Good fiction awakens our genetics that lie dormant in the body and listen to stories

Author: Wang Anyi

In the summer of 2013, go to Winchester, the iconic attraction of the small town when it is the cathedral. According to the tourist brochure, it was built in 648 during the Anglo-Saxon era, and in the three hundred years from 1079 to 1404, it expanded and expanded to become the deepest church in Britain, which is what we witness today. It can be seen that the years are stable and the world is quiet, on the other hand, there are few major events, and the famous record is about the female writer Jane Austen, in this parish all year round, there is a tombstone inscription on the north side of the church corridor. In the corner of the main hall, there is an exhibition of the life of a female writer, forty-two years old, a glimpse of life, all turned into words, left in fiction, the real personnel is quite limited, so the exhibition is simple. In addition, there is the movie "The Da Vinci Code", which was set here and also included in the history of the cathedral. The high seats on both sides of the pulpit are printed with various family emblems, which are obviously the special seats of the Wang clan. Below, a district on the left, separated by a fence, is a seat for women. It seems that the class should be in the middle, that is, not conspicuous, nor in the pulpit to face the common people. The fence is inlaid with a wooden plaque, and there is a special line in the explanatory text, which reads that there is a female writer in the table, named CHARLOTTE YONGE, "Charlotte", who has the same name as the author of "Jane Eyre", but the surname behind it is rare and does not know where it came from. Female writers introduced to China have a long list, can not find this name, this is predictable, for other countries to understand mostly from the mainstream, and the derived branches are endless, may never enter the history of literature. However, it has also been seen that British female writers are everywhere and attract the attention of the world. They have a certain education, and no matter how cold the house is, there will be a library. In the old houses in the countryside, there are old furniture, old silverware, portraits of ancestors, letters, books left behind from generation to generation... The daughter in the spring girl is most enthusiastic about novels. Like embroidered tricks, the novel provides a facsimile for the imagination.

◆ British writer Sarah Waters close-up. (Courtesy of Century Scene)

Sarah Waters 'Victoria Trilogy' (from left to right) "Lingchi", "Lick Velvety", "Fingersmith" book shadow. (Courtesy of Century Scene)

◆ British writer Daphne Du mullier's novel "Lubecca" adapted into the movie "Butterfly Dream", which can be called a screen classic. (File photo)

◆ In the film Becoming Jane Austen, Anne Hathaway shaped the life of the legendary British female writer. (File photo) Draft: Li Jie

In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Isabella elopes with Hickory, as if intercepted from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Taming, petruccio brings home his bride Catherine; a hundred years later, Daphne Du mulliers' "Jamaica Inn", the lone girl runs to her aunt, stays at night, and the scene reappears. Gloomy old mansions, footsteps in the air, hiding the past, are roughly the basic elements of romance novels. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe of the 18th century, known as the representative of the Gothic novel, I have only read two of her novels, The Mystery of O'Dove and The Italian, both have a traveling pattern, in The Italian, the marquis's only son, Vincentine Vivadi, with his servant Polo in pursuit of his lover, reminiscent of Don Quixote and his attendant Sancho travel in Spain, from the narrative tradition of the larger territory, the chivalric literature of medieval Western Europe. The history of Europe is roughly like the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period in China, where countless princes and small states must be united for a long time, and they must be divided for a long time, so that civilizations intersect and penetrate. Under the Gothic building, the female teacher from a poor but self-respecting background finally restrains the marriage of the rich, which should be jane Austen's legacy - "Pride and Prejudice", the male and female protagonists always begin with a confrontation, lip service, do not give in to each other, and then, turn the dry into a jade. With the exception of Wuthering Heights, the character fate of the characters goes beyond social reality and is left to natural adjudication. Virginia Woolf's comparison of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with her sister as a universal relationship between men and women and a sister a contest between heaven and earth, may mean that the novel's secular personality will be separated from modernism. In short, no matter what the origin, narrative activity is particularly popular in England, writing and listening are enthusiastic, and a considerable proportion of women, not only in quantity, but also in temperament.

