Chapter 15 "Death Thirst" - If you owe us the dead

Here, let's start with one of the most typical Scudder questions—what was I doing on 9/11 in New York? I personally don’t have any dramatic scenes (for example, the novelist Liu Daren said that a couple of his friends from New York were visiting the mainland, and they didn’t return to the hotel until after midnight. The husband went to bed early, the wife turned on the TV, and the husband glanced at the screen. Disaster scene, and complained: "Why are you still watching such bad Hollywood movies at such a late hour?"), I just sat in front of the TV and watched the news. , Not long after, the Live screen appeared, indicating that this was not an ordinary air crash. The second 747 turned a death arc, crashed into the sky-high building and turned into a ball of fire. Fang also appeared three horrifying but not very real English words: America Under Attack——

It feels very trance-like, but also kind of grimly mixed—you realize that the world has changed from this moment on, the word "security" in particular has changed, and the cost structures and consistency of capitalism and the globalized order have changed. The rules of the game have to be adjusted and rewritten, and Zhu Tianxin’s academic seminar on novels in Berkeley will probably come to naught. Also, the conservative forces represented by Bush Jr. must rise rapidly, and liberalism will be frustrated again. Also, Liu Daren, Zhang Beihai, Guo Songfen and others Everyone is safe. Is Carol, our old friend who just entered the Department of East Asian Studies at Columbia University and our gourmet queen, also safe?Also, what about Said, an intellectual fighter who also teaches at Columbia University, who is suffering from cancer? His independent situation is even more difficult...

Amidst the din, there was a little extravagant and inhumane voice in my heart—and Bullock should be fine, the cafe he used to use was not close to the scene of the disaster, and we used to read novels I have no impression that Matthew Scudder has been in and out of the World Trade Center. Will Bullock's series of novels with the theme of "September 11" appear?Or at least will he tell us where the Scudders were on 9/11?What are you doing? After "September 11", what thoughts and changes did he have?Of course, the real murderer has not been caught because he is well hidden in a cave in a mountainous area thousands of miles away, and it is not unknown who he is; in fact, it is absolutely impossible for the Bush administration to hire this person and lose his private detective license , reverting to solitary freelancers, whose hunt for murderers is much more terrifying, powerful enough to destroy any country on earth (but not easy to catch a single person, which sounds like a modern fable), And our Mr. Scudder is too old to go to war, to take part in this well-reasoned but still unrighteous crusade of the twenty-first century.

You continue to summon death, and you spend your whole life with death every day, just like the dragon-loving Ye Gong back then, but one day finally, amidst the sound of wind, rain, thunder and lightning, the mighty, huge and friendless dragon really Here comes. death longing. But not yet, our curiosity has to wait a little longer. The time we have in hand is 2021. This is the secret time when Al-Qaeda is still planning, training dead pilots and strengthening their belief in seeing death as home; I don’t want to gossip, between such a title, such a crazy killer who was lured by death to kill wantonly, and those modern kamikaze Islamic jihadists half a year later, Bullock saw in advance what metaphor, foresight or Even some kind of spiritual involvement.After all, death is mysterious and tragic in itself. We should be careful not to over-categorize and generalize, otherwise we will easily transform the physical grief into statistical, abstract concepts and even numbers, which is often the worst for the victims. blasphemy.

Relatively speaking, the novel originally deals with individual deaths. Today, it can also reductively fight against the statistically indifferent death-such a true restoration of death is what we expect Bullock to include "9/11" in the novel one of the reasons. But the real reason is that, since the beginning of 1976, or at least since the watershed novels of 1982, we readers of fiction have generally agreed that this set of Matthew Scudder novels looks It has been closely intertwined with New York. Apart from being a novel, it is also like a part of the history of New York, which records the daily life history of death, so it is hard for us to imagine that when New York is hit by a violent attack of death that has never been seen before At that time, this group of novels could skip it without incident and not keep its memory, which is a bit unreasonable.

Of course, purely from the perspective of novel writing, death in the form of "September 11" is very difficult to write; purely from the perspective of the writer's rights, he also has absolute freedom to grab the materials he wants in reality , no one can "rule" him to take this piece or not to take that piece, just like the two terrible periods from 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945, novels The writer can still turn his face away and write about a love affair, about a neighbor kid running away from home, etc., and of course he also knows that in the trenches of the European battlefield, people fall and die every second.

