The animal perspective and genre narrative of "Tide Map"

Author: Wang Yao

Young writer Lin Zhao's new work "Tidal Chart" was first released in the fifth issue of "Harvest" in 2021, and was recently released as a single book. The title page of the novel begins this journey with the Cantonese proverb "Listen to the ancients and do not refute the ancients". The proverb is that the person who listens to the story should not interrupt the story and do not care whether the story is true or false. This reminds the reader to prepare to enter a world of literary fiction. Lin Explains in the Afterword that the novel originated from a mid-19th-century watercolor butterfly figure that he encountered in a 2017 album. Artistic reality and natural reality are intertwined, and she realizes that the animals in the painting may not be found in real nature, and the real and fiction pull out the narrator of "Tidal Chart": a fictional thing, born on the Pearl River, traveling through Guangzhou, Macao, and finally reaching the center of the European Empire. The reason for the name "Tidal Chart" is that on the one hand, it involves the fantastic journey of the giant frog, which lands in the cities along the river and the sea, under the tide, and on the other hand, it comes from the flint stone of the story - Lin Zhao's Cantonese-English dictionary "Tongshang Zihui" and "Chinese Trade Painting" collection that Lin Di looked through in 2018. "Trade And Commerce" and Chinese trade painting present a picture of daily life and trade exchanges in the coastal areas of Guangdong, China in the early 19th century, with sea breezes and tides mixed with Cantonese dialects and Bafang dialects, which are transformed into a dynamic "tidal map" in the novel along with the travels of a giant frog.

The history of Guangdong at the end of the Qing Dynasty is slowly unfolded with local chronicles, and the "I" who undertakes the task of narration in the novel is a giant frog made of fiction. In Lin Zhao's first novel, Liu Xi, the young girl Zhang Zao'er also appears in the first person, telling about her upbringing in the family and how she finally killed her half-brother. The monologue seems to be true and true, but under careful consideration, there are always doubts, and the truth of the facts is unknown to the reader. In "Tide Map", Lin Zhao continues this narrative focus of "inner perspective", the narrator is not a cold observer, with an omniscient and omnipotent vision of God outside the story, but as a witness inside the story, telling a fictional story with realistic techniques. The title page "Listen to the Ancients" reminds the reader that it is necessary to believe what the giant frog sees, feels, says and does, in order to start this water trip, if you question it from a human point of view, you must be hindered. Lin Zhao admitted in an interview that in the conceptual stage of the novel, the protagonist is not a frog, but a female character, but in reality, the actions and vision of Chinese women in the early 19th century are quite limited, and it is impossible to complete this global journey, until the idea that "the protagonist can not be a person" is implemented, and the narrator's appearance is "rationalized".

The nautical narratives of literary history (especially European literature) are filled with imperial colonial discourses and legends of explorations that conquer nature, and the core of such grand narratives is to present an other who is watched, examined, evaluated, and conquered from the perspective of the powerful. From the female protagonist conceived at the beginning to the giant frog who finally wrote the pen, it reflects the female identity consciousness of the author Lin Zhao, and also reflects the spectrum of classical Chinese thought in the work. The giant frog in the Tidal Chart went from being male and female to being pronounced female by cold modern medical devices, completing its gender identity. Giant frogs can speak Cantonese dialects, also speak foreign languages, can communicate with people, establish relationships, become friends, can experience and perceive the world, although people have surprises about the performance of frogs, but also do not panic and question too much. The more the frog shows its vitality, the more we can see the loosening of the modern rationally constructed knowledge system and the rigid order of objectification presented in the novel world, and the boundary between man and non-man is crossed. Unlike European modernity, which relies on scientific and technological rationality to "liberate" man from nature, classical Chinese thought contains the symbiotic concept of "all things are one with me" in classical Chinese thought.

In fact, the "animistic" imagination has survived in literary history, and from the perspective of reflecting on the ecological literary criticism of the human center, this literary imagination is interpreted and evaluated as a positive literary value. We live in a living world, and as human beings, we, like other species, are brought to life by the environment in which we live. In "Tide Map", when a narrator from the perspective of a female animal who goes to the center of human beings and does not have a grand narrative begins to tell, and what connects with it are fishermen, crews, painters, dancers, naturalists, breeders, elephants, golden roosters, tropical jungles, sea breezes, sails living along the coast of Guangdong... It connects the cultural history of Lingnan in the early 19th century.

