Rational
□ Wang Anyi
Listening to Mr. Yu Guangzhong talk about prose, he proposed two concepts, one for lyrical prose, called "interest", and one for essay, called "rational interest"—I borrowed the latter to make this lecture. I love the concept that gives a name to the logical aesthetics of speculative fiction.
Let me explain my thoughts on genre fiction first. At present, there is no definition of genre fiction in Chinese literature, and we usually use "popular literature" to distinguish it from "serious literature", which in fact blurs the narrative mode of the genre itself.
Let's start with external phenomena and look at the place of genre novels in reading life. If you go abroad, walk into a bookstore, and the case on the door is flat, most of them are very thick, like bricks, one by one, usually genre novels. They sell relatively well, are popular with the public, and are also called "popular literature" in us. Then niche literature - the word "niche" should be initiated from Taiwan, that is, what we call serious literature, the length is relatively short, and when the new arrival will also lie on the book case, but soon on the shelf, the industry, called "lying" and "vertical", "vertical" also means that the audience is limited, and may soon be removed. Judging from the fate of sales, genre novels can be said to be the mainstream of reading, covering all levels of society, including intellectuals. Frederick Jensen, a well-known Western Marxist scholar at Duke University, attaches great importance to genre fiction, and when I went to Duke University in 2016, the professor was writing a research article by the American mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. This love of contemporary fiction may have something to do with academic direction, Marxism is in some ways a sociology that requires a great deal of sampling of reality, and genre fiction can provide material in the most timely and convenient way. Putting aside the professional uses of researchers and returning to the essence of reading, where is the value of genre fiction? I think it may have something to do with the senses. In a simple way of saying it, it is more beautiful and pleasant. Reading a so-called "serious novel" is very difficult, especially in today's day when modernism has become a new classic. The novel has diverged over the course of hundreds of years, and its original pleasure of storytelling and listening to stories has given way to philosophy of thought, just like all contemporary art, leaving the sensual pleasure to popular culture, and narrative literature is the genre novel.
When I arranged this course, I also reviewed whether it was too old and too old. The selections were all realistic texts. I had tried to find a modernist novel—very few in my field of vision could be used for case studies, the first choice being Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the rest being difficult to surpass, but it had been taught in class many years ago and published in a book. This is where I am not professional enough as a teacher, I can't repeat it, every course must have new content, and I am aware of the problem, that is, I can't deepen and perfect, and I will try to talk about some old topics in the future. I admit that modernism has an experimental meaning, for example, there is a famous musical work, the performer comes up, sits down at the piano, does nothing, gets up again, goes. It's boring, but it does convey a little bit of a meaning, which is to empty time, as I tried to explain in the first lesson, to beat time back to its original form. Divide the beginning and the end of the paragraph from the endless time and leave it to the audience to deal with it themselves. There is also a famous modernist painting, a blank piece of paper with nothing, which frames the space for the viewer. Another book that can be read from any page, presumably to depict the history of mankind over and over again? These are extreme examples, built with cancellation, balanced by subversion, but they run too quickly toward purpose, compressing the process, and art happens precisely in the process. This may involve the original intention of art, specifically to the novel, that is, why do people write novels? The French translation of my novel "Long Hate Song", a senior Chinese teacher, we ate and chatted, I said teacher, you French are very free, children write with their left hands, and do not force correction, and on our side, if children eat and write with their left hands, parents and teachers will definitely let him train his right hand. She said it was not good, and she should still use her right hand to write. I asked why? She thought about it for a long time, and then said that because the writing thing was designed for writing with the right hand. I would like to say that when an activity is generated, the rules have been formulated according to the needs of application, so what kind of needs are novels born to meet? I like to explore the origin of what happened, and many of the follow-ups come from here. I think the product of fiction is to provide stories to people. Human nature has a curiosity about mysterious things, is attracted by unpredictable results, follows the plot, and finally reaches the end and solves the doubts. Is there any deeper reason for this curious nature? The British writer and winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing, once wrote interestingly that sometimes just waiting in the dental clinic and reading a terrible novel from a very bad magazine, but you will also read it, track the ending, and even hope to delay the diagnosis and treatment, the nurse does not call your name, can read the rotten novel. Why are we so eager to know the end? Doris Lessing's answer is that because our lives have a beginning and an end, we can't tolerate losing halfway. I may not be able to fully accept this conclusion, the real life, is often incomplete, but perhaps because of this, people like to listen to stories, stories virtual life with beginnings and ends. In any case, the experience of previous writers can be used to prove that the love of stories in human nature is indeed a fact. Now, the age-old task of storytelling has been taken over by genre fiction. So I don't think we should expel genre fiction from our field of vision, even if we think of ourselves as writers of serious literature, we should go back and look at genre fiction, because it has greatly maintained our initial appreciation of literature.
