Chapter 16 "Flowers Will End" - Scudder's Death Curve

After "September 11", Matthew Scudder and Elaine Madai still lived in their original apartment on the 14th floor and did not leave, but Elaine Madai seemed to have a sad habit. The good window stares out in a daze, looking at the original location of the Gemini Tower, of course, now there is only a transparent and empty sky, like the end of Li Bai's poem. A certain sense of being alive. In the Sherlock Holmes novels, generally mistaken for the long story "The Hound of the Baskervilles", but actually from the short story "The Silver Spotted Horse", Sherlock Holmes raises an interesting question full of literary metaphors - wonderful, not late at night Why does the dog bark instead of Why doesn't the dog bark?

The dog barking in the middle of the night is the reasoning clue of "addition". Something unusual is added to the ordinary scene, a shocking corpse, a bloody knife, a row of footprints, a cigarette butt, a small piece of paper, And more and more popular, some things that our normal eyes can't see, fingerprints, semen in corpses, blood stains washed off, human cell tissue stained with something and so on.This extra unusual thing seems to be an urgent invitation, or even a provocation, ordering us to provide explanations, especially logical and even scientific explanations. But a dog that should bark but stay silent is the reasoning clue of "subtraction". It means that something that should have is missing and disappearing out of thin air. In this blank, logical reasoning is still useful, but empirical science is useless. No matter how sophisticated and advanced the instrument is, it can't "reveal" the non-existent objects.Joseph Agadio Sr. of the first generation in the novel made this heroic but futile effort, rehearsing it for days after the gypsy prophet Melquides brought him a camera from the outside world, Joseph Sr. Shooting around the room like a machine gun, including under the bed, in the corner of the cabinet, etc., imagining the existence of God like Descartes and Spinoza, the old Joseph believed that if God really existed, sooner or later he would let him Accidentally took a picture.

The game of deduction in the world is mainly additive clues, but the game of normal life today is always subtractive, especially in the matter of death. This is not to say that our real life lacks new and extra things, but perhaps it should be said that these things are too many, too frequent, and too dense, so that they become "ordinary" as a whole. It can't form a focus, can't arouse our favoritism and promote thinking.This is especially true in modern urban life. Every day, every day, we shuttle through a bunch of people we haven't met and pass through a bunch of things we don't know, but we don't know each other like unwavering believers passing through the valley of the shadow of death. Temptation to walk is fine unless it looms upon us in some violent and unusual form, yet the invention and dominance of newspapers and television news have preconditioned our bodies to resist it. Medicinal properties, our life experience can hardly compete with it in terms of quality and quantity. Therefore, even if you witness a broken body in a car accident on your way to work, or suddenly a skyscraper with more than 100 floors rises in front of you , some sense of being present, imminent, and unique may temporarily shake you, but usually only lasts until the after-dinner TV news coverage, or it is actually reported and included in the news archives according to the number of seconds it appears. It is placed in the cabinet, or it is not in the list of new things that are clamoring at all to prove that it is not important at all, and we don't need to care about it and give it any care.Roughly, this is the living pattern and duration of our direct life experience, like a may ant, like a bubble, like nothing happened or everything happened in our brain and heart in advance.

In addition to newspapers and TV news, don’t forget that we also have Hollywood, the world’s largest prophecy canning factory. Here, not to mention ordinary things such as terrorist attacks on the president’s assassination, even the end of the world is repeated for various reasons, various angles and forms. After rehearsing, if the future refers to new things and events that have never happened before, then we are almost tantamount to prepaying for the future in advance, or it is more like rudely exposing the negatives that have not been clearly and specifically visualized in advance.Weber lamented, "There are no prophets, no prophecies, who can we rely on?" The more correct language today should be, "There are full of prophets, and prophecies everywhere, who can we pay attention to?"

In this way, the clues of addition make us face the future, but the future has been emptied; From the perspective of mood, when people face the future, although they may be fearful, anxious, and confused, the tone is always exciting; when looking back at the past, although they may be full of warmth and nostalgia, the tone is always sad.From the perspective of a person's own age, facing the future is a natural life characteristic of being young. After all, he has a lot of future time but only a few memories; looking back, it is an old mental state. The limited time given to you can only be used to clean up and tidy up the messy pile of memories along the way.

