Chapter 19 In a day, how many times can you live?

"The story begins with a bed" It is strange that such a story always starts after waking up. In (X-Files) season six, fourteenth episode (Monday), the actor Mulder, who is a deep FBI agent, wakes up from the water bed on Monday morning (but he is a person who never sleeps in bed but only sleeps on the sofa), The water bed leaked and seeped downstairs, ruining the carpet, the alarm clock, the cell phone, and causing Mulder to fall.Mulder enters the office, and fellow heroine Scully comes to find him for a late meeting, but Mulder gets the bank on the corner to roll the check into the account to compensate the landlord, but there, he meets a bomb-strapped The bank robber, and Scully, who didn't know it, came in to find him. The robber pressed a switch and the whole bank was blown up.

When the audience was surprised that the hero and heroine died in such a "realistic" way (because this is a sci-fi series, how can the fate of the hero and heroine have nothing to do with aliens or the US government's cosmic conspiracy theory, and fans are still late Can't wait until the hero and heroine confess to each other), Mulder wakes up from the water bed again, finds that the water has broken everything, then falls, enters the office, Scully comes to him, goes to the bank, and it happens again , the only difference is that a mysterious woman stopped Mulder from entering the bank, she told him that she watched Mulder go into the bank "every day", and then the tragedy happened, she tried everything, so she was sure that Mulder Virtue is the only variable in this disaster...

But then Mulder woke up on the waterbed again on Monday... The mix of science fiction and reasoning Because of the similar debut time, Yasuhiko Nishizawa (1995), who is often compared with Kyogoku Natsuto (1994) and Mori Hiroshi (1996), with his unique SF reasoning (science fiction reasoning), Established his important position in Japan.He himself once mentioned in the postscript of "The Death of the Dead" that Masaya Yamaguchi's "Death of a Living Corpse" has a very important meaning and influence for him, and the rationality contained in "Death of a Living Corpse" The irrationality, and even the presented worldview that combines reality and surrealism have become an important nutrient in Nishizawa Yasuhiko's novels, creating a world beyond the reader's expectations, and the circular time "black hole" created by him. , is one of the best representatives of this creative concept.

In this book, Nishizawa Yasuhiko skillfully combines the different aesthetics and narrative strategies of reasoning and science fiction; it seems that he has followed the common "family kudzu" motif in Japanese reasoning literature to construct complex characters relationship (this is actually a very important genealogy that echoes modern Japanese literature. Recently, Taiwan readers are familiar with examples such as Toyoko Yamazaki's "Female Family" and "Gorgeous Family"), just like Yokomizo Masashi's "Inugami Family" , "The Hanged House on Hospital Slope" and other masterpieces are entangled in family blood, wealth, and inheritance. It can be proved that reasoning dramas spoof this subject in a large number.In fact, this is quite different from the sense of modernity, futurism, and urbanity pursued in science fiction novels. However, Yasuhiko Nishizawa has introduced a large number of core values ​​​​of science fiction novels in terms of time intention and design.

In fact, the time aesthetics of mystery novels are often presented through the reorganization of time remains, and the events, objects, and clues that drifted in the past time unit are corrected. Therefore, the temporality of mystery novels is often Pointing to the past, because the story always starts with a corpse or a case, and the task of the detective, of course, is to try to "go back to the past".However, science fiction is a highly future-oriented genre and a blueprint for human dreams. As Ye Lihua said, the core value of science fiction is "it is impossible now, but it must be possible in the future", so it always "back to future".

In the novel, time points to the past and the future at the same time. Yasuhiko Nishizawa not only uses the self-confident spiritual essence of "changing the future" in science fiction, but also follows the truth in mystery novels that always exists in the past. truth. Q Taro's various interventions in the past are all to change the original, delay, or even change the arrival of grandpa's death. This is the source of meaning for all his actions, but he must figure out if he wants to prevent this murder from happening. What happened in the past, so the truth he is looking for must exist in the past, so he constantly invests in various variables in the cycle of time, hoping to make those hidden and just lost links emerge one by one.

But the whole process seems to confirm the German physicist Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle". When Q Taro, who was originally just an observer, tried to directly intervene in any of the details, things became more and more complicated. He expected to develop in the opposite direction. When he thought he had grasped certain variables, he discovered that he was the key person causing those variables. That is, although he changed the path of the event, the result was still the same. So at the end, when Q Taro and Ms. Yuri discuss the causal logic of events in each round of time in a form that readers of mystery novels are quite accustomed to, their content is quite science fiction-style time speculation, and this can’t help but Reminds me of the "X-Files" (Monday), when Mulder and Scully discussed how variables affect the outcome on one of the Mondays, they concluded that if people cannot change things with free will, So is everything caused by fate?

"Free Will, Choice and Destiny" In a certain sense, Q Taro in the movie is actually quite happy, because he can change the future with free will in the repeated time track; but the most paradoxical thing is that this future may not be fully grasped by him. Yes, it’s like he can’t master the coming of the black hole, so that sometimes he can do well in the exam (because he has already tested the same question eight times), but sometimes he can’t stop it, so his freedom The will, in fact, has been restricted, and is also guided by some fate in the dark. But in fact, for people, as long as they have the opportunity to choose again, whether it is restricted or not, it will be exciting.However, just like in the masterpiece "Blind Chance" (Blind Chance) by the master director Chililawski, or "Sliding Doors" starring Gwyneth Paltrow, the protagonists in it are all because of their inability. However, which "version" of life will be happier?Is it true that with more choices we are bound not to go to the same outcome?It's like every time Taro Zhong Q invests in variables, but it brings different forms of disasters. Happiness does not follow, and fate seems to be always there.In the ending, although Q Taro contributed to the peace and happiness of the family, the love he was looking forward to the most came from the confession outside the time loop. Whether it is fate or not is still worth pondering carefully.

At the end of "X-Files" (Monday), the mysterious woman finally understands that the real key lies in her as the bank robber's girlfriend. If she doesn't put herself as a variable into it, she can't end this jumping needle. Repeated time rift.Because of this, it also made me care. In the third round of Q Taro's death, did grandpa die?Because when Q Taro died in the stairwell of the main house, it became a death scene that should be closed by the police. Grandpa must not be able to hide in the attic to drink, so logically he should die within the attic space every round Is it possible that he was "destroyed" because of the police investigation, interrogation, and taking to the police station that intervened early, and there is a very high possibility that he will not be able to die on "that day"?

But because Q Taro got up from the bed again in the fourth round, we will never know the truth... Chen Guowei (The author is an assistant professor at the Taiwan Literature Institute of Chung Hsing University and a novelist of the new generation)