In Western literature, genre novels have their own narrative format, so they are called "genres". I didn't deliberately study how this format began and how it came to be, but I just drew material from the scope of reading and tried to summarize a little experience. We all know "Jane Eyre", the protagonist Jane Eyre came out of the orphanage, applied to the rich as a tutor, encountered many strange events, and finally got love. Did it start from this that "orphan girls go to the big house to become female teachers" became a model? In fact, decades later, this model appeared in Henry James's supernatural novel "The Screws Are Tightening"; then, Victoria Hurt, we may be relatively unfamiliar, the mainland introduction is not much, but the Taiwanese "Crown" translation published a large number of her works, she basically followed the same model, such as "The Mistress of Merlin Villa", "House of a Thousand Lights", etc.; almost at the same time, Daphne Dumurier, her name is also unfamiliar, but the novel "Lubeka", especially the film based on "Lübecca", "Lubeka". Butterfly Dream", then no one knows that no one knows, but also the orphan girl came to the big house, although not as a female teacher or female companion, but the owner's new wife, is not also a maid of origin, a good fortune? The risk is on the other side, but the ending is always a reunion; to this day, Sarah Waters, a Welsh female writer born in 1966, can still faintly see the outlines, such as "Little Stranger" and "The Finger", but the big house has become decadent, the host's family is also withering, and the classical romantic history has been replaced by a "queer" narrative. From this point of view, such a model is flexible in a variety of ways, and the radiation is very wide. Back to the time of Jane Eyre, the work of another Bronte sister, Wuthering Heights, there are also big mansions, there are lone chicks, there are ghosts, there are also love and hate, but they get out of the barriers of mode, bid farewell to sweet life, and face sharp and irreconcilable conflicts, which originate from stronger creations. So, I thought genre fiction was a potential way to get into serious value.
In modern Chinese literature, there were signs of the emergence of genre novels, but finally they did not take shape, and they passed us by. At the beginning of the last century, with the prosperity of printing and publishing newspapers and periodicals, the growth of the civic class, the rise of novel writers, sellers and readers together, promoted the literary climax, the popularity of the works first promoted the theme of love in the wind and moon, the so-called "six mandarin ducks with the same fate of the birds, a pair of butterflies poor worms", known as the "Mandarin duck butterfly school". Because this kind of story is most concentrated in the weekly magazine "Saturday", it has also received the nickname "Saturday". I think the name "Saturday" is very well named, it puts a special emphasis on pastime, rest, entertainment. Fan Yanqiao, a predecessor of Shanghai literature and history research, has an article titled "Historical Outline of the Novels of the Old School of the Republic of China", and the neutral title of "Old School Novels" obviously corresponds to the "May Fourth" new literature, and also attempts to express an objective position. To some extent, the "new literary movement" conforms to the trend of history, enlightenment and salvation are all imminent dangers, whether it is slogans or practice, left-wing literature has a more prominent progressive force. In contrast, the "Mandarin Duck Butterfly" becomes alienated from reality, backward of the situation, and even boring, so it retreats to the edge. In the history of literature, it is obscured, and the text itself abandons the experiment of typology. After that, Chinese society experienced various changes, the realistic mission of literature was out of control, going farther and farther away, becoming the mainstream, the technique of storytelling became the last technique, and the clue of "Saturday" had no chance to develop. Therefore, today China does not have a real sense of genre novels, nor does it have the Dafa of novels, similar to the "six laws" of Chinese paintings, we all tell stories based on experience and feelings, of course, this is the highest realm, seeking the "Tao", but the lack of methods is inevitable to want and not reach. Genre fiction can solve the problem to some extent, because there is "art". Chinese folklore actually has "magic", and word of mouth has accumulated narrative wisdom, such as "The Legend of the White Snake", and the artistic conception here is really good! You think that the White Lady has been cultivating for a thousand years, and she can finally become an immortal. What is the concept of "immortal" in our Chinese culture? In fact, it is to return to time and space as one, there is no birth and no death, eternity. But she still has to be a person, and she makes people shed tears when she says it! Just like the stone in "Dream of the Red Chamber", determined to go to the human world, what is the result? "Full of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears." Speaking of the White Lady, and Xu Xian made a husband and wife, the Taoism is refined, can hide the origin, cover the real body, almost no flaws, even so, but there is still a life gate, that is, the Dragon Boat Festival, this day especially can not drink Xiong Huang wine - the Bible in the Israeli Hercules Samson's life gate is his hair, cut off the hair power immediately left the body, become a mortal. Leaving aside the metaphor for the time being, just say the story of the White Lady, because of this fate, the plot can go down, the Fahai Town Demon, the water floods the Golden Mountain, the Leifeng Pagoda collapses... She stepped into the earthly world, it can be said that there is no turning back arrow with a bow, and the steps are frightening, if not, all the way to spend a good full moon, falling into the ordinary life, but failed to live up to the past life of the immortal world.
