Chapter 19 Creation of the world with doubt

"Casupon", a character. In the middle of the night between June 23 and 24, 1984, the character roamed the streets of Paris, walking from Porte Saint Martin to the Place des Vosges, then hailed a taxi, yes The driver made up an address casually: "Avenue Elis ee Reclus, No. 7." The reason for this is that Casubone believed that a group of evil templars like devils were hunting him down; You must run for your life. Umberto Eco (Umberto Eco, 1932~), who put the role of Casubone (and narrator) in Foucault's Pendulum (1988) in "The Six Walks in The Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994) mentioned such an experience: After "Foucault's Pendulum" came out and caused a sensation, a reader wrote to question Eco: According to the author's detailed description of the travel map of Casubone, this character is not Likely not to notice: a fire broke out in a building on the road he was walking on that very day.Since it is impossible to turn a blind eye, why is there no mention of it in Casubone's narrative?Eco's answer is ingenious and sly: "Perhaps for some reason so mysterious that even the author does not know, Casubone did not describe the fire." The doubt that the fire was not mentioned at all" even further made this character "more" like a "real living person", but this living person did not respond to the fire for some mysterious reason.

One of the most convenient and simple arbitrations can be as follows: Although before writing, Eco (according to his own claim) had walked on the same wandering route no less than a dozen times-he even carried a tape recorder with him, and recorded the Sound materials for writing reference, but the author did not work hard enough, hard enough, and not meticulous enough to find out that there was a "really" fire that destroyed the realism of the novel in the middle of the night on June 23, 1984. However, this is not the only arbitration. If Eco's own words in "Youyou Novels" are true, then this enthusiastic reader must have referred to the newspaper on June 24, 1984, and the materials in the newspaper are obviously more "reliable". Letter”—at least within the scope of common sense, no journalist would risk losing his job to fabricate a record of a fire.But what if the reader is really a fabricator?In other words: there was no fire at all, it was just that one of Eco's fans made fun of him in an unreviewed old Paris The joke letter is quoted in the context of newspaper sources.Or—let's imagine Eco a little more cunningly: there is no such reader; Just a discussion of "the standard reader" and the ideal reader.

No matter what grades the writer of the literary theory divides the readers into (academic practitioners of Zhisi Yifen can also add the words "secondary", "quasi" and "super" to the words "standard" and "ideal", No matter whether the reader has sufficient reading training, cultural upbringing, imagination, reasoning ability or knowledge base, the novel is always providing a "test of trust ability"; Those who doubt are not the ones who can talk about novels.This "test of trustworthiness" does not have a quick standard such as "more trust is better" or "more doubt is better".We can only establish an axiom first—axiom, a fact of course, a presupposition that does not need to be proved, as the initial premise of a certain set of reasoning and deductive systems; this axiom is: different novels test different trust abilities.

In 1977, I owned my first 135 SLR camera. Nicomat, mechanical shutter.Under the guidance of a skilled and patient semi-professional photographer, I learned how to light, measure speed, frame the view, use depth of field and even the basic techniques of developing black and white negatives.Hanging this camera, I feel that I can quite capture a perceptual form of understanding the reality of Taiwan.Therefore, from the vegetable garden in Zhudong, the terraced fields of Yeheng, the ancient house in Wufeng, the fishing village in Donggang to the festival in Lanyu, it seems that they have become a battlefield for young novel writers to seek and absorb.During that period, I certainly would not let Yilan go.That was Huang Chunming's Yilan.

"Gong" published in 1974 included a preface by Huang Chunming. The first two paragraphs of the preface narrate that the author once passed a small town. In the corner of the market, the author saw a ten-year-old boy with a deformed palm. beggar boy.A few days later, the writer returned to this town, and was very surprised to find that the fingers of the boy begging for money swaying strange hands were "colored", "it is said that he was a drunken painter" to replace the beggar boy. Solicit widely and help him paint with red, green, white, blue, and yellow colors.Huang Chunming went on to write:

I hung up my camera and visited Yilan in 1979, thinking that I could find that town—at least the beggar boy with painted deformed hands should still be there?In the end, of course I fluttered.After rereading "The Gong" many years later, I realized that Huang Chunming's moving preface had teased me.In the reality of Taiwan that I try to capture and understand, there has never been such a "really" "complete world lacking in anything". Huang Chunming teased me for several years.Very precious years. I must have been teased by other novels before I got to that preface.While listening on my father's lap, I believe that Guan Yunchang's favorite color is green, because there is no portrait or statue of Guan Gong that shows the old man changing his shirt of other colors. (I gradually understood in the future) The entire cultural mechanism of the upbringing of "Three Kingdoms" supports Guan Gong's red face that cannot be matched with other colors of shirts.This "belief" is based on a choice that is not external to that cultural mechanism; Guan Gong's red face and green robe are caused by the cultural mechanism, but the "favorite color" is an invention of a child reader.In short: the teased (unsuspecting and mistrusted) reader creates a meaning that never "really" belongs to the text: the favorite color of the hero who is born with a red face is green.

