and transcend.
Gao Xiang
Synopsis of Trance is a true epidemic novel. The name of the novel is reminiscent of the famous "Summary of Disintegration", "trance" is more like a silent fog than the fragments of nothingness left by The disintegration of Ciolan, and all words become impossible and untrustworthy, they cannot even point to nothingness itself, so the word "trance" becomes the most accurate description. What Liu Ting refers to in the novel is far higher than reality. When encountering huang yao twice, the protagonist discovers and redeems not only the missed memories, but also the parts that have not been selected and deliberately eliminated, in other words, what he rediscovers is actually the screening device of human memory. Selective memory, selective forgetting, this artificial "choice" will be a reality or reality step by step to turn away. The "parallel world" in the novel, as a false explanation, highlights the fragility of human emotions, which they hope to ensure the stability of their memory and survival, but forget that memory is always crumbling and cannot withstand scrutiny. "Do you think that the things you have insisted on asking over the years have found the answer?" Even if you find it, is the answer you want? The elderly Huang Yao's question brings the novel to the place of ishiguro Kazuo's memory, and those who trust memory all their lives, even if they know the falseness of memory, can only use it to continue to live. A thousand kinds of memories, a thousand truths, a thousand kinds of people, so that isolation is formed, and we can live in our own way.
Jin Tingyue
Master of Capital Normal University
"Trance" can quickly gain the trust of readers by virtue of its storytelling ability. The novel radiates forward and backward from an afternoon in the late autumn of 2020, the narrative is smooth, the details echo, and the protagonist outlined by the logic of reality encounters illogical abnormalities... "Trance" provides a clear timescale for most of the time: early spring, mid-spring, summer, late autumn... The timing of approaching life makes the narrative rhythm jump, and it also forms an effect from real to virtual, real and illusory together with abnormal plot directions.
The "abnormality" of the story often has a moment of revelation, and in "Trance" it is "he" and the middle-aged version of Huang Yao's night drinking and chatting in the house. Similar moments have come to many previous novels, such as in a temporarily enclosed strange space, a rocking carriage or deck, a flickering candle or fire, and the listener is half drunk and half awake- "abnormality" comes with a trance, and the texture of the novel, or the logic of "reality", changes. Trance moments and "twin" settings do not necessarily rely on modern time coordinates, but the situation of not meeting for a long time and relying on electronic communication to maintain interpersonal communication is naturally suitable for breeding such stories. The pandemic era also seems to add to the sense of trance, as many realistic frames of reference begin to fail.
As for the hypothesis of "parallel universes", which provides a part of the explanation, the core of the story that has not been fully explained is because the coverage of the time coordinates makes people perceive the outline of urban weirdness - blurring the causes and consequences of "abnormalities" and originating in daily life, which is the source of its sense of horror and reality. This also creates the end of "Trance", which is not so much a technical treatment of the truth suspension or vacancy, but rather a habitual reaction based on psychological defense and seeking advantage and avoiding harm, just like the tone of some urban weird talk: some things are better not to get to the bottom of the matter.
Yi Jiaxin
Master of Chinese University
Synopsis of Trance asks what I personally think is almost insoluble: Are memories real and reliable? What does it mean for people to obtain self-proof and find their true selves? How exactly are the perceptions and sensations of life structured and functioned?
It is true that in the intermittent respite after the total lockdown, the stagnant spirit may not be able to keep up with the recovery of the body, and "trance" may have quietly become the mental symptoms of contemporary people who live according to the rhythm of life in the epidemic era. However, it is undeniable that "trance" is the hidden mental normal of countless post-80s and 90s, and the epidemic is normally intervened in a different state and fueled the waves. "People are actually not as nostalgic as they think, and the memory of the past will always be covered or even replaced by new things", He Yun's trance and dreams respond to the unreliability of memory, not so much memory, but rather He Yun's imagination to build the so-called "truth". The state before escaping into the dream is exactly trance, similar to the sleep period between wakefulness and sleep, wandering between memory and reality, surprised by the inexplicable reunion, the bizarre intrusion of middle-aged Huang Yao and the simple deconstruction of the meaning of the "answer" by the elderly Huang Yao, so that He Yun finally finds a certain lucidity in the trance. answer? No longer important.
Memories tend to be beneficial and avoid harm, forgetting the past that is not good enough, and being carefully selected unconsciously in the human brain, and then inevitably fragmented and blurred. The self-deception of memory reveals the self-preservation mechanisms of people's trance-like lives—the loss of the true and completeness of memories in exchange for a distorted but peaceful and ordinary life. But can we really forget the bravado, the mistakes, the bleeding blood, the torrential rain? The Trance Compendium is undoubtedly reminding the reader.
Edit | Easy
Image source network