So, welcome to the world of sad old age, no matter whether your date of birth on your ID card shows you are really old or unlucky, you should be just like the rising sun. Fiction writer Lawrence Bullock will visit Taipei for the first time at the International Book Fair in February this year. Let us take this commemorative day as a break in time to take a look-this storyteller from a foreign land in New York, now six years old At the age of sixteen, sixteen volumes of Matthew Scudder's detective novels have been written, and the many deaths that have been dealt with during the period, let's use "innumerable" for the time being, and someday there will always be a male Virgo The reader will kindly figure it out for us.

Before, we read novels one by one and talked about death one by one. This is to place death in a horizontal space and not let it go away from the current reality, so as to prevent death from being caught by us all the time. Careful conceptualization, abstraction, or worse, statisticalization, in order to preserve the tragedy of each death, as well as its unique, irreplaceable richness of content and revelation, is, in politeness, our duty to each death. A death (whether real life or fiction) deserves respect; from a selfish point of view, it is trying not to let ourselves "get used to" death, so that we don't become numb and rigid, and become a person covered with death. A person with a hard shell and no sensory nerves is like the anonymous private detective who claims to be "me" in Dash Hammett's "Red Harvest", no matter whether the good or the bad, the life or death is worthless.Now, let's try to further connect the deaths of Matthew Scudder one by one, like a bead chain, keeping their uniqueness as much as possible, but using an extra vertical axis of time as a line to connect them. See what kind of different landscapes will be presented in this way, what kind of light will shine on each other, and what will tell us.

Faulkner's Southern family novels did this, and a few others, but in the end, it's the basic style of writing that is unique to mystery fiction, and that is - mystery novels always start with a (or group of) The central character is the axis of the world, and the series has been extended. Each of us has already known from our own reading experience that each novel in the series seems to be continuous but is actually independent and complete. Don’t you see We have to read the first book from the source. In fact, we often read it halfway because of our personal choice or chance of life.Somewhere in the novel, we may see that it recalls a previous murder case, an old person, or just a sentence that has been said or heard, but you can know it in detail, and it’s okay to hear it at first glance. Reading can still flow down without any hindrance like the Yangtze River.

That's right, this loose or tight continuity will inevitably sneak in time, or to be more precise, it will lead real time into the unrealistic novel time. The collision of two heterogeneous times, of course, we can I hope with all my heart (like those who sign a lottery ticket), that this will make the final image richer and richer in time levels, and even hit new and interesting new things that have never been seen before like a physics accelerator.Yes, there is hope, where would we go without hope?It’s just that usually the results of the collision of reality are not so touching. In fact, most of what we see is quite funny, and we need a moderate amount of forbearance to make the reading go on smoothly.Let's give an example. Have you read the short stories of Qian Zhongshu, a senior novelist who is extremely clever but also unavoidably wicked?This wonderful novel makes people laugh and scold from the first word to the last word. It is written about a salon where the upper class eats and feeds. The time is set on the eve of the eight-year war between China and Japan. There is a self-proclaimed leftist, he is the only one present who comes from the vast lower class of society, he talks about everything with resentment, and he is full of bad words, but he eats more than anyone else (some kind of food resource that destroys class enemies is equivalent to The "young" person who weakens the fighting power of the class enemy), this is the degenerate and necessary version of such novels since socialism, especially since the archetypal character Bazarov in Turgenev's book. Real version.This angry left-wing young man had a series of adventures in his life, and he encountered everything. For example, where he worked as a dock worker for three years, which mountain he fought for three years as a guerrilla, and which city and which factory leader There have been strikes or riots for three years, in which countries have you wandered for three years, etc., etc.Qian Zhongshu said that there are too many life experiences, but he is too young to pretend to be in it. Therefore, when someone asks for the detailed time and place, he always answers vaguely, and it is a coincidence that he does not coincide with all the people who were present at that time. pass by.

The central characters of the series of mystery novels also have the same time troubles and cannot pretend to be in it. Therefore, for example, Ellery Quinn has to stay young forever, including his old New York detective father and a group of assistant detectives. Cold and heat have no four seasons, and the gods of time will never find them in the incredible country; the great Inspector Poirot has to come back again and again from retirement, or from his last case, and, at this twilight moment, Time suddenly slows down very gently, the end of life is so close, you can feel it but you can't reach it.