Of course, the Lingnan language must be used to write Lingnan, but unlike the dialect writing in the northern official dialect area and the Shanghai language culture of "Blossoms", it takes more courage and self-confidence for the writer to integrate cantonese dialects into the works, and the reader also needs to overcome the language barrier and prepare enough patience to enter the work. Lin Zhao used a language mixed with Cantonese and foreign names, place names, and property names to paint a map of Lingnan style and objects. In the picture, there are sailing ships full of goods and products from various countries, and with the sails are Qi Jiajie, Feng Xi, H, Minna, Dia Gao and all kinds of people, as well as animals and plants of various families in the sky, land and water systems. It can be said that this is the narrative of customs and cultural exchanges in the earliest trade areas of South China. Lin Zhao's creative ideal is expressed in the novel by naturalist H: "Repair a big book, lingnan everything is all-encompassing."

Among the people who established a connection with the giant frog, the painter Feng Xi had more ink and also pinned on the author's creative concept. Images have a special value for recreating the daily life and material culture of ordinary people in a certain period. This idea comes from the cultural historian Peter Burke's "History of Pictorial Evidence". Feng Xi's appearance is one of the few parts of the novel that changes the narrative perspective. The narrator is no longer a frog, but from an omniscient and all-powerful perspective, he carefully explains the location of the paving and plaque contents of Feng Xi's painting shop, especially the objects on the third floor of the painting shop are the most attractive: "The south wall of the Perimeter Card Table, the table is lined with landscape and water table screens, seven-color plum bottles, rice paper lamps, hazy paper rolled into piles, and countless paint jars." Large box of square glass in the corner of the wall... There are also many raw fruits such as sheep peaches, pineapples and honey oranges piled up in mountains, and potted flowers, branches and petals are scattered everywhere. The splendid glass of the Manchurian window casts a rainbow shadow on this flower world. Looking at these detailed descriptions, the reader is like looking at an image. The proof provided by the image is more credible in detail for the history of material culture, and the portrait as evidence can especially prove how the object was arranged and used. In the novel, Feng Xi's paintings are mostly "four scenes of the Pearl River, three hundred and sixty lines, large boats and small boats, flowers, birds, fish and insects, and portraits of people. From the novel's name "Tidal Chart", the shaping of the painter Feng Xi, to the depiction of Feng Xi's painting, this kind of picture-in-picture narrative nesting shows that the writer firmly believes in the concept of cultural history of "image as evidence". What makes the painting so important is that it often represents details that were taken for granted at the time and dismissed in historical texts.

Much of the appeal of narrative literature lies in its ability to shine the imagination into reality, and Tide Map has both the extremes of fiction and reality, and finds a balance between them. The opening giant frog confesses: "I am a fiction, I am not a human being at all, I am an animal that has not yet been shaped" is shocking enough, and it also summons the literary imagination and humanistic pursuit that all things are subliminal, can speak. The giant frog's perspective is humble and compassionate, and it can see the ordinary people, the suffering poor, and the animals and plants that suffered in the colonization of the Western Empire in the early 19th century, the seafaring plunder, and the global trade. It could see the joy, sympathy and love in Feng Xi's eyes when he looked at it, and it also looked at the various people it encountered, the scenery of the world, and everything in the world with the same eyes.

The giant frog's journey to see the world is actually a process of constant capture and exhibition, and this global journey ends when it is imprisoned in the "Imperial Zoo" as a trophy, made into a specimen and wrapped in ice after death, and finally magically disappears with the ice on the way to the "Imperial Museum of Nature". Frogs are born in fiction and die in fiction, but as "witnesses" they tell us about a cultural memory that is "invisible" in visible history.

(The author Wang Yao is a lecturer at the College of Literature of Lanzhou University, and the phased results of the "18LZUJBWZY086" special funding project of the Basic Scientific Research Business Expenses of the Central University of Literature)

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel