Chapter 38 Liar's Game - There Was a Butterfly Named Lawrence Block

This is the legendary, Lawrence Bullock's first book, published in 1961, a butterfly named Lawrence Bullock somewhere on the North American continent, patted him gently to break out of the cocoon The wings imperceptibly alter the air current a little bit. Fifty years later, we, who are used to the old Matthew Scudder in New York, have to shake off his deep-rooted existence in our hearts first, and have to remind ourselves from time to time during the reading process that this is not Scudder. , this is another young man named Joe Marlin or whatever else we would have expected him to react as Scudder would, to say what Scudder would say, to lay out Scudder with aplomb and worldliness. The ultimate German trick and ending.It's a bit like what you're used to seeing in Dr. Indiana Jones' Raiders of the Lost Ark series, when Harrison Ford went to play an ordinary doctor in Polanski's "Frightful Story", and got into an airport suitcase by mistake. In a transnational conspiracy, when your wife is kidnapped and you are in desperate situations and beaten up repeatedly, you can’t help but wait for the familiar soundtrack to cheer up. He will remember who he is, put on his western cowboy hat, and pull out his waist With whips and cracklings, these little gangsters and supporting roles who have no eyes and no eyes will be dealt with severely.

The man whose real name is Joe Marin in the book is a very young liar. Instead of giving us a detailed account of his family tree like the "I" in some novels, what he would rather tell us is: "Dry with a towel When I was in body, I saw myself in the mirror. The façade was still there—strong body, sloping shoulders, tanned skin, narrow waist, and muscles. I looked strong and rich. My luggage It was made of high-quality leather, the shoes were expensive, and the suit was expensive. I will miss it all." We can assume that he is only twenty-three years old. Of course it doesn't matter, but why twenty-three years old?Because this is exactly the age of the writer Bullock himself at the time.Anyone who is in the habit of reading novels will easily and usually quickly notice that the main character of the novel, especially the one whose eyes we have to rely on for narration and interpretation, through whose eyes we continue to see the world, always has a career. It is changing, and the appearance and figure will also change (but it is usually beautification, which is modified according to the "type" of the writer himself, and the writer is usually his own plastic surgeon), but it is strange that the age will remain plainly.The age of a person seems to be more difficult to pull out than anything else, unless age and time happen to be the theme of a certain novel, which happens to be the core curiosity of this novel, for example, Boer Hess, he was curious about his old age when he was young, and he was even more curious about what it would be like if the young self and the old self did not meet in the park, so he wrote it in the style of arithmetic problems in elementary school (actually It is also the core of the game theory) novels, looking back at the elderly and looking at the young on tiptoe are like two bicycles riding head-on, if a bee or fly flies back and forth between the two workshops, what will happen to the two bicycles? At what point did they meet?And how far did that bee or fly fly when they met?Theoretically, when we master the speed, time and space can calculate and reveal each other, so we also have the opportunity to perceive what time is, right?

Is it difficult to change the age number from twenty-three to say thirty-five?Of course, the difficulty is not the weightless number itself, but the heavy time of twelve years at a time. These twelve years are like rivers silting up on people's bodies. They are innumerable, hard to detect, and hard to gather and hold in one hand. all things.Here, time is not an artificial measurement or concept itself, but time is (or it can be said to be restored to) the change of life itself, which is a super huge and disorderly thing.If you become more handsome or engage in a more decent career, it may take you to another fork in your life, but at least there is still a way to follow, and there is still a certain distance of visibility in the future. To put it bluntly, many people are late at night Don't you often have this imagination and even plan it in the sleepless time, or on the eve of the weekly lottery draw?But jumping from twenty-three to thirty-five is a movement of the body of life, and even as Heraclitus said, it is impossible for you to reach out to the same river twice. The 20-year-old self is now two different people. This is not a fork in the road, but a completely unfamiliar world without navigation marks.

The persistence of age in the novel allows the writer to only move the perspective of life, but still maintain a stable, comfortable and familiar relationship with the current world, which is why you can distinguish which are continuous and which are mutated , know where your eyes should look.The more serious the novel, the more it needs this. Twenty-three years old, such a young Bullock novel, is it well written? It's actually pretty good.Our protagonist, Joe Marin, who assumes he is twenty-three years old, is set as a liar, also known as a gangster and villain. mind game.Such novels used to be more difficult to write, but now they are easier to write, so they are gradually increasing. Generally speaking, the basic difficulty is the ending, because of moral rewards. He relaxes on vacation, and usually "restores his humanity." When bad guys read novels, they also look forward to heroes, and look forward to the victory of good guys and evil will be rewarded.

