Ian Lancaster Fleming
(1908-1964), worked at the Reuters Moscow press station and was the personal secretary of the Director of British Naval Intelligence during World War II. In 1952, Fleming, who had retired from the army, began to write the 007 series of novels based on his espionage experience, which was a huge success once published and sold well in many countries.
City of Surprise
Author: (English) Ian Fleming
Translator: Liu Zichao
Edition: Beijing United Publishing Company
February 2018
007 Series Mysterious Goldfinger
Edition: Beijing United Publishing Company
May 2016
Ian Fleming's City of Wonders can be classified as typical "travel literature," but it has its own characteristics. As the creator of Agent 007 James Bond, Fleming also embodied a certain kind of "thrilling" interest in the globe travels proposed and funded by the Sunday Times. Naturally, for the Sunday Times, as long as the author is Ian Fleming, the author of the super-best-selling Bond series of novels, this "hugely invested" travel column is half successful.
It is also true that this travelogue is not particularly outstanding in travel literature that reproduces as fast as tropical plants, but it is still highlighted by the author's own peculiarities, and was translated into Chinese many years later to join the rise of Chinese world travel literature. Readers clearly have an expectation for the book, and what kind of travel will this author, known for writing exciting spy novels, bring us a different kind of travel feeling? However, Fleming's pickiness and arrogance between the lines, as well as the lightness of the cities, are disappointing and even unbearable.
Avoid the "everyday life" of the innate inadequacy of travel literature
At the beginning of the chapter on Geneva, Ian Fleming, in his usual critical and mean tone, sarcastically denounces Venice: "Venice has long since fallen into the cliché. I wanted to write a humorous essay about Venice, but not about canals, gondolas, churches, and squares. I will focus on the pure architecture of the railway station, the operation of the stock exchange, the chaos of the Venetian treasury, and the history of the waterworks and power plants. ...... However, apart from the nonsense, Venice really has nothing new to talk about. Honestly, after enduring Fleming's snarky and harsh remarks about the world's "cross-eyebrows, high-eyed" style, seeing this, the long-held resistance seems to have exploded immediately.
Although I have not been to Venice, but there are so many written memories of Venice, this old man dares to say that "venice has nothing new to talk about", and the two poets I like, Pound and Brodsky, are very fond of Venice, and even buried here, the latter has visited Venice 17 times and written a thick book for Venice in poetic language. My favorite Austrian poet, Hoffmannstal, described his travels in Venice in extremely sensitive and lingering language in his essay "Memories of a Good Time: Essays on Venice". Not to mention the novelist Thomas Mann's famous work "Death in Venice", which also placed the last journey in the life of the protagonist Aschenbach, who was entangled and indulged in a perverted love, in Venice.
In addition, Venice inspired other great writers—Proust, Ruskin, Rilke, Byron, Goethe, McCarthy, Montaigne, Montalet, etc.—"Whose words swirled around like the waters of a canal, like a gondola passing by, the sun shining ripples and crushing a thousand glimmers." (Nottbohm)
The reason I defend Venice is to show that true literature proceeds precisely from the dilemma of "nothing new to write", which Pound better summed up — literature is the news of everyday life. In this sense, the so-called "travel literature" is precisely because it avoids "daily life" and shows its innate inadequacy. The pursuit of novelty is often the original motivation for travelers to carry backpacks on their journeys, and it also implies that the way people are trapped in a corner is tedious and numb, and undesirable.
Novelty drives people to set out resolutely, to roam from city to city before boredom is about to strike, and travel literature is a record of this wandering: what is seen and heard, what is novel, a way of life that is very different from oneself, shakes in front of the eyes and then floats by. This way of walking is destined to be typical of travel literature as an essentially "floating light" impression. Ian Fleming is also well aware of this, and after concluding the first phase of his Hong Kong-Macau-Tokyo-Hawaii-Los Angeles-Las Vegas-Chicago-New York round-the-world tour, he concluded: "I spent 30 days traveling the world, and all I wrote about the trip were some superficial impressions and some superficial, occasionally disrespectful comments. ”
In the final analysis, this is brought about by the blind pursuit of novelty, novelty seems to be easy to obtain (just embark on the journey), but it is also particularly easy to lose, then the typical trip is destined to be flat, the traveler skims over those beautiful scenery and gourmet dishes, from the shallow human history or seemingly unique way of life, as long as he pauses for a moment, the sense of boredom immediately follows like a ghost. Moreover, every travel literature is filled with too many characters, but their professions are often monotonous—restaurant or bartenders, taxi drivers, flight attendants on airplanes, more passers-by who rush through the streets, or tourists with the same dreams and expectations as the authors. But these characters are all hurried visitors in the travelogue, leaving only a silhouette, an action and a mysterious expression, accidentally recorded by the travel writer in the book, becoming an embellishment, becoming a proof of why travel literature is flattened.
