Chapter 14 concept of place

In Los Angeles, if you can't drive, you can't do anything.Like I am now, you can't do anything without drinking.But when you get there, if you drink and drive, it's not going to work.If you accidentally loosened your seat belt, or knocked cigarette ash, or picked your nose, you would have to enter Alcatraz and be interrogated endlessly.If there is a slight misconduct, if there is a slight mistake, the tweeter will yell at you, the telescope, the helicopter, and the stupid pigs will all come to your hair. What can a poor boy do?After leaving the Lymont Hotel, walking on Watson Street in the city where the heat wave was rolling, I looked up and saw that the building was covered with God's green snot.Walk to the left, walk to the right, like a dry gopher landed in the surging river.This restaurant doesn't sell drinks, that restaurant doesn't sell meat, and some restaurants don't sell heterosexual sex.Someone grooms the chimpanzee, someone tattoos that thing, round the clock, but can you get lunch?Don't even think about seeing the signboard on the opposite side blinking in the distance: beef-wine-real price and real time.Go across the road unless you were born there.All the signs on the crosswalks read: Do not walk, all signs, no matter what time of day it is.That's the message, that's what Los Angeles is about: don't walk, stay inside.Don't walk, drive.Don't walk, run!I tried renting out.useless.Those who drive taxis are all Saturnians, and they are not sure whether to drive left or right.Every time I go out, I have to teach them how to drive first.

Martin Amis (1984) Readers can see at this point that my division of Xiaokuang art into several aspects is actually artificial.In fact, the aspects of the novel are plural and coherent, each benefiting from and forming part of the others.The quote here from Martin Amis is an example of a description of place, but it could equally be used to argue for "Killing Hills" or "defamiliarization," or for several other topics that have not been brought up for discussion.This also shows from another aspect that the description in a good work is not just a description. The concept of location is a relatively late development in the history of fiction.As Mikhail Bakhtin said, the cities in classical romance novels are all foils to the plot and are interchangeable: Feissus might as well be changed to Corinth or Suleks, because the situation described is roughly the same.Early English novelists were inaccurate about places.For example, London described by Defoe or Fielding is far less vivid and detailed than that described by Dickens.When Tom Jones seeks out Sophia and comes to the city, the narrator simply says that he is not familiar with London at all, that he first arrives in a slum, whose inhabitants are similar to those in Hannover or Grosvenor Square. The landlords had little acquaintance (for he came in along Gray's Inn Lane).So he wandered aimlessly for a long time before finding the way to the happiness building.The god of fate completely separates the lowly from the other kind of people, and only lets this kind of people live in the mansion of happiness. Bequeath property and honor.

London is described in terms of the hierarchical status of its inhabitants in the author's cynical pen.It is not the author's intention to let the reader "see" the city, or to tell us how a country boy feels about a city for the first time.Try to compare Dickens' description of Jacob's Island in the middle: To get to this place, the visitor must pass through a labyrinth of narrow, muddy streets lined with people who grew up by the water, rough and poor... The shops are piled with the cheapest, The roughest stuff; the most common and poorly made clothes hang from the doorway of the peddler to the railings and windows in front of the house... The front eaves jutting out onto the sidewalk are crumbling.The four walls were mottled and seemed to be crumbling.The chimney was half down, and the rest—half seemed to be hesitating as to whether it should fall too.The iron bars nailed to the windows were rusty and almost broken.How desolate and desolate the scene is here.

Tom Jones was published in 1749; it was published in 1838.During this period, the Romantic movement took place.The Romantic Movement noticed the influence of the environment on people, making people see the extraordinary beauty of the landscape, and at the same time, they also saw that the city scene in the industrial age symbolized the cruelty and ruthlessness. Martin Amis is the last representative of the Dickensian tradition of urban gothic novels.His fascinated and frightened thesis of the post-industrial city is instructive as a reflection of the extreme decadence of culture and society.Like Dickens, the environments in Amis's novels are always more alive than the characters, as if the life had been sucked out of the characters and reappeared in otherworldly, destructive forms in the physical objects: streets, machines, gadgets, and so on.

The narrator, John Self (meaning "ego". Amis also develops a Dickensian trick of playing names.) is not a psychopath or a sympathetic character, but a morally depraved Ruffian, glutton for fast food and chunks of food, addicted to fast cars and pornography.He shuttled back and forth between England and America, trying to broker a film deal that would bring him a fortune.London and New York are the main places for him to travel, and New York is more materialistic and morally corrupt in comparison.But due to business relationships, Self ended up in Los Angeles, the movie city. The reason why the novel chooses this form is, on the one hand, to make the description of the urban wasteland appear more convincing;Amis hides his literary talents in the joking and irreverent speech of the characters, making the narrator full of slang and dirty work.Some of the Mid-Atlantic dialect spoken by the narrator comes from popular culture and mass media, and the other part may be invented by the author.For example, to understand the first paragraph of the quotation, it is necessary to understand that "Alcatraz" is the most famous prison in California, that "pig'' is a derogatory term for a police officer, that "drawing a bead" means "to aim," and that "rug" is an American term for The common name for wigs (Self refers to real hair here), "coptered" is probably a participle derived from "helicopter" (helicopter). He compared the polluted city to "covered with God's green snot", suggesting that the gods of the Old Testament are looking down on this modern place of sin. This metaphor is no less surprising than that of T. S. Eliot, in J. Alfred P. Ruflock's Song of Love says that night "stretches its limbs with its back against the sky, like a patient anesthetized on an operating table." Amis' metaphor is also somewhat inspired by the first chapter, in which Stephen Dedalus speaks of the sea as "the snot-nosed sea." Pruflock, however, is after the mannerisms of high culture; Self's use of this metaphor seems to be mischievous, to express childish distaste. This distracts us from seeing the literary meaning of this metaphor.

Several of the major tropes describing Los Angeles are hyperbolic, or exaggerated statements.In this respect, it is similar to another Kanshan-style narrative novel we talked about earlier.But this passage of Amis is very different from Salinger's novel, it is a grandiose scenery description.Los Angeles is a city full of traffic, a problem so common that Amis makes a series of comedic hyperboles in this passage (e.g. "Go across the street unless you're born There.") and he has similarly hyperbolic descriptions of other, less obvious problems: retail stores in the United States are exceptionally fine-grained, and American taxi drivers are always newcomers not yet familiar with the route. migrant.

On a recent trip to Boston, the taxi driver who took me radioed the console three times in Russian to find my way out of the airport.This inefficiency is difficult to describe in words, but Amis found the words: "Taxi drivers are descended from Saturn, and they are not sure whether to drive left or right. Every time they go out, they must first be taught how to drive. This is a parody of the well-known catchphrase to fasten your seat belt: "Whenever you go out, fasten your seat belt"; it is also a parody of science fiction—Amis's prose style favors this style taken from contemporary Parallel sentences of urban consciousness garbage.The imitation lends the passage a self-satisfied, finger-snap rhythm that at one point almost gets stuck in the rhythm of a couplet (“Somebody grooms a chimpanzee, and somebody tattoos that thing.”)

There is a danger in most scenography of places (the novels of Sir Walter Scott are amply exemplified) that a string of well-formed declarative sentences, compounded by puns, will lull the reader to sleep.There is no such danger here.The present tense in the text describes both the place and the narrator's actions within it.Verbs change frequently—from demonstrative (“You walked out of the hotel”) to interrogative (“But can you get lunch?”) to imperative (“Don’t walk, drive. Don’t walk, run!”) There are also generic second-person pronouns ("you go left, you go right"). — all of which draw the reader into the process.After reading a few pages of this kind of book, you may doze off, but it is not boring to sleep, but tired to sleep.