Let's listen to the story told by Umberto Eco, in his fourth novel A Walk in the Forest, which he called "The Forest of Possible", and he used the novel, which is not to hide from the inside , it is his own terribly difficult to read novel "Foucault's Pendulum". Among the people I know, Zhang Dachun seems to be the only one who likes it. What happened to Foucault's Pendulum?There was a letter from a reader who was a bit of a fake show and was also a bit critical—we quoted Eco's words in the original text: "After the novel was published, I received a letter from a reader. He obviously went to the National Library to read a book. All the newspapers on June 24, 1984 found that after midnight at the corner of Hemul Street (this street is not mentioned in my book, but a certain section of St. There was a fire when Khashobong walked by—if it was even reported in the newspapers, it should be quite a fire. This reader asked me, why didn’t Kashobong notice?”

Here, we add the necessary background information.Casaubon is a character in the novel "Foucault's Pendulum". In Chapter 115 of the novel, on the night of the turn of June 23 and 24, 1984, he walked away alone as if possessed by a demon. Crossing the entire St. Martin Street, crossing the Ure Street, passing through the center of Beaubourg, and arriving at the Church of St. Murray, etc. - when recounting the writing process of this passage, Eco said a very good sentence by the way, which is worthy of the writer of the novel ( or aspiring writers) reference: "To write this chapter, I took the same route on several different nights, taking a tape recorder and recording what I saw, heard and felt along the way. I have a computer program that provides What the sky looks like at any time of the month, at any latitude, I even took the time to find out if there was a moon that night, and where the moon was in the sky at different times. I didn't do this to imitate Zola's realism, but to like the narrative The scenery is in front of my eyes, which helps me to get familiar with the things described in the book and get into the hearts of the characters."

Well, well prepared, even the tiny details of the moon's shape and position change (does it really need to be like this?) have been taken care of, but missed a lot of noisy and steaming fires that dyed half of the sky red; what's more, Eco fake The time is really detailed, there are years, months, days, and times, and the walking route of Kassaubang is detailed. There are street names and building names, but it is more eye-catching in the dark of night, and it is even more impossible not to see it or write it down. but not among them—Eco admitted graciously that what the reader said was "not unreasonable", since you have gone to great lengths to induce people to believe that the story took place in the "real" Paris, even the date is clear Chu, of course, readers can rightly and confidently question why the fire that was actually at the scene disappeared out of thin air.

Of course, Eco's story about exposing himself may not be just about demeanor, but that the trouble that actually does not hinder the establishment, progress, and even good results of the novel is too funny (could it be himself again? Made it up?), it is simply a fable that flies from the sky, which can lead him and us to go deep into the real and fictional woods in the "possible forest". But we have to say that "September 11" is to New York and to Matthew Scudder's novels, and the fire is to the night of the Rue Saint-Martin in Paris, and to Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". With the same meaning——"Foucault's Pendulum" may record the fire together. It is basically a housework "inside" the novel. The gap opened is the long-term problem of the boundary between reality and fiction in the novel. You will feel that Interesting discussions are generally limited to those who actually write novels, and the issues have not really surfaced on the stage of reading for readers; but "September 11" is different, not because "September 11" really died People were killed (the fire in Paris may also have killed people), but "September 11" killed too many people. The number of deaths has crossed the boundary line in the dark. It is no longer just a simple death, but has been upgraded to "destruction"; the dead are no longer just simple New York citizens, but the entire city.

