Chapter 26 to conceal

The label on the bottle of the correction fluid I use regularly says it has methylcyclohexane and titanium dioxide as its main ingredients.It is said that some brands that pay attention to environmental protection will also add the words "no trichloroethane".For consumers who are not familiar with the chemistry of toxic substances and are afraid of health damage, the word "does not contain" means a safety guarantee, so let's not go into detail about the essence of what it does not contain.However, correction fluid from any label can be extremely unsafe for an author who is concerned about his creative process or the possibility of his secrets being leaked.An old friend who was also engaged in creation once asked me: "Do you know? After many years, if your original manuscript is still preserved, the correction fluid on it will have weathered and fallen off, and the clumsy things you wrote will be gone." It's all kept."

I also heard another anecdote.Samuel Beckett (Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989) met Joyce when he was teaching in Paris, and worked as a typist for the latter for a period of time. The work he typed should be "Finnegans Wake" ( Finnegan's Wake, 1939).One day, when Joyce was dictating a novel and Beckett listened to it immediately, someone knocked on the door suddenly, and Joyce responded casually: "Oh, please come in." Typed the document.Later, when the two were proofreading the typescript, Joyce was baffled by the "Oh, please come in" that broke into the text.After a long time, I just remembered that it was his answer to the door, but it is said that Joyce did not ask Beckett to delete his article, and it still remained in that boring and obscure masterpiece.I have never been actively and alertly probing where it is. ——even, I forget who and under what circumstances this anecdote was relayed to me.As time went on, I began to doubt: Are the two protagonists in the anecdote really Beckett and Joyce?Even if it is, does the "oh, come in" line end up in the Finnegans Wake book?

Whenever I use correction fluid, a stationery that was only developed in the 1980s, I think of my friend who died young, Joyce, and the mistakes that had to be preserved in creation. In the short story "Ice Man", Haruki Murakami uses a female narrator "I" to tell a story without a story. "I" and the ice man met in the hotel of the ski resort, then dated, got married, and went to Antarctica together, and found the ice man and "I" myself deeply buried in that "lonely and cold" place, and could never be loved The loneliness that melts or even shakes with warmth.When "I" and Ice Man talked for the first time, Haruki Murakami wrote: "The Ice Man looked into my eyes. I could see that he smiled very slightly. But I don't know. Ice Man really Are you smiling? Or maybe I just think so." (The Ghost of Lexington, 1996, p. 61)

This paragraph uses an important technique on a detail that isn't "important" in the story. "I" first made readers think that the hero in their minds "smiled slightly", and then blurred that smile.In other words: let the narrator make a mistake and correct it right away.Did the Ice Man ever smile?There are only two answers, and they are two mutually incompatible answers (if the ice man's performance at that time was half a smile, then he was not an ice man, but probably the big boy Watatani Noboru in "The Clockwork Bird Chronicle" badass).However, Haruki Murakami used "I"'s uncertainty about the past to make the smile appear dynamic in an out-of-focus way.This dynamic not only expresses the description of the character Ice Man, but also echoes the lost relationship between the "I" who will "never (can) leave Antarctica" and the "eternal past" in the future, because the momentary memory of that smile was given an obscure process.

This modification of the previous narrative almost never occurs in novels that use the first person as the narrative point of view.If we still take the works of Haruki Murakami as an example, even if an article like "Swimming Poolside" (collected in "The End of the Carousel", 1991) tells the story of "him", there is still a person who has to appear on the stage and makes people wonder. People clearly realize that the "I" who is the embodiment of the author himself prophesies like this: "I want to declare first, and I will record what he said to me from the beginning to the end. Of course, there is a certain article-like structure in it, and it is arbitrary. Some parts that I think are unnecessary... However, on the whole, this article can be regarded as written according to what he said, and there should be no problem." It is also because of such a statement that readers are more able to re- Read carefully the opening sentences of this work:

After carefully reading these two sentences, we can pause and ask a question that the author will not answer himself: Since the "expression method" in the previous sentence is incorrect, why didn't Haruki Murakami simply delete the incorrect sentence and write directly What about "in the spring of thirty-five years old, he was determined to cross the turning point in his life"?Because he couldn't bear to throw away a piece of manuscript paper with only twenty characters written on it?Or is he not used to correction fluid? Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) famous short story "A Friend of Kafka" (A Friend of Kafka) describes an outdated Yiddish theater actor Jake Kong En's down-and-out later life, and memories that may have been exaggerated and altered form the main content of this novel.Kuhn often confronted God (or fate) who fiddled with him with the contempt of a celebrity, and used his self-consciously brilliant experiences (such as: the private pilgrimage with Kafka) to explain Exchange friends (narrator "I") admiration, listening, and change.In the short story, which is only a few thousand words long, Isaac Singer has Cohn perform two minor corrections.The first time Kung asked "me": "Didn't you once ask me how I lived? Or did I think you did? What gave me the strength to endure poverty? Worst of all—hopelessness?" Well, young friend." Later, the veteran actor, who was trying to warm up his tragic and heroic affair, went into the details of his bed with a "countess": "And, I feel her The approaching, strange warmth emanating from her body, unlike anything I've ever known—or maybe I've forgotten (the woman's body heat)."

Readers get to know the old actor through the narrator "I", and the "I" here and the "I" in "By the Swimming Pool" coincidentally are both novelists, and they are both "recorded" through the protagonist's own stories. "Out of this novel.Haruki Murakami clearly told readers: "Swimming Poolside" is almost a replica of real people, but "there are also some details that are added based on my questions, and a little bit of my imagination is also used, but that is only minimal."In other words: the author is trying to convince his readers that the novel is not fiction.Just like the character Kong En in "Kafka's Friend" tried to convince "I"-could be called Kong En's only audience: those adventures were not fabricated.When these storytellers want to show the authenticity and correctness of their narratives, "correction" has become an indispensable means.In Isaac Singer, the narrator "I" does not revise his narrative even once, because that would confuse the division between "I" and the storyteller, Conn.As for Kong En's repeated use of memory corrections to show that what he said is true, it is exposing the old actor's efforts to gain credibility in order to make it clear.How can a storyteller, who is so committed to correcting mistakes, lie about fiction?