We usually don't care about these funny time landscapes, and we can't afford to care about them. Once we care about them, we will almost run out of reasoning books to read. Bullock's Matthew Scudder series certainly has some small time troubles like this, but in general, the most different thing about this series from ordinary mystery novels is that its novel time and real time are consistent and synchronized , the time of real life has an effect on Scudder in the novel, from age, physical fitness, to his emotional and psychological changes, and most importantly, his perception of the eternal mystery of death——to a As far as novel writers are concerned, Bullock has given up a large part of the privilege of arbitrary fabrication, distortion, and use of time in novels, especially genre novels. The writing restrictions imposed on him in this way are actually some kind of confrontation, facing real life. Including your own life, as well as the lives of many others in society. Therefore, those who are familiar with Scudder's novels can easily draw a similar curve for the death of this group of novels. Generally speaking, this is a mountain-shaped curve, and the central peak is the cruelest and most violent. It began to climb sharply, reached the peak of He Sanshu, and almost softened in the first book—I remember the editor-in-chief of the reasoning line of Facebook Publishing Company at that time, when I edited the movie that drove a truck, killed and dismembered with piano strings, "You're on The truck is no longer a person, but a pile of organs", she resigned angrily or asked to change the line because she was "about to spit it out". This curve is ups and downs, which is very strange, but Luo Yijun, a sensitive and intelligent novelist, is full of doubts (does it prove that he is still young and does not really know death, even though his own novels are full of death images?), horror Is Scudder so peaceful, so "middle class" today that he asks himself if he's getting old? At first glance, it can be said so, but the young and ambitious Luo Yijun, who is immersed in the world of novel skills and fascinated by acting, wants to know more?Should we also jump away from the present self and try to use other paths to approach and perceive death?Do we want to change the way of understanding novels? The novel is not just a gorgeous performance of personal professional skills. It is also the most complicated language created by man, which contains the equal existence of endless others, so it can be A kind of "endorsement" that is more modest and makes the writer lose himself. It can also be just a simple outlook on life, especially the novels of the elderly. Cutting off those branches and leaves, I just want to try my best to say the ultimate life problem that I really want to ask, so it is a pure "expression of ambition", not narcissistic, exaggerated, and not caring whether people applaud or not. In her book "Reading "Lolita" in Tehran", Azaer from Iran repeatedly said that the novel is "democratic". in one sentence. One of the mysteries of the Scudder curve, as we mentioned before, is that it can be superimposed on the death curve of the reality of Greater New York City where it is located, and you will see that the two of them generally present an interesting coincidence of step by step. The cruel peak of the shade is the most dangerous and sinful (and so-called most gorgeous) era of Sodom and Gomorrah in New York. An old friend of mine living in New York still recalled that she knew the New York that lived through those years. People, I really can't find two people who haven't been robbed, hurt, or directly pointed at the head; and the gentle slope after that is synchronized with the new death scene in New York after Mayor Giuliani's administration. , New York has gradually ceased to be the number one criminal city of the century. Even in terms of head-to-head objective statistics, it has given way to Los Angeles on the West Bank. Therefore, in the past, I wanted to simply close New York into a large prison and let it fend for itself. The self-destructing movie "Escape from New York" has a sequel, this time it is "Escape from Los Angeles". That is to say, the Scudder curve is also a curve of real time, which faithfully records the historical facts of death in New York.At the time when New York’s law and order improved, the writer of the novel was faced with two choices. One was to lament recklessly like the damned Sherlock Holmes. Could it be that those criminals have lost their imagination and activity?Writers do not want to come out of the ubiquitous and harsh world of death, so they can only stop their own footsteps, ignoring the rushing forward of real time. Make it up; one is that you continue to follow New York, even though it's not as exciting or easy to write anymore, so we say it's a confrontation.New York is divided into two roads, and the Scudder curve shows that Bullock chooses to face the rarer path of death in real life. I personally feel that this is brave, and I even want to say that it is more noble. If we can give In terms of value evaluation, if the mind of the writer can be explored and discussed.Just because it has a higher risk of "failure", it is more likely to be questioned or even abandoned by long-term readers who are accustomed to