The realm of the writer and the plot direction of the short novel
- Take Shivandi Ranasinghe's "Pretty Maid", for example
Short fiction attaches great importance to ending, and some commentators say that short fiction is the art of ending. Ending art refers to the reversal of the plot at the end of the short novel (or turning the head to the opposite, or forming a certain angle with the previous plot direction), bringing psychological acceptance contrast to reading with relatively large plot changes, thereby producing a strong reading pleasure and enhancing the artistic appeal of the work. British writer O. Henry is a master in this regard, and his famous novels such as "Maggie's Gift" and "The Police and the Hymn" often use inflectional endings, so this ending is also customarily called "European ending". The ending is often the key to the success of a short novel, and the treatment of the ending is also closely related to the writer's artistic accomplishment and ideological realm. Sri Lankan writer Shivandi Ranasingha's "Pretty Maid" is a masterpiece with a profound and powerful ending that reflects the writer's powerful ideological capacity.
This short novel is only more than 600 words, however, it is short and concise, with the body of an "ant", with the power of a tiger and leopard.
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The narrative of this article is very plain, and the plot structure can be roughly divided into four paragraphs: first it is written that Robert's family hired a beautiful and capable maid, and the Robert couple is satisfied, and then it is written that the maid is pregnant and gives birth three times, and after each pregnancy, she offers to resign, and is retained by the owner who has no offspring and adopts her child. However, within a few weeks, the maid again approached the hostess and asked for her resignation in a firm tone. Readers reading this point generally guess the ending. For example, following the reading habit to think that the maid is pregnant again. It may even be guessed that the man is the biological father of these children, that the person who leaves this time may be the hostess, or that other situations between the employer and the employee will be complicated and troublesome, and so on. If you write such an ending, it also fits the "unexpected" rules, conforms to the "rules" of short novels, and conforms to the usual logic of life. However, such an ending seems to be commonplace, easy to guess by the reader, clichéd, and easy to reach in the writer of short novels. The writer's ending avoids the "nearness" of trauma, and relies on the sharpness of his thinking to realize the "danger" of the idea of the work and the character of the artwork -
When she learned that the maid did not resign because she was pregnant this time, the hostess kept her for the fourth time. But, "the maid shook her head firmly again: 'I must go, now you have too many children here, I really can't take care of them.'" ’”
The taste of this ending seems a little light at first reading, and the maid's unkindness is a little incomprehensible. But it endures careful tasting:
The reason for resigning because there are too many children to take care of is a high-sounding reason. However, the child, although adopted by the employer couple, was the maid's own biological child. The maid was tired of taking care of them and firmly chose to leave, and had to ask: Where is the blood affection?
However, upon closer analysis, this ending seems to show the maid's ruthlessness and simple selfishness, but in fact, behind it, it corresponds to the truth and essence of capitalist society: all social relations are materialized, the inheritance relationship is a paper contract relationship, and the continuation of the bloodline is worthless. And family affection without a material basis is just a pitiful, pale carbuncle, a heavy burden, which is abandoned and cut off, just one day earlier and one day later. Its power to criticize social reality is enormous, and its call for an ideal society is on paper.
When the creation reaches a certain time, the fight must be the writer's character and morality and ideological pattern. Only writers with great compassion and great love in their hearts will focus their attention on the spiritual trauma and life difficulties of the characters at the bottom. The writer found with his sharp thinking that the seven emotions and six desires of the maids filtered out by the article did not exist, but were not issued a pass by capital. The trauma in the maid's heart can only be eaten by herself, and at the moment, the most important thing for her is to get out of here, leave her own child, find a job she can bear, and live.
This short novel also has the following art styles worth noting:
"Shadow" characters
Generally speaking, novels pay attention to "writing close to the characters" and writing real people - that is, according to the characters' personalities and the logic of life to advance the plot. However, the narrative of this article is very plain, and there are few detailed descriptions of the characters, and there are basically no adjectives, so the personalities of the characters are basically obscured. From beginning to end, the description of the characters uses only a few modifiers such as "handsome man from a neighboring county" and "beautiful maid". There is no word about the owner's appearance, temperament, professional clothing, etc., as if they are just props. And the "beautiful maids" and "handsome men" were not arranged to show their true expressions, temperaments, and hobbies, and they were not much different from props. For the characters, the writer seems to just "borrow" it, without praising or disparaging, without any emotional preferences, and does not let the emotions of the characters in his pen overflow arbitrarily. This restraint not only saves pen and ink, but also creates the effect of linear portrayal, making the reading smooth and undercurrent, until the end of the virgin maid said that amazing sentence, the reader appeared a short "short circuit" of thinking, quickly organized brain cells into the active period of thinking, and then saw that the writer showed us a real world that abandoned all pretenses.
This choice of "shadow" characters maximizes the scope of "application" of analytical works. Although the writer is a Sri Lankan national, the events he describes can not be limited to Sri Lanka, but can be extrapolated to all suitable scenes, so it has a broader extension than the specific and perceptible characters of a certain era and a certain region.
