Having lost her husband and children, the old woman who had no one to rely on became a wolf," the statue bowed her head, looking left and right, and then looking up in the direction where her relatives were, until she was completely engulfed by the shadow on the other side. ”
This is the end of a story in Tokarczuk's short story Collection of Grotesque Stories, which is translated into the fourth book, following The Ancient and Other Time, The House by Day, the House at Night, and The Journey to the Clouds. "Time" and "House" are the author's early masterpieces, the English translation of "Cloud Tour" won the Booker Prize, establishing a reputation for her in the English-speaking world, her writing at different stages and different themes, continuing a stubborn spiritual pursuit, in the recent "Collection of Grotesque Stories", readers can intuitively appreciate what she emphasized in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech: literature perceives the pain of the world being wrong, it reveals the experience that people are difficult to unfold to others in other ways, in the writer's mind, Tiny fragments stubbornly glue into another complete universe.
When Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, the response in Poland was two completely opposing voices. An editor of a literary magazine once summed up Tokarczuk's readership in mainland Poland: young people, from western cities, eager for multiculturalism, curious about the country's intricate multi-ethnic history. These people argue that Tokarczuk's work tears apart new imaginative spaces at both literary and historical levels. But in the eyes of the Polish "old-school", only the historical novels of the Szynkowaki represent orthodoxy, and Tokarczuk is a double traitor to history and literature.
Tokarczuk converted to the scattered, even forgotten, vein of Polish literature. Her idol was Bruno Schultz, who once said, "I adore and envy Schultz because I know I'll never be able to write as well as he is." Bruno Schultz, a down-and-out Jew who had earned his living by teaching, had little detail about his life, and was imprisoned in a concentration camp after publishing two thin collections of short stories in the Cinnamon Shop and The Sanatorium in the Mirror of Sand. He was fortunate enough to be sheltered by a Nazi officer because of his paintings, and absurdly, the officer, because of his disagreement with his colleagues, executed the Jews he was protecting, and the other party shot Schultz several times in the head in retaliation. A modern writer who was later shown to be as talented and accomplished as Proust died in the winter of 1942. Under the dust of oblivion, Schultz left an unusually colorful piece of the map of literary history, and he used his writing to open up the mysterious fields of secular life, and the rich, sensually attractive language opened the core of trivial everyday events and emerged with an infinitely brilliant vision—which attracted Tokarczuk.
Like Schulz, Tokarczuk came from the mixed-ethnic southwest of Poland. After World War II, Poland, as the victorious power, regained the homeland of East Germany at the cost of transferring the eastern territory to Russia, which meant that the entire territory of Poland was "translated" to the west, and the indigenous peoples of Poland and Ukraine in the east were collectively immigrated. "A lot of Poles lived, their roots are still in Ukraine, they miss their homeland, they get drunk all day. Some Germans did not go, intermarried with Poles, and claimed to be Polish. There are Germans who come back in search of roots in the wind and candles, only to fall by the dividing pile between Poland and the Czech Republic..." Tokarczuk was born into an immigrant family, raised by a German wet nurse, and from a very young age, she was confused by the "border", and her life and writing became a cloud of travels across the "border" again and again. Yi Lijun, a translator of Polish literature, described Tokarczuk's works as "novels on the edge of literary varieties", "mixed and infiltrated rhetorical styles", "hybridization of various genres", until "all kinds of people and things come and go freely" and "tangram puzzles form a cohesive whole".
Just as Schultz believes that "artists should devote their lives to interpreting images that are stuck to their minds like stamps" and "their creative efforts become never-ending annotations", as the heir of the spiritual dimension, Tokarczuk wrote in the tone of a first-person narrator in "The House of the Day, the House of the Night": I am not good at reproducing a story itself, but I can always reproduce the scene, the environment and the world in which the story takes root in my heart... What I was left with was some vaguely exciting plot or highlight of the story, and I forgot the whole story, remembering the kernels and seeds of little value, and then my memory had to spit them out.
Tokarczuk, who majored in psychology at university, realized after graduation that "she was more neurotic than most patients to the point where she couldn't pursue the profession." In the years from university graduation to full-time writerhood, she briefly lived in London, working as a cleaner in a luxury hotel to earn a living, and thus saw the sides of the glittering corridors, "the chaotic room behind the door and the same chaotic innermost hearts of those guests". Her training in psychology and her life experience in London led her to believe that the truth of life was disorderly and ambiguous, and that too smooth first-person narratives could not decode the noise in all directions. "I write novels, let everything that belongs to mankind and beyond mankind penetrate me, personify and personalize everything" "Time has no end, no before, no future, I will not know anything new, nor will I forget everything I see", Tokarczuk's writing creates a new style, a new reading experience, and she creates a nuclear fission reaction to the novel. In novels such as "Taikoo and Other Times" and "House by Day, House by Night," it would be a misreading to see the author as "the folk watchman of the eastern European countryside," or rather, she reconstructed a long-lost tradition of allegory, a new myth that caught even literary editors off guard—when she handed over the final draft of Cloud Travel to the publisher, the editor sent her an email after reading it: "Have you messed up the order between chapters?" ”
Tokarczuk's novels are so important and fascinating, and here's why: her writing is not a reproduction of experience, she creates experience in her writing. In "The House by Day, the House at Night", there is an unsuccessful nun who prays to God to turn her into the form of a man, and the monk who wrote her story is a beautiful boy with unspeakable thoughts. In that story, the gender lines are blurred. In The Land of Bones, the writer portrays an angry old woman rarely seen in literary history as insane by the villagers, defending a silent world of foxes, rabbits and deer, where species boundaries are blurred. Until "Center of Transformation", the old woman who was full of thoughts turned into a lone wolf and disappeared into the shadows. In her speech, Tokarczuk mentioned a "teapot that was thrown in the garbage" in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, and she said that what she pursued in her writing was also the silent, broken, "world of teapots." "Speaking for the Silent", this writer's tenderness, is not a slogan that panders to ideological correctness, but finds a new story in a noisy and turbulent world.
Just like the heartbreaking gentle epilogue of "Wheat Ear's Time" in "Ancient and Other Times", Wheat Ear is insulted, hurt, and she is at the child's grave in a moment of nothingness—
"She saw a gigantic beast, a giant, and everything around her was a big torso, and her body was part of that torso. She saw a force that permeated all things, and she understood it. She saw the contours that lay out in our world up and down and other times in the rest of the world. She saw many things that could not be put into words. ”
Author: Liu Qing
Editor: Wang Licheng
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Xin
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.