The boundary between good and evil is now being questioned, ridiculed, and ridiculed, but God is merciful. Today, people have not completely given up on it, and even look forward to someone who can prove it, at least hope that someone can really convince us, right? But sometimes people can't wait for the ending to appear, and readers will die before spring like animals that can't survive too long a freezing winter. Prepare for the ending, cheer up the readers who are always on the verge of reading limit, give them the necessary warmth and comfort, and make the change of ending believable.

The real key is whether the villain is so bad that people can still like him to some extent, or at least admire him.Or, we can still catch a glimpse of a ray of light under his gloomy shell, a certain final persistence, a certain unalienable belief struggling in the soil of evil, and we can sigh and call him a noble villain; or, he is still pure The evil inside and outside is like the metaphor of the novelist Green's "Brighton Lollipop", this famous stick-shaped hard candy you can still buy in Brighton, England today, its appearance spirals The shaped pattern is not just the appearance, but the same pattern that you lick to the core and the innermost part.Such a pure gangster can still be bright, even so bad that it is dazzling. His light source does not come from morality, but from his unfortunate intelligence. Of course, intelligence is another kind of light, which may make the moral part appear darker and more gloomy. There is no light, but it still has the ability to pierce another part of darkness like a sharp blade, such as people's ignorance, people's stubbornness, people's exhaustion and loss of feeling, and it also pierces people's hypocrisy and so on.

It is said that the last sentence of the great poet Goethe, who died of old age, was "more light" - a novel must have light, and only when there is light can people see it. This is not only at the mental level, but even physical. ?Complete darkness is equal to nothingness, equal to non-existence. In the future, it may not be right to say that in the future, because we are looking backwards, and the protagonists of Bloch's novels, in a sense, will further analyze a liar and villain like Joe Marin in a spectral way.The private detective Scudder who was a policeman is closest to the side of justice, but he can't follow the rules; Tanner, who doesn't sleep, is a liar, but he has a choice of targets, so he becomes a savior instead; Mis-collisions always achieve justice due to self-rescue; the killer Keller is the worst, and usually does not have a story ending with moral comfort, but as we said, readers will still not hate him.

The most fundamental point of intersection of these characters is intelligence, which varies from soft to hard, and no one will be caught without a fight. At the age of 23, I personally think that the most difficult part is that some young novels are prone to and almost always make mistakes. At the age of 23, Bullock basically escaped unharmed.Obviously, Brock's mental age was quite a long way ahead of his physical age at that time, and it could be seen that there was an older soul hidden in his body. This may be quite bad and heavy in the reality of life, but it is a good thing. Basic traits of a novelist.

The most error-prone part of young novels, which is somewhat different from common sense, is that most people always think that young people may be sharp, and there may be partial sparkles, but it is not easy to be comprehensive and complete, and it is not easy to write novels with a consistent and beautiful structure, etc. , but this is not the case, because novel writing skills in a narrow sense are easy to learn and mature. If a writer starts early, he will probably know everything he should know before the age of thirty.This is a bit like what we say about mathematicians. Mathematics, which is purely rational and purely logical and causal, reaches its peak very quickly. Great mathematicians can construct structures with exquisite structures and seamless joints at a very young age. We look like super Things in the maze, such as Gauss who is less than twenty-five years old.It is even said that if you do not have the ability to produce such results before the age of thirty, you can almost announce the end of your great mathematics life in advance, and you can only go back to being a teacher and a professor.There is no such thing as wise old age in the mathematical world. If a mathematician's old age does not retreat to the academy, he can only go to philosophy, to things that are difficult to calculate, such as Leibniz or Russell.

The simple skills that do not involve the details of the content are actually simple compared to a person's diligent life, so we can understand and believe that what Picasso said is by no means bragging. He said that he could talk to Raphael at the age of 13. I draw just as well, purely technically.At the age of thirteen, he has mastered the skills, and he will continue to paint for more than sixty years in the future. So just the other way around, the place where young novels make mistakes is not in the structural framework that can be calculated and constructed only by relying on intelligence; it lies in the specific content and details that fill and support this framework. We can call this part for short. It is scattered, chaotic, and disorderly. You cannot learn it quickly. You can only perceive it, feel it, and accumulate it bit by bit in the scene of life. This is extremely time-consuming. , but also consumes the writer's stamina, will and sympathy.

