Chapter 10 "Walking Through the Land of the Shadow of Death"——The sun is setting and the jokes are far away

I'm Matthew, I just listen and don't talk— This phrase has recently begun to circulate in a certain cultural circle in Taipei. It was originally the most common saying of Bullock's unlicensed private detective in New York, Matthew Scudder, when he attended a temperance meeting.Here, we don't go into the outline to extend the symbolic meaning of this sentence, but we readers of the novel do feel again and again that Scudder is really a quiet person who wants to talk, and in a chattering city like New York In the novel, he keeps walking, watching, and listening, and his words are not many and often short. These short words are usually just a few witty and funny words impromptu, but they always have less sarcasm and more self-deprecating elements.

I have personally read a book of interviews with Bullock, After Hours. In the book, Bullock said that in 1982 he finished the fourth part of his Matthew Scudder series, especially at the end of the book. When I break down and cry at an AA meeting, it feels like the series is coming to an end.However, it is Brock himself who is reluctant to let go. He likes Scudder, "I like to see the world through his eyes, and I like to talk about the world through his feelings." Card opened another new path.The drafts of six books were abolished, and it was not published until four years later in 1986. Since then, this reborn former alcoholic detective took to the streets of New York City again, and his personality stabilized. Bullock really found a pair that belongs to him. With his own sensitive eyes and a sensitive heart that belongs to him, he freely looks at and tells about this city and the world that he loves and hates.

After rebirth, Scudder no longer looks like the protagonist in the series of detective novels.Rather closer to Bullock himself-so, more than once, when a friend asked which current star actor would be suitable for Scudder, I thought someone suggested Tommy Lee Jones. , be low-key and quiet), but in the end I still think Bullock himself is the most suitable, especially since we have seen his appearance in the photos, and it is very close to the Scudder we know. This time, it is Bullock's 1992 work, which is dangerously tense and completed in one go. It is a profound and moving masterpiece. We leave it to you to read for yourself. Let's talk about others here.

Zhu Tianxin once said of Philip Marlowe, the noble private detective written by Raymond Chandler: "What amazes me is that this man seems to have a way to find out a bunch of things in any situation and in the face of anything. wise mocking words." This observation, of course, is accurate—since half a century ago Dash Hammett created San Francisco's hard-boiled sleuth Spade, and Raymond Chandler created Los Angeles's noble sleuth Marlowe. A family of detective novels known as "cold private detectives" has almost established a basic attitude towards the world: a lonely individual against a huge world of injustice.

Everyone can see that this is a battle of extremely disparate strengths (the strange thing is that they still have a chance to win at the beginning), so this lonely person has to have certain characteristics: 1. He is a lunatic and neurotic Xiu Dou-sang, otherwise he would not have stayed long enough to provoke this battle.This is Don Quixote. Second, if his mental state is not too serious, he must be a person who is confident, smart, poor in reality and full of ridicule.This is the basic shape of the cold and hard private detective. Why is it necessary to have faith?Because if it is not for some outdated beliefs, the world is unrighteous, so let him be unrighteous, what do I do?

Why do you have to be smart?Because if you are not smart enough, it is probably impossible to penetrate the appearance of the illusion and detect the hidden injustice; and if you are really not smart enough, then this disparate war is even less likely to be fought. Why do you have to be a little down and out?Because if the world is set to be so unjust, rich and noble, doesn’t it mean that you must distort some of your personality and physical bones to conform to some righteous people who never want to stain your sins? Then why do you have to speak with sarcasm?This is beyond words. I admit that I have always had a serious prejudice personally. I always believe that the smarter a person is, the more he loves to tell jokes, and the harder it is for him not to tell them. When he thinks of a good joke, he insists on not telling it. It is the so-called: Power cannot be subdued, wealth cannot be lewd, and jokes cannot be tolerated.

Yet when a joke penetrates an unrighteous world, like light through a prism making a rainbow, the joke becomes a sneer. In the process of refraction, the joke finds its more fertile breeding ground, and at the same time it finds itself transformed from a virtuoso performance into a weapon of attack. What kind of fertile land?Generally speaking, the main source of nutrition for jokes is not ignorance, hypocrisy, and excessive sacredness, which happen to be the most basic qualities of an unjust world.This explains why the so-called "Iron Curtain jokes" have always been of high quality and quantity, and have been in constant supply for decades; it also explains why politics and religion have always produced the most good jokes, both in ancient and modern times, in China and abroad. The most frequently appearing characters have been officials and monks.

If you don't believe me, you can call CoCo, a famous video political commentator who draws cartoons. So, jokes become a weapon against what?Certainly the ignorance, hypocrisy, and sanctity it ridicules to the fullest.Among the many weapons used to attack these injustices, jokes have always been the more elegant and cultivated ones, active before desperate violent revolutions and before the nothingness of desperate abandonment-revolutionaries who use violence to defeat injustice usually have no mind Not smart enough to tell jokes, and the nihilist who gave up fighting has long since lost the mood to tell jokes.

