"Sandalwood Punishment" is one of the representative works of Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan.
Set against the backdrop of germany's construction of a railway in Gaomi in 1900, this book tells the story of the local Maoxiang artist Sun Bing who led the crowd to revolt, Yuan Shikai sent troops to suppress and order the local county to order Qian Ding to hunt him down, and finally was sentenced to "sandalwood punishment" by Zhao Jia, the first executioner of the Qing Dynasty. People who have read this book are all shocked by the anti-colonial struggle that can be sung and wept, moved by the love story that is entangled in the passages, and frightened by the cat cavity drama of the earth-shattering ghost god.
Poster of the opera Sandalwood Punishment
If Yu Hua wrote the song of the times, then Mo Yan composed the song of the homeland.
The exquisite and unique structure, the superb narrative technique, and the rhythmic beauty of the whole are mixed in the feelings of compassion and compassion, and together they create a huge work that makes people shoot the case - and these are precisely the most wonderful uses of the "Faulkner spatial narrative mode".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 What is Faulkner spatial narrative mode</h1>
William Faulkner was one of the most influential writers in the history of American literature, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his powerful and artistic contributions to the contemporary American novel, showing the rise and fall of American Southern society over the past century and a half and the rise and fall of characters from all walks of life. Author of "My Dying Hour", "Absalom! Absalom! "Noise and Commotion" and other masterpieces.
William faulkner
Faulkner, Proust, and Joyce are collectively hailed as "master of stream-of-consciousness fiction," and their influence on contemporary Chinese writers and readers is far-reaching and timeless. Among them, Faulkner is the most.
With the continuous development of the literary genre of the novel, the simple model of "beginning, development, climax, and ending" is no longer enough to support the creative needs of contemporary literature. Faulkner's founding of the structure of detachment from the limitations of time and space and the structural connection based on the order of the psychological flow of the characters adds new glory to it. Spatial narrative theory is the main theory adopted by Faulkner's novels, and it is the only way to enter the world of value described by Faulkner through Faulkner's novels.
As Faulkner said, "Man is immortal, not because he is the only one in the creature who has an incessant voice, but because he has a soul and a spirit of mercy, sacrifice, and endurance." It is the duty of poets and writers to write these things. His special glory is to lift the heart, to remind people of courage, honor, hope, pride, compassion, compassion and sacrifice, which are the glory of humanity in the past. To this end, humanity will be immortal. ”
Whether in terms of creative methods or creative spirit, Faulkner's influence on Chinese writers cannot be underestimated. In the bodies of writers such as Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Ge Fei, and Sun Ganlu, we can all see Faulkner's shadow.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Practical application of "Faulkner spatial narrative mode" in the novel Sandalwood Punishment</h1>
Faulkner spatial narrative mode, as the main narrative means and means of expression in novel creation, provides several writing methods, including multi-thread interspersed and multi-angle narrative, montage techniques, stream-of-consciousness narratives and temporal variations.
One of the main features of Faulkner's creation is the juxtaposition of multiple threads in the conception of the novel and the interspersing of multiple stories in the novel, which also forms a unique form of Faulkner's novel.
"Sandalwood Punishment" is divided into three parts: "crest, pork belly, and leopard tail". Looking through the whole text, it is difficult for the reader to find a clear, main clue, and instead a number of parallel threads intertwine the narrative. Using different clues, both different and corresponding to each other, so as to run the whole novel through.
"Phoenix Head" first starts with the small matter of Mei Niang and Gan Dad County making Qian Ding fall in love and steal love, and then slowly pulls out many clues such as Dry Daddy Executioner Zhao Jia telling the old man to return to his hometown, husband Zhao Xiaojia becoming half-foolish and half-stupid without his father's company, and Sun Bing, a pro-daddy cat artist, preparing to meet with the Germans in order to defend the land.
Qian Ding, Mei Niang, Sun Bing, Zhao Jia (from the Internet)
The "pork belly" is a variety of clues intertwined and intertwined, containing each other, and all the contradictions are concentrated on the Germans to build the railway.
In the end, it was pushed to a climax in the "leopard tail", through "Zhao Jia Daobai", "Mei Niang Telling", "Xiao Jia Playing Song" and "Zhixian Absolute Singing", echoing the beginning of the novel from another angle, and also making the novel constitute a different symmetrical beauty.
In the complex bright lines, the author also cleverly laid a dark line - "cat cavity". The whole book begins with Mei Niang's cat cavity "Great Compassion Tone", after which Qian Ding, Sun Bing and others appear in turn, borrowing the cat cavity singing section to express their nostalgia. The nursery rhymes sung by the children interspersed in the middle, the call signs of the Boxers, including the unknown tunes of the onlookers, are all interpreted in a cat's voice.
At the end of the book, there are only four words: "Drama... From the beginning to the end, it seems to be just a cat drama, and all the characters and plots are firmly bound by this dark line, from beginning to end.
Narrative is the lifeblood of a novel, and a reasonable narrative angle determines what kind of artistic achievement a novel can achieve. With a good narrative perspective, interests, suspense, plots, and conflicts can be laid out.
Any narrator has flaws and limitations, there is always something that cannot be seen or heard, and the omniscient and all-powerful narrator is unreal, and there can be no such narrator. The best way to resolve this is to let everyone take their own point of view and explain the matter.
The same thing of "stealing affection", confided from the "Mei NiangLang Language" is that he has a loyal and honest husband in his own home, and there is a rich, powerful and amorous friend outside who is satisfied;
What is poured out in the "Voice of Hate of Qianding" is the extreme fascination with Mei Niang and the deep debt to his wife;
In "Zhao Jia's Wild Speech", it becomes a dissatisfaction with the daughter-in-law's extremely charming and unruly woman's morality;
But all this becomes a frank and even proud relationship in "Xiao Jia's stupid words" - the county order is the dry father of my wife.
In the first-person narrative, these characters are both parties and bystanders, and the opposing, corresponding, and contrasting writing techniques are fully displayed here.
As the French literary theorist Zvetan Todorov put it, "The same fact is narrated and supplemented by many different characters; the same story is repeated by a character; a concrete event or fact of true connotation through one or more contradictory narratives of characters can also make one turn from conviction to suspicion." ”
It is precisely because of the application of the angle narrative that the plot becomes more and more ups and downs, and the story is also wonderful.
Stills from "Sandalwood Punishment"
Montage is a transliteration of the French Montage, which means structure, assembly, and by extension "splitting" in the construction industry. It was first used in film art to present the overall effect through fragmentary editing. It was then used in interior design, artistic painting and literary creation.
In the scene switching of writing, it is called "montage technique", which can be subdivided into parallel montage, cross montage, psychological montage and so on. Mainly through the slitting and grouping of lenses, scenes and paragraphs, the materials are selected, so that the performance content is clearly prioritized and prioritized, and a high degree of generalization and concentration is achieved. Thus enhancing the "sense of déjà vu" and "sense of picture" of the article.
The main use of "Sandalwood Punishment" is the type of psychological montage. The modeling performance that belongs to the psychology of the character is a kind of dream lens language that is both real and illusory, and the image intuitively shows the psychological activities of the characters on the paper. In the novel, the imagined scene of the characters is "virtual", and the scene that really exists in time is "real".
The most typical is this passage in "Little A Stupid Words":
"A big white snake as thick as a bucket, standing in front of the kang, with its head sticking out, spitting out purple letters, two bright red lips opening and closing, actually emitted the voice of the wife from there: Xiao Jia, what are you thinking?"
The big white snake in the first half was what Zhao Xiaojia fantasized about when he was unconscious, which was "virtual"; the second half was the voice of the eyebrow lady that Zhao Xiaojia actually heard, which was "real".
With this, it is "virtual": "If he saw that it was a white snake, he would immediately show his original form and open his blood basin to swallow it." No, she knew that if she carried a knife, it would open her belly when it entered her stomach, and it would not survive. Even though Xiao Jia really heard the voice of his wife's eyebrows, he was still immersed in his own fantasy.
Then, he heard his wife tell him to "go and see what your father, who has killed forty-four years," is that there are false and real, half false and half true. In Xiao Jia's chaotic, uncivilized mind, he could not distinguish whether everything he saw was imaginary or real, but his subconscious knew that his wife hated his father, and he also knew that his father was not so glorious as an executioner.
Obviously, this montage technique is jumpy, interspersed, and irregular. It led people to jump with Zhao Xiaojia's emotions, one moment sober, one moment confused, one moment chilling and one moment fearless. From the perspective of "fools", the absurdity of ordinary people is reflected, and the narrative effect of "defamiliarization" is produced. This nonsensical reverie is interspersed with reality, giving people a strong sense of substitution.
Faulkner describes the stream-of-consciousness field he pioneered this way:
"I arbitrarily dispatched the characters in the book without being bound by time, and the results were particularly successful, at least in my own opinion. I think this is enough to prove my theory that time has no other form of existence except for a brief manifestation in the individual body, and therefore time is in a state of flow and does not exist in a fixed form. ”
Stream of consciousness breaks the chronological, causal and logical relationships in traditional novels, and combines and juxtaposes events that occur in different space-time through imaginative reverie.
Just like the part of Sun Bing's torture. Let's start with the Boxer brothers robbing the prison and Sun Bing's refusal to comply with death, which caused Yuan Shikai to be angry. It also turned to chang mao, a curium pot maker during the Yongzheng period, and when crying, his voice was full of emotion and emotion, which was fascinating, and eventually evolved into a gentle and humorous cat cavity. Then the conversation turned, Sun Bing had already appeared on the prison cart, and the sandalwood sword was already ready...
The stream of consciousness makes the originally complete event of Sun Bing's torture become fragmented and fragmented, so that the original simple linear relationship between the event and the event becomes a network-like relationship closely linked. The two stories of Sun Bing's association with cat cavity and Sun Bing's acceptance of sandalwood punishment have a strong connection through quotations, paraphrasing, simulation, comparison, and echo.
Stream-of-consciousness is often tied to the fragmentation of time and space, making the work more layered and more profoundly revealing the hidden emotions of the characters.
From the opening "Mei NiangLang Language" on August 13 to the "Sandalwood Punishment" of Sun Bing's hand on August 19, the middle is only 7 days. However, the narrative of the novel has traveled arbitrarily in the past few decades, Zhao Jia has changed from a child to an old man, wu shu changed from planning to fiasco, Sun Bing went from living in peace and contentment to leading the fiasco of the Boxers, Mei Niang and Qian Ding from not knowing each other to falling in love... It was as if all this had happened in just seven days, and everything was like a world away.
This structure of interlacing time and space makes the story time gradually appear in the process of narrative time. As the plot moves, the unity of story time and narrative time is finally reached. The transition mechanism is omitted, so that the list of words and sentences, events and events shows the spatial state after editing, and no longer has a logical relationship in time.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 Conclusion:</h1>
In "Sandalwood Punishment", the author skillfully uses the Faulkner space narrative mode such as multi-thread interspersed and multi-angle narrative, which is not only the arrangement of writing skills, but also the need for theme sublimation. Under its support, it was able to successfully interpret the heroic struggle of the people against colonialism, successfully compose a generous and tragic song about the homeland and the world, and shape a love story that seems to be brave, cowardly and proud.
Due to the limitations of the background of the times, Faulkner's novels often give people a sense of obscurity and abstraction.
Mo Yan combines a large number of opera colors, folk art and dialects on the basis of his spatial narrative mode, making it more fascinating. Mo Yan once said: "'Sandalwood Punishment' and subsequent novels are mixed texts that inherit the tradition of classical Chinese novels and borrow from Western novel techniques. ”
It is precisely this mutual integration of Chinese and Western cultures and technologies that makes "Sandalwood Punishment" a nationalized literary masterpiece.