Among the long lists of women writers is a contemporary of Victoria Holt, born in 1906 and died in 1993, and Agatha Christie, who was born in 1890 and died in 1976. From the writing scale, Holt is not inferior to Christie, and the fame of the heyday is also comparable, but I have a hindsight, until I recently lived in hong Kong Chinese University, I saw his literary series on the library shelf, each book collapsed into scattered pages, I know how many hands have turned over. The first book to read "Thousand Lantern House", the title of the book has a beautiful color, as usual is an orphan girl, as usual is a big house, unpredictable master, strange signs, true and false are difficult to distinguish, confusing, but the plot goes out of The British mainland, to Hong Kong, where is the dream of the Thousand Lights House. Half of Holt's story continues in foreign lands, either Australia, or Asia, or the South Pacific, showing the rapid expansion of overseas colonies. The author was born during the reign of Empress Victoria, which was the golden age of The Miss Marple of Christie's mouth. There was another Daphne Du mullier, born and died in 1907 and 1989, and like Victoria Hot, almost through the beginning and end of the 20th century – how brilliant, the film "Butterfly Dream" based on her novel "Lubecca" swept China since the 1940s and 1980s. The mansion of "Lubecca", the Manor of Mandalie, burned out at the end of the fire, which is a harbinger, heralding the liberation of romantic history from the trap, and for female writers, it means stepping out of the boudoir and obtaining greater spiritual freedom. However, the change and renewal of the story elements did not disintegrate the model of this kind of novel, on the contrary, the structure became more complete and solid. That is because, from its occurrence to its development, the model is subordinated to the characteristics of the narrative time. E.M Foster's 1927 collection of lectures, Faces of the Novel, defines fiction as "story", an English novelist and critic who has a say in local fiction. Foster, a male writer who emphasizes the urgency of the story, is exemplified by a woman, and Shanruzod of One Thousand and One Nights may indicate that women are more fascinated by stories than men. The story's simulation of life makes the imagination real and believable, and women are mostly interested in the concrete things of daily life.

E.M Foster commented on Daphne Du mullier, arguing that no english novelist could "break the line between popular fiction and pure literature" like her, and this praise implied that in their time, that is, in the first half of the twentieth century, narrative activity had been clearly divided and would go farther and farther, until it was cut off. "Popular fiction", known in britain as "Cheap Nove l", literally translated as pulp fiction, expelled from the evaluation system of intellectuals. I remember that when Junichi Watanabe's "Paradise Lost" became popular, Japanese writers denied that they had ever read it, and the Chinese translator of "The Dream of the Covered Bridge" hid his real name. At the same time, "pure literature" abandons the original element of the story, the pleasure of the body and mind, which is the basic principle on which the ancient narrator, Shanruzod, maintained his life.

Like all modernity, music is difficult to hear, painting is incomprehensible, and novels, difficult and obstructive, are all instinctive challenges to the senses. It is also more or less a surplus of ideas, which in turn exacerbates the lack of materials and is overstretched, and art is squeezing resources from second-hand and even third- and fourth-hand life. Things go through the cycle, that is, to start the next round, similar to Chinese said, "willow dark flowers and bright villages", in the covenant, the British story surfaced again. The recent translation of Sarah Waters' novels, the Victoria trilogy's Velvet Licking, Lingqi, And The Fingersmith, as well as The Night's Watch, Little Stranger, and The Tenant, six books in total. There is limited information about this Sarah Waters, born in 1966 and followed by Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, for 23 years, and Victoria Holt, who died in 1989, for 27 years.

Sarah Waters's novels are indeed good, and nowadays they rarely encounter addictive reading. Best-selling like Dan Brown, the story is derailed from the logic of reality, beyond consensus and empathy, closer to the game, like Harry Potter's wizarding school, far from providing the imagination of life. The rise of the novel in the Victorian era, as well as the rapid popularity of the modern Chinese city of Shanghai, the space to cover life, are all because the citizen class has grown and risen, and the small citizens are the mainstream group of novel readers, which determines the urban character of the novel.

Sarah Waters's novels are beautiful here, with no supernatural elements, following the logic of reality, but not universal reality, but individual, special, expectant, and the reality of literary history attributed to the "romantic history" school. Some ancient factors, lurking in the new stories of the 21st century, echo the reading experience of the past, as if the genetic code, at the beginning of life, has determined the form. The history of romance can be said to be the first occurrence of reading, with sensual desires, just as the innkeeper asked Chaucer to come up with a better story to "please" everyone, and it is also described by E.M Foster, whose life hangs in the balance of "the dangers of this profession", which must control the body of the listener, not the material "body" that once prevailed in "body writing", on the contrary, it is immaterial to matter.

The heredity of listening to stories, hidden in our bodies, is in a dormant state, and when the time comes, it comes alive. Open Sarah Waters's novel, and from time to time, as if it were old, as if it were an encounter, it came to me. Not the plot, but the context, which is the type. The isolated mansion surfaces in Sarah Waters's novel, provided that time is pushed back, in "Little Stranger", the story begins after World War I, unfolds, and ends world war II; "The Fingersmith" does not point out the specific era, from the opening two girls to st. George's Coliseum to see "Orphans of the Mist", it is always out of the 40s of the last century, the play is based on the adaptation of Dickens's novel "Oliver Retreat" published in 1938, the time of grace dissemination and stage, that is, before and after World War II, The legacy of victoria's golden age, the big houses are mostly withered, the people are weak, the family road is not good; "The Tenant" is about the same period, the Regency period architectural style of the mansion, has been embarrassed to recruit renters, stay and is a modern figure, born in the city life insurance appraiser; "Light Lick Velvet", the white villa in the center of St John's Wood Square in London, spacious front door, high glass windows, the hall is covered with pink and black marble, the stairs are spiraling up like threads in shells, and the rose red of the walls is gradually deepening- As if the Museum of Contemporary Art, and like a high-end pornographic place, from the perspective of sudden wealth, about the beginning of the 20th century; the time of "Lingqi" is the most certain, because it is carried out in the form of a diary, starting from August 3, 1873, the lights of the Crystal Palace can be seen by the window, and as a clue, about in the rich area of South East London, Sydenham, is the fallen old or the upstart, in short, the family employs servants, but not as loyal as in Kazuo Ishiguro's "Long Days", jumping ship at any time, quite mobile, no matter what, The lady of this family does not have to take care of the housework herself, like the one in "The Tenant", but has to be free to intervene in charity. The female characters here are also old and unmarried, in addition to the dowry and social reasons, it is more likely to be out of some choice, that is, abnormal sexual tendencies.

