Chapter 36 "Killer List" - Elephants heading for Mount Kilimanjaro

Kafka's begins with a normal person waking up and transforming into a gigantic worm, Nabokov reminds us that we also try to draw it, not as a flat cockroach, but as a bulging beetle, and not Not finding a pair of wings, the whole world turned into a nightmare and became weird, a "black and white story" in broad daylight.But we have to pay attention, the chemical change that caused such a nightmare, in fact, there is only one change, that is, the protagonist Gregory Samsa, the ordinary little salesman, has become a bug, and everything else remains completely unchanged. Drop operation as usual.His parents, his sister, his housemaids, everyone didn't scream, rush out, or shoot him, they still knew he was Gregory, it was more like he was infected with some kind of shame Treat him like a strange disease or something shameful, for example, his father once threw an apple at him in order to drive him back to the room instead of the living room, one of the apples was embedded in his worm body and rotted ; and Gregory himself "still belongs to the imagination of the human mind and acts with the body of an insect", he learned how to turn over, how to get out of bed, how to use his new feet, new body and new physiological instincts and needs living.

Kafka is really extremely calm, so cold that he is cold and even nothingness.This kind of coldness or nothingness is more for oneself than for others——No matter how far or how different the novel writer is to the characters he writes and the characters he creates, no matter how far or how different he is from himself, unless he originally set it to be To attack someone, to insinuate someone, or else, strangely, there is always some element of self-examination and self-punishment, and so there is often a certain courage involved in such callous nothingness. We often say "perspective change", but it really allows us to see what a real perspective change is.It's even been a living experiment, everything is tightly controlled, only one anomalous element is put in, which is the event of a person turning into a bug, and then watch and record what happens without blinking changes, every detail, every reading...

If everyone changes together, everyone becomes a bug, then there is no perspective change, that is called evolution, it is insect research, as we can easily see on the National Geographic channel. Today, Kafka has, ironically, become something of a colossal presence, or at least an insider fashion presence, the way tourists in Prague always stop by to buy a T-shirt with his name or a high-contrast likeness on it. Like the T-shirt, Haruki Murakami, a great Japanese writer, also got one to put on his clumsy novel that doesn’t have a trace of Kafka (if Kafka is still there, you can consider suing him for damage to reputation or aggravate the defamation).But we said, in today's age of writing that is accustomed to cranky thinking, is it difficult to imagine a person waking up and turning into a worm?In other words, which is unique and which is brave?Obviously, this is not the reason why top writers such as Nabokov, Milan Kundera and García Márquez are surprised or even admired.The difficulty is not that people become worms (so Kafka did not explain why this happened), but what happens after people become worms?Gregory flew alone and tangentially from the "normal" world, while the world remained where it was, and the gravitational force of this world acting on him thus changed organically and continuously, but still existed, still existed. Restraining him, trying to pull him back to this world of experience, perception, and ordinary people from time to time.The original balance and stability are destroyed, and for the first time, we perceive that everything in front of us is moving, and we realize that this is moving, and from its movement (not a drastic change, but antagonism, plus Kafka's as if play it in slow motion) at the same time perceive the existence of the two forces of disengagement and pull and the convulsions of their interaction, and we also recognize the danger, because the so-called stable balance is only temporary, if not an illusion, and is fragile. of.We seemed to wake up from a deep sleep following Gregory, although we did not become a worm like him, our sobriety was dizzy, and double images appeared, as if the human eyes and the compound eyes of the worm were superimposed, so the real What is truly horrifying about the grotesque is not the presence of a "big beetle the size of a dog" but the way the world looks, or more correctly, a certain truth that emerges through that look.

As a result, the imaginary and hypothetical premise of why people become worms seems to be explainable, at least retroactively contemplative, not a scientific or biological genetic mutation, but a metaphor of human history and the basic situation of life . In the past, when the Soviet Union was still in existence, a certain book was banned in the name of the country, and the reason for the ban was "this book is too real"-this is really a wise but grandiose reason.Things that don’t really exist may scare people (why not? Doesn’t every sneeze scare people?), but they don’t constitute a terrifying and persistent nightmare, because hallucinations don’t last long as Borges said, The dew evaporates quickly, and the real sticks to you.Gods and Buddhas flying all over the sky will not be scary (mostly disgusting), unless you first make people believe it is true, and for those who believe, a ghost is enough.

Is this difficult to understand?In fact, it is as simple as hell, so what those clumsy writers who only pretend to be gods and ghosts are really lacking is not freedom and imagination, but ignorance of real things.They can also write about a person waking up and turning into a bug, but then they don't know what to do, so they have to repeatedly increase the dose, more people become bugs or people turn into uglier things, etc., with increased doses. In the words of Cía Márquez, it is not imaginary, but ugly. What if a person wakes up and finds himself a professional killer? Years later, when Borges wrote the preface to the new edition of his first collection of poems in his youth, he said apologetically that the young poet embraced "the evening, the country and the sadness", and now he likes His favorite is "Morning, City and Tranquility".

There is a kind of ease in old age, which is a state of freedom, a state of being relieved of responsibility.The responsibilities mentioned here are not just social. When you retire at the age of 60 or 65, you have paid taxes for decades or raised your children and grandchildren. Now you can turn around and ask the country or your children and grandchildren to support you and take care of you. .What we want to point out in particular is the biological responsibility, the responsibility of species evolution and survival, whether this responsibility is the order of some life instinct, or some kind of endocrine and glandular restriction, which drives you to be desperate and not afraid of being ugly. There are various obligations that have to be fulfilled on the ground, even contrary to your reason, aesthetic upbringing or self-hope, among which the heaviest and always more or less like a moth to the fire is the matter of passing on the seed.Old age means that this part of the evolutionary mechanism has let you go, and you are a free person in it.When you walk on the street, your eyes no longer need to look for prey and only see a few people of the opposite sex. You have the opportunity to see all kinds of people leisurely, with a distracted focus and no purpose of action. You can see that the world is more complete and more Meticulous appearance; your brain also has a large remaining space, you don’t have to toss and turn always thinking about the layout of all kinds of beautiful traps, now you have enough time to think about many things and people, including the forgotten ones that have been shelved in the past, Even when dreaming, there are more themes.After the high fever is gone, the mind will be clear; the tunnel syndrome will be opened, and the vision will be broadened.

After all, old age is not a product of nature, but a result of civilization.There is basically no old age in living things, only death with responsibility, and humans haven't had it for a long time, so there was always a certain tension that lingers even today.Like China, it emerged around the Zhou Dynasty and became a very important topic of speculative discussion. It was even necessary to seek utilitarian reasons for its existence, not just based on morality and humanistic tolerance. For example, "Three Rites "There are many places in it that emphasize the rich life experience and wise speech of the elderly, which is enough to serve as a national encyclopedia-like consultant. Therefore, our memory images and intelligent images are always old people.This is true to a certain extent, because the complexity of the construction of human civilization has far surpassed that of nature, which not only requires longer learning time, but also requires a wider and freer vision; that is to say, the reason why human civilization has become Civilization is actually the transcendence of a certain direct purpose of life and the corresponding utilitarian actions, so civilization needs idlers, even Marx said so, and old people are the idlers who take it for granted and have even liberated the biological reproduction mechanism.

I recently read Faulkner's novel "August Light", and I especially noticed that Pastor Hightower said to himself in the novel: "There are many things in the sky and the earth besides the truth." Especially this There is a strong sense of old age in the sentence.The construction of human civilization does not lie in the truth (whether there is such a good thing, we are still not sure), but in that "there are many things".Such an idea is difficult for young people to swallow. It’s easy to feel a certain tension in the past two Keller Killer books.We (in fact, more or less including the writer Bullock himself) walked down the thinking of Matthew Scudder, only to find that he became the killer Keller. Is this a Kafka-like dream of his?Therefore, something about Scudder during the day is always left in Keller’s dreams at night, and the most acute of them is probably the moral foundation problem that sticks to his day-to-day work——Scudder, and then No matter how soft, no matter how complicated, no matter how much you hear and doubt, no matter how you evaporate the prosecution of the judicial work into a simple sense of balance of life itself (Scudder has always had a certain religious feeling), after all, is a man of justice as a vocation; Keller the Killer is on the other side.But he is obviously not another person who is completely rebellious or irrelevant, for example, like the "crow" in Green's "A Gun for Sale" with a harelip on his face and a large piece of unmelting ice in his heart.As the dream of Matthew Scudder, the thoughts related to justice are largely preserved, which makes Keller have the idea of ​​retirement in his heart from the first book in which he appeared to kill people. , This is justice's relentless pursuit of him. He can only hide and try to delay the time, including the reason for delaying the retirement fund.Other writers who write about murder as a profession, especially the new generation, may be able to ignore or not realize such a moral dilemma at all, but it is not easy for Bullock. He is what Borges said, how can people not be Humanist.

