In this issue of "Little Subtle" column, writer Xie Zhiqiang talks about the profound detail energy in short novels. Life is a process, in the same way, the focus of the novel is not the end - the destination, the "middle" is the focus of the writer, just like a person's life and death, is the beginning, the end, there is inevitability, but we all live on the line of two points and one line - the loose and tight "process" is unpredictable, but it also presents the appearance and meaning of life, and thus, lives a unique "this one".
Inner tension: a tendon-like fan
Text/Xie Zhiqiang
Published in the May 9, 2024 issue of the Literary Newspaper
As a child, I flew a kite. Look up to the sky and run. Holding the string of the kite, he took care of the sky, forgot the ground, and fell into the waterlogged dam. The dam is the equivalent of a pond in the south. In fact, the kite embodies the vision of a little boy flying freely.
Reading the novel collection "Daddy" by French writer Vasikos Alexakis (People's Literature Publishing House, August 2017, 11th edition), I was reminded of my childhood when I flew a kite on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. It is said that it is a child who is pulling a string to fly a kite, but it is like a kite flying a child. In September 2017, I wrote down on the title page how I felt after reading it: strange and familiar expressions, hallucinations from everyday life, but not surreal absurdities. Four short novels, "Hot Air Balloon" uses the word hot air balloon as the starting point of flight, expanding the imagination. "Tweezers" uses tweezers to pluck out the nostrils, then the body, hollow out itself, and then disappear. And South Korean writer Shin Kyung-sook's "The Story of Boogers", the action of "digging" is like a code for intimacy between people. "Alaskan Cod" is a fantasy of a bowl of pasta, fantasizing about turning itself into food, hoping to be eaten by the woman you like by the sea. This kind of "change" is surreal in the Japanese writer Abe Gongfang's "Red Cocoon", the protagonist is struggling to find a house to live in, and as a result, the character materializes into the object of search - the house, which can be described as a cocoon and self-restraint.
Vasikos Alexakis
I seemed to be between fictional characters, weighed and considered, and finally chose "Platini's Free Kick" for the reason that the novel favors tendon-like characters. This short novel is narrated in the first person, a fan who is obsessed with the star Michel Platini. He decided: "The most beautiful goal I've ever seen in my life was a free-kick scored by Platini. If in Chekhov's novel "The Kiss", an inexplicable kiss changed the fate of the hero, then a star's free kick also changed the life of a fan.
Paul Auster's "Red Notebook" depicts an eight-year-old boy who is also a fan who plucks up the courage to get a star to sign his autograph. It's also a first-person "I" narrative, without a pen, not even with my parents. No pen, no way to sign, "I'm disappointed", from that day on, it became a habit to carry a pen with me. As a result, this is how he became a writer. The "ready" pen has played a different role. Another village, fans turned writers.
How to behave the tendon-like characters in a small novel? There must be a detail that matches the character, and that detail has to "run", like a kite flying in the sky, like a signature pen traveling through time, and in the process of flying or traveling, the character's fate changes - to the extreme or extreme. From this, the reader can see how "confused" the characters are. I identify with one word that Argentine writer Julio Cortázar used in his novels: tightness. He said that this "tightness" itself exists before the story, and the best stories have a kind of explosive power after tension.
Note that Tightness precedes the story. Usually, some authors create an external "tightness" by compiling the plot, while Alexakis is close to the character, which is the internal "tightness" of the character. I think of Raymond Carver, who doesn't win with storyline, and is good at expressing the "inner tension" of the characters, so as to extend the inner "explosiveness" of the mind. Whether it is the external or internal "tightness", it can also be seen whether the writer prefers the story or pays attention to the tendency of the characters.
Platini
The first sentence of "Platini's Free Kick": "The most beautiful goal I have ever seen in my life was Platini's ...... A free kick. The final sentence: "Sometimes, I wonder if it was all an illusion, maybe Platini never scored that goal." "Affirmation at the beginning, negative at the end. The first-person narrative, and it is "this life", from reality to illusion, goals and life constitute the relationship between reality and fiction.
Borges, who writes short stories (mostly short novels), says: "An island can be used as an analogy...... I'll always know what the beginning and end of the story are, and the only thing I need to write about is what happens in between the beginning and the end...... I need to discover what's in the middle section. Of course, I don't believe in Poe's set, and he thinks that all stories should serve its ending. Borges rejects Poe-esque endings, including O. Henry-esque unexpected endings, because O. Henry's novels are based on unexpected endings.
The beginning and the end, two points and one line. So what is the line in the "middle" of Alexakis's Platini's Free Kick? "I", a fan, watched the game on the TV at home, in slow motion, and claimed to be "very smart", as if he had foresight, and recorded the whole game. It was what Cortázar called a "tight" thread, and it bent from time to time.
"I" as a fan not only has to pay attention to the football game on TV, study the "goal curve", but also take into account the feelings of the family, because my wife and daughter are not interested in the football game and interfere. Then, he went to the office and talked about the free kick, trying to resonate with his colleagues, but unfortunately he was met with indifference, and finally, he was fired by his boss. So, he went home and watched the video, dozens of times a day, so that his wife and daughter left. "A few years later", life was tight, "everything was sold", only the videotape remained, and he could only go to a friend's house to play the video. It's like flying a kite when I was a child, it was the kite that "led" me in the air. The tape leads the protagonist to the void. The tape had been shown so many times that the image had blurred, and even the historic free-kick had disappeared. This is how the novel naturally comes to an end: the illusion of life. A void burst out.
What is interesting is that there is a paragraph in the "middle", where the protagonist studies the incredible free kick, and the association is endless. Think of the curves of a woman's body, of the trajectory of the planets on the blackboard when I was a student, of geometry. That free-kick leads him into a world of brisk and grace, an imaginary flight that transcends time and space. In contrast to the hanging of life in the back. You might as well compare and read Chekhov's "The Kiss", which is an incredible kiss at a party, which makes the protagonist fall into imagination, and even immerse himself in the length of the kiss that is said and thought. The characters are written, and the fate of the characters is also written. A free kick, a kiss that didn't see each other clearly, changed lives like this. This is the energy of the details in the running of the novel.
Life is a process, in the same way, the focus of the novel is not the end - the destination, the "middle" is the focus of the writer, just like a person's life and death, is the beginning, the end, there is inevitability, but we all live on the line of two points and one line - the loose and tight "process" is unpredictable, but it also presents the appearance and meaning of life, and thus, lives a unique "this one".
Editor-in-charge: He Jing New Media Editor: Li Lingjun
Image source: Data map photo network
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