Works in this issue
My Father's House of Whimsy
Han Song fell
Author of this issue
Writer, film critic. Representative works "Watching Movies for Revenge", "Our Women", "Spring Awakening of the Furious River" and so on.
Gao Xiang
Ph.D., Chinese Min University
My Father's House of Whimsy kneads space, speech, time, and "father" into a vast mystery. The metaphor of "the house within a house" seems to be a blindfold, and when we cling to space and the certain reality, strangeness and ephemerality of the "Father", we obscure the problems of speech and time in the novel.
After the gymnasium, the earthquake drill, and a high-pitched speech, the protagonist leads us to discover that the speech "is a performance of faith", and then another amazing discovery is born - "language temporarily builds a house". Was it the "house within a house" that was shaken by memory as a childhood reality, whether it had really existed, or was it an illusion created by the words of the "Father"? We don't know, we can't even share the confusion. Because this illusion, relying on the setting of parallel time, is subordinate only to the individual. In a small internal cycle limited to twelve years, the role of time may not be continuous, but rather spaced, or divisive.
Xu Lihu's network convening has become a way to open up individuals and groups, and individual experience has thus been confirmed as group experience. But the face of the "Father" becomes more obscure. "Huts" are related to construction, and interestingly, the legitimacy of this construction makes it impossible to judge. How fortunate people are to escape the catastrophe of an earthquake, but at the same time they have to face unfamiliar houses, whose interiors are hollowed out, whose memories are dissipated, and there are no ruins left. We can't help but ask, is the "earthquake" fictional? Is the exercise just a means for the "father" to complete the game? We are constantly following the trail of the "Father" so that we have similar careers, interests, and resumes, and as individuals, are we therefore complete? Or, that's the price of "in the name of the Father." I don't know what it means for the protagonists to eventually walk towards a "father" with a vague back.
Zhang Hui
Ph.D., Chinese Min University
It is an imaginative and creative novel. As an architect, his father was often thoughtful, he was able to hide another house in one house, to open another way in the seemingly solid reality, to create a secret that belonged to him and was very different from the texture of the real space. In a way, his architecture is the embodiment of its rich inner universe. The "space" here is no longer homogeneous and limited, but can be "extended" with the extension of the inner universe, and redefined and interpreted through the way of "architecture". Like Heidegger's metaphor — "the banks of a river arise only because there is a bridge crossing the flowing water" — it is precisely because of "architecture" that "space" is endowed with various meanings. Thus, the "architect" here departs from the meaning of occupation in the sense of modern functional subdivision and becomes a prophet who understands all the mysteries and mysteries of the universe, a legislator in the flood. This is exactly what we romanticized about "fatherhood" in childhood. But cruelly, it seems that the only way to maintain this romantic imagination is to resolutely "leave" before growing up and aging together, and instead transform into a literary or artistic image (the father in the novel does not say goodbye at the age of 40, and then enters the child's comics and writing), and then obtains eternity.
Jin Tingyue
Master of Capital Normal University
A novel with a sense of cinema, and a cool feeling of some light novels. The cinema's camera sense appears on the night of the blackout when "I" see my father standing in the light and shadow; like the moonlight that makes "me" meet the oncoming locomotive (like "The Train Comes"),the signal failure is also reminiscent of the magnetic field disorder in some science fiction films—not only because the author, as a film critic, may intentionally or unintentionally integrate the film's "expression and visual experience", but also from the interaction or collusion between readers, texts, and authors. After all, in the current mass production of film and television products, one of the influences of film on novels is that its lens language and narrative structure are often internalized into the reader's interpretation of the novel and the expectation of the vision. This also means that the reader can participate in the intertext of hypertext, just as the parody in the text makes people see the origin of the text in time derivation and spatial collage intertext.
Coolness is one of the effects of fantasy. Stepping into a seemingly limited space and then into another bizarre space reminds me of the recent "The Magic Flute Bearer: The European Middle Ages Behind the Legends." If the study of social history carried out in this book with legend as the entrance can largely dispel the bizarre fog of legend with the analysis of the humanities; then this work uses light brushstrokes to lead the misfortune of disappearance to the dreamy universe - the re-"enchantment" of literature to the world, which is implemented specifically and appropriately here. The father may not only have the ability to change space, but also intermittently foresee a woman's misfortune and save her from misfortune in a way that accompanies her. In short, in the real promise becomes unrecognizable, the realistic subject is "! At this moment of sucking away the power, a cool poetic world woven by fluttering fantasies also provides a temporary shelter space for the reader's heart as well. Although its fiction is no more than those around us.
Zhu Zixia
Master of Chinese University
In the child's imagination, every father is his own hero; but the imagination will eventually be replaced by a deeper reality, and after going around, we have to admit that the fathers and even ourselves are "ordinary".
In another kind of fantasy, although the "father" is absent from the "I" part of the growth process for some reason, he falls from the sky like a real superhero to save the people from the water and fire. At this time, "I" stared at the back of "father" and slowly stepped forward, as if I had participated in some kind of grand historical narrative with him.
It's a pretty retro story. Rather than seeing this imaginary "father" as an idealized projection of a father in the real sense, it is better to see it as a classical romantic imagination, a call to one's own weight and sense of mission—behind this imagination and calling is precisely the resistance to the flow of modernity. In the novel, the author makes a mockery of some social phenomena seemingly inadvertently: "enthusiastic netizens" who make up nonsense in order to draw lottery, "keyboard man" who indiscriminately and directly "sprays", "computer face" that only fakes a smile... These phenomena constitute a representation of modern society in which machinery operates. But the more so, the more we need some kind of eternal value—or a heroic "father" to shelter our existence, imagination, and language. It is also in this contrast, behind the romantic representation, that the practical significance of the fantasy begins to stand out.
Edit | Hu Zhi
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