Apart from truth, there are many things between heaven and earth, and besides justice, there are many things between heaven and earth—the ultimate significance of such trembling words depends on the speaker's tone, expression, and the atmosphere of the scene when he speaks, as well as What the speaker is going to do next, such as poetry exists between the lines and in the turning point of stopping and breathing.Basically, it affirms the oversimplification and extreme difficulty of truth (or justice) at the same time. As for whether people should belittle it and abandon it, or endure it and be tortured by it more deviously and for a long time, there are two divergent paths in the woods.

"No one knows his name, and each of us is doomed." These are the two lines in the famous aria "Nessun Dorma" from "Turandot" that began to soar. Recently, because of a British mobile phone promotion With miraculously tender voices sung again, this immortal song, and poems so soulful, once again keep us up at night. In the last book of killers, death, together with justice (in this series, the two are intertwined in a peculiar way) was interrupted, a successful ruse by Keller, using stamp collecting, He arranged this childish and unfinished business as a time maze, letting death and justice get lost in the obstacles, shaking his head and sighing; and in this book of killers, the sense of time has completely changed , like some kind of trophy.During this borrowed time, his tone of voice eased and slowed down, and people no longer wandered like ghosts and shadows and perched on vehicles, as if for the first time he could safely walk in broad daylight and feel the sun and the whole world. Changes in world temperature.Where in the past he had to keep himself ignorant, preferably squashed into a thin two-inch mug shot of his prey, now he could stare at them, watch them, study them.

