Chapter 32 The Very Thai Adventures of Tanner - The Hero That Gets Away

Quite unexpectedly, at the end of the novel, when we were still laughing, we discovered that there was an afterword, which was written by Bullock himself of course—Block never spoke much outside of novels, let alone Explaining his own novel (everyone who saw him during the Taipei International Book Fair last year was a witness to this incident), what is even more strange is the time, the novel in 1967, the postscript of two years, a total of thirty-three years , after most of my life.There was a cool breeze in the sky, what made Brock suddenly think of it, and he changed his habit to say it?

As expected, this postscript does not mean that there are any specific things to explain to specific people to thank, or that the new edition of an old book is a polite greeting to a new generation of readers, and so on.Bullock almost tells another story, no murder, no secret mission, although the location is somewhat sensitive Ireland, this is just a backpack trip he used to escape, it is really closer to the end of the book The little Mickey Ballou's conversion trip.The only visible connection between this memory and the comical Ivan Tanner novel is time, like two separate lines intersecting at the point at which, at the end of the journey, he opens the novel and throws Tanner into The Indochina Peninsula, which is far away and has never been visited at all, was locked in a hanging bamboo cage far more embarrassingly than his writer from the very beginning.

People may think of something for no reason (of course, those psychologists who are suspicious and seriously interpretive may not believe it), but people probably will not write this thought or memory for no reason at the back of the book and write it in black and white. Printed out, unless he vaguely sensed that there was some echo, an indescribable connection—is it more correct to say that? In any case, the memory of this event after thirty-three years has at least played a role, that is, it also brings our minds back to the more specific year 1967 when we read the novel.Think about it, what time is 1967?The Vietnam War was fighting, blacks were fighting for civil rights, and young people were restlessly carrying their backpacks and walking on the endless long road and the vast world - not only Bullock himself was still young at that time, in 1967 It was most likely the last youthful time in the human world in the twentieth century, with almost all the traits and vices of youth, including undiminished ideals, justice, and enthusiasm, as well as rage, wandering, destruction, and not knowing how to take Boredom about yourself and how to make the world a good place, and of course, music, sex, drugs, and sudden death.

Back in 1967, at least our Tanner novel, which was as empty as a fairy tale and as clear as if there was no time to interfere, had undergone some changes. I don’t know if it was our illusion. It felt cruel, not just human death. It is more than the previous three books, and it is real, like the four hanging heads, like the old gentleman who sang the Marseillaise and lived in a poor mountainous area all his life but knew and loved Paris like the palm of his hand. There is also the statement of the local Swiss smuggler Abel Wodos, which sounds less sophisticated sarcasm and more youthful anger: "The question is, so what is the reason for kidnapping this group of people?" Maybe they stole jewelry, so the kidnappers robbed people and goods: It's just that this kind of theory is too bizarre. Could it be that they were kidnapped for political reasons? It's really hard to imagine. But then again, when it comes to Politics, nothing seems impossible. No matter how unimaginable the development is, you have to be on guard. If you are doing business, you are basically seeking profit. Basically, there is some reason for it; but politics... how can a lunatic make any sense? ? The situation must be too chaotic to be expected.” ——So now in Taiwan, why a wanted criminal is more credible than a leader is not only a question of personal integrity, but also a question of logic.

Bullock's departure to Ireland was due to writing and an affair; Ivan Tanner's departure to Indochina was due to the kidnapping of an African-American jazz band after performing in front of the Thai emperor and the theft of Thai royal jewels at the same time. The beautiful woman Tupansi from Senegal (that is, the home country of the football team that came to Taiwan to recruit prostitutes) in the group had a special relationship with Tanner-in 1967, everyone who was very still and moving was separated from each other. There are specific reasons that may be urgent or unavoidable, but if, for example, we stand on the moon or look at a satellite orbit, the visible image will be just people walking continuously one after another, just like that The title of the famous novel: .