gorgeousness, excitement, and death everywhere. Luo Yijun is just one of such typical examples. But this time, we try to make this Scudder curve turn inward, not the real time of Greater New York City, but the real life time of Scudder or even the mirror man behind him, we try to superimpose These two, let's see what new things will come out of the collision, and tell us what? Simply recall.The first big death gap in Scudder's life, we know, was his stray bullet, the death of that innocent little girl, which brought about immediate and violent changes, from work to family to the way of life (such as drinking , go to church to light candles, throw tithes into offering boxes, etc.).To be honest, as a reader, I personally have a certain degree of fear at this stage, but I dare not speak out, because this is the most typical psychological trap in novel writing, and how many smart and skilled novelists all respond to this kind of place Fall, and then a certain set of tedious and crude psychological software package hypotheses (especially the Freudian one) takes the place and the job of the writer, from the plot of the novel to the character of the characters and their The reaction began to distort, stiffen, and become predictable and unreasonable frantic madness. Not to mention, let’s talk about the founder of the hard-line school and the practical writer Hammett who was a private detective. He was not immune to writing " Dann's Curse, old Hemit laughs at himself comfortingly afterwards: "It's a crazy thing." Therefore, Nabokov, the master of modernism, was full of wonderful ridicule when he talked about Freud, and Bakhtin, the master of literary theory, wrote a series of articles to bombard him head-on. I personally think it makes sense and is very pleasant. Maybe others Freud was not so bad at that time, but in the literary republic of writing, he was a very bad invader and autocratic ruler, a traitor and traitor, everyone can be punished. This is not to say that certain great psychological traumas of people will not make people go crazy or even commit suicide, but it will not be so witchcraft-like, and the connection between the cause of the trauma and the effect of the behavior will not be so monotonous and hasty Still so naive (Levi Strauss said that witchcraft is not without cause and effect, but rather a causalist who is too impatient and desperate).Here, we see that Scudder did not fall into the trap of this disgusting voodoo psychology, his death consciousness was detonated "in advance" by this accidental trauma, but the meaning is still ambiguous, it is like the body Like a magnet, Zhongzang attracts all kinds of deaths for Scudder. He not only asks to solve the case, but also asks for an explanation, which makes him a collector of deaths. The reason why I say "in advance" is because I personally believe and I have talked about it again in other articles (for example, the article "Crossing the Turning Point of Life" that I read), that the peak of human death consciousness is usually around forty years old. Or it will really come later. People who were too young and in good health didn’t seem to exist before. They lacked the physiological mechanism to feel death. Death can only be an abstract concept. Something grand and emotional.Until the turning point of one's own life is crossed, the body starts to go back and downhill, begins to relax, disintegrate, decay, and seems to be rotting slowly and emits a strange smell, then it is really the god of death visiting you , appearing in front of you, and will not go away for a while, wrapping around you and staring at you coldly, struggling to fall asleep. In other words, around the age of forty is the time when people are most afraid of death. What you were afraid of before was not really death itself. Death was just a follower, or even a tool or a false symbol. Love, the future of life, the meaning of life, the understanding and sympathy of others, or some other weird things.Young people are seldom afraid of death in a simple and simple way, and there is no way to be afraid of it. The little girl's murder predates Scudder's resignation to become an unlicensed alcoholic private eye, which is to say long before everything in the first book, but the Scudder curve doesn't change abruptly until a decade later (from The layout, touch, thickness, and depth of the book itself, as well as the interesting delay and rhythm change of the writer Bullock's own writing time, are so comprehensive), and in the third book of violent death, he officially succeeded in the top three—to put it coldly, the little girl Death was originally just a clever writing design, but it slowly absorbed meaning in ten years and finally blossomed like a flower. In other words, the Scudder curve is obviously superimposed on the private curve of Scudder's personal age and body, and superimposed on the private curve of Bullock himself. Therefore, it may not be correct to say "detonation in advance" Because it does not change the shape and direction of the curve, it only elevates the curve as a whole and makes it translate upward on the coordinate. Superimposed on the real time curve of Greater New York City, Scudder’s novels have a solid foundation of universality and connection with the vast others, instead of murmuring in self-pity, superimposed