Chapter 18 time conversion

Monica blushed with anger. "Mr. Lloyd put his arm around her. I saw it with my own eyes. I'm sorry I told you about it. Rose is the only one who believes me." Rose, Stanley believed her words to be true at the time, but that was because she was indifferent.In the Brody Mystery, it is she who cares the least about Miss Brody's affairs.She is indifferent to anyone's affairs.She always does.Later, when she herself became famous for being sexy, her charm was in fact precisely that she was sexually uncurious, that she never thought about it.As Miss Brodie said, she had an instinct for it.

Monica Douglas said, "Rose is the only one who takes my word for it." In the late 1850s, when Monica visited Sandy at the nunnery, she said: "I did see Teddy Lloyd kissing Miss Brody one day in the art room." Sandy said, "I know you saw it." She knew it long before Miss Brody told her one day after the war, when they were sitting in the Braid Hill Hotel drinking tea over sandwiches.Miss Brodie was shivering in a dark muskrat coat that had been in storage for many years; she had been sold out, left early, and lived on rations, which she could not afford at home."I'm an old man," she said.

Sandy said: "It was a good look back then." Muriel Spark, Miss Gene Brody in her prime (1961) Whether it is an ancient bard or a parent putting a child to sleep, the simplest way of telling a story is to start from the beginning and tell to the end, otherwise the audience will fall asleep.But even in ancient times, storytellers found that disrupting the normal chronological order had interesting effects.Classical epics are told from the middle of the story (medis ces).For example, the narrator of the Odyssey begins with the hero's perils on his way back from the Trojan War, inserts flashbacks describing his previous adventures, and continues until the end, when the hero arrives in Ithaca. .

Through time shifting, the narrator can tell the life story out of the actual order of events, but leave some gaps, allowing us to grasp the causal relationship and irony between events.An event occurs later in the normal sequence of story development, but the reader in the text has already experienced it.If the timing is shifted so that the narrative point of view goes back in time for some time, it is likely to change people's interpretation of this event.This is a well-known technique in the film industry, known as "flashback" (flashback).Movies are more difficult to create "flash-forward" (pre-narrative) effects.The so-called pre-narrative is to narrate future events in advance. Classical rhetoricians call it "prolepsis". This is because doing so is equivalent to implying the existence of a narrator who understands the content of the entire story; and movies generally have no narrator. It is surprising how much simpler and more traditional the film "The Prime Day of Miss Gene Brody" is in this respect than the novel it is based on. The story of the film is told in a straightforward manner of natural order; the novel Then flashbacks and prenarratives jump back and forth, and are known for their skillful time conversion.

The story is about a female teacher and a group of female students in a girls' boarding school in Edinburgh between the two wars.The female teacher, Miss Gene Brody, is eccentric but charming, and is quite admired by the students.Among the students are Monica, who is good at mathematics, Rose, who is famous for her sexiness, and Sandy Sjunkir, who is famous for her unique way of pronouncing vowels, and she also has another characteristic, namely " The eyes are so small that you can hardly see them." But these eyes can't miss anything, so Sandi is the main point of view in the novel.The novel begins with the girls as seniors, then quickly rewinds to describe their junior years, when Brody's influence on them was at its peak; Some situations of women, at this time they still have not forgotten the outstanding teacher; troubled by the past.

In the lower grades, they were keen to explore Miss Brody's sex life, especially whether she was having an affair with Mr. Lloyd, the art teacher.Mr. Lloyd is handsome and handsome, but "lost the contents of one sleeve" in the battle. Monica claims that she saw them hugging each other in the art room, but Rose is the only one who believes her words, and she is indignant for this .She was still angry years later when she talked about it with Sandy, now a nun living a reclusive life; she admitted that Monica was telling the truth.The narrator says she knew it even before Miss Brodie told her herself one day after the Great War.

In this passage, the reader is thrown back and forth, into many distant points in time, with astonishing speed.There is the main narrative point, around the late 1920s, when the younger girls are having a discussion about Miss Brody's love life; Already known for her sexual charm; there was a point in the late 1950s when Monica visited Sandy in a nunnery; there was a point in the late 1940s when Sandy had tea with Miss Brodie who was forced to retire; There is also an unspecified point in time when Sandy discovers that Miss Brody was indeed kissed by Mr. Lloyd in the art room. She discovered that Dee had discovered this in her senior year, and the book did not explain it until a long time later.As it happened, Miss Brodie announced in a conversation that Rose would replace her as Mr. Lloyd's mistress, because she herself had devoted her life to girls.Sandy felt that the teacher's egoism was a bit too arrogant, which was both exciting and dangerous. "She thinks she's God, Sandy thinks, she thinks she's a Calvinistic God who can see things begin and end." Novelists can see stories begin and end, of course, but Muriel Spark suggests , there is a difference between the two, that is, fiction is beneficial, while illusion is dangerous—or it can also be said that there is a difference between the Catholic God and the Calvinist God, the former allows free will, the latter does not .There is a place in the novel that describes the fatalism of Calvinism, that is, they believe that "God actually made arrangements for everyone, and a person is doomed to encounter a disgusting surprise before he is born."

Sandy wants to make Miss Brodie's prophecy come true, so she becomes Lloyd's mistress herself, so as to challenge the teacher so that she cannot control the fate of others.She later betrayed Miss Brody to the school authorities, accusing her of sending another student on a deadly and risky mission to Fascist Spain.So the phrase describing Miss Brody in this excerpt is "she was betrayed".Sandy, for all his teaching, never seemed to be able to shake off his guilt over the matter.The author describes Miss Brody as "shivering deeply," because she is dying of cancer and is in dire condition.But this description is placed in the first half of the book, and the later account of Miss Brody's heyday can offset people's previous sympathy for this character.

Time shifts are very common in modern fiction, but usually either "melt into" memories of past events in a stream of consciousness (Molly Bloom's internal monologue jumps constantly from one time period to another , like a phonograph's selection system jumping back and forth between tracks on a LP); or more formally, as a character-narrator's memory of the past (e.g., Dowell in Ford's novel The Good Soldier).Graham Green's novel "Affair's End" is a good example of using this method, and it is worthy of being a famous master.The narrator of the novel, Bendrix, is a professional writer who meets Sarah's husband Henry at the beginning of the narrative.Several years ago, Bendrix and Sara had a relationship, which Sara suddenly broke off.Bentax thought she had a new lover, and she still harbors resentment and jealousy to this day.When Henry reveals that he suspects Sarah of infidelity, Bendrix illegally hires a detective to uncover Sarah's secrets.What the detective found was only a diary of Sara, which recorded the love affair with Bendrix, which revealed her motives for abruptly breaking off the relationship, which were completely beyond Bendrix's expectations, and there is no doubt about it. That is, she changed all this for religious reasons.All these developments are made more believable and more dramatic by breaking the normal chronological order of the narrative.

Muriel Spark's combination of frequent time shifts and the third-person singular narrator's tone is a typical postmodernist tactic of alerting the reader to the artificial mechanism of the text so as not to "lose" the reader in the In the plot of a fictional story or in the psychological depths of a central character.Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is another striking example.The author tells us from the beginning that the protagonist of the story, Billy Pilgrim, is a fiction based on his own experience as a prisoner of war.In 1945, the Allies launched the most horrific air raid of World War II, when bombers blew up Dresden.Billy was there.The story starts out like this: "Listen. Billy Pilgrim's sense of time is out of order," and then jumps back and forth, jumping back and forth between the different phases of his civilian life and his military life.He was an optician before enlisting, lived in the American Midwest, had a wife and children; after enlisting, he experienced many battles, the most serious being the Dresden air raid.This fictional technique is not just a reminiscence of the past, Billy is actually doing time travel". He and other traumatized veterans use science fiction myths to easily time travel between the stars, trying to avoid The unbearable reality of modern history. He claims to have been hijacked at one point to the planet Tralfah, populated by a sort of plumber's friend, with an eye on top of his head. These are parodies of science fiction on the one hand, It sounds very interesting; on the other hand, there is no lack of serious philosophy. In the view of Tralfama Taoists, all time is the present tense at the same time, and people can choose arbitrarily the period they are in. In the concept of our earth people In the novel, the movement of time is one-way and ruthless, and the tragedy of life will be born from it. Unless you believe in a kind of eternity, you think that time can be saved, and its role is also reversed. "Slaughterhouse No. 5" discusses these issues Some enlightening reflections are made on the book, and at the same time these reflections reflect human aspirations. The novel is as much postmodern as it is post-Christian. One of the strongest and most moving images in the work is that of a war film. Shot. Billy Pilgrim looking backwards:

American planes riddled with holes, loaded with wounded and dead bodies, took off backwards from an airfield in England.Over France, several German fighter jets flew backward toward them, sucking bullets and shrapnel from some of the planes and crews.These fighter jets also ingested some bullets and shrapnel from the American bombers that were blown up from the ground, and those planes reversed and lifted off to join the formation. Martin Amis (thanks to Vonnegut) has recently taken this whim a step further with a novel titled The Arrow of Time.The novel narrates the life course of a Nazi war criminal from death to life backwards.The approach, at first grotesque and comedic, becomes increasingly disjointed the further you look at it, and becomes increasingly bewildering as the story progresses and approaches the horrors of the Holocaust.This story can be seen as a kind of purgatory, in which the mind of the central character is forced to relive the horrors of the past years; Evidently impossible, sin must never be written off.The vast majority of radical experimental fiction that attempts to tell a sequence of psychological events seems to be concerned with crime, misconduct, and evil.