The Surging News reporter Luo Xin intern Zhou Xinyi
Thirty-five years after the publication of the global bestseller "The Handmaid's Tale", Canadian author Margaret Atwood's new work "The Testaments" released in 2019, which was "sold out every four seconds in the United Kingdom and sold out in 500,000 copies in the first week of the global market", and the 80-year-old "Queen of Canadian Literature" Atwood also won the Booker Award again with "Testimony", becoming the oldest writer in the history of the Booker Award.
Atwood and her dear reader said, "You have asked me many times about the details of gilead and its inner workings. These questions became the inspiration for the book. The other part of the inspiration comes from the world we are in. ”
As the predecessor of "Testimony", "The Handmaid's Tale" tells the story of the totalitarian state of the United States at the end of the 20th century after a coup d'état , the " Republic of Gilead " ( " Gilead " ) , the heroine Offred recounts through the recording of her experiences after being forced to become a fertility machine "handmaiden".
The story timeline of The Testimony is set fifteen years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale, and has the same structure as The Handmaid's Tale: the main body of the novel consists of handwritten material discovered by historians a century later, which itself is a first-person retelling of the inside story of the Republic of Gilead in the early twenty-first century. The most important part of the Testimony is how such a dramatic change took place, in the mouth of Aunt Lydia, and two other first-person narration voices: Agnes, who grew up in Gilead, and Nicole, who grew up in Canada. In terms of generations, three generations of women correspond to the era of "pre-gill-gill-post-gill", thus expanding the fictional space-time called "gillith".
During this year's Shanghai Book Fair, the Chinese Simplified edition of Testimony was first published nationwide by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House. On August 14, translator Yuan Xiaoyi, scholars Mao Jian, Luo Gang and the translator of "Testimony" came to the flagship store of Duoyun Academy in Shanghai to read the story of Gilead and the handmaiden with readers, and talk about why the world in Atwood's book can evoke such strong resonance with us.
Testimonials Chinese book launch
Testimony is a very great book of answers
Atwood said that before it was officially written, part of the work of "Testimony" was in the minds of readers of "The Handmaid's Tale", and everyone was asking - what happened after the novel ended?
"It's a long process to think about what kind of answers to this question will be in thirty-five years, society itself is changing, some possibilities are becoming reality, and with it comes a constant change in answers. Citizens of many countries, including the United States, are under more pressure now than they were three decades ago. She said.
For the gileading setting in the novel, Luo Gang thinks it is very interesting: "The gilead country is dominated by men, but it arranges women to manage women, by torturing some elite women and making them convinced, becoming the so-called grandma, and then letting them formulate how to manage women, to some extent, women's autonomy." ”
Yuan Xiaoyi stressed that this oppression is always in a cyclical state: "In fact, the oppression of women often comes from women. This, even if Atwood writes lightly, her setting still contains a little meaning. The questions of 'the male world' and the 'female world' are already foreshadowed in The Handmaid's Tale, and although Gilead's worldview suggests a series of virtues such as the male mind being more focused, the final plot of the Testimony also proves that men are not so great. ”
Therefore, he emphasized: "In fact, some of the seemingly patriarchal countries in Gilead have adopted the management methods of matriarchal society completely, and they are set up in quite detail, such as women's education, marriage, and inclusion of women's growth process from scratch in this matriarchal society, which is the most important part of the testimony. ”
She said: "In fact, from Offred's point of view, the men of Gilead are not much happy and do not have much advantage. If binary and opposed, Gilead is indeed dystopian for women, but in turn it is not a male utopia. All the people in Gilead, not only women, but also men, including men of all walks of life, have no way of realizing their self-worth. From the point of view of human nature, even if the institutional setting of the whole country is premised on the great goal of perpetuating the race, it is still a failed system and will eventually lead to extinction. ”
In a sense, this testimony is tailor-made for the readers and audiences of The Handmaid's Tale, and in that sense it is unique. Through it, every reader can find answers to the questions left behind when watching The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood uses the structure of a book to answer questions, almost as a kind of text experiment. Mao Jian said that "Testimony" is a very great Q&A, a game, and an act that specifically treats the reader as God.