Of course, more generally speaking, it’s not just a question of quantity, let alone the lives of Americans and New Yorkers. We all know that at every moment in the long history of mankind, or just at the same time At this very moment, many more people may have died silently in other corners of the earth—the overall tragedy of "September 11" was formed, and the mass and instant media did help a lot, making death in front of your eyes The location, method and possible extended influence of the death are all involved in this casting, including the choice of the murder weapon, which is actually a civil aviation plane with hundreds of civilians, and the selection of the execution location of the death, which is full of symbolic meanings. Behind the twin towers and skyscrapers, including such a sudden and violent death, flows the historical hatred between the Islamic world and the Western world that has been inseparable for thousands of years and is getting closer and closer to a dead end. Ending tragedy?Or is it just the first song?Like George Lucas's multi-billion-dollar Star Wars franchise, when the time comes for a sequel, it's going to have to hit the ground running... That is to say, from the macro perspective of human history, "September 11" is indeed not a great tragedy, and there are many collective and instantaneous deaths; however, from the perspective of New York's two hundred years of history, it is really a tragedy An indelible devastation - just as a car accident is enough to constitute the tragedy of family destruction.From that moment on, people's eyes changed, and it was impossible for the city to return to its original appearance, no matter whether the original site of the twin towers was preserved as historical ruins or rebuilt into taller new skyscrapers; people's minds also changed, and some Strangers have different meanings, safety and freedom have different meanings, life and death have different meanings, and finally, what you firmly believe or are accustomed to believe that was there before you were born, Therefore, it will probably remain until you bid farewell, including a tree, a shop, a building, a street, and even more solid and difficult to pass away, some principles, orders, and values ​​that you believe in and practice. Faith and faith, as if painted with the moving color of sunset, may walk away before you. Maybe some cynical people will say, look, it will all return to "normal" after all, people's forgetfulness is all strong, and it will still take over to rule it all-this is roughly true, but not because it is inevitable in the end In this way, do we need the addition of literary scholars?We rely on literature to resist rigidity, statistics and digitization, and everything to become a sealed archive of history. Literature records people's hearts, emotions, and everything that will be buried in sleep when the time comes.The focus is not on the mere "forgotten", but on the transformed "forms of forgetting" (such as numbers, archives or brief historical entries, etc., which are both the catalyst and the initial stage of forgetting), the resistance and recording of literature , especially the writing of novels that appeal to sensible and touchable details is a kind of "reduction" of such a "forgotten form". , most suitable for forgetting), but use all possible means of reality and fiction to try to make things stay in the present and retain the original relationship between the things and people. Therefore, it is not because of the factual fiction of "Foucault's Pendulum", which is only about the writing of the novel, let alone the issue of Elaine Madai's Jewish identity in Scudder's novel (but this may be a convenient gap for the novel to cut into, maybe ), but, in Eco's words, since this series of novels has spent more than two decades trying to lure us down this New York death road, it has forced us to stop at "September 11 "Before, it was really unreasonable. Darren Doffer's "Problem Awareness" Ralph Dahrendorf, a general of the socio-academic conflict school, when criticizing the traditional "structure-function" school of sociology, sharply pointed out the fundamental problem of "structure-function", that is, the loss of "problem awareness"— —Darrendorf said: "Many shortcomings in modern sociology, especially the utopian nature of sociological theory, are produced by the loss of 'problem awareness'; and the loss of this thing itself is a problem worth studying. Society How can scientists lose touch with these things in a world full of problems and mysteries?" "From the way they look at society—or rather, the attitude that they should look at society and not look at it." — They are indeed promoting a disengagement, an attitude of not wanting to worry about things, and elevating this 'temperance' attitude to a 'scientific theory'.  … Duties are left to those in power, whose legitimacy these sociologists vaguely acknowledge; What’s more, Max Weber was right when he advocated the separation of politics and science, but how these people misunderstand his words!” I personally think that these words are also sharp when applied to the world of novel writing, and they are far better than Lukacs' vague "intelligent typical" claims-they see roughly the same problem, as Lukacs bitterly criticizes novels The writing method of naturalism is involuntary, non-selective, where the pen takes the eye wherever it goes, but Lukacs' "wisdom model" advocates to go to the other end of other people's achievements, and its meaning is close to the "answer" , it is very easy to become a dogmatic and rigorous test; the suggestion of "problem awareness" focuses on the beginning of novel writing, but the question does not set an answer, and is relatively free and open. We should put it this way, without "problem awareness", novels can still be written, not only can they be written, but many - like most genre novels, and a large part of so-called orthodox novels, but These novels have no real doubts, no curiosity, they only have design suspense, only the temporary blank suspension of the plot, the "answer" has been well prepared in the writer's sleeve long ago, but it is not shown immediately.Basically, this kind of novel does not take risks or explore, and has no intention of provoking and trying to break the boundaries of human thinking. Everything revolves in the known world, so there is no new