There is a passage in Don Quixote where the valiant sad-faced knight of La Mancha and his loyal squire Sancho Panza have fought another just battle, or more correctly, another After a good beating, the two began to check their fallen teeth. This is different from the great knight predecessors of the past. Achilles, who had been fighting for ten years in the bloody battle of Troy, never had to worry about his teeth. So Homer didn't need to tell whether the Greek coalition forces had a dentist with a Red Cross armband accompanying them. The great director Fellini said it, obviously from the side of the storyteller and the creator. The most boring thing in the story is probably the kind of robot-like invincible hero who doesn’t (need) to know fear. .Because there is only one fixed relationship left between him and the world, and it is still the kind of relationship that can't be developed at all, and it doesn't have to wait for the listener to find out. Know what to do.Therefore, although it was said at the beginning that this was a story of an "angry hero", the storyteller had to find a way to prevent Achilles from taking part in the battle, otherwise the war that mobilized all the warriors in the world and the gods in the sky would never last ten years. It only takes one day; moreover, it seems that this great hero who never loses his teeth must die, otherwise Odysseus's delicate and brainy plan of massacring the city will be impossible, because the invulnerable Achilles only needs to step forward. Just walk straight into the city of Troy. If you have a tank, why do you need a Trojan horse?

In this way, we have at least figured out two things - first, Achilles' good armor was stolen by his friend (Brokeback Mountain friend?) and died in front of the real tragic hero Hector. The set in his hand is most likely just an ornament, some kind of famous brand clothing (from the hands of Hephaestus, the chief designer of ancient Greece).Because from a functional point of view, Achilles, who has been soaked in the water of the Styx, wearing it will only add bulk and hinder movement, right?If he didn't care about his appearance because of his vanity, he could be lighter in pajamas or simply naked, wouldn't he?Second, Achilles must therefore have left the door, some lethal weakness, or no one can get rid of him; that is to say, his wise fairy mother, full of vision, must also be careless, as any painter can do. The ABC mistakes that no apprentice would make (Thousands of years later in China, Fang Shiyu's mother did exactly the same thing, but her negligence was more beautiful, like a fallen leaf falling down), leaving us with "Ah The wonderful and immortal anecdote of "Karius' heel" has really become the official name of this tendon in each of us that any athlete knows in the future.

Borges tells the story for a long time, any literary trick will be exposed, but the trick of Achilles' heel will not take much time, and the listener will soon realize that this kind of hero with only one weakness is ultimately more powerful than any other. A person with weaknesses all over his body is vulnerable, so he must die impartially. This is called fate, and it has nothing to do with chance, otherwise it would be too easy to win the lottery. Here, what we want to say is that what is really meaningful is not the question of death or immortality. As Homer demonstrated, the storyteller can handle it and arrange it; what is really unavoidable is that you cannot pass A person like this looks at the world. A person who loses the sense of danger cannot discover new things. His eyes cannot have layers, and they cannot distinguish, let alone distinguish, the differences and particularities of things and people, so they cannot establish sympathy. , so in addition to being crude, it will also be cruel. The symbiotic relationship between the two is much closer than we imagined. Achilles is the crudest and cruelest one in the whole book.Moreover, his brain is largely idle, because there is no drive to open it, so he can only be ignorant and primitive, and even time has no meaning or function for him.

Pushing this up a little bit, it becomes a kind of theological problem-if there is a God, it is hard for us to imagine that he would be kind and loving. This is a matter of his attributes and location. , I don’t have time, and looking from a place far away in the clouds, Lao Tzu’s guess is probably closer to its real image. The world will be a flat, holistic existence, and everything will look the same. They are all dogs and grass. The key word that Fellini said was "fear", he said that fear is a delicate feeling, or more precisely, fear makes people feel refined. Our Ivan Tanner is a person who is afraid of the situation, often frightened half to death, and even full of complaints because of this, as if he was hung in a bamboo cage and called out names one by one: "I cursed Tupansi's father for why he returned home. When I went to Africa, I hated myself even more. Why did I know this person? I hated Tupansi who moved from Nairobi to New York, and from New York to Thailand. I’m not a thief, but the one I criticize the most and the one I can’t forgive is myself: why am I always being fooled, why am I always being a fool?”

It is precisely because he is afraid of death that Tanner draws materials from the real place, the real thing and the real person again and again (this time it is a Thai virgin who wants to be crazy about women), and comes up with so many ingenious ideas of getting away. Let us see, from Tupansi's innocent father, to His Majesty the Emperor of Thailand just because of his good musical literacy, to himself squatting in a cage naked, the world is so absurdly and so urgently connected once again; if Tan Na Thinking about it more, we believe that this connection will continue to expand like an amoeba in time and space (for example, the father of Tupansi’s father or the history of the founding of Thailand), so as to reach the level of thinking in philosophy and even theology, for example, that It is a repeated dialectic of Tolstoy's endless cause and effect and endless chance and chance.

It should not be difficult to notice or conclude that Ivan Tanner has one "main thing to do" as García Márquez said, and that is to "escape", a continuous, non-dwelling escape , occupying an estimated 90 percent of his life in the story—at the beginning of the story, he is always horrified and regretful to find himself inexplicably trapped in some closed and dangerous small space (prison, train carriage, Bamboo cage and so on), followed by trekking, escape travel from country to country, and finally, of course, the New York apartment where he lives alone and sleepless, which is his hometown of Qi Sejia, except that there is no one who weaves during the day , Penelope, which was dismantled at night, waited for him by the door, or, later on, he even had Penelope, and she was a real princess, from the former Lithuanian independent kingdom that was annexed by the Soviet Union, smart, beautiful, and chaste And solemn, but she is only seven years old. In other words, he was on the orders of James Bond, but he was living the life of Odysseus. Friends are met while fleeing, beds are laid while fleeing, children are made while fleeing, money is picked up while fleeing, justice is practiced while fleeing, hope is also exchanged, confirmed and survived while fleeing.The whole world is known again and again through escape, and emerges with content. In this way, Tanner's comfortable and safe New York apartment, where he can read books, learn various strange languages, and write reports for lucky college students, is actually close to death, as they say, "still kind of a graveyard where something happens"; or in the case of Tanner, a gifted man with a traumatized sleep center, his sleep, his necessary and self-healing rest—people have long since discovered that death and The cousin relationship under the similar appearance and sleep makes them exchange clothes like a beggar and a prince in "The Prince of Beggars".Sleep has become a small death that can be captured, recalled and contemplated, and thus acquired a part of the fear of death and deepened; on the contrary, death has become a great sleep, turning the terrible death into a rest after exhaustion, not only Whether it is necessary or desirable, we are comforted by it, and we can further hope that we will still wake up as we sleep every day, and there will be another new day, right?The one-way trajectory that does not turn back like a tangent of life becomes a cycle in a larger space and longer time, just like the path of a comet that we know later. This may also answer a public case in the history of literature—the two epic poems of Homer and the Odyssey, which were regarded as conjoined twins for a long time, are now gradually separated in the longer literary river. It seems that each has acquired its own unique appearance, and it also vaguely presents the superiority or at least the different time endurance.This seems a bit strange at first glance, but it contains more credible historical elements, but retreats from the reality of our life, and becomes a purer and immortal classic that is enshrined for people to appreciate and admire; it is absurd and full of ghosts and spirits The "Odyssey", which can do whatever you want, has a full sense of reality, and it has vivid explanatory power, enlightenment power and prophetic power to the real situation of each of our generations without retreating. What "Odyssey" leaves is not only the content, not just the single anecdote and metaphor that can be used inexhaustibly, but also its story format itself.Its storytelling method, frame and meaning finally become the prototype of human life, revealing a certain basic relationship between human beings and the world, and also revealing the very nature of how we view the world, enter the world, understand the world, and organize the world. basic style.In the history of mankind, there should never be any epic work that has been "applied" to writing continuously from generation to generation. Such a spectacle is possible, except by accident. Think of what Joyce directly named, which many even consider to be the greatest novel or one of the three best novels of the twentieth century; Each has their own minds and ghosts (and the daughter is really pregnant, yes), and the funeral procession is like being trapped by the real road and lost in the ghost path; there is also Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", Bullock Call it a wonderful book that "changed our entire generation" (By the way, don't you think Ivan Tanner has a cousin relationship with the Halton boy who is beaten every day in the book?), Three points form a plane. In fact, the three huge points we choose are the most direct and undisguised examples of the story style of "Odyssey", and they are all examples that were only released in the 20th century and are still steaming. , are examples of classic novels. If we further take the "running away", "escaping", "exile", "returning home", "drifting" and "hometown" in the story frame of "Odyssey" and let them rise like smoke all the way to the metaphysical conceptual heaven, this is also feasible. , and it is appropriate and helpful, you can certainly hear the moving voice that echoes them in almost any good novel (try to reread every novel from this perspective, and you are guaranteed to feel very good. You’ll see a lot of good stuff you’ve passed by, but now it’s all over the floor), and you quickly find yourself building a giant library of novels in the name of the Odyssey. Yes, Fellini is right, defeat is more delicate than victory, escape is more delicate than conquest, trek is more delicate than marching to the beat of a march, and Odysseus, who is wounded and scared to death, is far more delicate than Achilles, who is invulnerable Si is exquisite, the latter is just a straight-through one-way street suffering from tunnel syndrome, while the former seems to explode and fly in all directions. In fact, this is exactly what the Frenchman Raymond Aron said about Ivan Tanner’s exodus and homecoming in the 1960s (Aron’s statement is still one of the best interpretations I know personally) After 20 or 30 years, Aaron is like a person returning to the ruins to pick up relics. He thinks that Europeans and Americans have come to this special moment in history, which happens to be the moment when all great values ​​​​and beliefs collapse. The traditional religious and social value systems that supported the Western order like a rock have disintegrated, and even the various revolutionary ideas that have been claimed to replace them for two hundred years, including Marxism, are no longer simple and credible.It is indeed like an explosion, a big explosion of people's hearts. People escape from this core, and they have to find their goals again, to find a place to live and work for themselves, especially their souls (so it is both an escape and a return home), but greatness is no longer possible. Humble and unwilling, this effect is especially clear for the younger generation who still have sufficient energy, enthusiasm, sense of justice and moral yearning, and have a lot of time in their lives and have not yet tried it.This, Aron points out, then spills out into a "chain of sympathetic consciousnesses," randomly finding something to practice in a vast world as cold and vast as a ferocious sea, such as the emancipation of women, children, blacks, the poor, and farther away the first The people of the Three Worlds, or the more simple and vague so-called universal human rights claim, and the environmental protection movement that is not even human but suffers the same (animals, plants and even land).Of course, there are also people who spend their whole lives just looking for things, and die before they can practice anything. different from previous historical experience.Don’t go away because of the war, because the war only spreads in the distant Indochina Peninsula or at least Central and South America, so the war is not to drive away the power but to care about the target, isn’t that what Ivan Tanner is?Not because of famine and plague, because the people who left this time came from the most affluent society with the best sanitary conditions on the earth at that time, so hunger, like disease, is not a driving force but a specific care target. Isn’t Ivan Tanner just suffering Did you take several doses of vaccinations before you set off?There is no gold to dig. In fact, most of the people who pack their bags first and form the so-called "Freedom Summer" are young people from upper-middle-class families on the east coast, walking in the opposite direction to poverty, backwardness, and hostility. And the dangerous and unpredictable American South (the first stop is roughly Mississippi, where a group of people fell heartbreakingly, most of them died of murder by the Ku Klux Klan) or the Indochinese Peninsula in the south, Ivan Tanner Isn't he from New York and pays out of pocket every time he goes out?Except that the well-meaning Bullock always rewarded him with a large amount of remuneration with interest like a fairy tale afterwards, and comforted us novel readers by the way. Basically, this is a collective exodus that lacks a collective goal and a single collective route. Except for the most unreachable and ultimate, but also the most personal and most private moral call like the voice of wisdom in the heart, the journey on the road There are really not many things that people can safely follow without thinking.In comparison, being a hero in the past is really like role-playing. You made up your mind to sign up for the super luxury tour group of Troy Ten Years Three Thousand Six Hundred and Fifty Nights. Except for extremely violent physical activities, other parts are not really needed. Use, and therefore, you have nothing to expend or lose except toss this skin-like body, whether the result is death in battle (like Achilles) or even tragic defeat (like Hector) , you are still a hero; but this time people have to cook by themselves from the beginning, you have to find a role by yourself (Tanner did not try his best to avoid the arrangement of the "organization", this can be regarded as a metaphor), and then Find the target, find the path by yourself, and the various practical methods that only when people arrive at the scene do they really have clues.In other words, what you are betting on is not only the body, but also the mind that is more and more troublesome.The body is obedient and obeys orders, but the human heart is like a wild horse or an ape (so it is called the mind ape), especially when it loses the protection of a rock-like value system and cannot be firmly bound by faith or at least inertia. Well when it fixes it (and in fact these six people are rebelling and trying to escape against this), it's never enough to make up your mind once as tame it once.The human heart is