Stories come from life, and life is essentially repetitive, which is close to genre fiction. In Sarah Waters's "Lick the Velvet", we can see the contour line of Dickens's "Great Prospects", which is also to leave the rustic township and go to the big city, where the sea of people is vast, full of traps, after sinking and struggling, returning to true love. The lover of "The Tenant" is in a more severe situation, class, ethics, morality, values, trust crisis, can be said to be thousands of hills and valleys of isolation, and there is a corpse in the middle, the shadow of "Lubecca" swaying surface, "Happy Life" has a realistic appearance. The end of "Lingqi" is cut off, there is no "happy life", but never lose my love, which belongs to the sad drama in romantic history. That beautiful little psychic medium, reminiscent of Little Douglas, the recipient of Wilde's Book in Prison, is frivolous, clumsy, and scheming, and of course, the image in the text may not be true, and we talk about it as a certain type. This story of the Demolition Party is the mainstream theme of old-school Chinese novels, such as the sea dreamer's "Xiepu Tide" and "Lingqi". The story is arranged in the three years from 1872 to 1874, when the british boom in supersensory research arose, and the dormant folk psychic medium was suddenly exposed to broad daylight and became a specimen of experimentation, which was the meteorological of academic freedom of scientific and technological progress in the Victorian era. Research activities ended in the field of empirical evidence, but gained in literary writing. American writer Henry James's "Screws Are Tightening" published in 1898, Alice Monroe, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature after 2000, the short story "Mana", similar to the structure of "Lingqi", but the position of the character is reversed, the psychiatric medium is an obsessive lover, willing to be sent to a mental hospital, tamed to accept fate, so there is a variation of the model, to the deep human nature, into the serious literary field. The Lingchi is still in the narrative tradition of romantic history, with Gothic mansions replaced by nineteenth-century Milbank-upon-Thames prisons, large, towering towers, labyrinthine inner courtyards. Faintly visible is the poor people's art school where Dickens's Oliver Tstier was born. The world, far beyond the radius of victorian female writers, works as governesses or female companions, is almost the farthest they can get out of the house. The thief family in "The Finger" is Oliver Swift's social school, and the story of the role exchange is at the heart of the story, which can be traced back to the origin of the folklore "The Prince and the Beggar". Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" is also derived from this source, and the sister Viola in the dragon's phoenix fetus, the woman dressed as a man to be a servant to the baron, as if it were the predecessor of Nancy in "Licking Velvet". After departure, they parted ways, Viola is the daughter in the boy's outfit, and Nancy is the boy's heart in the daughter's body.

Sarah Waters's stories always take place in the old times, and to be in China, it is necessary to fall into "nostalgia", in fact, I thought that the author's intentions were not here, but "taboo". If the tension is all relieved, postmodern theory does this, deconstructing differences, not accurately, which is the root cause of the decline of the story!

As mentioned earlier, "Little Stranger" began when "I" was ten years old, and Baisha Manor was thriving, and thirty years later, "I", a clinic doctor who had opened a partnership, walked into Baisha Manor again, but it was desolate and ruined everywhere. This appearance is reminiscent of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Akroyd. The most easily associated of the two novels is the subject of the narrative , "I", the identity of the common village doctor, in the words of Agatha Christie: "My life has been a boring and old-fashioned life, doing some mediocre and boring chores", Sarah Waters's is: "I can't even support myself, let alone my wife and family", in short, the two "I" are not satisfied with their lives and are eager to change. But in the vertical class structure of the old empire, the probability of variables is quite limited, and they have to do something. "The Murder of Roger Aycroyid", under the revelation of detective Poirot, wrote a manuscript, that is, this novel, and confessed to the world. "Little Stranger" does not have any flaws, such as Poirot such a highly intelligent character, unless special chance, can never reach the withered mountain villa, until the end of the text, the narrator leaked an inadvertent word: "If the Baisha Manor is entangled with ghosts, this ghost never appears in front of me." Because I was so disappointed that I only had to fix my gaze on it, and all I was looking at was a window pane with a distorted face staring at me—a confused and longing face, myself. ”

The criminal's self-narrated mystery novel Roger Akroyd is good enough, and the inheritance of "Little Stranger" makes the pattern more detailed and refined. This can be seen as the ecology of the genre novel, which is not static, but created under obedience, and this creation is driven by the higher expectations of the reading experience.

When the novel is divided into popular and niche, or popular literature and pure literature, it is difficult to trace what exactly is the Taoism of the novel. In the classics of the novel, there may be some kind of embryo buried that forms a paradigm for future public reading; is it still a novel to get rid of the worldly appearance, dismember the coherence of the story into metaphors, and go to the metaphysics? Once discussing with a French translator the question of left-right handwriting, she said, should still be written with the right hand, because— she groaned for a moment — because writing was designed for the right hand. This sentence is interesting, with the meaning of tracing the origins. The pattern of anything is established for applicability. Specific to the novel, the narrative nature of the novel is designed for people who are keen to listen to stories. (Wang Anyi)

(The full text is published on Wenhui App, this article is an excerpt)