Anomalies, by Elvie Le Terrier, translated by Yu Zhongxian, edition: Haitian Press, July 2021
Copied people and airplanes
"Happy families are all similar, and unhappy families have their own misfortunes." To paraphrase Tolstoy's classic opening line in Anna Karenina, French writer Elvie Le Terrier perfectly set the tone for his own 2020 Goncourt Literary Prize-winning novel Anomaly with "Safe Flights Are All Similar, Bumpy Flights Have Their Own Bumps."
The story begins with an unusually bumpy flight on March 10, 2021. Air France Flight 006 from Paris to New York was about to arrive at its destination when it was about to arrive at its destination when it was hit by a huge cumulonimbus cloud like a cotton wall, and the plane was like a handkerchief thrown into a washing machine drum, encountering violent bumps as it passed through the clouds, severely frozen wings, instruments and radar all failed, and the windshield was hit by hail and cracked. After a brief disappearance from the ground console, the Boeing 787 finally landed at Kennedy Airport under the leadership of Captain Markler, and the 243 passengers on board were safe and sound.
However, the strange thing is that one day, more than three months later, on June 24, 2021, the same plane carrying the same passengers appeared over New York again, such as the fake captain Markler who asked to land... Kennedy Airport was confused and handed over the scheduling of the ghost flight to the FAA Special Operations Command, which was soon handed over to the North American Air Defense Command. For national security reasons, the plane was required to land at McGuire Air Force Base, where all personnel on board were liened to be investigated at the highest level of secrecy.
What happened during the journey through Cumulonimbus clouds? Wormholes? Space folding? Time travel? Parallel worlds? The fourth dimension? The plane seemed to have entered a huge aerial photocopier, and when it came out, it became two identical planes, two identical crew and passengers. The plane that arrived in March and the group of people were originals? Is there a copy of the arrival in June? Since the photocopy and the original are exactly the same, how to distinguish between the original and the copy? Can the Cartesian "I think" still be the reason for "I am"?
Elvie Le Terrier (1957- ) is a French writer, mathematician, astrophysicist, and current president of the "Uripo" group, whose major works include The Disappearance of Perek, Every Happy Family, Bar Sonata, and The Thief of Depression. In 2020, he won the Goncourt Prize for "Anomaly".
When you face another self
After the Industrial Revolution, mechanical copying technology became more and more popular, whether it was daily necessities or works of art, and even the copying (cloning) of human bridges was not uncommon in science fiction/ethics films: Rachel in Blade Runner, Adam in "The Sixth Day", Lincoln 6E in "Escape from Clone Island", characters who appeared repeatedly in "Cloud Atlas". It was as if the real world and Alice's mirror world overlapped, as if the dream Zhuangzi and the awake Zhuangzi were both blowing the wind on the shore of the Haoshui River and chatting about the happiness or unhappiness of the fish. When Rimbaud's "Je est un autre (I am the other)" is embodied as a "self" in the material world with the same memories, the same identity, and the same emotions as you, what kind of ripples will arise in your heart, and can you accept that you have become the "only two" beings? Theoretically, you can step into the same river twice, you can live one more time, you can die again...
As a result, "Anomaly", a futuristic novel with a not very strong sense of science fiction, soon has an absurd meaning of ethics and philosophical thinking. In the face of this "vision from heaven", everyone has to go through the test of "the other", the parties, relatives and friends, the public and the state apparatus. Obviously, in the face of the existence of another "me", everyone's attitude is different. June Blake kills March Blake, a simple counter-riot solution to the problem. This kind of fierce method of either you die or I live is fully in line with his personality in the novel, and for many years Blake has lived a double life, ostensibly a successful businessman, doing a vegetarian food takeaway business in Paris, opening branches in Bordeaux and Lyon, and behind the scenes is a scheming hired killer on the dark web, with various names, various passports, and a murderous business all over the world.
Victor Miezer is a kind of projection of the writer himself, as if the perspective of God is not too addictive, and Elvie Letelier has to appear in the guise of a character, a typical OULIPO style of performance art. In the book, Victor Miezer is an undesirable writer who earns his living by translating ("liberating the pure discourse imprisoned in the work through transformation"). March's experience of escaping death in the air gave him the inspiration to gush out, and the new book, titled "Anomaly", is the author's seventh book. "I did not give the rest of my life, but gave life to eternity." After writing this sentence, on a Thursday in April, he jumped out of the balcony after handing the file to the female editor. The suicide of the writer was exchanged for the big sale of new books, newspapers, radio, literary awards, book clubs... In June, Victor Miezer did not choose to disappear and live another life in another identity, he chose to "resurrect" and return to the public eye in front of the camera, microphone and international media.
The FBI's psychotherapy team and France's Ministry of The Interior's crisis response team made a lot of preparations for the meeting of the two groups of people who returned in March and June, after all, except for the two people above, everyone else had to face the problem of coexisting with the "other".
The initial meeting between the two Lucy was somewhat tense, two single mothers fighting for a child, each wanting to resolutely defend everything he had, work, house, especially son Louis, could not think of a better way, Louis proposed to roll dice every day to decide which mother he lived with. And for Andre, March Lucy had already broken up with him, "In her, there was too little desire, and in me, too much loss." In addition, there is no doubt that there are too many expectations and too much impatience. But the other Lucy had not yet rejected him, and perhaps he and another Andrea (the greatest enemy was himself?). There was still a chance to get her back. As for more practical questions, such as who owns the company, the house, and the deposits? What about future pensions? Will the government compensate? Or an insurance company?
David was terminally ill in March, and in June David had the opportunity to try another treatment option, hoping to be cured.
March Joanna, who is married to newspaper illustrator Abie and is pregnant with his child, said to June Joanna, "I don't want to steal your life, but I don't want to lose my own life." "There's always someone to be forgotten, there's always some love that can't be shared.
In addition to the writer Victor, who found inspiration from the aerial horror, there was also a singer slim boy from Nigeria. He wrote "The Jabba Girl", a song that suddenly became popular all over the world, touring, Lamborghini, luxury apartment with a view of the sea, and the poor boy's dream came true. When meeting with the Slim Boy in June, the two quickly got rid of Freud's so-called narcissistic ghosting and inner mirror image, and they sang together "Handsome Guy in Military Uniform" created by the Slim Boy in June during his detention at the air base, and they decided to start a new life as twins, forming a slim men's group, holding concerts together, writing songs together, and enjoying the success of the much-anticipated and drunken fans together.
Cognitive science experts believe that with pet Toad Betty, March Sophia and June Sophia can naturally get closer to each other in the game and accept each other. They think that little girls are not afraid of new things at this age, and that the other is not yet an enemy. Indeed, the two little girls are at peace with each other, nothing more than being unconvinced of each other and climbing up to each other more than anyone knows. And from the eavesdropping conversation, the psychologist accidentally discovered a surprising secret: a father made the little girl swear not to tell anyone, especially to the mother...
A gripping symphony of destiny. Around these few people whose lives have been disrupted by "abnormal" events, the novelist uses kaleidoscopic jumping brushstrokes to touch multiple themes of modern society, murder, love, parenthood, disease, religion, politics, homosexuality, sexual harassment, and even environmental issues. As the current chairman of "Ulipo", mathematician Elvie Le Terlier's novel inherits the usual style of games and experiments of the "Potential Literary Workshop", like Lego bricks, which can be freely disassembled and assembled, ubiquitous miscellaneous and parody, and the shadows of detective novels, science fiction, horror novels, psychological novels, romance novels and even hit dramas overlap in the book, and why not an ironic "style exercise" for the increasingly serious phenomenon of cultural convergence (replication) around the world?
What is true?
Anomaly is undoubtedly good-looking, and it has a popular entertainment side; but it's also ugly if you try to figure out the clever combination of all the literary codes. The translator Yu Zhongxian has given several important guidelines and clues in the afterword, introducing the literary tradition of Uripo - "to explore the potential possibilities of expression in words", as well as the clever intertextual intertext between the lines of the book and the works of Ulipo masters such as Gurnow and Perek.
With constraints and rules for writing, and dancing in shackles, the Ulibos describe themselves as a group of "rats trying to escape from a labyrinth they built with their own hands." But if you blindly indulge in the game of form, literature is ultimately just a show of words. Only when potential literature confronts the underlying crisis that plagues human society can the beauty of mathematics blossom into a philosophical flower. From this point of view, Elvie Letelier's Anomaly also inherits the metaphysical traditions of Plato, Descartes, and Nietzsche, borrowing the words of Merredis, a British female topologist who works in the mathematics department of Princeton University in the United States, to raise "the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything." What is true? Is life a big dream of Zhuangzi, or is it an image of a torch illuminated in Plato's cave? Is the time we live in an illusion, a series of programs and code in a virtual world, manipulated by a computer-based artificial intelligence system like "Matrix" in The Matrix?
Perhaps the greatest value of this work, created in 2020 when the human world is threatened by the new crown epidemic, and the Goncourt Prize jury has awarded the award online with ZOOM, is perhaps to make us reflect on how to face ourselves, others and the world when "abnormalities" occur. Since we are alive, we will feel, we will love, we will suffer, even if everything is empty, in the day of yesterday that cannot be left behind and the day of today when there are many worries, we all choose to continue and pay our hearts.
Author| Yellow Wattle
Editor | Zhang Jin
Proofreading | Chen Diyan