People who tell jokes are generally called "cynics" in a slightly derogatory sense. I personally disagree with the negative connotations carried in the title "cynic", and I sympathize with the joker.After all, much of the sourness in a cynical joke comes from the inevitable exhaustion and bitterness of fighting an entire world of injustice, as Philip Marlowe did. My favorite statement comes from Van Loon, the clever, kind, and educated historian who wrote "The Story of Mankind" and "The Story of the Bible". While describing the history of mankind for thousands of years, he said: "The irony And mercy are two good counselors in our life, the former makes life glad with its smile, the latter consecrates it with its tears." "If we don't know how to laugh, we'll be so cowardly as to hate those people."

As a weapon, or as a drug (don't you think the two are often the same thing?), what is the object or disease of which a joke is most effective? Ranking the three of ignorance, hypocrisy, and holiness we listed earlier, the order is holiness, hypocrisy, and then ignorance. Jokes are the most effective way to heal sacred fevers. Among the limited books I have personally read, the best and most intelligible statement is most likely the clever and cunning famous symbolist and joke-loving scholar. The novelist Umberto Eco, in his parody of medieval monastery murders The Name of the Rose, uses an Aristotelian work on comic discourse as the cause of a string of monastic murders.The reason is that the overly pious old monks believe that the most terrible enemy of maintaining the holy and pure Christianity is "laughter", not any violent anti-Christ alternative worship-because any anti-Christian belief is only the light of Christianity. The shadow of existence, it is still in the category of belief, it still retains the sacred essence, and it still believes, but the object of worship is "temporarily" different; on the contrary, the old monk said, if "belief in Christ makes me feel funny" , all the sacred meanings will be disintegrated on the spot, and people will go directly to another road of non-belief.

Here, jokes and human rationality join hands, playing the most effective disenchantment function. This also explains why revolutionaries in history, especially socialist revolutionaries since the 19th century, always despise or even hate jokes so much. Narcotics will only paralyze the awakening and action of the revolution.Their abhorrence and the killing of old monks are right, because the socialists have their more sacred gods to worship, unrighteousness, for them, it is only the wrong god to worship, not the bad behavior of worshiping the god, they He has always been the kind of person most like the old monk described by Eco in history, afraid that the destructive power of jokes will lead people to another path of not believing in any gods. Among the smart people in history, I have always thought that the person with the least sense of humor is probably Karl Marx, the eternal revolutionary teacher of socialism.Kant and Freud, who are serious and unsmiling on the outside, it is not difficult for us to find some kind of cunning and joy that they tried their best to hide, while Marx is like an owl squatting on a tree branch with wide eyes from beginning to end. At this point, some people may have noticed that the so-called unrighteousness is only ignorance, hypocrisy and sanctity?You are right, of course there is more than that, at least there is cruelty, cunning and organized and sustained violence and so on. This is of course the sadness of jokes as a weapon. Kurt Vonnegut, a famous American novelist who tells jokes (of course he is also a very smart person), said such a desolate sentence: "The joke is cold, But unfortunately the barrel is still hot." Think about it, if you were facing a cruel and vulgar character like Stalin who was neither smart enough to understand jokes, nor had a sense of humor to tolerate jokes, let alone care about jokes, what funny and sarcastic words could you say?In other words, when you face a whole row of inanimate, feelingless, manufactured guns and cannons that have no other function other than killing people, can you tell them a joke like a religious saint preaching to stone birds and beasts? The wisest joker has never seemed so stupid. Of course, from Chandler's Marlowe onwards, the American society faced by these ironic and hard-line private agents is not like this. The injustice they feel does not exist in a butcher like Stalin, but gradually It confirms the predictions and diagnoses of capitalist society by some great scholars, such as Weber, that injustice comes from bureaucratic suffocating organizational structures; or, for example, Fromm, that injustice is inhuman and anonymous. The paradox is that a so-called organization, structure, legal person, etc. that is not a natural person, in a sense, is a more thorough Stalin, without any feelings, sympathy, and understanding, and it is naturally beyond the reach of ridicule. Penetrates the arriving object. Thus, the hard-line writers of fifty years have become like archers who have gradually lost their purpose-it is no longer just a policeman, a lawyer-prosecutor-judge, a politician or a false philanthropist of high society, a certain The mastermind behind the gang organization, but the anonymous structure that hides behind all of this.It is meaningless and useless to ridicule these pawns who are dominated by manipulation. I don't think there is any honor to speak of. Therefore, we can easily find in Scudder's novels, which are half a century away from Marlowe's novels, that there are fewer "bad guys" in the book, such as policemen, lawyers, judges, politicians or gang leaders who used to play villains. They also gradually fade away from their symbolic roles, and return to ordinary people with flesh and blood, who can do bad things normally, but also have normal sympathy.The policeman has his helplessness, the poisonous worm has his sorrow, the politician has his cowardice, the gang leader has his weakness and powerlessness, and the stubborn detective who pursues the murderer has also grown from fighting against the unjust Marlowe knight. The silent Scudder outsider. The only time in his life when he could find peace was when he was injecting heroin into his veins.The most beautiful thing about heroin, besides the sudden high, is that it feels exactly like death. Of course, it's only temporary, which is why it's so good. This passage is used in the book to talk about the boss of Curiel, a poisonous Phoenician. He likes water and bridges. He hopes to be buried in water after his death. In the book, he drives Scudder across the bridge. The conversation is the most sentimental part of the book. Today, when we look back at the fifty-year history of cold and hard private detective novels, we only feel that the jokes are cold, old, and far away, like the sunset on the Brooklyn Bridge.