Chapter 18 Batman's Sidekick: Matthew Scudder Short Story Detective - Nobody Dies Tonight!

The 2008 Taiwan leader election has come to an end. Many things are dew, or the dew evaporates instantly as the sun rises. The Zhalang incident is one of them. It's like a lifetime away, right?At this moment, it is really hard for us to believe that there were such an intensive three or four days, that Taiwan would be the place on earth that cared the most for Zhalang people and reacted the most violently to the Zhalang incident.This is of course impossible to be true (why think back to what kind of bluff elements our media and our social spoken language topics have in the past few years), and as expected, the hotel closed and everyone went home, the saddest Hsieh Changting in the green camp barely supported I prayed for the Zalang people more than once a day (but didn't take out his ocarina to play again), or rather just shot a mocking little cold arrow after losing the battle, and didn't continue to run and appeal. No contact with Richard Gere; Ma Ying-jeou, the most radical in the world in the blue camp, met with the panic-stricken Chinese baseball team, asking everyone to prepare for the war and win the gold, silver and bronze medals that may be the last, and so on and so on.

There used to be a situation that seemed to shake or even determine the outcome of Taiwan's elections (in fact, it didn't), and it could be completely ignored. We have witnessed such a dramatic event like a light switch, but it is really not surprising. Where are those Zalang people who once bloomed overnight in Taiwan like a flash in the pan?doing what?What are you thinking?Except Nanke Yimeng. What is this like?In life experience, it's like watching a movie or a genre novel.In the few hours of being in it, every person in the story, every step of development, and even every action, every expression of joy, anger, sorrow, joy, and joy, all tightly grasped our eyes and touched our nerves, but once the story ends, time is the most important thing for us. Afterwards, it freezes, fleeing to death, like an actor dismissed, doing whatever he likes.

But the real river of time never stops, our side has finished the show, and the others' side has just begun. Falsification of the truth, and the truth of the false, this provides us with an additional perspective on the truth and falsehood of novels. No one dies tonight, that quote comes from "Night and Music" in this collection of short stories.This is a rare Chekhovian novel written by Bullock. It writes about a breezy night until dawn the next day, and the season is "New York in spring, summer is coming", roughly equivalent to the end of our election. Someday between the inauguration of the new leader.Matthew Scudder and Elaine Madai went to listen to the opera "La Bohème" first, but they were not satisfied. They went to a newly opened nightclub, but they were still reluctant to end. Finally, they took a car and went straight to the old basement bar in Charidon Square. He listened to jazz until he didn't know that the East was white, no cell phone rang, no stranger approached, the death of New York gave him a day off, no one died tonight, or it's not that no one died, but tonight death took the form that had been in ancient times. A silent, composed, easy-going way that didn't bother them.

No one dies tonight, and Elaine Madai's last epilogue echoes her heartfelt thoughts after watching "La Bohème", like a humble wish that has been granted: "She always dies. "At least six or seven times. You know what? I could watch it a hundred times and it's still the same. Every fucking time she dies." "So I want to hear something different, before we go home and sleep Before." "No, it's okay to be sad. I don't mind being sad. I actually prefer sad music." "Yeah, it's okay to be sad, as long as no one dies." Perhaps, most likely, Woody Allen, who was also in New York that night, had a similar thought to Elaine Madai, so he made the movie "The Purple Rose of Cairo".In the movie, Mia Farrow avoids the boring marriage, avoids the overwhelming global economic depression in the three years, avoids all misfortune, depression and despair, and watches the same movie over and over again, until the movie is really popular. She saw it differently, the heroes on the screen even jumped out of the movie, and the unchanging story diverged, like atoms suddenly deviated from the straight line, and got freedom.

We, especially those who write fiction today by profession, always say that cities have no stories to tell.For example, after Shanghai became a global metropolis again, Wang Anyi, who wrote about Shanghai, also lamented so much, so she retreated to the suburbs of the city, to the water village where lotus and root were grown, where time was relatively constant and people were relatively calm. And the world where everything and every action can be seen is looking for stories again; the pen that once explored modernism has also been withdrawn. Recently, the novel writing course taught by teacher Wang Anyi has also turned back to the healthy, simple, and upright traditional leftist the road.

But Bullock said differently. He said that there are eight million people in New York, eight million stories, and eight million ways to die.Does that mean he still has a steady stream of stories to write or even too late to write?At least until he has finished writing these eight million novels?If it can be so whimsical, it is not a pure novel, but a Balzac-style New York human comedy, or a Sima Qian-style biography of New York deaths. Well, after all, cities have stories but no stories. Here is a wonderful four-sentence dialogue, which comes from "A Case that Completed the Virus by Itself" (or translated for "The Leper")—

"But what if we can't love?" "I don't believe such people exist. Love is something that's built deep inside a person, though it's as useless as a cecum to some. Of course, people sometimes call it hate." "I haven't found any trace of it on myself yet." "Maybe what you're looking for is too big, too important, or too active." Maybe the thing we are looking for is too big, too important, or too active, and we have certain normative requirements and imaginations for it, just like a fish under a certain size has to be thrown back into the sea-the disappearance of such a story, strictly speaking It has nothing to do with whether the city is a city or not. On the one hand, something so big, so important and so active, like a big whale in the sea, it is impossible not to be seen and killed by people soon. It has been used up and has turned into a book-like specimen. On the other hand, it is the irreversible change of our own mind. The above history, like people, will grow old and youthful. Just like Montaigne's introspection, there are old people's suspicions. We don't believe in such stories anymore, just like we We no longer believe that there is a Santa Claus who gives gifts and makes our once-a-year dreams come true, and we even less believe that our one sock can hold all the things we want.Believe it or not, it melted away like a snowman in broad daylight.