You want to write about a great painter, but his aesthetic quality is not even ABC. You can tell that a painting with painstaking efforts is a disaster, which is totally untenable; But instead it's a hypocritical, jerky upstart you just want to punch; you're going to write about a wise man, but what we actually see is an idiot, and we have to put up with page after page of gibberish .In this case, bravery is cruelty, kindness is cowardice, old people are made up by teenagers, mavericks are street ruffians, and progressive intellectuals are actually hooligans—the writer knows what to set up. characters, but can't write them out.You’ve seen the great ones, right? If the puzzles that hide the secrets of the world’s history are just anagrams and mirror images on the level of newspaper weekend anagrams, then to be honest, the descendants of Jesus are as numerous as the stars in the sky. Sand is not enough to die, is it? Therefore, we see the disintegration of the structure of young novels, which cannot be turned around and cannot convince us. Usually the problem is not the structure itself, but because the people in the novel have wrong reactions and wrong writing.The characters in the novel are struggling between their own rationality and the plot links designed by the writer, ordering him to go east but not west, and the winner is always the writer who is eager to complete the work and shows God-like authority, so in the book Characters can only give in, say lines that they shouldn’t, can’t say, or can’t say, and suddenly do things that even a lunatic would not do—writing about a lunatic and scribbling are two completely different things, A madman has his own logic, his own weird coding of his world, his own unique trajectory of thinking and behavior, he just happens to be different from us.The lunatics in the novel must be crazy and orderly at every step, even more rigorous and stubborn than "normal people", like the demon perfumer Grenouille in the novel, or the most dazzling lunatic in the history of novels, Don Quixote of La Mancha . The young, twenty-three-year-old Brock relies half on the privilege of genre novels to flatten and typicalize the characters in the book to avoid the pressure of insufficient understanding of human complexity; but for the other half, human Even if the reaction is not profound, it is basically accurate and OK.It is obvious that young writers who are positioned as young writers are already on the road ahead of time. This is a preview. Of course, we already know the answer. It is a complete hindsight prediction-the content texture will be completely different in the future, the depth and accuracy of characters will be completely different, and the success or failure of novels beyond pure reasoning The specs of the Matthew Scudder novel emerge. Seriously, to be a liar (in fact, to be a prophet), you have to have the generosity of fate to help you, and you have to be born in a country with a large size and enough land depth, because the industry of a liar is cultivated by fire Those who have squeezed out the nutrients of the land will have to migrate away.We noticed that the young Joe Marin in the book finally entered New York, hiding like a leaf in the woods, like a drop of water falling into a big river, and landed in the most populous and, of course, liar in 1961. Also the most century city. In 1961, wait another two years, and in 211 (hopefully, the economic boom will also recover by then), we can stately say that this happened half a century ago.What was the world like half a century ago?From the point of view of us living people, the past is half a ghost. Today, more than half of the population on the earth did not exist at that time, not even the sperm and eggs of the previous human beings. In a certain void, there is nothing. That is to say, the world has almost been replaced once, like the "children who exchanged children" for the Scottish folktale that Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe loved and used as his title, the world seems to be all right and sleepy as nothing Unaware of the mother, the population is increasing to the point where it is annoying and frightening, but in fact, billions of people have disappeared, stolen by death, together with what they once thought, felt, and cared about Something to fight for by all means. Of course it won't be different, will it?We who are alive today, and far more than half of us will not have another century and a half before the next visit of Halley's Comet, and we will be exchanged and stolen, together with our thoughts, thoughts and feelings here and now Do whatever you want to fight for what you want to defend. But rest assured, all this will continue in a smooth and unwavering manner as before. Time is a huge old river that has flattened the land it flows through.The ancient Greeks realized very early that the river water here was a good medicine, and people who drank it would forget their sorrows and everything else. Dante correctly recognized the origin of this great river. The explorer draws us the complete picture of the great river of time, starting from where it drips, trickles, and cannot float the wine glass-the origin of this great river is the huge statue of old man time, and the water flows from his The cracks in the body seep out, and it has a long history, becoming the river of forgetfulness that enters the underworld. People are afraid of sadness, they would rather forget, and try to forget the sad, unpleasant, and regretful things, including the first book he wrote when he was young. Borges is like this. The readers of the first collection of poems should apologize to them, and exchange with them the works that they are more satisfied with in the future, in order to destroy it; but in fact, we are in the river of time, basically we do not lack forgetting, we actually do Realizing that sooner or later we will forget, so we will swear by people close to us, we will write things down, we will want to write novels, we will feel lonely because we remember recognizing something, the history of something .Memory is a matter of mixed sorrow and joy, even if the element of sadness accounts for more, what does it matter? To put it bluntly, we will not be sad sooner or later, so, can we also change our minds and try to cherish it and get along with it?Trying to remember something lost in time? Including a certain novel, a certain story fifty years ago, a certain little butterfly that patted its wings lightly.