Infinity is most likely not just an imaginary concept (any number N is followed by a number N+1), Borges said, it is most likely a trick of people.Moreover, infinity is not only open, infinitely far away, beyond human ability to keep up, but also closed, divided, and completed in a world with boundaries.Therefore, Borges likes to talk about the ancient Greek trick story that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise, which everyone has heard: When Achilles ran to the point A where the tortoise was originally located, the slow but non-stop tortoise It has advanced to point B, so the infinitesimal division of CDEFG continues.This seems to make the so-called immortality possible and even practicable in a human life with boundaries and ends. The endless labyrinth in this finite world is also an unwaking nightmare for Kafka; but for the soft-hearted Bullock, it is transformed into a fairy tale. No way, this sometimes has to be the choice of the writer. The choice and the loss mean the impossibility of perfection. In the old and new testaments of the Bible, such as the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, we can see similar choices and differences. Abandon.The Old Testament is a nightmare, while the New Testament is a fairy tale. Those who preach the gospel must give up some new facts, must conceal a considerable part of the truth, and must make everything simpler, including themselves. Telling it with fables, metaphors, and hypothetical stories that are not so accurate is an explanation that simplifies the difficulty, but it is more or less the speaker's own way of noting memory, with a little sense of grievance and melancholy.Because of this, good news is always deceived with benevolent intentions, and it will definitely be exposed in the future. Therefore, the gospel must be updated every now and then. It is just information, not the truth. The cessation of time and the disappearance of time, in this new book of killers, are also shown in its writing style - in the past, it was Keller himself who was responsible for carrying time, and he vertically arranged each The murder stories scattered like beads run through, and it is not these victims who are thrown away after killing that change (change is the product of time, or vice versa), but Keller himself; Then there is the sequence, showing a flat arrangement.In the language of literary style, it is like a collection of short stories, which can be negotiated and exchanged. The form of a novel has content and meaning, and of course it is not just a matter of the number of words.A long novel, no matter how loose its structure, is still bound by this structure. As Hume tried to ask, whether the order of things is its causality, so it will still exclude the trivial and so-called irrelevant things. Go out; there are many finer and brighter and more diverse things in life, such as a certain thought of a person, a glimpse of the eye, or a dream that suddenly wakes up. Imagine that many great novelists actually spend a lot of precious time and energy on how to "stuff" these real and beautiful feelings into the troubles of novels).This is a great revelation given to us by Chekhov's novels. Every story starts afresh and has pre-existing meaning, regardless of the short stories like stamp albums. In the history of novels, their value has been underestimated for a long time.Of course, this may be related to the basic way people understand the world and themselves. As Levi-Strauss said, we always try to grasp the whole at a glance first, and then we are attracted by the details one by one. , into the hierarchy.In fact, starting around the second half of the twentieth century (inconsistencies in various places), the good, subtle, and vigorous and discovering novels are mostly short stories, and the long novels show bad signs of passivation, and gradually tend to care less about repetition and even Popular, popular novels that welcome repetition. This book follows the author's self-awareness path rather than the production path of popular novels. After the "explaining" of the first two books, it no longer looks like a thrilling, black, jackal doomsday-style professional murderer story Rather, it is more like reading Zhang Beihai or Shu Guozhi's human articles, with anecdotes, historical names, knowledge, and more importantly, the writer's accurate appreciation and thus the expert leading ability of "stretching fingers" All these knowledge anecdotes and the gradual distance from the hardened and unfamiliar world are restored to life experience and called back into our lives. This is not only the popular enlightenment of the wise world, but also the so-so naturalization of the common sense world, acting as a bridge or a ferryman. cross-strait connectivity.In the book, we all see baseball, horse racing, golf or house sales, NBA, pet raising and the social conflicts that occur every day. Each of them looks like an independent cave. This is not the so-called "plot" in the structural sense of the novel, so the order what is the relationship?The order can be arranged by chance. We have long known that Bullock himself is a person who reads more, remembers more and thinks more, and lives in New York, a moving city with a lot of knowledge.Fiction writers often have a trouble, that is, the professional needs of writing development are often faster than the substantive development of his life experience, and here there is an embarrassing trap, which is what Nabokov called "pretending to be an expert" ; Then, there is the next problem, that is, each industry and each kind of knowledge has its own logic and norms, and its own rules of the game, which to a considerable extent determine the appearance, thinking and actions of people in it. way, it often does not meet the dramatic requirements of novel writing, which is another trap, the more obsessed with dramatic plots, the easier it is to fall into novels that like to create climaxes, so that baseball players are not like baseball players. Apart from the pain, he is just an empty-headed idiot Yun Yun.This trap is full of popular writers and their fake people and stories, and there are also many master writers and their masterpieces mixed in. For example, Nabokov pointed out that Dostoevsky is also among them. Wait, Nabokov can't stand his overly sensitive murderers and philosophical prostitutes. In the knowledge caves here, there are some that I am still familiar with, and some that I am completely unfamiliar with.The former, for example, major league baseball or NBA, I can fully assert that Keller (and Bullock) is indeed a knowledgeable and qualified fan, he has not changed the appearance of MLB and NBA, he