Arrogant tone
Find ways to disparage the observer
Although the tone of the book is somewhat arrogant, according to the famous travel writer Jane Morris in the preface, he "raises a pair of arrogant eyebrows for everything", but the whole travelogue for gambling (these cities include Macau, Las Vegas and Monte Carlo, the three famous casino cities are not accidental), the various doorways, the legendary Hong Kong gangsters and chicago gangsters History and present, etc., show the arrogant author's intrinsic thoughtfulness to the reader . He knows what kind of manuscripts the media needs, and he understands what readers want to see.
At the beginning of the book, Fleming admits that he may be the most clumsy tourist in the world, "and often even advocates the provision of roller skates at the entrance of museums and galleries." I couldn't stand having lunch at the government building, and I had no interest in visiting clinics and resettlement sites. All this undoubtedly implies that Fleming is not a common sense traveler, but also a disguised advertisement for his unique travelogue. However, after reading the whole book, what impressed me the most was his harsh tone, such as "The streets of Hong Kong at night are the most charming streets I have walked through", such a sincere and simple sentence, which is almost unique in the book. (You can see that he does like Hong Kong.)
For most of the time, Fleming tries to disparage the observer, which is even the most prominent language style of his travelogue, of course mixed with humor (amusing), but when this mockery is more directed at others, it is not far from mean. I picked a few random words from the book: "Just as I was observing him, a woman in a black silk dress, probably any age between 50 and 100, left the nearest table and walked over to him. "There's no doubt that Bahrain has the dirtiest international airport in the world. Even in prison I couldn't stand such handwashing facilities. The slow fan hung on the wall of the crumbling shack, and even the flies didn't bother to move. "If these seniors were wearing clothes that suit their age, they would disappear into the urban context, but in Hawaii, thousands of people in their sixties and seventies wear all sorts of weird looks, which makes me feel even more depressed."
Excitement and novelty
Genre literature routine limitations
"City of Surprise" has a detailed description of various gambling methods and various people in the casino, and also has a more detailed introduction to the world-famous Hong Kong gangsters and Chicago gangsters. Fleming's own status as a super-best-selling author, as well as the influence of the Sunday Times itself, allowed him to interview some of the best in the world. In Macau, for example, he visited Dr. Rob, the king of gold; in Los Angeles and Chicago, he interviewed Playboy headquarters and well-known crime journalists; and in Geneva, he visited Chaplin's house. All of this ensures that City of Surprises excels in its pursuit of novelty.
I think this is both Fleming's own interest and the media's requirements for the manuscript, because for the media, the specificity (exclusivity or novelty) of the content itself is always better than the style of the text. In other words, as long as the content is compact enough, the text is clear and smooth. Obviously, the humorous, derogatory, and sometimes vivid style of City of Surprise has long exceeded the general requirements of the media for words, that is, Fleming's travelogues to the Sunday Times are completely excellent manuscripts — from the media's point of view.
The problem is that, like the excessive number of characters in travel literature mentioned above, the overly solid content makes the whole text too crowded, and yes, this is the characteristic of media reports, which have a terrible hunger for the "facts" themselves, and it cannot tolerate the author's mysterious thoughts, even if it is stunned. In this way, the space left for the expression of the text itself is too small, and literature is naturally squeezed out of the overly compact layout of the newspaper.
As a lover of pure literature, I may be a little harsh on "City of Surprise", comparing Thomas Mann's novel to Hoffmansthal's prose and "City of Surprise". Although I myself have no interest in gambling, it does not prevent more people from being interested in gambling, and Fleming can easily refute that I did not intend to write a biography, it is just some flashy record of travel. Just as the authors of speculative fiction did not want to compete with Tolstoy, they probably thought more about Lawrence Bullock or Raymond Chandler, as well as sales and royalties.
In other words, I'm not a target reader for City of Surprise at all, and there must be a lot of people who like the book, just as there are more people who like Bond novels, Harry Potter, and Stephen King's novels. But as soon as it enters the field of writing, a comparison is inevitable, and this comparison is not fundamentally based on sales and royalties. As genre literature, speculative fiction, detective fiction and travel literature all have a broad market, and they also have high and low points, some genre novels are more attractive and sell better, and some may be uninterested.
In general, the routine of genre literature limits the heights it may reach, it is excessively sympathetic to the reader, and it uses the two effective triggers of stimulation and novelty to draw the reader's conscious consciousness, making it impossible to focus more on human nature and language itself as those classic literature. In this sense, genre literature, including travel literature, is indeed the main force in the popular literature market, but it does not shoulder the inheritance of elite culture.
□ Lingyue