Chapter 26 Magical Realism

Then suddenly they sang those three or four simple notes again together, quickening the dance, escaping rest and sleep, transcending time, and filling their innocence with strength.Everyone was laughing, and Eluard, leaning on a girl in his arms, said: A person with peace in his heart always has a smile on his face. She laughed, planted her feet harder, and pulled the others to join her up above the pavement.After a while, all the people left the ground, they took two steps without touching the ground, and then took a step forward; yes, they all rose from Winslaw Square, forming a circle like a Huge garlands in the air.I ran on the ground, following them, looking up at them all the time; they floated, first on one foot, then on the other, and Prague was under their feet; there were cafés full of poets and crowded A prison full of traitors.At the crematorium they yielded a representative of the socialists and a surrealist; the smoke from the cremation of these two men rose like an auspicious omen.I heard Eluard's piercing voice chanting:

Love is at work and never tires. I chased that voice through the streets, hoping to keep up with the magical wreath of human bodies that rose over the city.I realized with anguish in my heart that they were soaring like a bird and I was falling like a stone; that they had wings and I would never have them. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) Magical realism (that is, the impossibly magical happenings in narratives that are originally realism) is a creation particularly associated with contemporary Latin American fiction (e.g., the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez) school.But traces of magical realism can also be found in some novels from other continents, such as the works of Xunde Grass, Selman Rushdie and Milan Kundera.All of these writers have lived through great historical upheavals and have had misfortunes in their personal lives.For these turmoil and encounters, they feel that normal realistic discourse cannot fulfill the task of adequate expression.Presumably because British modern history is relatively less turbulent, British writers still adhere to traditional realism.Thus, the magical variant of realism was imported and did not come naturally, although some native British writers welcomed the style, especially those female novelists with strong views on gender, such as Fay Weir Dayton, Angela Carter and Janet Winterson.

Being unfettered by gravity has always been an unattainable human dream, so it's no wonder that images of flight, levitation, and free fall often occur in such novels.In Márquez's, a figure rises into the sky while drying clothes on a line outside.Serle Rushdie's The Satanic Verses begins with the two main characters falling from an exploding jet plane, embracing each other, singing opposing songs, and landing in the snow unscathed Covered British shipwrecks.The heroine of Angela Carter's Night at the Circus is a trapeze artist named Favors, and her gorgeous feathered costume is not just a stage dress, but can make her Flying wings.In Jenny Winterson's "Sex Cherry", there is a floating city in which floating residents live-"After several simple experiments, it proves that people who have abandoned gravity are also abandoned by gravity."From this - excerpt from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - the author claims to have seen dancers rising in a circle into the sky and drifting away.

Milan Kundera, like many other young Czechs, welcomed the Communist coup of 1948 with enthusiasm, hoping that it would lead to a new and better world of freedom and justice.But it wasn't long before he was disillusioned, "said something he shouldn't have said" and was expelled from the party.His later experiences became the material for his first excellent novel (1967). In The Book of Laughing and Forgetting he explores in a looser and more piecemeal narrative a series of events in postwar Czech history, some personally tragic, some To the public it is mocking.The narrative methods are also varied, including documentary, autobiographical, and fantasy, and various forms are intertwined without any scruples.

The book's narrator's sense of being excluded not only from the Party but from humanity, of being a "non-human," is symbolized by the fact that, while routinely celebrating party-sanctioned holidays, he excluded from the circle of dancing students.He recalled a day in June 1950, "when once again the streets of Prague were crowded with young people dancing in circles. I went from circle to circle, getting as close as I could to them, but they Keep me out of the loop. The day before, a socialist politician and a surrealist artist were hanged as “enemies of the state.” The surrealist, Zarvis Kalandra, had A friend of Paul Allouard, who at the time was probably the most popular communist poet in the Western world, could have saved his life. But Allouard would not interfere: he was "too busy going around Dancing in a big circle...around all the socialist countries and communist parties of the world; too busy reciting his beautiful poems about joy and brotherhood. "

Kundera, who was wandering in the street, suddenly met Eluard himself dancing in a circle of young people. "Yes, absolutely, the most popular man in Prague, Paul Eluard!" Eluard began reciting one of his noble poems about joy and brotherhood.It is at this point that the characters begin to "take off," both literally and metaphorically.The dancer's human ring began to lift off the ground and float into the air, which was—impossible.We no longer doubt it, however, as the incident expresses forcefully and poignantly an emotion accumulated in the previous pages of the narrative.The scene of dancers still lifting their feet in unison after rising into the air, rising into the same sky as the smoke of the country's two cremated victims, epitomizes the folly of comrades' self-deception, embodies It reflects their urgency to profess their purity and innocence, and their determination to turn a blind eye to the horrors and injustices of the political system they defend.At the same time, it expresses the author's own jealousy and loneliness from being permanently exiled from the dance community and unable to share in its joy and security.One of Kundera's most attractive features is that he never pretends to be a hero and martyr, nor does he underestimate the price that ordinary people have to pay for being a dissident.

I don't know how this passage reads in the Czech original.But as a translation, it is still very exciting, perhaps because the visual processing of the original text is very good.Kundera once taught a film class in Prague, and this description shows the film consciousness in creation, which is expressed in the frequent switching of screens: one is a panoramic bird's-eye view of Prague, and the other is the hunger of a narrator running on the street. Thirsty looking up at the picture.The floating ring of dancing people is a sort of movie "stunt" in itself.Grammatically speaking, this paragraph is mainly composed of an oddly long sentence, and numerous clauses are equivalent to groups of "shots", which are arranged together by simple conjunctions and (and) to form a flowing sequence; this The sequence emphasizes neither the narrator's irony nor his sense of loss—the two are so intertwined that they cannot be separated.