Based on the same reason, my experience of believing that "there is indeed a beggar boy with deformed hands in the corner of a certain market in a certain town in Yilan" is very precious.This experience made a young novelist who hung up his camera and tried to understand the reality of Taiwan later discover that the reason why he was being teased was that he regarded the preface as more reliable than the story.To regard the preface as more reliable than the story is like imagining the green-robed Guan Gong on the portrait or statue as the hero who likes green the most. It is also caused by cultural mechanisms (including reading training, historical education, imagination, reasoning ability and knowledge base). for the sake.But who's to say "being teased" isn't fun, meaningful and worthwhile?Didn't the reader being teased create a character (the green favorite hero) and a world (there is indeed some grotesque child in the corner of some market in this town)?In the years when I seriously believed that the town did exist due to ignorance, a fictitious town (it has nothing to do with Luodong, where Huang Chunming was born, nor with any Taiwanese town in Yilan County or even any county) was born. .In the viewing window of that Nicomat camera, I poured all my imagination and speculation about this small town into it.Therefore, it is impossible for me to be a competent reporter or photographer. Even after the baptism of the rural craze that became popular after the mid-1970s, I have to suspect that those photos that were gradually developed and fixed under the red light of the darkroom may have been as early as When I clicked the shutter, I was already distorted by my own "virtual town".

If someone asked me: how does it feel to be teased by the author?Without thinking about it, I will mention Huang Chunming, an outstanding novelist. His "complete world lacking in nothing" has quietly settled in me.At the moment when I might have mistakenly thought that I could capture and understand a certain Taiwanese reality, the preface jumped out and reminded me: You are a novelist, and the novel itself is the "complete world that lacks nothing." , rather than the actual mirror symmetry. Fiction should not be a hidden map of reality, and even if it were, it can only be a very unclear and inaccurate hidden map.In that chaotic zone, the author teases the reader, and the reader tests his ability to trust the world in the novel.

Question: Why are readers taking the quiz? Answer: Because there is more than one answer. People who firmly believe that there is only one answer for everything about human beings (including the belief in God, the future of civilization, the development of history, the certainty of truth...let us add a small item: "Taiwan's future") have completely misunderstood the "axiom " the meaning of this previously mentioned word.They do not understand that axioms are of no value unless they are deduced.But in order to maintain the uniqueness of truth, they would rather carefully guard the most original, natural, presupposition without proof.Huang Chunming was once kidnapped by such a person.

At the time of the upsurge of the debate on local literature, Tang Wenbiao, a critic who believed in social realism creed, once accused him of two mistakes.In the novel, Colonel Gray of the U.S. Army stationed in Taiwan broke the legs of Jiang Afa, a Taiwanese worker, by driving a car, but brought money and material compensation to this poor family.Colonel Gray improved the Jiang family's life like an angel: "They ate sandwiches, drank soda, and talked and laughed. Jiang Ahfa and his family have never been as harmonious as they are now." Good Guys (Colonized Poor People)/Bad Guys (Grand Officials, Nobility, Capitalists)" is a short classic that opposes clichés, but it has committed the taboo of social realism critics-two mistakes.Tang pointed out: It is impossible for a low-born person like Jiang’s wife Agui in the story to reprimand their children with the following language: “Your father was crippled after you all saw it. From now on, each of you must wake up and give me your eyes.” Keep your eyes open." The second so-called mistake is: the writer should not have allowed Agui and Azhu's mother and daughter to steal white and soft toilet paper from the hospital.

