Chapter 30 Sense of history

The Big Mole was not alone that day.Some fishermen apply asphalt, some repair fishing nets, and some repair shrimp pots and fishing rods.In addition, there are high-class people, early tourists, and local residents.They strolled along the calm sea.The sea is still at high tide.Charles found that the woman he was looking for was not even a shadow.He quickly forgets about her or Cobb, though.Unlike when he was wandering around the city in the past, he walked briskly along the beach to his destination. He might make you laugh because he's dressed so well for the part he's playing.He wears a pair of sturdy boots decorated with spikes.Canvas boot covers held tight the thick flannel Norfolk breeches.Wearing a tight and long coat on the top, it looks a bit unbelievable.He wore a beige canvas hat with a low top and a wide brim, but it wasn't the right color at all.In his hand was a large wooden cane, which he had bought on the way to Cobb.A huge heavy rucksack with hammers, packing cloths, notebooks, pill boxes, adzes, and God knows what.There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the seriousness with which Victorians go about their business.And this point is most prominent and absurd in the "Travel Guide" published by Baedek Publishing House, which was handed over to tourists free of charge.People may ask, I am afraid that all the pleasures of the world are included in it?Take Charles for example. How could he not understand that light clothes should be more comfortable?How could he not understand that the hat was superfluous?How could he not understand that those sturdy studded boots were no different than skates on a pebbly beach?

John Firth, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) The first writer who borrowed fiction to give people a real sense of history was Sir Walter Scott.Scott's novels are about Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Waverly (1814) and Heart of Midlothian (1816).These "historical" novels describe people and events in history; but through the description of the "way of life" of ordinary people, they are reminiscent of the past in terms of culture, thought, etiquette and moral norms.In this way, Scott played a great role in the development of later novels and had a considerable influence.It has been said that the Victorian novel is a historical novel about the present.Many novels, such as "Middlemarch" and "Vanity Fair", from the point of view of creation, push back time to the past, back to the author's childhood and adolescence, so as to highlight the social and cultural changes .However, it is difficult for modern readers to appreciate this effect.The following is an excerpt from the opening remarks of Vanity Fair:

At the beginning of this century, in June, a sunny morning.On the way to the iron gates of Miss Pinkerton's Girls' School on Chiswick Avenue, came a huge private carriage.The two horses pulling the cart are fat and strong, and their harnesses are shining.The handlebar type is a bloated man with a wig and three-cornered hat.The speed is four miles an hour. The time in which Thackeray wrote the book, the late 1840s, seems to be as old as the time he describes.Still, Thackeray clearly wanted to create an air of humor and nostalgia.To him and to his readers, the railroad age seemed to come uninvited, thrusting its way into the early nineteenth century and mid-forties.The slow speed of the carriage recalled the more leisurely and comfortable way of life in the early part of this century.Depictions of Zaff's wig and hat seem more distinctly contemporary to readers at the time than they do to our readers today.

Even today, events of the immediate past remain a favored theme for novelists.Faye Wilton's novel "Girlfriend" is one example.However, there is a huge difference between what people did and what life was written about in the last century, especially since the writers of the last century have written a lot about life in that century, and these books have been deeply rooted in people's hearts.How could a writer of the late twentieth century better describe the masses of the nineteenth century than Charles, Dickens, or Thomas Hardy?The answer is obviously impossible.All writers can do is to judge nineteenth-century codes of conduct with twentieth-century eyes, or to show how Victorians lived because they themselves didn't know, or didn't want to. , or take it for granted.

If we look at the first paragraph of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" alone without the specific context, we have no way of knowing when it was created.This is because the seaside scene described by the author "transcends time and space", such as fishermen, fishing nets, shrimp pots and fishing baskets, pedestrians on the beach and so on.In addition, this is also completely in line with the creative technique of novel realism that has lasted for nearly two hundred years.Charles is about to embark on an adventurous journey to search for fossils. He describes the scenery through his eyes, how he meets a mysterious woman in the Cobb storm, and cleverly reproduces the brilliant narrative techniques in the novel.Only the somewhat archaic word "elastic" suggests that this may be a Victorian novel or a modern antique.

However, the second paragraph of the novel clearly shows the time distance between the author and readers and the characters in the novel.The story took place in 1867, exactly one hundred years from the time of Fowles' creation.The costumes of the characters are the main means of expressing the era in the novel. Pay attention to words such as "costume drama" and "women's corset undresser".Information about ancient clothing can be obtained through research.At this point, Firth has clearly done a great job.However, Charles's clothing and accessories have different meanings to him, his contemporaries and us today.To them, it meant he was a gentleman, behaving in fashion and representing Victorian values.For us, it represents cumbersomeness, inconvenience, and the inadequacy of the attire for the activity being performed.

The change of point of view in these two passages represents Firth's novel writing technique.In the first paragraph, the author uses his imagination to recreate events from the past.The second paragraph and the first paragraph show a clear distinction.Below the quote reads: "Yes, one can't help but laugh. However, there are perhaps a few admirable things in the difference between 'comfort' and 'fashion.' We meet again—two century Dispute between: Is Duty a Guide to Our Actions?" There is an asterisk above the word "Duty" and a footnote below it, citing George Eliot (a veritable Victorian novelist Furth is a twentieth-century writer who describes the customs and customs of the nineteenth century, which is most prominently reflected in his later description of Charles.Charles finally got his wish and got the mysterious Sarah.The author deliberately uses the method of "misplanting the age" (that is, the mistake that the narrated personnel and events do not match the time) to describe Charles' state of mind at this time: "It is like a city that was bombed by an atomic bomb dropped in the clear sky." The discrepancy in time and the author's year of creation inevitably shows the "falseness" of historical fiction, and indeed all fiction.Firth wrote shortly afterwards: "The story I have narrated is purely fictional. The characters I have created are purely the products of the brain." Fiction.This kind of novel has a proper name, called "ultrafiction".This is discussed in detail in a later section (see section 46).