Black and white engraving
The famous mainland art master Leng Glacier is famous for his black and white carving, and he created the art of engraving ink painting, that is, first painting the cardboard with ink, waiting for it to dry, and then carving it with a knife, the difficulty can be imagined. His works are only black and white, but they present a rich world to the world. Painting conveys the beauty of art with pen and ink, and fiction shows its charm by listening to echoes at the end of the text. Hemingway, a literary master known for his concise writing, put forward the "iceberg principle" of literary creation: "The iceberg moves solemnly in the sea, because only one-eighth of it is exposed to the water." "Good writers are good at subtraction, showing only the spire of the iceberg, and the part buried under the surface is the bulk of the work. The two parts of water and water are added together to form a complete "iceberg" body.
Cold glacier ink engraving "oleander", woman is Zhang Ailing's silhouette
This article "hides" a lot of things -
As mentioned earlier, "Pretty Maid" creates "shadow" characters: characters whose faces are blurred and whose personalities are not a word. This is a kind of simplicity, but also an extension of extension. Not only that, almost all the emotional colors related to people's own likes and dislikes are not shown in the article: whether the maid shows excitement and shyness when talking about the "handsome man in the neighboring county" is not described, the interaction with the child she gave birth to is not recorded, and the hesitation, pain and sadness that a mother should have before deciding to leave the employer's house and leave her own child is not shown - the biological sense of human joy, anger, sorrow, sadness and panic are almost filtered. Only a sociological woman at the bottom of society is left to respond to or parry the hardships of life. The article removes the cold or warm colors that should be in life, and only sketches a boring and bland rational world, just like a frame of black and white depictions, maximizing the realization of artistic creation with less.
Tough confrontation
The history of a living individual's biological bloodline inheritance relationship and sociological identity relationship has a long history of confrontation. Driven by nature, blood has a natural charm; However, in the life of social groups, nature is erased, and undignified blood relatives even become lifelong humiliation and even enemies. The lifelong relationship between Tan Chun and his biological mother Aunt Zhao in "Dream of Red Mansions" is a typical presentation of this relationship artistry.
In this article, the exploration of the biological fatherhood of the maid's three children is generally the focus of light reading, but it is easily ignored by the writer: the article only mentions that the child she is carrying is a handsome man from a neighboring county when the maid resigns to the hostess after her first pregnancy, and the question of the child's father is not mentioned again in the two subsequent pregnancies. These belong to the privacy level, if you want to find out the child's father's belonging, only DNA can best explain the problem, because the person concerned is likely to hide the truth and lie to cover up out of risk avoidance considerations. And the writer has never expressed the child's appearance in a single word (such as suggestively like a male host; Or directly disdainfully say that although this child looks good, he is a wild species, and who knows who he looks like; etc.) - the writer does not care whether the children are Zhang San or Li Si's, they may be the male master's, or the handsome men in neighboring counties, or other men who belong to the maid's heart - the writer does not care who is the biological father of the child. The focus of the work has nothing to do with ethics, not on the wind and moon, not on DNA and genetics, but only on fait accomplis. At the end, even the maid herself gave up the child carrying her DNA and resolutely chose to leave.
The writer's focus is on the maid giving birth to three children and desperately abandoning them. The reason behind this is nothing more than that these children have been adopted by employers and become sociologically other people's children. The emotions of people as living beings and the DNA of children who represent the continuation of biological genes are filtered out by the writer's "thousand eye sieve", thus realizing the writer's "ambition, its power".
The ideal picture
In the creation of short novels, writers pay special attention to the refinement of words. In this article, almost all of the biological human joys, angers, sorrows, and fears are "stingy" filtered out by the writer, leaving only the sociological human shadow to advance the plot. However, the writer consciously gave the maid a beautiful appearance, and when she became pregnant for the first time, the maid said the characteristics of the man who made her pregnant: "A few months ago, I met a handsome man from a neighboring county..." The qualifiers "from a neighboring county" and "handsome" are not used casually, which just proves that they fell in love at first sight, "Lang has a concubine intention". The maid described in the article is simple-minded, simple-minded, shallow in insight, and lacks planning for the future, as if she is just a naïve big girl, whose cognition of life is only 1+1=2 or 1-1=0, and has not been nourished by the world, nor contaminated with the dust of the world. We might as well say that she has a "maid mentality" - this is caused by the inherent class limitations of human beings, the limitations of education, etc., or we can say that she is just a "vase". If she has a "brain", deep enough social experience, and a high enough "IQ", she can exchange her child for bread - just like the now popular egg donation and surrogacy, earn some dowry and pension money for herself while she is young. However, she did not realize the value of children to the employer couple, did not recognize the social value of biological children, so she only asked for her resignation on the grounds that she was unable to do the heavy labor of the employer's family, easily left her children, and chose to leave firmly.
"Beautiful women" and "handsome men" put together, regardless of their social attributes (no matter what kind of social attributes), what a perfect match, and how wonderful it would be if they formed a family. That may be the ideal picture that the writer expects (the world is the same, all beings are equal, there is no class rivalry, there is no exploitation and employment, everyone is happy to work and love their post, respect the old and love their children, love their love...). ), can only be left to the future to achieve. Now, the maid must have been completely distorted by the life she experienced, she has stated the reason why she must leave, what kind of future will this world dominated by capital human life give her? The answer is an unknown. We only see a lonely boat, on the rough sea, fluttering in a thunderstorm...
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