Chapter 12 "A Long Line of Dead" - A Novel, Like a Little Bird

This time, before reading, let us settle accounts with Mr. Lawrence Bullock - as a very, very loyal reader of the Scudder series, this is by no means to find fault, but because we like this series of novels, After reading it carefully and reading it again and again, it is natural that we will find that some mistakes should not come from the proofreader's negligence, but from the original author's mistakes. For example, Etita Rivera, the little girl who was unfortunately killed by Scudder's stray bullets and changed Scudder's life because of this, the age at which she died, and the memories in different books of Iscarde, from From six to eight years old—of course, this can be explained by the fact that Scudder, who is getting older, has a problem with his memory.

Then, there is the name of a hotel, which is sometimes called "Antares and Spiro's Bar", and sometimes it is reversed as "Spiro and Antares Bar"-of course, this can still be interpreted as the hotel. The shares of the first bosses changed, and the name of the person with the highest number of shares moved to the front. And then there's the Northwest Hotel where Mr. Scudder rests, the silent counter with ball pens doing crossword puzzles and drinking codeine cough syrup, sometimes named Jacob, sometimes Isaiah—of course, Both names come from the "Bible Old Testament". It is possible that they are really a pair of twins from a certain Christian family. They have the same appearance, hobbies and personalities. The two brothers take turns on duty.

The funniest of the mistakes, and probably the most important woman in the series, is Elaine Maddie, whom Scudder tells us was his call girl sex partner when he was in the police force, until a book about the sadistic Leo The appearance of Molly made them reunite after twelve years of separation. However, we also noticed that in the first book of this series, Elaine Madai still received Scudder as if nothing had happened. De also put thirty dollars on her nightstand. All these kinds. You ask me if I personally care about these doubts?To be honest, I personally don’t care about it at all. As I said, the reason why I discovered these doubts is that I naturally remembered them when I was reading novels.

Here, let us first quote an anecdote from the "Bible Old Testament". This anecdote is very important in the history of literature because it is related to two brilliant geniuses in the history of old Russia, Tolstoy and Chekhov. This anecdote is recorded in the Book of Numbers. It is said that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to seek the promised land. When the Israelites marched into the plains of Moab, the Moabites were terrified, and they bribed the prophet Balaam with money to let him build The altar cursed the Israelites. However, Jehovah intervened in this matter. First, Balaam was blocked by an angel on the way to Moab. The donkey he was riding stopped when he saw it, but he didn’t realize it. Finally, he reached Moab Stepping up to the altar on the top of the mountain, Balaam uttered only words of blessing to the Israelites, four times in a row.

Tolstoy quoted this anecdote to read Chekhov's "Lovely Woman", a novel about a very easy to fall in love woman Olenka, she first fell in love with the melancholy theater manager Gujin, then After hearing the news of his death in the telegram, she immediately fell in love with Pustovalov, a quiet timber merchant. The timber merchant died of a sudden illness. She then fell in love with Milov, a military veterinarian who had a wife and son. After being stationed in Siberia, she was deeply saddened, but she also fell in love with Shasenka, a clever ten-year-old veterinary boy—according to Tolstoy’s experience, he thought that Chekhov “was going to condemn her, but he made the poet’s meticulous After focusing his attention on her, he lifted her up instead." —It means that Chekhov played the role of the prophet Balaam, and this lovely woman, Olenka, became the Israelites blessed by writers.

Well, what does this koan of old Russian literature tell us? Tell us that fiction (and other forms of writing, of course) don't always do what the author originally intended, in Tolstoy's words, "As Baran experienced, true poets and artists It often happens that the poet, seduced by a promised gift from Balak (King of Moab), or by hope, or by vague preconceived notions, fails to see the angels standing in his way (But the donkey saw it), he was going to curse, but, you see, in the end he blessed." - Of course, Tolstoy took this inconsistency to the extreme and became the opposite of the two. , Things are usually not so dramatic. Umberto Eco, a famous semiotic scholar and novelist, has a relatively calm way of distinguishing. He tried to separate the so-called "author's intention" from "the intention of the text", clearly revealing this. The two don't exactly overlap.

How does this relate to the errors and contradictions we have pointed out in Bloch's novels? Here we have to go back to Bullock's original intention of writing Scudder's novel.According to Bullock himself, the origin of the Scudder series is that he wanted to write a detective case of a drunk and retired policeman, but there is no single tree, you have to give him styling and equipment, so, just like Milan Kunder In the middle of it, from a gesture to gradually adding flesh and blood to create the beautiful woman Agnès, Scudder lived in a small hotel in New York, did not receive a private detective license, and had a prostitute girlfriend from the beginning, etc.To be honest, this preliminary shape and equipment are all interesting ideas, but still in the smell of genre novels, especially the combination of "retired policeman and prostitute", the supporting design thrown in the crime city of New York, very With the imagination and development of genre novels, an experienced writer will clearly know that things can already start, you have found a high enough snow slope, and rolled the first stone smoothly——