I read genre novels to see this, "mountains and rivers are doubtful and there is no way, willows are dark and flowers are bright and another village." It's a pity that I don't look at martial arts. A few days ago, we went to Jin Yong's hometown in Haining, and we felt very sorry that he had written so many books, but I couldn't read any of them. I still have the book signed by Mr. Jin Yong himself, and I still can't read it. There is no way, not your dish, how you can not taste the benefits, can not get close to it. Just like sometimes I envy mathematicians, I think they have a mystery, but you don't have a password, you just can't get in. The martial arts are also like this, as if they have crossed a deep ditch and cannot cross it. But I like the concept of martial arts, the master moves over, one move past, one move back, and finally no move. I like this, but the process is not convincing, because the chivalrous guests are superhuman, and realism has obsessive-compulsive disorder, that is, more true, even if legendary, it also requires common sense. Speculative fiction can satisfy this paradox. Therefore, I am most worried about the appearance of psychopaths or pathological personalities in speculative fiction, which is nothing more than giving up the responsibility of reasoning. Once a person is sick, all actions can be explained, so the patient in the speculative fiction is Superman, and they can do anything and be forgiven. The real fun, and the challenge, is to explain the suspense in the logic of daily life. Based on my limited reading experience, I also disagree with the Benguets. Limiting the case to an isolated environment, the case is almost turned into structural engineering, purely physical activity, and lack of life and human factors. Dr. Li Changyu, a Chinese-American trace scientist, I once heard a lecture from him. We all know that he has cracked many major cases from the traces, and has also spared obvious perpetrators because of the traces, such as Simpson, and the blood samples have left the scene without being adopted. I was very impressed that Dr. Li said such a sentence, he said, I only look at the traces, the motive is not in my control. I think speculative fiction is all about motivation.
Speaking of motivations, it is necessary to mention Kiyoharu Matsumoto, a representative of Japanese social speculative fiction. I thought that the name "social school" was deliberately and efforts were made to summarize the characteristics of Kiyoharu Matsumoto into a genre, but in fact, it is difficult for anyone to really be subordinate to him. Later Miyuki Miyabe was recognized as a descendant of the social faction, but it was still not enough to reflect the connotation of Matsumoto Kiyoharu. This is a very remarkable novelist who incorporated critical realism into the genre of reasoning, because of him, japanese critical circles redefined the concept of "popular literature" and put it into the category of serious literature. Matsumoto Kiyoharu's life experience is very rich, he experienced the Second World War and the difficult life after the war, workers, peasants, soldiers and businessmen, almost every line involved, and finally became a speculative novelist. The logic of his reasoning comes from the reality of life, and personal experience provides him with a large amount of social material, which is not obtained by relying on investigation and interview collection, but by doing it himself. You must have seen a movie based on the novel "Sandware", which is just one of his massive works, and he has a short story called "Surveillance", which is about the criminal police crouching opposite an ordinary family, targeting the housewife of the family, who is the old lover of the fugitive. A few days passed, seeing that the woman was living a quiet life of scrupulous duty, and there was no sign of abnormality, just when he lost patience, there was finally a movement. The criminal police followed, seeing that the woman suddenly became lively and full of vitality, and sure enough, found a trace in the hot spring hotel, arrested the fugitive, at this time the woman went home, and also rushed to the house to meet her husband after work, the criminal police were very emotional - "this woman only burned a few hours of life." In this regard, jump out of "type". No matter how it is interpreted, "type" is always a universal social morality, but Matsumoto Kiyoharu has a special concept of life.