on Scudder himself, and even Bullock himself The real time curve of Scudder endows Scudder's novels with real feeling details. Death is no longer an external object, but an irrelevant and purely scary thing. The deaths of others are integrated into the body of "I" one by one. Come inside. However, this private death curve in the human body, after the peak, how will it go next?I personally think (with the help of other people's experience and my conjecture) that it will still go downhill and calm down. On the one hand, it is unlikely that we will stay in such a tense and tense state with death; When we get along like close friends for a period of time, we will gradually get used to and even accept its scary appearance and shadowy presence, and regard its ubiquity as a helpless fact, just as we will gradually get used to the continuous decline of our bodies, find harmony The way it gets along is average. I don’t know whether it’s a beautiful design of human physiology or psychology or even God’s mercy. People will not be more afraid of death as they get older and closer to death. Death in one lifetime is still a mystery, an eternal problem, and we are still defeated and carried away by it.But usually we don't walk like a broken-hearted captive, we more often walk like a pair of old friends who set off on a long journey, and the traveling companions really don't look very pleasant, just like the old Woody Allen movie "Love and Love" In the last scene of Death, the ferocious Grim Reaper with a scythe bowed his head and walked forward, while Woody Allen continued to talk non-stop without losing joy, and the picture showed a beautiful scene of mountains and lakes. How did Scudder solve the death problem of the little girl's death?No, he simply "come over", in form it is more close to forgetting and slowly digesting in time, in fact, even the writer Bullock didn't realize the natural disappearance of this problem, in an interview he frankly Even he himself didn't know when and why, "Maybe Scudder came out by himself!" That's great, isn't it?Also, Danny Boy, a nocturnal animal who was operated on for cancer in the past, once drew up a death list, recording all the people whose names he knew died before him. This is obviously an attempt to tame death. However, in In this book, Danny Boy also put aside this increasingly long list, still with a crush, ready to appear in a fixed bar, listening to songs, and drinking his frozen vodka that is as precise and sharp as a surgical knife. Does Luo Yijun need to be surprised at Scudder's kindness now? Death has gradually moved away from him, while he is gradually moving away from the turning point of life; or it should be said, death, the many deaths that Scudder has seen, touched and collected along the way, have surrounded him layer by layer , guarding him, no one has the power to pierce such protection even when bad luck comes suddenly, really scares him and hurts him, visits the old half as a ghost, from this shore's point of view, we see loneliness, misery and It is lonely and desolate, but when I think about it from the other side, it is warm and gentle. The country road leads me home. Luo Yijun likes to refer to Borges, but the eighty-year-old Borges, who is too far away to see the turning point of his life (and he is also blind), when rewriting the preface to his young first book, finally He concluded by saying: "I loved the evening, the country, and the melancholy then; now I welcome the morning, the city, and the calm." There is a kind of novel, or some great novelists who have written all their lives, will finally hand it over. Let us call it "the novel of the elderly". Readers who are young and have followed him all their lives will usually be shocked and even extremely dissatisfied with it. There is no more dazzling old skills, no more flowery text performances, only stubborn and somewhat ignorant focus on a certain topic, even a commonplace topic, so we usually say this Is a failure of the best work, and mourns the aging of the heroes of the past-- The best reaction I have ever heard from young readers comes from Huang Jinshu, a young scholar who criticizes first-hand novel creation. He thinks that a novelist of a certain level, after reaching a certain age, does not need to be obsessed with the evaluation of success or failure of his works , it is a manifestation of the outlook on life, we should welcome it, we have another one if there is one - Huang Jinshu's example tells us that the age curve of a person can still be partially surpassed, as long as you have enough, there is More importantly, have enough care and sympathy for others. How about trying to read these books beyond your own age curve?Like Tolstoy's, like Hemingway's "Crossing the River and Into the Woods", and Kundera's "Ignorance" like the aging Kundera, etc. When all the flowers are gone, we usually say it is a sad autumn season, but the Chinese Zen masters who like to go against it say that it is "the body reveals the golden wind", which is cool, clean, with long autumn water and long sky, and the clouds are as high as clouds pressing on people's chest. The blocks suddenly soared away, and we even felt a kind of cold sweetness and aroma on the skin. Yes, autumn is the best travel season-of course, the southern hemisphere is an exception.