Does the city have a story? I prefer Walter Benjamin’s poetic statement. He didn’t say whether there is, but he said that the clues were cut off, it melted into the crowd, and it disappeared after turning a street corner. This at least allows us to see two meanings - more superficially, there are too many people in the city, coming and going, and everyone on the stage only has time to perform for three minutes before being usurped and replaced by the next person.Calvino's famous novel "If On a Winter Night, A Traveler" writes a huge labyrinth of novels that pretends to be a wrong page, cuts off clues just when people are interested in reading, and starts another new story for no reason. , Our urban story readers are far more fragmented, disordered, and absurd than this one. It is fragmented, partial, and disappears before it can make people interested or show its own uniqueness.The beginning of the story is like a sculptor's first knife, the number of types is extremely limited, the real uniqueness of things, especially in our old, overdeveloped age of fiction, it is difficult to appear at the first moment, you have to wait patiently It unfolds itself, when it really faces the crossroads and the choice, and when its specific details are rich and full; at the same time, you have to wait patiently for your eyes to adjust naturally, and it will know "yourself" What to see” separates all things to form a focus of gaze, and gradually adapts to the slight difference in brightness to see the difference.

Here, if possible, I would really like to take the experience of looking up at the starry sky at night as an example. The longer you look at it, the more stars will appear, and finally the entire Milky Way can be decomposed or reduced to stardust, just like ours. The eye has to stay there, waiting for the photons from the most distant stars to travel across space and project onto our retinas and so on.However, it is a pity that such a vivid and specific basic experience of life that everyone once had almost every night is no longer common and even extremely rare and expensive—the city has no story, and the city has no starry sky at all. Gone.

Therefore, the captors of these stories can no longer just sit and watch. The stories of the city are as slippery as escaped criminals. .Yes, the catcher of the story is not just an idler fully immersed in the city, he must also be a detective when the time is right. slope. The deeper and lonelier aspect is that the story, which has just begun to disappear among the crowd, escapes the public's sight, so it is impossible to survive in people's memory.What does it mean?This means that the story of the city has lost people's collective participation, and has lost the imagination of people's words and words. People no longer exaggerate it, modify it, polish it, transmit it, and it is equivalent to leaving the river of time. Among them, it is no longer possible to mature naturally.So it is strictly true that there are no stories in the city, it is not a story, it is just a social event of life and death, and then it is just the fate of the individual.We know that stories are also a gentle and comfortable form of memory. If individual life experiences are not compiled into stories, they have no power to go far in space and time, and they can't go anywhere. They can only enter into the Forgotten cemetery.

