Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all similar, and unhappy families have their own misfortunes. This sentence not only conveys a general insight into family life, but also hints at the conventional concept of "happiness" or "unhappiness" that people's perceptions of "happiness" or "unhappiness" are firmly tied to family life.
Symmetrical to the real family is the family narrative in literature: from the tragedy of Oedipus to the choice of Antigone; from the man in the dream of the Red Chamber to the "man" in The Metamorphosis; from the evening family gathering in Cambre to the century-old family legend of Macondo... As long as human beings are still thriving on the earth, there will always be people to tell their family stories - a classic family story is a slice of human history, the eternal carrier of literature.
"Drizzle", by Luis Landro (Spain), translated by Ouyang Shixiao, version: S Code Study | Writers Press, August 2021
Question the veracity of narrative discourse
Spanish contemporary writer Luis Landro's "Drizzle", which seems to be just an ordinary realist family melodrama, is in fact a subversion of the traditional family narrative. The story itself is not complicated: years ago, the father died, and the life of the mother and three children has changed completely. Children have to step out of their childhood dreams and face the cold and cruel reality. The pain they experienced as they grew up led to the disintegration of family relationships in adulthood. Many years later, reunited on the occasion of his mother's eightieth birthday, his son Gabriel decided to take the opportunity to reunite estranged family members and heal the wounds of the past.
Luis Landro, born in 1948 in Albuquerque of Badajoz, became famous in 1989 with his debut novel "The Game of Later Years", and later published the novels "Lucky Knight", "Magician's Apprentice", "Guitarist", "Today, Jupiter", "Portrait of an Immature Man", "Drizzle", etc., is one of the most important writers in contemporary Spain.
However, under the elaborate design of Luis Landro, the discourse of the narrative itself, instead of the storyline, became the main body of the novel. That terrible "birthday party" ended without even actually starting. The characters in the story are pulled out of the dramatic situation and suspended in a calm moment, where each is a survivor and tells a story about their lives. Luis Landro uses the dialogue on the phone to create a space that belongs purely to "words", they talk about love and jealousy, about the collision of desire and reality, about the burden of poverty, about the dark secrets of married life... And Aurora, the protagonist at the center of the discourse, listens to everything - it is not so much a real character, but rather Aurora is the ideal reader of the novel, she listens not only to everyone's story, but also to the sound of the story, to the lies in silence...
These narrative discourses have a rich space for interpretation, each person's tragic fate has its social roots, and everyone's pain has its psychological basis. We can imagine that if Dostoevsky or Tolstoy had written the same story, language would have pointed definitively into the abyss of human nature. Luis Landro jumped out of the story and questioned the veracity of these words:
“...... They are told over and over again, albeit only to make them sound more real and dramatic with each restatement, for in the boiling water of remembrance even the most trivial plot acquires the meaning and importance of a warning or a plan as the years go by, and even eventually becomes part of the framework of destiny. All this is, of course, told in a rhetorical way that corresponds to the essence of the facts, if they are inconsequential at first, even somewhat amusing, but over time they are given a legendary dimension in which humor and irony have been forbidden beforehand. ”
A rain of "words"
Luis Landro does not deny the deep nature of things, he emphasizes the stylistic deviation caused by the exaggeration and ambiguity of discourse. For example, Andrea's suicide is only a childish farce in the eyes of her mother, while Andrea describes her despair in a romantic language. The contradiction between the two narratives makes us clearly aware that even for an event experienced together, different people will give birth to completely different narrative methods. In other words, we can only experience the things that language enables us to understand. Once things are over, discourse begins to diverge and reacts to reality.
From this point of view, the "rain" in "Drizzle" is like a rain of "words": words swallow reality and change the form of reality. As the novel begins, the children's father takes home a portrait of a stranger abandoned in the basement and hangs it in the middle of the living room, where he tells the children that the person in the portrait is the ancestor of their family, the great adventurer "Pentaporin", and has made up countless legends for this fictional character. This romantic lie is reminiscent of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the father of the novel, just as Don Quixote embarked on a mad journey of a Ranger knight by obsessing with chivalric fiction. The main characters in Drizzle (Gabriel, Sonia, Andrea) are almost modern echoes of Don Quixote. And the tragedy of their fate also comes from the magic of words, their desires are not spontaneous, but the weak phantom of the story projected on reality. As a result, they are "always as innocent as children, and everyone is imprisoned in childhood."
The birth of the truth of the novel
After the death of her father, the first thing the mother did was throw away the portrait of "Pentaporin" and force the children into the real world. The image of the mother is like the cold embodiment of reality, always reminding children of the real rules of the world: to work for material things, to abandon fantasies about the future, to enter marriage in order to achieve class leapfrogging... While the image of the dead father, as an idealist, is constantly elevated, his existence is seen as a dream life possibility.
This is not only a contradiction between ideals and reality, but also a contradiction between the language world and the real world. As the children of the weak, the only way to confront is to constantly tell their own stories: Sonia's marriage story, Andrea's love story, Gabriel's thesis on happiness is also a story — even if this story is told through the mouth of silence — and he can't accomplish it because his "happiness" is just a way of escaping reality.
As a family novel, Drizzle is textually reflexive. It doubts not only the way people in the family relate to others, but also the traditional family narratives we trust, and the reliability of the family discourse that human beings have constructed throughout the ages. Luis Landro lends out a family drama that presents a linguistic turn in the novel. Language is no longer a magic wand, but a tool full of holes. To some extent, though, this is the only tool for human beings to explore themselves and the world. And the way humans use language, presumably like Sisyphus, lifting boulders up mountains and letting them slide down every day is just some doomed attempt, and this is the mission of generations of writers.
“...... Although nothing happens, people never and never stop telling, and if hell really exists, people will continue to tell it there for centuries and centuries, winding up language toys again and again, trying to deepen their understanding of the world, groping in the absurdity of life. Perhaps looking for a spring that can open blind stubbornness, like a curse on Alibaba's cave, leads us to discover great treasures full of reason, light, and the exact meaning of things. ”
At the end of the twentieth century, the Colombian writer García Márquez wrote his biography of life entitled: Living to Tell. All writers dream of being the perfect storyteller and always trust that writing can fill the void that has been forgotten by history. Luis Landro doubted that no matter how people told it, they could not get close to the reality of life. Therefore, we cannot trust neither "reality" nor "telling." However, it was between these two eternal failures that the truth of the modern novel was born.
Author | Qu Rui
Edit | Zhang Jin Li Yang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning