Chapter 11 it's too late, it's too late

Advanced people who declare that "the novel is dead" can indeed speak plausibly.Comic strips, movies, TV, and any video media we can touch have already provided the audience with the satisfaction that the audience can imagine—satisfaction with action. It seems that understanding and recreating the actions of characters through reading novels is obviously labor-intensive and inaccurate.Today's audience only needs to plant their buttocks in the soft sofa, and simultaneously "experience" the actions in the story with the virtual characters of the actors.This "simultaneity" feature brings the audience instant tension, excitement, relaxation, depression... and various physiological reactions that accompany mental activities.What Aristotle claimed to be "purification" (catharsis) turned out to be a vulgar ritual that is closer to physical therapy in human daily life.

For the time being, we don't have to pay nostalgia for the pleasures and gains we once had in the age of reading novels, and we can even admit with humility and pride: "Jurassic Park" (Jurassic Park) in film history is a Not even Steven Spielberg's own sequels can hold a candle to it, but Michael Crichton's original "Jurassic Park" novel will never become a classic in the history of fiction.Has the highly developed audiovisual technology really forced novels to "give way" to feature films or TV series?Does the sensory stimulation caused by the film and television industry really "occupy" the human imagination of fictional texts?

Or, a history of novels is originally a history of novelists constantly revising their "action writing"? When the novel is imagining and constructing all kinds of life, it has to deal with actions, whether it is the fugitive Dantès who is digging treasures on the small island of Monte Cristo, or the old man Shantier who is fishing for marlin in the Gulf of Mexico. Ge.Writers set a character—that is, a subject in a narrative sentence, and everything that follows must point to action.If the action is more complicated, or a series of actions appear immediately after the action, it will make the subject overwhelmed.In the environment and atmosphere of "telling" stories passed on by word of mouth, people don't care about the redundancy of the subject in the narrative sentence in order to respond to complicated and continuous actions. However, in the text environment of writing and reading, Even a writer who is good at describing actions in concise and varied sentences can hardly provoke the burden of "a subject that starts a lot of actions".For example, in Shi Naian's collected, retouched and rewritten scriptures, there is a section about Lu Zhishen's weeping willows upside down:

In the narration of this group of eight consecutive actions, four "ba" characters, one "use" character, and one "jiang" character are used.Except for "meeting each other and walking to the tree", every action is preceded by (due to the convenience of oral English) auxiliary verbs that reinforce the dynamics.Of course, we can modify the original text like this as the grammar teacher did: Removing the four "ba" characters and one "use" character, the narrative seems to be concise, but the burden of the subject "Zhi Shen" seems extremely heavy, so heavy that I am afraid that we can't pull up the weeping poplar tree.In addition, such a modification does not help to improve the staggering situation of the written text in the face of all actions.

As an epic tome that "gives political correctness to bandits", it provides entertainment in the "speaker"'s field far more than it brings aesthetics to later generations of text scholars who are careful with their words.The plot of the story is dragged by one action after another, rushing towards a level of violence that is stronger than one level, and the heroes in the story have to increase their bloody breath again and again.From Lu Zhishen to Wu Song, and from Wu Song to Li Kui, the "author group" of this book (many speakers, as well as Shi Naian and Luo Guanzhong, who signed the manuscript) could not borrow words full of elegance or humor like those published later. Poems, words, and ballads are used to revise the prose narrative.And look at the seventh chapter:

Even if it is not a poem or a word, Wu Chengen, the author of the book, is well aware of the help that musicality-rhyme and rhythm-brings to prose, especially the effect it brings to action writing.Also in the seventh chapter, there is such a sentence, which can be read aloud to identify its function of assisting movement: As of today, there is no theory of fiction native to the West that is sufficient to explain or clarify the invention made in the history of Chinese fiction through phonology and rhythm; this invention has initiated a new mechanics of action writing, which makes prose sentences heavy The subject of the word gets rid of the redundant burden.In other words: Even after the addition of rhymes that cannot satisfy poets and poets, action writing adds a slang like "Shu Lai Bao" or "Ligerer", and the speaker leaves the imitation of actions to the ears instead of reading the words The visual imagination evoked.Compared with almost no poems and words to explain actions, this attempt can be called a revolutionary feat in the history of Chinese novels.It is worth mentioning that Bianwen, which was introduced to Zhongtu based on missionary activities as early as in the Middle Ages, although it has the performance of stray parallels and rhymes according to the sound, also inspired the art of opera with both singing and vernacular, and directly affected the script. , Tanci and other rap traditions, but these prior texts obviously intended to appeal for the convenience of memorizing the (seven-character) poems, and never addressed and solved the problems faced by the novel system in action writing. right question.However, while absorbing a large number of Bianwen stories (such as fighting scenes and Buddhist anecdotes), from the level of activating language, the rough movements of the speaker's life are written into the realm of sonorous rhyme.On this point, Wu Chengen is more particular than Shi Naian; although Sun Wukong is more "rogue" than any Water Margin hero, he is also more thoroughly domesticated than all the stars of Tiangang and Dixie - Sun Wukong has to Ear, because the novelist who created this character originally created a language environment for him that is a more exquisite and rich world than Zhuliangshanbo.

We can imagine the following situation: in the palace built by the ideal of pursuing perfect language, the author Cao Xueqin—in essence, he is also a poet—rebuked with a frown and snort: "There is also a kind of Fengyue pen and ink, which is obscene. Dirty smell, children of bad people are the easiest." Cao Xueqin's scolding voice echoed in the corridors, especially in the bedroom where the jade couches lay horizontally.The author "Xiao Xiaosheng", who is not published under his real name and real name, heard it. He was naked, with a grape in his hand, and was about to shoot it into the pussy of a "female white and hairless".Xiaoxiaosheng smiled.

Xiao Xiaosheng is a character who is full of mysteries and controversies. "Who the hell is he?" and "Is he a celebrity or a villain?" gossip shoots up, stopping at the typically middle-class vulgar heights of "pornography/art."Even socialist literary historians (such as Liu Dajie) who intend to "exonerate" the gentlemen of the Si people can only say veiledly: "The value of the book lies in its ability to describe the true inner shape of that dark society. "It describes the essence and typical of rogue philistines, the painful souls of prostitutes and the rotten external life, and the social reality of many families going bankrupt and selling their children and daughters under the collusion between officials and businessmen." The evaluation that the tree that can be seen is the forest that cannot be seen is as arbitrary and stupid as the right-wing bureaucratic philistine who deletes "obscene language".

Xiao Xiaosheng infiltrated the world of heroes, pried open the back door of Wu Song's house, recruited Wu Song's sister-in-law Pan Jinlian, and let Pan Jinlian lead us into a world that mixed carnality, market, tricks, pills, money, utensils and craftsman details. Trivial universe.In this microcosm (compared to Liangshanbo, the hiding place of righteous bandits who profess to do justice for the sky), the most brilliant embellishments are the endless streams of poems, lyrics, and musical prose.They are not even just plot decorations, their charm almost surpasses the characters themselves.These poems, words, and operas are more elegant and even more solemn than the poems; their serious attitude is probably to the point where only talent can be compared with them.Here, it is easy to remind us of the "high burlesque" among the burlesque - describing trivial trivial matters in a refined (or even sublime) style.

Xiaoxiao put all his energy into writing a hundred chapters of novels.Between the pot and the pussy, between the silver tray and the aphrodisiac, between the jug and the teacup, on the cool bed, next to the fish tank... It's not just a matter of imitating emotions to the fullest. It also has a unique posture and shadow of dancing and writing.This kind of writing that deliberately provokes the objection of "practicing wind and elegance" is in line with the spirit of "upgrading to imitate satire".To put it bluntly: on the one hand, Xiao Xiaosheng chose the corner of the back window of the heroes of the Water Margin as the field, and went against the style of grand narrative, great justice, and great truth; On the other hand, he used poems, words, and operas to write in action without fear of extravagance, and his intention is obvious—to destroy the "big" that has been entangled with "wen" for thousands of years. Tradition.For this reason, poems, words, and songs are miscellaneous in the narrative, so they are no longer like that, out of compensation and relief for the prose narrative, but instead dominate the audience, show off their skills and mockery, and become a complete joke.

What is explained and proved here is naturally not just the revolution of action writing, because the revolution of action writing involves the basic belief of novelists in the profession (or career) of novels.Cao Xueqin, a frustrated Gongsheng who believes in novels, of course cannot tolerate Xiaoxiaosheng's behavior of "using" novels to make jokes. Based on the so-called "children who are most likely to be villainous", the so-called "obscenity and filth" should be based on Xiaoxiao unrestrained nihilistic attitude to understand.From the perspective of the history of novels unfolding in time: Xiao Xiaosheng obviously lacks respect for the "big righteousness" that shines in the book field and the "righteousness" it demonstrates, and obviously lacks respect for the poems, lyrics, and prose that he plays so well. His meticulously portrayed, captured, and described movements are probably also lacking in respect—Xiao Xiaosheng's (regardless of his real identity) essays, as the name suggests, demonstrate an alternative belief in the history of Chinese fiction: a total contempt. Using language style as a tool, working with personal identity (rather than book tradition), and taking the form borrowed from the West as the scale—these three conditions constitute the basic outline of modern Chinese novels. Almost immediately after this turning point, the film and television industries successively mastered and controlled the audience’s reading rhythm and needs. Hysteresis or even inability to load.An action that takes two seconds in reality has 48 frames on the negative and 60 frames on the tape. The audience is not pretending to expect it, and they have seen and heard these two seconds. What happens on or off the screen in the clock.Through editing, sound effects, and even special effects that match the logic of watching movies, the time in the real world can be distorted (compressed faster or extended slower).However, novels that are "long if there are words, and short if there are no words" often backfire on the pursuit of action: it cannot process an "extremely short and complicated but clear at a glance" action at a speed equivalent to real time.Mo Yan used 450 words at the beginning of the book to describe a father slapping his son on the left cheek, and Joyce used more than a thousand pages to describe the 1904 The physical and mental activities of a Dublin couple and a young intellectual between 8:00 am and 3:00 midnight on June 16, the reason for this - no need to go to great lengths to argue, simply because the novel has long since abandoned The writing task of "describing action", the novel has already entered into the action.Novelists have to say that the time when he told about Lu Zhi’s deep uprooting of trees has passed, and the time when he followed Dantès and watched him dig out his tension, depression and excitement with a pickaxe has also passed, and he stretched his three heads and six arms with the help of slang and folk songs. , or beg spirits from Lishi's erotic words to laugh at the era of big breasts and fat buttocks.The modern novelist writes about an action only when he perceives that there is meaning within it, and that the action clearly cannot be adequately plundered by the audio-visual medium. The ancient speaker left these two sentences with a rather "meta-assumption" meaning: "It's too late to say, then soon—" These two sentences can make modern novelists smile; modern novelists can only admit their own Only when he is unable to "describe" actions like a film and television artist can he rebuild or discover his belief in novels.Fiction is certainly not fast enough, yet, at every stage in the history of motion-writing, belated fiction has created a language that wrestles with motion.