Keigo Higashino is also what I like. I love Keigo Higashino's Kiba, who often has unexpected peaks that are unique to genre novelists. But it is also this miracle that requires equal miracle solutions, and the challenge to wisdom is quite daunting. Keigo Higashino's cases are often double-handed. The difficulty of speculative fiction is not in solving the case, but in the crime, that is, designing a perfect crime. In the words of Agatha Christie's Poirot: "My crime is art" and "they are the highest level of exercise of the imagination". In Keigo Higashino's crime, sometimes one person can't get together, so two people are arranged. There is a British movie called "Deadly Magic", which is about the early days of the rise of magic, London introduced a kind of transposition performance, people disappear here can appear in other places, the effect is very amazing, the magician is also famous. Then there is the opponent, and this opponent has designed all kinds of mechanisms, and in the end it cannot be as magical as he is. In a hurry, find a person who looks like himself, cooperate with the performance, disappear here, appear over there. Since then, the two magicians have fought each other. It was at this time that his stand-in began to blackmail him, demanding higher pay, or else announcing that he had cheated, showing him the color on the spot several times, and therefore, it was quickly closed. And the good scene over there is still the same, night and night bursting. The mystery is not revealed until the end, and it turns out that the performers of the transposition magic are twins. Keigo Higashino's crimes are sometimes done by such a pair of twins, which somewhat reduces the precision of the crime and thus disintegrates the charm of suspense. The Nile Massacre is also a double,000 film, but the main murder was carried out by one person, Simon, and the other, Kitty, shot to fill in the gaps. Let the murder leave a flaw, probably unavoidable, the crime is too delicate, without leaving clues, reasoning can not be carried out. It's only possible to get the killer to do it again, or even twice—it's hard to imagine going without a trace, but Poirot starts with the motive, and the cruise ship on the Nile can't use the detection equipment, which is why I like Agatha Christie.
Once I talked to Huang Ziping about Christie and asked each other which novel she liked the most, and we invariably said "Beer Murder". In this novel, Poirot is commissioned to a case from seventeen years ago, all traces no longer exist, all that remains is memory, what Poirot can do is to visit the witnesses, everyone's narration is so subjective, with a strong emotional color, Poirot said, I see so much personality. He is attracted to these personalities, and I think that for a detective, the personality gives him not only the aesthetics of human nature, but more likely to provide psychological motives, which do not disappear over time, but on the contrary, continue to grow and show consequences.
Christie's motivation is also a daily life of people and things, and the materials she uses are very ordinary, all in our understanding. Unlike Holmes, whose sources of material are beyond the experience of ordinary people, and the British overseas colonies provide him with a legendary space to win with mystery and danger, Christie's crimes and judgments lie in the pleasure of common sense. We know that her two famous detectives, one is Poirot, a professional technician, and the other is Miss Marple, who is an amateur. Both start from common sense, but the number of paths is different. Let's start with Miss Marple. Miss Marple had lived all her life in the countryside, her mouth shut in the "Victorian era", and in the eyes of young people, almost a hundred years old. The old lady of England is very powerful and should not be underestimated. One year I went to Cambridge to attend a seminar on contemporary literature, and toward the end of it, I arranged to visit Cambridge. Two volunteers were guides separately, and the person in charge of our group was a beautiful lady, obviously very old, thin and tall, with an elegant demeanor. She came up to us and counted the number of people: one, two, three, four... Halfway through the count, someone walked by with an umbrella, which reminded everyone that Britain was a rainy place, and the team was scattered like a group, and they went back to get the umbrella. Madame sighed, waiting for people to regroup, and then counted from the beginning: one, two, three... Count to eighteen, circle the line, introduce yourself: Good afternoon, my name is Mary - at this time, suddenly two people came to join, this time she was really angry, said: No, the person in charge told me, the total number of thirty-six people, each group of eighteen, you go to that group. Some people retorted: we are not thirty-six, we are forty, so we should accept both of them. She froze for a moment and immediately responded: It seems that my English is too bad! This sentence is very interesting, to this group of foreigners to say that their English is very bad, is not sarcastic to us and what is it? Most of the volunteers in England are such a lady, the musician Handel London House, also served by the old lady, she complained to me about the government's inaction, the house has been in disrepair for a long time, no funds are allocated, all the staff are obliged, and the tickets are not enough. Another time we went to the parish where Jane Austen once lived, Winchester Cathedral, and the wooden ladder to the tower was basically vertical, and halfway up, a smiling face popped out from above, and another old lady, as if waiting for a long time, said: We have Chinese explanation, but we have never come here Chinese. As soon as I gained a foothold, a valuable introduction to the church was in my hands. Apparently a patchwork of translation software, there were a lot of typos and sick sentences, but the old lady's eager eyes made me shut up. These old ladies reminded me of Miss Marple.
Once walking with friends on foot on the outskirts of Manchester, on one side of the road is a field, on the other side is a house, a distance between each other, many houses have been uninhabited, deserted, but the pattern is still there, the main building, the annex, the horse shed, the servant's lower room, you can imagine the life scene of the prime of the year. From morning to noon, it was a full five kilometers away, reaching a small market town, restaurants, shops, post offices, hair salons, around a round yard, which was the administrative and commercial center of this area, and Miss Marple lived in such a country, and the murders took place under the calm surface. Miss Marple is like a nosy neighbor's grandmother, and like a volunteer who cares about public affairs, and whenever the wind comes, she has to rush to insert a foot. With her long life experience, this experience is not in the breadth of insight, but in her deep understanding of human nature, in fact, nothing special, it is all about you and me. What she often says is that I once knew someone — a reference to each other, and the truth surfaced. This is the logic of Miss Marple's reasoning, from the general to the individual. Everyday life was like an encyclopedia for her, and any kind of suspense could find annotations from it, so that people and things that were blind to her suddenly became wonderful.
What we are going to focus on today is Poirot, a professional detective who has an office in London and is openly picked up, so he has the opportunity to encounter some high-quality cases, strictly speaking, It is Poirot who selects high-quality cases in a huge list. The so-called fine products, as Fang Cai said, exquisite art, the highest level of imagination, chess opponents, only excited. Poirot's strategy for solving the case is different from Miss Mapple's, "different" is that he does not focus on concreteness like Miss Marple, but starts from form; "same" means that his "formalism" also comes from daily life, is refined, from figurative to abstract. This is my topic today, "Rational Fun." Poirot looks at the scene, often considering the natural and the unnatural. He believes that all things have their established form of starting from themselves, derived from the needs of life, which requires common sense. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British art critic John Ruskin discussed the aesthetics of architecture in the third lecture of the "Ten Lectures on Art", arguing that a building should first reflect the practical function. He said: "If it is a house, its size should be just enough to meet the needs of the owner's comfort, the type and number of rooms inside should be what the owner needs, and there should also be the number of windows that the owner needs, and these windows should be arranged in the position where the owner wants to place it." If it is a church, it should be the right size to be able to hold a rally, with the right shape and layout so that people feel comfortable inside and can hear clearly. If it is a public institution, its layout should make those employees feel comfortable in their daily activities. This is what a normal space has, and Poirot's judgment begins. For example, in "The House of Illusions", he almost fell into the ground before and after the murder, and his first feeling was depression, "because what he was seeing was a very fake murder scene." "The blonde dead man by the pool, the woman with the gun, another woman in the distance holding a basket of flowers, followed by a man in a shooting suit, and then the third woman mentioned a basket full of eggs, like a theatrical pose, specially staged for him Poirot. This form is not normal, it is set for a special purpose, so what kind of purpose is it? At that time, unlike today, there were probes everywhere, and there was genetic testing technology, and reasoning could only start from the phenomenon. In Poirot's eyes, the order of phenomena is meaningful, it embodies the attempts of man-made activity. Murder in a Foreign Student Dormitory — Christie's novels, mostly named "Murder," is a promise to the reader that we'll have a suspenseful affair, and that we'll solve it and not let expectations run wild. Taiwanese book reviewer Tang Nuo said that the author and reader of genre novels have a tacit understanding, which is a good statement, I think, tacit understanding is here. In Murder in a Foreign Student Dormitory, there is a series of thefts in the student dormitory, and the lost items have no connection: cosmetics, stethoscopes, clothing, ink, etc., and Poirot asks for a list in chronological order. Once this miscellaneous thing forms order, it may take on a logical relationship. Poirot likes to use "puzzle" to describe the logical chain, where there is a missing piece, he intuitively feels that it is in front of him, but he does not know what it is, and where to fall, he sorts out the clues, and waits until all the pieces in the "jigsaw puzzle game" are in place, and it is done! (Excerpt)
(For full text, please refer to "Yangtze River Literature and Art, Good Novel", No. 1, 2022)
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Excerpted from Harvest, Issue 5, 2021
The original journal is responsible for editing | Zhong Hongming
The journal is responsible for editing | Yu Xiang noon
"Yangtze River Literature and Art Good Novel", No. 1, 2022
▲Wang An recalled |
Wang Anyi, novelist. He has published fifteen novels such as "Long Hate Song", "Kao Gong Ji", "A Knife, A Thousand Words", eight volumes of Wang Anyi Novella Collection, eight volumes of Wang Anyi Short Story Series, and many other essay collections, plays and essays, etc., with more than 6 million words. He has won the Mao Dun Literature Award, the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Malaysian "Trace of Flowers" World Chinese Literature Award, the South Korea Lee Byung-joo International Literature Award, the Hong Kong Novel "Dream of the Red Chamber Award" and other awards. He was nominated for the Man booker Prize for International Literature in 2011, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettress of the French Republic in 2013, and the Fifth Newman Chinese Literature Prize at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. Some of his works are translated into English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Serbian, Japanese, Israeli, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Polish and other translations.