revelation. Therefore, it is closer to the "performance industry" , or "dancer" as Kundera said, it is not used by everyone to entertain and entertain. Kundera has a strict attitude towards such novels, he thinks that there is no doubt about novels, that is the death of novels, a useless silent death. Kundera's words are very serious, but he is not aimless - what really leads the writing of novels to seek forward?What really determines a novelist's choice, to read this or not to read that, to write this or not to write that amidst the din of everything?This is not just a problem of writing skills, but before the skill occurs, the novelist has something in his heart that cannot be solved. He is "caught" by the problem, and he follows the footprint of the problem to catch up, and is forced to hide and seek by the front all the way. Seduced by ordinary "answers", it is in this way that skills become more important and more complicated. Skills help him find the right way, take the right car, and prevent novelists from getting lost, and prevent us readers of novels from getting lost. Therefore, doubt plays the role of the backbone in the novel, and is the "first cause" and promoter of the novel's progress; at the same time, it is also the basis for the selective focus of the novel. But what is the problem with fiction?Here let us go back to Darrendorf's words. In fact, he has given us a very good answer-the problem Darrendorf said confronts the "social status quo" and "the legitimacy of those in power", that is, That is to say, novelists do not (should not) obediently answer the questions of those in power, these questions are only about the self-interest of those in power, or they are "false questions", intentionally or unintentionally, this kind of people in power lose Questions for the society are often only for the purpose of directing the public's attention and excluding real questions from being raised. They do not really seek answers, but are only used to cover up and consume.Therefore, what needs to be considered here is not only to answer the struggle for power, but to go one step ahead, starting from the maintenance of questioning power.The questions of the novel are independent, real and transcendent. Kundera generalizes the ubiquitous novel questions that are "problems and mysteries everywhere" into some kind of "existent problems", revealing the broad boundaries of the problems. However, reading Kundera's novels has a few Anyone with a deep understanding of it knows that this is by no means a departure from reality, a Stoic-like abandonment of the present and facing eternity-of course, the problem of human beings may not be new in terms of conceptual classification, just like a certain Muslim A wise man said as if nothing happened: "Man is just born, grows, falls in love, gives birth, grows old and then dies." However, although the problem has a long history and it is never possible to solve it once and for all, every different historical stage, every different country, The squeeze and entanglement of different societies and different groups of people endow the problem with special perceptual color, special difficulty and special intensity and urgency, thus making the problem "real".The novel’s question is just such a current, “one” and “one” real problem, with the unique burden of his time and space. Maybe he has a different awareness of the long-standing nature of the problem than ordinary people, and time has given him a different problem. The depth and difficulty of his questions also make his questions unclear and direct, but the workplace of a novel writer is still in the present, and what drives his thinking is still the unique problems of the present. He has neither the ability nor the leisure. Leave the current matter alone and jump to another time and space to worry about what the novelist there should worry about. We often think of fiction writing as a kind of eternal industry, but in fact eternity is just a gift, given to the writer of fiction who is responsible and successful in his time. As a reader, we still have no difficulty in distinguishing performance fiction from fiction that asks questions, and even in the world of genre fiction that is largely part of the performance industry, it is easy to see that le Carré is different from other spy novelists. , Raymond Chandler, or Josephine Tey are different from other mystery novelists-the straight backbone in their novels makes them stand out among many non-brain-wrenching peers. The same goes for Bullock, especially his Matthew Scudder series. But today, the overwhelming problem of death is brought before your eyes.We don't know for sure if Bullock himself read Darrendorf's words, but Bullock's situation after 9/11 is exactly what Darrendorf said - it's not just a matter of huge tragic death , including what questions to ask and by whom.The Bush administration took advantage of the trend and simplified the problem into a black-and-white confrontation between Western civilization and the evil Islamic jihadists. It asked Congress to increase the military budget and send troops to Afghanistan to cause death no less than "September 11". , Incompetence in overall governance.This kind of cost of life, only to get this level of introspection, and even being used, only singing the national anthem and "God Bless America" ​​on the court, and looking for Arab-looking people at the airport, on the street, and in public places. This makes "September 11" a greater tragedy, and even the first part of a greater tragedy. We've long remembered Bloch's talk of eight million ways to die in New York, and now apparently there's one more; The kind of humble people who can't help but line up in line and can only bow their heads and walk silently towards death; what we are more impressed with may be the poem he quoted in the book, engraved under the statue in Dwecklinden Park, the original author is John McGuire: "...we are the dead. Not so long ago we were alive, falling, watching the sunset glow, / We loved, we were loved; / And now we die in the fields of Flanders. ... If you have wronged us dead, / We shall not sleep, / While the poppies bloom / In the fields of Flanders." In all honesty, it's really hard to incorporate a tragedy as real and massive as 9/11 into a novel, yet -- "If you blame us for the dead, we won't be able to sleep." Nope. Is it like this?