Testimony
It's not just "feminism" and "sci-fi"
Although Both The Handmaid's Tale and The Testimony tell the story of women's survival from a female perspective, Atwood always emphasizes that she is not a feminist writer, and That The Testimony and The Handmaid's Tale are not feminist works. She once put it this way in an interview with the British Independent: "The label of feminism can only be attached to authors who deliberately use the feminist movement as the background of their novels." ”
In this regard, Yuan Xiaoyi said: "At least when I read the Testimony, I did not read it as a women's novel. As someone who is more accustomed to French novels, I think she is very 'stanced' compared to French women writers, and she writes her position very clearly into the novel. In the 1980s, when he was able to write "The Handmaid's Tale", Atwood was actually very remarkable, because at that time everyone agreed with Western values, believing that democracy, freedom, science and technology, etc. would definitely bring mankind to the light. But Atwood can think outside of this discourse system, and I don't think her novels are entirely feminist. ”
Rogan believes that Atwood has absorbed more of the results of postmodern feminist thought than feminist writers and has a reflective attitude towards modernity. "Modern feminism gives women a wide variety of rights, liberating them from the shackles of various traditions. But these rights more reflect the values of the West, such as Westerners think that women wrapping small feet is a manifestation of Chinese ignorance, to some extent has become a symbol of China, but in fact, wrapping small feet is not a common phenomenon in China, by generalizing special phenomena, it vaguely constitutes a hierarchical system of civilization - Western civilization is high-level, Chinese civilization is one level lower. Postmodern feminism reflects on this universal value, emphasizing the female position not by fully accepting the western view, but by being aware of its own historical uniqueness."
"So looking back at Atwood, it's interesting that she wrote about the 'process' in the novel — that women's rights that seemed natural in the West were won after a long struggle, not innate. The problem of women here is not simple, and it cannot be solved by emphasizing universal values." Luo Gang said.
The Handmaid's Tale
In addition to feminism, Atwood has also always refused to define the "Handmaid" series as a science fiction work, although the Gileads in the story is a specific overhead situation and adopts the "doomsday trend" common in science fiction literature, but she believes that it is more "realistic" than "science fiction". In a conversation with Juno Díaz, she confessed: "As you know, the human acts shown in my novels are not fabricated, they have happened in some places in some historical stages, and in some countries of the present world, they are reality. ”
This "de-sci-fi" may be more evident in TV dramas, such as the "2197 Seminar" that appears in "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Testimony" in the series. Mao Jian analyzed this: This deletion should also be a consultation with Atwood, she will not be willing to make this drama into a science fiction drama, if you put 2197 into it will be very obvious science fiction. "Grandma also said, 'There's nothing in my book that hasn't happened in history,' so from that point of view, the show was very successful."
Mao Jian concluded that both "feminism" and "sci-fi" are just sub-themes in Atwood's vast narrative, and she wants to express much more than that: "Her work is not only feminist texts, nor is it just science fiction texts, women and science fiction are embedded in a larger power relationship and a wider world." Atwood's novels are embedded with a larger, more complex narrative, so it would be inaccurate to simply extract feminism or science fiction as the primary issue. ”
The novel and film and television adaptations are linked to re-illuminate the value of the work
It is not common in literary history for film and television dramas to promote the birth of a sequel to the novel, but the popularity of the TV series of the same name "The Handmaid's Tale" and the eager attention of fans around the world undoubtedly greatly promoted Atwood's continuation of "Testimony".
In 2019, when Testimonials was released worldwide, the third season of the TV series of the same name, based on "The Handmaid's Tale", was released, which has swept the Emmy Awards, Golden Globes and critics' choice awards hailed as the "Oscar weather vane" in the past three years. Atwood himself also made a cameo appearance in the first season, slapping Off fred in the series. So in the afterword, it is mentioned that this scene is obviously a scene written by Atwood himself, but Atwood felt particularly terrible when he performed.
Atwood had been in close communication with Bruce Miller, the screenwriter of The Handmaid's Tale, when writing Testimony. Miller tells Atwood the details that appear in the series to keep the work consistent with the plot. For the film adaptation of "Testimony", he revealed: "Many people are looking forward to a good ending in the fourth season of filming, but as far as I know, the fourth season will not shoot "Testimony". In the future, "Testimony" may have a new drama. ”
Mao Jian said that in general, first-rate novels are difficult to be adapted into dramas, and compared with third-rate or even fourth-rate novels, they are more suitable for adaptation into dramas, but "The Handmaid's Tale" is very successful as a TV series. Not only the ability to choreograph, but also the care of time points. "In 2017, there was a series of focus events on women's morality and feminism, and US President Trump pushed such topics into the air, and the "Handmaid's Tale" TV series became a very effective topic."
She is also very much looking forward to the filming and television of "Testimony": "When I watched this novel, I felt that it was too suitable for making a drama, especially the second half of the speed, which was slightly simple, but it was very scripted, as if it had prepared for the plot of all aspects of the TV series." ”
The linkage charm of novels and film and television may lie in this. Although Atwood is considered by many to be one of the "most deserving writers to win the Nobel Prize in Literature", she has been facing the situation of "applause or not popularity". Although "The Handmaid's Tale" had a response at the beginning of its publication, it did not "go out of the circle", until the remake of the TV series in 2017 made it popular all over the world, and the novel frequently jumped to the top of the best-seller list in many countries.
"Atwood is actually a very strong writer, and I think she's the strongest of all the female writers," Rogan said. "The Handmaid's Tale" was adapted into a TV series in 2017, and for Atwood, it is the value of the TV series that re-illuminates this long-dormant work. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang