Chapter 7 foster is swinging

Exactly seventy years ago, EMFoster (1879-1970) delivered a series of special lectures on "Aspects of the Novel" at his alma mater, Cambridge University. The impression on people - far-reaching.It's the spring of 1997, and you're standing in any liberal arts college, not necessarily Cambridge, and you stop an ambitious young man who wants to do fiction theory and ask him for the must-have classics of his profession, if he doesn't This "Aspects of Novel" may be mentioned because he feels that the concepts and theories in this book are outdated, or because the academy, which aims to keep up with the dance steps of popular discourses, has completely forgotten Foster's theory.

In 1927, Forster, whose physical and creative life was at the peak, must have been able to foresee this fate of being ignored or forgotten, at least in the epilogue of "Aspects of the Novel", he humbly stated: He (and Novelist of any ability or position) has no right to "make certain estimates of the future of fiction", because "we have not allowed the past to be our stumbling block, and we have not been able to use the future as an instrument of profit." This kind of humility is probably only limited to being more tolerant of the "future".Forster's theory was never really favored by a canon worthy of sympathy or familiarity—say: Aristotle's Poetics. The urgency with which "Aspects of the Novel" must get rid of "Poetics" is really on the page, otherwise Forster would not have written in the fifth chapter on the plot: "Aristotle can really hide Withdrew, at least, from the field of fiction, and took with him his arguments about plot."

Forster can take advantage of the advantages given by time to ridicule Aristotle for "not reading many novels", "of course he has never seen modern novels", "the so-called inner activities are not to his taste at all", but, How far beyond time and space does Forster have on the plot of the novel? “We have to define plot,” Foster says. “Our definition of story is a narrative of events arranged in chronological order. A plot is also a narrative of events, but with an emphasis on causality.” The king dies, then the queen dies' is the story. 'The king dies, and the queen dies of grief' is the plot."

Forster did not "go beyond" Aristotle's discoveries in such accessible examples as "Kings and Queens"; nor did Aristotle need to read "enough novels" to propose "the The fundamental characteristic is causation," he said long ago: "In a well-established plot, every event has either a cause or a consequence." When he refers to plots as "imitations of actions," he never The "inner activity" of human beings has been excluded because of appetite problems.In the Cambridge lecture hall, Foster may not think that the students present really have any intimate experience of Aristotle's "Poetics", otherwise, on the one hand, he shouted for Aristotle to retire, and on the other hand, he quietly Picking up the armor of "Poetics" as the arm of one's own arguments, it is really presumptuous and bold.This sudden sentence "We have to define the plot" seems to only make readers who do not understand the art of fiction (there may be many authors and critics among them) think that they "understand" a little bit, the reason is very simple : The example of "King and Queen" is really easy to understand.But "'The king died and then the queen died' is the story. 'The king died and the queen died of grief' is the plot" I am afraid it only simplifies our understanding of the subject of plot, it does not help us at all A deep understanding of the question "Why is the law of causality the fundamental feature of the plot?"

To directly answer "Why is the law of causality the fundamental feature of the plot?" will make the question seem a little far-fetched, because the law of causality is the most convenient way for human beings to explain many events in the flow of time.Whether it is a play or a novel, it can neither show the loose and trivial panorama of life in an all-encompassing way, and it has to make its audience or readers feel that it is an "imitation of life", and it still cannot " Explain "why it fails to show any character's life (like Hamlet or Emma Bovary or Jia Baoyu) more fully (even if it is a day in their life, down to the smallest detail of daily life and psychological activities) ).Just because of the impossibility of "full display", narrative art as "imitation of life" has to give up its struggle with time for constant-speed reproduction, and instead change the requirement for the concept of "completeness".

How can the "imitation of life" that has been cut, selected, and filtered be "complete"?Aristotle gave us an answer that is almost a language game. He said: In drama, as long as the imitated behavior has a beginning, a middle, and an end, it constitutes a whole.The so-called beginning means "nothing happens before it, but something happens naturally after it".The so-called mid-waist means "following something and before another thing at the same time".The so-called ending means "something must happen before it, and nothing must happen after it".

The seemingly complete schema analogy covers Aristotle's theory of completeness—a lie that changes the requirements for the concept of "completeness" and makes the work seem "complete".From around 335 BC, the norms of plot in Aristotle's Poetics, like Foster's "Kings and Queens" later, provided an aesthetic guideline for narrative art on the cheap.However, is there any work whose content can really be cut into the head, waist, and tail like pork?Is there any part that has been cut out that does not belong to another part in all aspects of skin, flesh and blood?The real doubtful question is yet to come: Why does the law of causality, which is regulated to show the "integrity" of the work itself, become the fundamental feature of the plot?If "the king died", "then the queen took a walk in the garden", could it not be interpreted as "the queen walked in the garden because she missed the king"?Can it not be interpreted as "the queen walks in the garden because she feels relieved"?Can it not be interpreted as... "the queen is just walking in the garden", can it?

Aristotle, who believed that the universe was pervasive and pervasively permeated with reason, could not tolerate such a walk.Because it doesn't seem to be a cause or effect of "the king is dead".Aristotle also could not tolerate episodes in plays that fail to support other events.We can forgive him, because people who watch plays are not obliged to serve a playwright who does what he wants and has nothing to say. Similarly, we can also agree that if a novelist wants to cheat more money for his manuscripts, it is indeed possible to "know Yihu Hu "Writing in a bottomless manner", wasting readers' precious time and eyesight.Then, a life that has been cut, selected, and screened seems to be suitable to yield to the requirement of the work of "appropriate length".People who believe in Aristotle's plot theory of "arrangement of events" like "a head, a tail, and a middle" feel safe.From a superficial level: the premise of obeying the law of causality is to "recognize that each event in a work can be abstractly transformed into a logical relationship", so that we will not watch or read "unreliable narratives".From a more complex and subtle level: the plot avoids the wrestling with time that it cannot reproduce at the same speed through the arbitrariness of the internal law of causality. Narrative art begins to have its own time, creating a timer that conforms to the work itself, and has a A new measure of everything. (As for humans, they have never lived in such a time, even if it is only a microsecond.) The timer created by the "cause must have effect/effect must cause" rule in just a few short seconds "Life" rehearsed in hundreds of thin pages—whether it is a tragedy or a realistic novel, not just an "imitated life", but also compressed, condensed, and distorted by this "another timer" , The deformed life, it is for people to peep, reflect, compare and refer to.No matter the viewers and readers have pity, fear and get cleansed, or they can't extricate themselves from singing and crying, at the last moment, the sense of security of the audience of the work must flash at the bottom of their consciousness, because the characters in narrative art (even in that under the arrangement of an elaborate chronograph) is finally closed at an end—whether it is "marriage" or "death"; Aristotle said "nothing must happen after it", and the viewer and reader The future is still open between universes.He was so safe in his time.

Although Foster inherited and squandered the legacy of Aristotle's law of causality, he was so close to the rising "modernity" in his prime of life that he hesitated after all. "Nearly all novels end very weakly. The reason is that at this point the plot has to pick up the pieces," Forster writes. "Is this necessary? Why can't the novelist just when he feels clueless or bored Just accept the pen?" The plot theory revealed by Aristotle, whose entire set of philosophy is subject to the great rationality of the universe, has been shaken, and the ancient strategy of first conceiving its "unity" and "integrity" structure in order to make "event arrangement" is gone Inspiring doubts: "However, we must also ask ourselves whether this method is the best way to write novels." Foster actually questioned very cautiously, "Why do you have to be confident when writing a novel? Can't it grow naturally? Why must it Want to have the same ending as a drama? Can it not drag the tail?... Although the plot is exciting and attractive, it is only a stage idol borrowed from the drama and has its own space constraints. A structural method that is not very logical but more suitable for one's own talent?"

As a result, Forster praised André Gide (1869-1951) for his new book, The Counterfeiter, published the year before his Cambridge lecture.This work can be regarded as the distant ancestor of the "meta-fiction" that will flourish in the future, and even the forerunner of the French new novel. Of course, it is not completely free from the plot norms of unsatisfactory causality and completeness. The stagnant respect is obviously related to its disruption of the plot-oriented logic; , exposing The Counterfeiter - even suggesting that The Counterfeiter is most likely like a gilded glass "declared to be a counterfeit"; interestingly, in the novel, no one actually detects the counterfeit The authenticity.

Precisely because Gide's courage in playing with novel forms can easily be associated with his courage to expose the mysteries of writing, so even Forster directly pointed out that "Gide also made public his diary when he was writing this book."In fact, Gide neither cares (and probably does not ask his readers to care) whether Édois is regarded as Gide himself, much less whether the counterfeit money is "really" a counterfeit, because Gide borrowed Édois Wa Zhikou put it this way: "Isn't it because novels are the freest and most lawless of all genres? Isn't it precisely for this reason, precisely because of the wariness of this freedom (that is often because there is no freedom) And artists who sigh, when they once get it, are often the most bewildered) that fiction always clings to fact with such timidity?" Let us interject after these words of the character Edouard: the readers and critics and theorists of fiction are often as timid as the novelist.Even if the facts cannot be firmly attached, they still have to come up with a set of causal laws for the plot to adhere to! "The king died, and then the queen walked in the garden."—This is a disturbing plot, because it is difficult for us to understand or imagine what kind of facts these two sentences adhere to, or correspond to. law of cause and effect.However, we cannot deny that these two sentences provide the plot.We are curious, guessing, imagining, and thinking, and they may be filled by some other materials, and the filling action may fail in the end—if it is not lost in the vulgarity of obvious cause and effect, it may also be lost in mystification without profound meaning.However, let the wobbly and timid Forster retreat, Gide's Lola and Edouard have such a charming dialogue: After all, the queen didn't die for nothing, nor did she have to die of grief in a well-arranged way; she was just walking in the garden, and that was all very well.