wandering on the empty land without landmarks like a runaway, it will still think, turn, repeat, advance and retreat, doubt, be weak, and continue to be beaten and lured. Therefore, the probability of failure is not only magnified to It is close to inevitable, but there are still multiple states of failure. Depression, emptiness, and having sex are not the ultimate, and it may also be alienated into various unbearable appearances due to getting lost (starting from the original heart of human nature and using simple drug trafficking, robbery, etc.) , Kidnapping, and murder), or worse, it will betray, and stand on the side of the persecutors and plunderers in all its glory and wealth. Therefore, like Ivan Tanner, who can always break free from the abyss of body and mind, and everything is perfect and everyone is happy and gets a gift, we call it a fairy tale, or we really need a few Such a fairy tale. The heroic years of Troy had a collective clear outcome, the Greeks won the war, made Troy an archaeological treasure thousands of years later, took Helen back (the girl later lived well, in the Odyssey book) and began to dominate the world (Of course, what they called the world at that time was an exaggerated imagination and statement); and what collective and clear results were there in the vicissitudes of life without heroes in the 1960s?It is difficult to say specifically, but generally speaking, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the black civil rights movement with the most realistic and objective achievements. For this reason, he was awarded the Nobel Prize and was shot dead, becoming the most heroic person.But we know that the black civil rights movement was only an important part of the 1960s, and it was not enough to represent and explain the whole; moreover, the black civil rights movement was not so much a success as a progress, and there were still people who worked tirelessly in the 1970s and 1980s. Go on, until today, not like Troy can draw a full stop. In this way, it is not to make a boring article on the definition, but to give us a chance to return to the truth of the matter-let's just say it, today, especially when capitalism is sweeping the world, "few people are seriously opposed to capitalism" Looking back today, the most precious and historically significant aspect of this rebellious explosion and exodus in the 1960s is not that it explored every field, including human rights, environmental protection, and all kinds of people at the bottom of the fringes. How far we have come, first of all, lies in the discovery, revelation and practice of these "moral meaning" and "poetic" goals, as Aron said, as well as the consciousness and thinking behind each of these specific goals. The most difficult thing to survive under the rule of communism.Relatively speaking, the degree of social legislation that can be obtained at present is only its confirmation.What's more, once these marginal and heterogeneous worlds are discovered, it is difficult to pretend that they do not exist and bury them back (although capitalism is always trying to do such things), once the work starts, there will be people who will continue, and , once certain consciousness and thinking rise up in the human heart, it is expected to grow, transmit and infect enlightenment horizontally by analogy, like tenacious wild flowers and weeds.Today, we see people from all over the world seriously protesting before the G7 meeting, people continue to go to Africa to rescue medical treatment, paddle boats to protect whales in raging waves, plead for all kinds of suffering people, even the earth and air, etc. , may have different origins and current historical focus, but in each of these compassionate and angry songs, we can hear the familiar melody and beat of the six years. The storage of these goals and their consciousness and thinking cannot be in the so-called collective society outside the human heart, because society is just a structure, mechanism and network. It can erect monuments but cannot think, so these things can only be broken into pieces Hidden in the hearts of different people——Judging from today's historical results, the six years is not necessarily a special process of self-reflection, re-enlightenment, and re-understanding of the world. Therefore, a larger part of it is so private, So personal, so difficult to separate from the memory of a person's life alone. Use your body, such as soldiers returning from the Trojan expedition, will leave scars on the body, it is said that this is a medal, you can show it to strangers and brag all night, proving that you really caught up with the life and death battle; Emotion, of course, must leave a scar somewhere in the mind and emotion, but the difference is that it is not visible on the surface, and there is no way to show it proudly when you are drunk in a pub. What ever, it aches so very, very lonely. What have you actually done?You have lived in an age, smelled strange smells in the air, and glimpsed the world once unfolded in another form, and all these, like the songs of bards in that era, have gone with the wind. Is this the case, next time if Bullock has a chance to come to Taiwan again, we must remember to torture him, why did he dream of his youth in the middle of the night on a certain day at the junction of the second century?Why did he suddenly recount to us the story of his exodus to Ireland, out of the blue?