Lucius is a donkey.No, it should be correctly said: Lucius was victimized by witchcraft and was once turned into a donkey.To be more precise: Lujius was not harmed by anyone, but Futis, the maidservant who secretly communicated with him, took the bottle of witchcraft ointment by mistake, causing Lujius who wanted to turn into a bird to become a bird. a donkey.To be more correct, perhaps I must transcribe (Metamorphoses) from beginning to end. The author of the oldest surviving novel, Lucius Apuleius, used his own name as the hero, trying to inject some believable quality into the legend of transformation, and he certainly did not forget this indication and correct it later. wrong technique.In the sixteenth chapter of this book, "The Beast Tamer", the tormented Lujius finally took a break from his arduous adventures and was sold into the kitchen of the noble Serasu.Not only did the donkey no longer have to be whipped, but he was also able to steal the leftovers from his master from time to time, and became healthy and healthy.Unexpectedly, one time he got carried away with eating, and didn't know that there were many slaves peeping at the spectacle of it eating human food through the crack of the door behind him, and the sound of laughter even alarmed the master.Apuleius wrote:

"No, in retrospect, he himself led me away." These two short and dispensable sentences made the whole paragraph full of brilliant spirit.Readers can imagine that a donkey really has memory, and while shaking its head, it still has the will and ability to defend its true and correct memory.He is obviously not just like the storyteller Kong En in Isaac Singer's "Kafka's Friend" mentioned above, but he is just performing his technique of imitation and trustworthiness; he is also different from the narrator in Haruki Murakami's "Poolside" The pretentiousness at the beginning of the chapter is just to make readers confirm that the following narratives have an inseparable foundation.Apuleius' revision here also implies the irony of pretending to be realistic, and the parody of sanctimonious care about details.This is a humor that was demonstrated before 1800.Arguing like this sounds like an excessive reverence for the ancestors of novels, so let us also correct it.

The thirteenth chapter of "The Mill" continues the theme of the second half of the previous chapter "The Eunuch": exposing the collection of adultery initiated by the adulteress.Unsurprisingly, the seemingly loyal wife of Lu Jiushi’s owner, the miller, finally exposed the behavior of the private young lover—thanks to the donkey for being an accomplice to the big man; as a result, the young lover was sodomized and whipped by the miller Retaliation, the woman was reprimanded.Then, the author couldn't control how the abandoned woman "decently studied the art of magic spells, how she worshiped a witch to practice the law, and how after using witchcraft to lure her husband to change his mind, she used a female ghost who was raped and died to possess her." on his body and kill him."Then, however, Apuleius, realizing that it is impossible for a donkey tied to a mill to know so many secrets, intervened:

Sure enough, in the following text, the author immediately let the woman who has been disguised by witchcraft charm the miller master, forced her to hang herself, and let a daughter of the deceased who had recently married to a neighboring village go home crying, telling My father came at night to make a dream to appear, counting the twists and turns, and finally the truth came to light.It seems that those "smart readers" are really impatient and worrying too much.There is, however, a curious flaw here: we had never heard (or read) before that the miller and his wife had a newborn daughter.Thinking about it this way, the appearance of this sudden daughter naturally has only one function: only through the statement of such a character, can the donkey tied up in the mill learn from the unjustly deceased that the abandoned woman practices and performs witchcraft These "women's secrets".In other words: the role of this daughter is only a correction of the preceding text; without her, the donkey should not have certain memories. It may be difficult for readers after 1800 to understand: why did Apuleius leave such an obvious trace of revision in his book?He only needs to add the sentence "the miller has just married his daughter to the next village" at the beginning of chapter thirteen, and delete the self-confessional interjection that he so actively and clearly interjected to the audience, and the context is complete. The echo is not too abrupt, and the traces of correction are gently erased; even the most cunning and impatient readers have to admit: the donkey can indeed hear the secret in the mill.Why did Apuleius leave the gap and the chisel to mend it? When asking this question, perhaps modern readers have exposed their sophisticated and paranoid perfectionism and structural views.Admittedly, we have no way of knowing: did Apuleius really have "some intelligent readers" questioning and defending at the same time as he wrote the story?If there is, then Apuleius obviously did not deliberately cover up the flaws of the work, rather than highlighting its flaws, and even showing his talent for impromptu repairs and corrections; Does it create a situation of self-questioning and defense, and further ridicule the concept of "perfect novel"?At least, for Apuleius, not only does the novel not have to be a seamless narrative, but it should allow all kinds of so-called fallacies, absurdities, irrationality, mistakes, and loopholes that can only be discovered after the fact.It is indeed possible that Apuleius realized that the donkey tied up in the mill was "impossible to know" the secret hidden in the distance while he was creating.He had no intention of erasing or covering up the failure; his duty was to get on with it.What he discovered, without obliteration or disguise, was a "narrative point of view" that no one had named at the time.And his fully exposed revision process stimulates and leads readers to explore the reasons for this discovery.And so we learn what audacious adventures were still possible for the novel in that naked, frank, vigorous age. If one day, fortunately, as my deceased friend said: My original manuscript has been preserved and there is still a reader who reads it carefully. After all the white powder has fallen off, the value of this manuscript to that reader will be It will surpass the original author with a collector's edition book with exquisite printing, elegant binding and well-revised content.I can never "correct" this conclusion.