Therefore, we know that the lamentation of the city without stories usually comes from novel writers, and a large part of the meaning is rather a professional complaint, telling us loudly how difficult it is to write novels today.The proportion of the picker in the identity of the writer keeps decreasing or even disappears completely, there are no ready-made stories to dictate and record, and the importance of the eyes and ears of the writer gradually gives way to the heart and brain; he loses the support of the social collective , can only rely on one's own strength to track, edit, imagine and create, so Benjamin said that modern novels make writing the loneliest industry, telling incomparable incomprehensible stories. The incomparable mentioned here mainly refers to the isolation from the collective and universal life experience and its care.A lonely writer, like a person living alone, lacks common sense and constantly corrects and pulls, easily loses the sense of reality, including the sense of time and space, and is easy to mutter to himself, and it is easy to have hallucinations in the heart, and even a ray of Enter the dark and mysterious world like a soul. In his later years, Goethe suggested to young poets to remember to mark the date after writing each poem, saying that it can be used as a diary at the same time. This old man’s advice is actually far more wise than it seems to have been passed down. Be deep.Young poets tend to have a kind of arrogance, not necessarily for themselves, but for the sanctification of poetry as a thing and the identity of a poet. They think that when a poem is written, it should escape the grasp of time and its wear and tear, This is a temptation to the so-called eternal immortality; but the old poet hopes to keep them in the stream of time, so that each poem retains the past from which it came, and its glorious completion or temporarily frozen state at this moment. , and its unpredictable future.It may not be modified, but the meaning is still flowing and changing, and at different times different angles and colors of sunlight are projected to show different edges and shadows.The endowment of time perspective makes each poem unfinished, so that it will not stop growing, and also allows the writer himself and our readers to have a more dense and equal dialogue with it. This is a collection of short stories by Matthew Scudder (should it be called detective stories or homicide books?).Generally speaking, because the short story is not completed in one go, but the writer has restarted it again and again in different days, under different thoughts, and with different touches and cares of the current reality, so it is not so great and intimidating. At the same time, relatively richer and clearer space-time clues remain relatively——with the help of old Goethe, we might as well regard it as Matthew Scudder’s diary, intermittent, unaccustomed, and recalled Just made up the diary. Although it does not clearly write down the year, month and day of writing as Goethe said.But if we don't need the precision of scientific data below the decimal point, we normal people can be almost the same, then it is not difficult.Because Matthew Scudder, like you and me, has plenty of beacons of time in his life to refer to (and don’t we all remember the past?), such as his futile tithes and tithes at church. Candles, for example, his relationship with Elaine Madai, for example, the more hidden and more qualitative, the changes in Scudder's mind and even the fine-tuning of his viewing angle of the world and his life philosophy (like he can't remember The little girl who was accidentally killed by his stray bullet), for example, noticing that he entered the store to drink alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages and so on.Even more experienced or crazier people will find the vague and uneven footprints of time in those specific things that are not so big, not so important and not so active, a person's name, a store name, a number, a piece of clothing, a sentence words, an action, a gesture, an expression, and so on.It won't be extra drudgery for readers especially of speculative fiction, and I'm sure it's fun, fun to solve puzzles, and fun to actually swim in the stream of time. In addition, in the collection of short stories, apart from the time when each individual article is completed individually, there is another very meaningful time, that is when they are assembled into a book.When they are connected in series, another kind of tapestry-like image will appear, subtly changing the lines, shapes and meanings of a single article. In this way, we can almost be sure that these short stories are generally compiled sequentially and follow the pace of time; and the writing time is not too early, basically a later product.As for the time when the book was completed, Scudder and Elaine Madai had become an old married couple. He no longer lived alone in a small hotel room, worrying that he would die for three days and a week before his body was found. His cold relationship with the world was over. softened up. That is to say, it has become a book of memories—recollections, addenda, tidying up, things that are not so big, not so important and not so active, but vividly remembered, those cases that have been closed or not completed. What was left over and what was left over, those things that could not be written into the closing report and so on.The crowd who only care about the murderer's catch has dispersed, but their life activities continue to move forward and cannot stop. Matthew Scudder cares about them lingeringly, and tells us those who are not at ease going home to sleep, Listen to the few people who linger at the deserted scene of life instead of the scene of the crime. Specifically, the earlier short stories, "A Candle for the Bagwife" (excellent one) and "First Light of Dawn" (remember which of his novels were the prototype? From What has changed from the short story to the long story?), it still has the appearance of a murder case, but either the murderer and his method of killing do not meet the standards, or the so-called righteous retribution does not meet the standards, or it is not even a murder, or rather The involuntary fate of people is submerged like a wave. "Merciful Angel of Death" is particularly weird, this kind of horror between medical care and cold-blooded murder, we have heard it from time to time in the newspapers, from the TV news, and there is no shortage of novels dealing with it, but Bullock went a different way Mysterious and unspeakable paths less traveled, so the picture of death before our eyes is completely changed. Therefore, the "Night and Music" we mentioned earlier, this strange short story (not even a story), is like a rest, a festival, a rest stop before a divergent road, and the river of time continues to flow forward The side alone out of the water does not move rocks. In the future, "Looking for David", through the vicissitudes of encountering the murderer himself many years later, from the perspective that the law does not catch and is not interested in knowing, but the two would rather be more concerned, look back at a long time ago, the bones of the dead have long since disappeared. "Fantasy Bubbles" and "Moment Confused" are pure memories of nothing, and the atmosphere is like Matthew Scudder and Elaine Madai. Yaoyao was brave and laughed again.Among them, "Dream Bubbles" is a stunt-perfect performance by Scudder, who has seldom been so majestic, when Elaine Maddie was still the sweet young whore and Scudder was still a cop and a father. A heroic knight reached out to help her eliminate a death case. The performer of "A Moment of Confusion" is not Scudder but his partner teacher Mahaffey, who took money from the police, which means that it happened earlier, and Scudder is still a rookie watching and learning , this is a tribute to the teacher in old Scudder's memory. Yeah, none that big, not that important, not that active, but I'm wondering if a big part of our sinking into nothingness, our sinking into despair is just our technical errors; our obsession with a certain size , we too wishful thinking it should be a certain way, we make ourselves rough, hard and edgy. "Invincible" is very interesting. Is it a Scudder novel?But Bullock insisted on putting it at the end of the book, referring to the previous article "Batman's Helper" in which he worked odd jobs to earn living expenses (it was originally written to write about the peddlers in "Shitamachi" in New York, with leftist intentions), So he was really right about Scudder. At that time, young unemployed people were poor and short-sighted, and they were too busy saving lives every day. What outrageous things could not be done?So we have to write erotic novels, and we have to do things that are easy to do. The big city of New York is a gnawing jungle, but it is also a rich place full of gaps. There is only a thin line between freedom and corruption, or even this line. no is it? But are we really sure this is the young Scudder?Or that dark-skinned street kid, Ajie?Or was it Keller, the New York killer who really made a living by killing?