Regarding the first mistake, it is actually the misunderstanding of the critic who does not understand Taiwanese. He does not know that the word "juewu" is not as noble and rare in the dialect as it is in the current official Chinese system (Guoyu), but it is a dialect. A positive evidence for the preservation of Mandarin vocabulary due to common and inflected usage.As for the second mistake, it is more out of the critic's ambition to monopolize the meaning of the world and maintain the uniqueness of truth.Such critics cannot bear the moral blemishes of the "humble, teased, downtrodden" nobodies. It’s not a big deal for the critic who points out these two mistakes to insult the novel, it’s worth digging into that he both expects the characters to remain humble and refuses to believe that the characters are mean, in other words: the so-called two mistakes are actually incompatible with each other .Such critics believe that there is only one comprehensive answer to everything about human beings, so when a second or more answers may appear, they have to get rid of them before they can. Of course, they can only continue to insult the novel. The Templar, who believed so firmly in God that the face of civilization, history, and truth must be fashioned in that only way, executed the skeptic Belbo at the end of Foucault's Pendulum—in another sense, of course. , skepticism, too, is a form of dogmatism; leaving Casubone perilous and terrified, with no escape and no redemption; Casubone can only tell the story.This is the fate of a novelist - not seeking to be known to the princes, because Gou Quan's life is in troubled times, and the opposite is also true.The survival of the novelist rests on his duty not to monopolize the meaning of the world.It is an obligation to be suspicious, and readers have the right to accept teasing. Did the fire like that described by Eco's readers happen in Paris in the middle of the night from June 23 to 24, 1984?If the fire was a fiction, then what happened?A little error in the location reported by the media?Or did readers who cited media sources question the writer misidentify the time and space of the incident?Perhaps this reader has premeditatedly turned around and teased the writer by "using his own way to deal with his own body"?Or is the writer teasing the readers of "Youyou Fiction Forest" again?The progressive and endless question marks come from readers who hold different attitudes towards the world, and their ability to trust thus shows different foundations.The female doctor of law who read a truckload of romance novels finally met a master flirt after experiencing a failed marriage in middle age, but no matter how she looked at it, she felt that the other party was a knight who jumped out of the pages of the book, so she committed herself. marry.Unexpectedly, the sea of ​​love is full of waves, and the fangs are exposed, and the marriage that was so easy to complete immediately broke down.Is this a romance novel teasing her?Or is she incapable of resisting the teasing of romance novels?Is it because she has read too many novels?Or is it too little? It is naive and harsh to demand that novels must have a life reality that can be based on, just like requiring that life must have a novel text that can be followed.Unfortunately, however, people often hold this duality and criticize fiction even as they are unwilling or unable to improve reality.The fact is very likely to be this: if Eco is unfortunate enough to be born as Huang Chunming, and then writes "Fou Ke's Pendulum" and "Youyou Novel Forest" which exposes the inside story of his creation, it is hard to guarantee that he will not encounter the same rough critics and accuse him of The Casubone in his works ignores a real fire that may take the lives and properties of countless people, and refuses to rush into the fire cave to rescue the disaster. For such an argument, let me—as a bystander who does not need to further search for the hidden map because I am actually at the scene, stand up to solve the mystery: In the one hundred and fifteenth chapter of "Foucault's Pendulum", when Casubone passed by the androgynous person, he immediately walked into a bar that was still open and drank two glasses of beer.The name of that store is "Aux Ambassadeurs" (Aux Ambassadeurs) - a famous pastel painting painted by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) around 1876 (now in the Museum of Lyon), Eco did not The name of the store appeared because Casubone was in a panic and was unable to take care of its signboard (he hadn't dropped a drop of water for nearly 30 hours at that time).As for the fire, it did happen, but it was on the Rue de Sevigne (that is, the road the androgynous people turn into), and the reason I say this with certainty is that in June 1984 In the middle of the night on the 23rd, I was in the "Ambassador Square" (with the tour guide Mr. Lu Wei). I may enter the room later than Casubone, because I was delayed for a while because I was outside the house.Since it took almost seven years for me to read the original text of "Foucault's Pendulum", and it took another year for me to read the Chinese translation, I have always regretted that I was too busy watching the fire at that time to get acquainted with that learned and thoughtful character. I made unnecessary witnesses, because such witnesses are actually still following the phantom of the hidden schema, which locks the novel into a molecular formula that is too stable, and makes readers forget: the reality of life is slightly different. The result that is fleeting and absolutely difficult to restore is actually the root of the novel, and the attempt to restore the novel to reality is as absurd and foolish as restoring the lost reality. However, if a reader seriously believes my testimony, his ability to trust the world suddenly emerges: this reader is a person who trusts the truth of the detailed description.