The following is my guess as a reader: this Scudder snowball began to roll smoothly, and it continued to stick to the new snow and became bigger and bigger. Scudder accumulated more memories, met more people, and had more Five years later, in the process of pursuing the ice pick killer (), he "improperly" met Jane Ken, a female sculptor who also suffered from alcoholism, and let Jane Ken led the run to Alcoholics Anonymous.Bullock's "author's intention" is now clearly and immediately in trouble. He must have vaguely sensed that he is about to become the prophet Balaam, so he chooses to fight back: at the end of the climax, Scudder looked at the ring in the party. The drinker said with a bit of sarcasm: "Good luck, ma'am." He decided to find another pub and drink another glass of bourbon——

But this last blow proved to be a completely weak blow. Jane Kenn, who played the role of the angel of the road, did not admit defeat. His self-deprecating and silent resistance culminated in Scudder's self-confessed alcoholic breakdown. As the author, Brock said that he felt that this series should come to an end—however, through the above discussion, we know that the true meaning of this sentence is that the original author’s intention and design are over here, and then, The novel grows wings and wants to fly by itself. Attentive readers must have noticed that it was a watershed. From then on, the thickness of the novel suddenly increased by one or two hundred pages. This was by no means accidental or coincidental. I thought it was a clear sign.Bullock himself has noticed this change uncomfortably. As a genre novelist who has to worry about readers' reactions, he said that he has doubts about whether book buyers are willing to bear a former alcoholic private agent muttering three or four hundred pages at every turn. But he decided to bet his credit as a successful genre novelist on this group of "Scudder Rebirth Detectives" that are not very genre novels in the future.

Well, we have somewhat understood that "author's intention" does not necessarily equal "textual intention", but is such a separation good?Can't an author put an iron fist down on his ready-made characters? Of course, a novelist closes the door and kills the people he writes no matter how he likes, without being accused of murder and torture, but is this okay?I think the writer's vocation is to write better works, not to show power. Many people have said that a novelist means God to the creatures he writes about.This is of course not true.The biggest difference is that I personally think that God is omniscient and omnipotent, including the future, but the landscape in front of the novelist is not transparent, and the so-called "creation" in the novel world is not like God's in the "Bible Genesis". The way of creation, the way where there is light and there is light, transcends time. The creation of the novel world is a process involving time, and time means change. Therefore, if we forcefully decompose the novelist’s creation factor , it may include: setting, groping, thinking, introspection, adjustment, determination, etc.

People are never omniscient and omnipotent about their own creations, and they are usually out of control. I personally think this should be common sense. Those who don’t believe it can think about the nuclear weapons, currency, national society and family structure created by human beings. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" has long told us this. For years, I've always remembered a passage from an old movie called, In which the sword master's first lesson to Stewart Granger, who learned to take revenge on the sword, was, "A sword, like a bird If you hold it too loosely, it will fly away; if you hold it too tightly, it will suffocate." I guess, if someone wants to learn to write a novel about revenge, the master novelist should also tell him something similar in the first lesson. We often hear and say that the characters in the novel should be made "live". What is the simplest explanation for "live"?It is that he has his own purpose and will, and he has his own reactions, feelings and opinions about the surrounding environment and things.A character who is completely manipulated, we will not say that he is alive, we will say that he is a "puppet", which is the opposite of live. From this point, I can clearly see the dilemma of the novelist industry. Either you lose part of the power and face of dominating everything, or you get a rigid novel. This is the fish and the bear's paw. However, to put it another way, even the God in the "Bible Genesis" allowed Adam and Eve, which he created in his own image, to be tempted, commit crimes, and eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A person who writes novels understands When to let go and how much to let go is not necessarily a shame, it can also be a pleasure-I once heard Zhu Tianxin talk about her creative experience, she said that the happiest time in writing a novel is when you start to notice The eyebrows of the characters in your pen gradually become clear, and they will think and react at first. At this time, you may find that some of your carefully prepared arrangements and designs are no longer available, and you are a bit annoyed, but this is also the beginning of your imagination to let go of its four hooves. And the extremely accurate moment, in the words of Confucius, is "doing what one wants without transgressing the rules". I believe Bullock must have had a similar sense of enjoyment before and after writing. That being the case, should the novelist simply admit defeat as soon as possible, let go early, and let the novel itself take you away? This is another big question, and many people who write novels, comment on novels, and study novels make this claim, especially in the past ten or twenty years, postmodern, postindustrial, poststructural, etc. have been crowned with "post" In the era of digital labels, here, all we can say is that we have seen many courageous experimental and innovative works, but we have not seen any decent and successful examples. I think that a diluted, soft, and negotiable will is not the same as having no will. Let the horse gallop, but the rein that roughly regulates the direction is still in the hands of the jockey. When and how the novelist let go, here It may not be possible to find a priori easy-to-use guiding principles, but a kind of tension and art between tension and tension.From Bullock's pen, we can see that Elaine Madai, who was originally set as the first heroine, was finally arranged by Bullock to reappear in the book more than ten years later, although I believe she is no longer It's Elaine, the sweet call girl at the beginning, and her new relationship with Scudder has been ups and downs and faced many tests from time to time, and there is a sculptor with strong hands, Jane Kane, and then there is () Lonely little girl Lisa, we know that Brock may hope that Scudder and Elaine will always get along, but no one knows how they will get along, and what the future of getting along will be like. Should the curious call up New York and ask Bullock himself?I guess he might reply with a quote from some important novelist: "How do I know what I know until I write it?"