has not made mistakes, and the plot of the novel and even Keller The art of murder fits precisely into its crevices, and from this, I dare to infer, that the same must be true of those I am not familiar with, such as horse racing and golf. In fact, the reader's professional knowledge is not absolutely necessary, because reality has a shape, a certain texture, a certain rough edge, certain edges and cracks that De Quincey said, and so on. Readers of novels with a little brain and eyes can generally recognize it when it appears. A person had a dream freely, and woke up to find that he was a killer who lived by taking people's lives, but the whole world was still what it was, and it was still moving forward at its original pace. Some words are not easy to say clearly, beyond the limited ability of the speaker, language and writing are inherently flawed, it can never reproduce the integrity of things densely and without omission, and cannot change itself as a mere symbol. Therefore, it is only indicative and even metaphorical after all. The gaps in this gap depend on the careful goodwill of the speaker and the listener, so Calvino draws it as a fragile suspension bridge in the air. Ballast vibration.Therefore, there is no such thing as debate, proof, and persuasion in the strictest sense (Emerson said: "Argument convinces no one."), these are just demonstrations and explanations with dramatic gestures, tone and atmosphere. It is nothing more than enlightenment, and it can only speak to those who have basic benevolence and aspirations.A person who makes up his mind not to believe and what kind of person he is determined to become is almost unstoppable in the final analysis, at least humanly unstoppable. Fiction writing (and not just fiction writing) requires complete freedom, which is both fact and solemn and unremitting belief. Words that have become easy to say today have inevitably lost some of their dignity and become a bit Frivolous, and a little lazy.However, in the same way, apart from the free world, there are many things, including the inevitability of things everywhere. Umberto Eco, the devil who is most willing to subvert and ridicule, and has to turn over everything before he is willing to take a closer look. When I was invited to give a speech at the library of Alexandria, a symbolic place for the collection of human intelligence, I tried to point this out to us. "God walked here—" Eco quotes Hugo's historical epilogue, after Hugo recounts and carefully examines every accidental, almost erratic, battle-related aspect of the Battle of Waterloo It was written solemnly and helplessly as if standing on the old battlefield that has become a hard and difficult fact in history; the God Hugo said is the God in the "Bible Old Testament", the one who likes to refute human actions and makes all efforts instantly turn into God of dust.Eco does not necessarily insist that we agree with Hugo's conclusion on this matter. What he originally wanted to point out was the novelist's serious thinking towards facts and inevitability; but from this, we also feel that the so-called inevitability has a How many possible levels isn't it?Necessity flickers between "this fact is true" and "this fact is completely inevitable", and we can't help but wonder, what if God hadn't walked here?What if he had a change of heart?Has he ever had such a criminal record?I believe Eco wants us to see this too.Freedom is not always about playing, undoing and re-doing, though it may favor this mask, masking the truth that it is more often sweaty and hard-working. Perhaps the heavier and more unalterable necessity for us is the matter of death.But there is a clear fact that in the history of human literature, death is a subject that is far more refined, thought over and imagined than love. Forty is unsustainable, unlike the endless variety of death, the dream of death lasts longer.Faulkner is an over-romantic person who is still in love in his life until he is sixty years old, but these things that consume his time, thoughts and real economic costs cannot enter his novels. He is not a trivial man. , What happened to know what must try to turn it into a novel to tell the people?Rather, he wrote about the death of generations in the southern land of the United States that flourished and withered like seasons, and the ghosts that lingered after death like vines.The most perfect work in his life, like Hemingway, is the book "As I Lay Dying". In fact, dying happened before the novel started, so it is just a memory and last words. "I" is a dead wife and mother. A group of strange-looking family members escorted her coffin back to her hometown for burial, and the lost journey of the Odyssey began from then on.Here is a passage from Borges, from the preface he wrote to an unknown book in Argentina called The Name of Death: Infinity. Maria Estelle Basque felt deeply the central mystery of death, and each of her stories is an illustration of a certain way." Dialogue in novels is both the easiest and the most difficult to write. García Márquez only blames the reason on the fact that the description in Spanish is not suitable for spoken language, and it is always strangely false and exaggerated in spoken language, but this is actually It's not a single problem with Spanish, is it?Bullock likes long conversations, perhaps because of the unique factor of New York, this city with all kinds of strange caves, in our impression of the hurried modern life, there is a place to block The closed "indoor" of time, such as the concave river beach on the bank of a rushing river, has nothing to do, and the long nights do not want to do anything, compared to the country life where people leisurely greet each other, talk about the weather, and check on each other's family well-being.Here, the language expands horizontally and sooner or later it is inevitable to go straight to the depths. People have to have imagination and have to resort to various kinds of knowledge to fill in the gaps and get rid of depression.In the movie, the dialogue between the killer Keller and the death agent Taoer has a kind of calmness and slowness, which is the disappearance of all the tension of sex, like Matthew Scudder or the thief Luo who loves all over the world. Dembar always has it.Milan Kundera told us the mathematical paradox of this time from another angle. When people get old, the closer they are to death and the closer they reach the end, the longer the time will be.Death may have been decent and leisurely, as long as the living don't interfere too much with it and invade it, and let it go at its own pace. Like an old elephant walking slowly into the forest of Mount Kilimanjaro.