Written by | Beautiful spirit
Sci-fi setting of bundle discharge
"Beam discharge" sounds like a superhero, but "Power" is not a superpower-themed story. There are only two truly surreal settings in Force: the power that women collectively acquire; and the voice that hovers in one of the characters' heads. Neither is novel in the fantasy setting, and all other plots are based on these two points. The same grounded part is that there are no particularly dramatic heroic characters in "Force", and each character can find an archetype in reality. In the story, the choices made by women who gain power are stereotyped, and similar situations are more commonly done by men: from controlling religious organizations, reorganizing armaments, fighting for power, running gangs, to controlling spouses, harassing the opposite sex, protecting families... The setting of the corsus muscle is what if at the beginning, and the deduction after that is where the novel looks good.
Power
Author: Naomi Alderman
Translator: Yuan Tian
Edition: Qi Hao Culture | Oriental Publishing House, January 2021
The characters in the story spread out in a sprawling posture, with as many as thirty-five female characters named, twenty-five male characters, and even more nameless and involved in the plot. With the four main characters as the core, they expand outwards, colliding with each other, merging and splitting, fighting alliances, and rising and falling. The development of characters and forces is like the interpretation of power in the book: infinite, complex, always branching, changeable and uncontrolled, following only its own laws, not the will of individual human beings. Corresponding to this description, the ability women to obtain "bundle muscle discharge" is also a vivid and appropriate visual design. The "power" that serves as the title acquires multi-layered imagery in repeatedly deepening interpretations. In the face of traditional force, the more powerful corsoidal power of aggression and destruction is the persuasive power that affects and controls people's hearts, the power of religious belief, the influence of political power, military and authority, and the power to choose history or erase history after monopoly, dictatorship and control.
Before reading it, I was worried that the novel would be indulged in a purely gender-reversed imagination. But in fact, "Power" is very good about character growth and people in desperate situations.
The three main female characters with strong bundle muscles in the story make different choices in front of their respective realities. Eve learned to take the initiative to hurt and control everything from the experience of being hurt, and her power was thriving; Margot learned restraint in the high pressure of her lifelong political career, and she and Eve learned the same truth from a completely different path: to have everything is not to lose; and Lotsi, who was originally the most powerful, insisted on principles, fairness and tolerance, but it was difficult to escape the fate of being repeatedly seriously injured.
At the beginning of the story, when women are still in a weak position, those of them who have the strength and courage to hurt can protect themselves and avoid harm; in the second half of the story, when women occupy a strong social position, the aggressive active harm easily crosses the boundary of balance, and they begin to do what men have done to women before: gradually weakening the status of men, redefining order and discourse, monopolizing all resources with half of the population. In this process, it is natural to avoid rebellious terrorist attacks and killings. Jump out of the novel, on the real Internet, the huge MeToo movement has set off a wave of celebrity participation; and ordinary women without social resources, when they are hurt by men but told by law enforcers that they are not accepted, some of them have also learned to ask for help, or to take revenge in the form of Internet violence. All of this proves that injury is a force that is more generalized and cruel than the electricity emitted by the bundle muscles in Force. The perpetrators and avengers only present a relatively fixed gender distribution under the normal state of reality, and their essence is actually gender-independent. Behind this, in a society where people can only use lynching to pursue justice, the absence of laws and systems is bound to be shocking.
Naomi Alderman, a British novelist, graduated from Oxford University and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Springs University. Alderman studied under the renowned Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who was voted one of the Best Young Novelists by Granta Magazine and won the English Orange Literature Emerging Writers Award and the Sunday Times Young Writers Award. She hosts science on BBC Four and is the developer of the best-selling mobile game Zombies, Run! He is the author of the novels Disobedience, The Curriculum, and The Gospel of the Liar. In 2017, Alderman won the Women's Fiction Award, a British Literary Award, for his book Power.
Perhaps on the author's part, there is a relative absence of male characters with positive behavior in this story—just as for a long time women often appeared only as vassals in literature. The only male character who runs through and penetrates the story, Tontoku, acts as a war correspondent for most of the time as a walking camera, visiting places in the world that several major female characters cannot reach.
The story of the pursuit of equal rights is reversed
As early as the 1920s, Virginia Woolf, the author of "Orlando", introduced the biological concept of "intersex" into literature, arguing that two genders can coexist in the human body, forming a harmonious flow, and only writers with two gender personalities have the ideal state of writing. Since then, countless literary works have explored, in different forms, the states in which two personalities are biased towards the struggle of man. Before becoming a journalist, the male character Tongde in "Power" had shown muscle love to girls in his own pool, and also tried to produce skin kisses with the girl without the consent of the girl, and at the end of such a depiction full of male gaze, the girl refused with a degree of discharge that did not hurt her life but left scars. The masculine tentacles in Tongde's heart were promptly shocked. Shortly after that, when the front-line female fighters frankly took Tongde back to the apartment, the strong gaze and corset muscle strength of the women brought him a mixture of fearful excitement. He was able to become a male character who could understand women, and thus to make reports that were not biased and controversial. In the context of gender war, male characters are either stubborn or directly subservient, and it is cute and valuable to have such a person who jumps out of the poles and seriously explores the meaning of war. At the same time, he provides the reader with a perspective that is appropriate: both in a worldwide confrontation and not on either side with the greatest will to win; most of the time there is no direct benefit or harm, but he also knows that everything will happen to him at any time. This is the most common position of ordinary people in society.
As a student of Margaret Atwood, Naomi Aldman's novels have more or less traces of taking nourishment from the work of their teachers and sprouting and blossoming. If The Handmaid's Tale shows a situation in which the distribution of power is more extreme than in the real world, "Power" extracts power from the appearance of gender and more obviously pushes it into the exploitative relationship between the strong and the weak. Just as Atwood never regarded "The Handmaid's Tale" as science fiction and only called it a speculative novel, Alderman also emphasized everywhere the thousand reflections of the plot and reality of the novel: humiliating and discrediting the victims with sluts; the sexual assault of male subordinates by female leaders; men must have female guardians and are not allowed to drive or own property; female soldiers who humiliate and rape civilians for pleasure and are not prosecuted... This kind of "overcorrection" and deeply rooted reality of gender reversal is not only a kind of irony, but also an emphasis: such a ridiculous world, its portrayal of the prototype is derived from historical materials, it is not fundamentally different from the real world we live in.
Strong women who gain strength through the discharge of the bundle muscles are in the position of the men of yesteryear, and the strength of the strong is still based on inequality.
In the epilogue, women continue to hold their strength and stand in the position of the former men, but the new world after the apparent conflict and war subside is still not at all beautiful. Strong genders still stare at weak genders, human relationships are still tense, discrimination and aggression have not decreased, or even changed. This is perhaps what Alderman wants to tell us: the war to use one gender over the other is neither end-ending nor victorious, and even a short-term dominant party can produce a lot of unnecessary attrition in constant friction and complex social relations. On this level, the enslaved are not free when they become masters, but only those who do not want to be slaves nor masters are truly free.
Overall, "Power" is a work that looks like feminism, but actually points to equal rights, and it dissects the operation of the power mechanism in the reversed world in a subversive way, showing how to create obedience, obliterate opposition, and despise the weak. It also prompts us to pay attention to what is happening, to open our eyes to everything that we are accustomed to and unbelievable. Everything in the story happens around everyone.
Edit | Gong Zhaohua Li Yang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning
Source: Beijing News