(Source: IC Photo)
Ma Xiangyang/Wen
Novels can be roughly divided into two types: one for reading, and one for playing. In fact, there has never been a game more fascinating than word games (a game of signifiers). Playing hide-and-seek in the labyrinth of language (signifiers) has always been a "great event" that many great writers have tirelessly and carefully constructed--the layered and nested time and space labyrinth tracking in Borges's novel "The Garden where the Path Forks", the emotional archaeological record of the Grand View Garden where Countless Youths were buried in Cao Xueqin's pen, and the complicated metaphorical symbols of the monument in Eliot's poem "Wasteland", are all amazing symbolic games.
"The God of Micro-Things" is such an "alternative novel", its carefully constructed text maze is both brain-burning and intoxicating, and the writers Yu Hua and Professor Dai Jinhua have specially recommended this novel by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, and even have to take it out and re-read it every few years. Through the perspective of twin children Essa and Ruihaier, "The God of Small Things" looks through the various images and symbols represented by the dense and inconspicuous smallthings in the eyes of the children, such as the dying bee in the coffin of their cousin Sophie Merle lying in the coffin; their grandfather Papach can not forget the gray, hairy moth with particularly dense tufts on its back that symbolizes the malignant ghost And the frogs that were finally crushed on a road full of rampage cars, and so on... Most of these metaphors epises the fear and loss, despair and love, struggle and death of a pre-modern Indian family.
The heroine of the story, Amu, the mother of two children, finally spends her life to fight for the "chance to live" - she takes the fatal step towards the "untouchable" carpenter Virusha, like a moth to a fire. The recurring man in the dream is her "god of loss, god of things, goosebumps, and a god of sudden smiles," and the big reveal of the final chapter of the novel cleverly responds to the myth of the first chapter of the novel. Unlike detective novels, Roy's tragic novel mourns without complaining, complaining without hurting, and in the dense, layered and repeated weaving of images, it is difficult for the Ammus to even use the word "lived" to describe, in the shadows of the empire and the historical ledger, the women who have a lot of ink in the article are just pale "micro-objects" in history, they are small people alive, and death is only a repetitive, unimportant little thing and mysterious ghost that has no novelty in history.
Swirling Imagery: Echoes of History
As a magical melody novel, the first chapter of "The God of Micro Things" "Heaven fruit and vegetable pickling factory" to the last twenty-first chapter "The Price of Survival", almost every chapter of the story is nested together, in the linear narrative of time is full of past and future interweaving, a bit like the "Hui style" structure in Chinese poetry, such a careful arrangement, not only the storyline is full of various reverie myths, but also let people feel a long aftertaste of singing three sighs and meaningless meanings, it must be said that this is a film that needs to be read repeatedly. It is a clever novel with strange narrative structures and intriguing imagery.
In the first chapter of the novel, "Paradise Fruit and Vegetable Pickling Factory", the protagonist Amu's two children, the adult siblings Essa and Ruihaier, meet again in the ancestral house of Ayemenlian 23 years later, one is sent back from their father, the other is from the United States, and the reunion reminds the brothers and sisters of the strange story of their cousin Sophie Mer from London from London for a vacation and died in a foreign land. What has happened in those 23 years? Why did their cousin die so soon in Ayemenlian? The two stories intertwine and intertwine, culminating in a more hidden and tragic love story – the love of their mother Amu and the carpenter (pariah) Virusha, who eventually paid the price of their lives for exceeding the "law of love".
The layered structure of the story slowly unfolds step by step. What happened to Sophie Mer, the cousin of the two children, who died? What secret did their mother, Amu, tell when she went to the police station after attending the funeral of her cousin Sophie Moore? After that "terrible" day, why did his brother Aissha have to be sent back to his father immediately after that? Writer Roy begins by grasping the curiosity of the reader, but at the same time throwing the reader a pile of "wreckage all over the house after the fire", and then this indian family history with Amu as the protagonist In the remaining 20 chapters, one picture after another, one image after another, one story after another, slowly unfolding, the writer not only tests our patience, but also hopes that we will discover the "truth of history" from those "burnt clocks, burned photos and charred furniture".
These cruel truths are hidden in flickering imagery. The author is good at weaving a variety of complex and meaningful images in a swirling, dense, and swirling language, which are repeated again and again, and this repeated use of the film "flashback" method further imitates a whirlpool-like time; allowing the reader to find a unique ghostly horror atmosphere in the time labyrinth constructed by the novel - that is, the protagonist Amu is like a ghost of history in every "horror" moment. Especially before the revolt, they were only an inherent part of the historical order, as if they had never "lived" before.
Take, for example, the two recurring images of "Moth" and "The Law of Love." In the second chapter, "The Moth of Papach", the protagonist Amu's father, Papach, was once an entomologist of the British Empire, relying on the shadow of the order of the British Empire, and he was already the director of the Institute of Zoology at Pusa College when he retired. But when India became independent and the British left, the aura of empire on his head began to fade, and he soon suffered the greatest setback of his life—the moths he found were not named after him.
In the original text of the novel, the moth is clearly a metaphorical symbol of "The Phantom of the Empire and Postcolonial Culture", and Papach's greatest frustration in personal fate is symbolized by a moth, and even becomes the cause of his later "depression and sudden anger", "its disgusting soul—gray, hairy, with a particularly dense tuft of hairs on its back, which haunts every house he lives in, and it torments him." torture his children, and the children of his children".
In the novel, the moth appears over and over again in a variety of different scenes, but its allegory points to only one place, it is a stark mockery of the dying and decaying imperial order, no matter how vicious and ugly it has been before, and this imperial ghost, together with its colonial culture, has been deeply rooted in every part of this Indian family, and cannot be whisked away at all.
As for the "Law of Love," a law that prescribes "who should be loved, how to be loved, and how much love one can receive," it is mentioned again and again in the novel, metaphorically for the horrific influences and rigid traditional systems in which the suzerainty, caste system, and patriarchy are still active in modern Indian life. Amu's father, Papach, liked to beat his wife with a brass vase, and in the eyes of his daughter Amu, "humans are just habitual animals" and "just look around and you will find that beating people with brass vases is the least surprising of these things." Among the three generations of female representatives of the Amu family, her mother Mamachi could only bear domestic violence in silence; Amu's hasty husband in his early years was a tea house assistant in Calcutta, who not only lied and lived a life of alcoholism, but even persuaded his wife to accept his British manager's offer to exchange her body for her husband's job, and beat her when her wife refused; Rui hai'er, who had lived in peace and terror since childhood, was even afraid of marriage, and divorced shortly after marriage.
In Rui Haier's view, once the laws of "making the grandmother a grandmother, an uncle become an uncle, the mother becomes a mother, and the cousin becomes a cousin" and breaks into the forbidden area, it becomes the worst transgressor, and then pays a heavy price.
This timeless, boundless law is of course quite absurd on the other side: Amu's brother Chuck is also divorced from his ex-wife Margaret, when Amu became a disgrace because of his divorce, this Margaret because she is British, this special status in India is enough to offset her full sins as a woman, when Amu meets the pariah Virusha, bursts into a spark of love and is ruthlessly murdered, Amu's brother Chuck likes to provoke factory women, but is regarded as a normal physiological need, His mother, Marmachi, even opened another door in her son's room for the low-level women to access.
From the day when the twin siblings' cousin, Sophie Mer, came to Ayemenlian, on the surface, "things can change in a day, and dozens of hours can affect a person's life", but the author's pen changes sharply, "In fact this thing began thousands of years ago, before the arrival of Marxists; it began before the British army took Malabar... It can even be said that this event began before Christianity arrived by boat and seeped into Kerala like tea in a tea bag", and of course "began when the law of love was made".
In the narrative of the novel, the writer makes extensive use of concise nouns and extremely simple irregular verbs, and uses a large number of swirling long sentences and a large number of lists to arrange and combine into a variety of strange images, which form a flowing vortex of water, and Loy clearly shows the reader what the twin brothers and sisters reunited 23 years later and the old house in this small town in southern India have witnessed everything - how history and reality switch, replace and intertwine with each other. And every life in the Amu family has been shaped by the ghosts of history in the depths of time.
The God of Micro things
Author: [India] Arandati Loy
Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Translator: Wu Meizhen
Publication year: 2014-5
Dark Creatures: The Order of the Empire
Using poetic language to show the cruelty of the imperial order, Professor Dai Jinhua once admired the unique narrative aesthetic of "The God of Micro-Things" - when poetic language and highly dense text are combined, each group of words becomes a diamond-like polyhedron, and each cross-section with different shapes reflects the dark trauma in the depths of the temple of history. This not only challenges the reader's reading, but also allows the reader to see in this novel the revolutionary, creative effects that words and language can have.
Taking chapter 21, "The Price of Survival," as an example, the novel has this white description when laying the groundwork for the climactic passage of the protagonist Amu and the carpenter Virusha falling in love:
"Hurry, the whole world has disappeared.
Termites who are about to work.
Ladybug who is about to go home.
A white beetle that was about to dig a burrow to avoid the bright light.
A white grasshopper holding a white wooden violin.
Sad white music.
It's all gone. ”
Such a series of highly dense nouns not only brings the reader to the textured material scene when Amu and the carpenter Virusha secretly dated, but also sets the tone of a beautiful and sad story. Roy doesn't tell any shocking storyline in this novel, or even a clichéd love story and a short family life scene in the parents, but once the writer changes the way it is told—touching your heart in a new, moving, and direct way—the cruel truth hidden under this aesthetic language will stab you like a sharp blade.
In chapter eighteen, "The House of History," the novel's brutal themes are further poetically revealed. The "House of History" is the place where Amu and virusha the dalit dated, like a silent witness to history, before Amu and the untouchable Virusha, it used to be the property of a Calisep (meaning localized white), his lover was originally a local boy, the boy was taken away by his parents, he also committed suicide, and this place became an abandoned house. Kalisepp was once a double transgressor, with one foot crossing the line between the suzerain and the colonized, and the other crossing love across gender. When the police beat the pariah Virusha to death in the "House of History", the author wrote in extremely cold words: "These people are only followers of history, sent to settle the accounts and collect from those who violate their laws that they should pay a non-price." They are driven by a primitive but completely inhuman feeling, by a sense of contempt that arises from the raw, unrecognized fear—the fear of civilization of nature, the fear of men of women, the fear of power of power."
In order to maintain the consistency of the imperial order, power itself became the only legitimate "divinity." For the dark creatures of the imperial order, such as Amu and virusha the untouchables, they were nothing more than small things under power.
The core of the story of "The God of Things" is derived from the country rumor told to her by Loy's mother when she was a child: a sad love story of an upper-class Syrian Christian divorced woman and a Dalit carpenter across castes and classes. In his hometown of the Indian state of Kerala, where Loy lived, such stories happen every day.
With poetic depictions of cruelty, fragments of language to piece together violence, and ghostly memories to document imperial order, "The God of Micro-Things" is such a labyrinth novel that can give readers an immersive experience, it is worth holding it on your knees in the lazy afternoon sunshine of winter, watching the flow of life, like chewing a cheese cracker with a complex taste.