Return to the tradition of storytelling

20 12 12 on February 8th, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mo Yan gave a speech on the theme of "storytellers" at the Swedish Academy.

It was mentioned in the speech that Mo Yan often went to the market when he was a child, and then told his mother stories when he came back. Later, he was not satisfied with retelling the story completely, but would tell the story in his own language and way. In the 1980s, he changed from telling stories with his mouth to telling stories with a pen.

This is the origin between novelist and story, from listener to narrator, and then from narrator to writer. Mo Yan said: "I am a storyteller, so I still want to tell you stories."

Mo Yan's understanding of novels is simple, traditional and oriented to people who listen to stories. Since sandalwood punishment, he has been telling stories by standing in the square facing the audience. This is the tradition of China's novels and the tradition of the world's novels.

In the tradition of China, storyteller is a folk profession. In the fields, in the streets and lanes, in teahouses and restaurants, he tells people stories that have been circulating for a long time.

Classical literature such as The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and The Journey to the West were originally circulated among the people for many years, and were finally published by one or more people. "predict what will happen, and listen to the next decomposition." This is often seen at the end of the chapters in the book, and it is also often said by storytellers. The imprint of storytelling can be seen in literary works.

Look at the world again, there are storytellers in China and bards in the west. Bards are usually vagrants, criss-crossing, knowledgeable, and the carrier of story circulation. The most famous bard is Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey, two epic novels handed down by Homer, are masterpieces of oral literature and great works of ancient Greek literature.

In addition to professional storytellers, the elders at home also tell stories, the former for entertainment and the latter for educational inheritance. No matter who tells a story, there is a similar scene: the narrator is in the middle, the listener will be around, the narrator will tell the story to the listener, and the listener will watch the narrator's mood change with the story.

However, in the era of advanced science and technology, we have more and more channels to get stories, and we have long been far away from the tradition of storytelling. Our novels have less meaning in telling stories and more skills in telling stories.

The novel Zaragoza Manuscript by Polish writer Jan Potoki is a story-telling novel. Not a story told by one person, but a story told by a group of people.

There are many characters and rich stories, and you will be attracted by the stories like the audience in the book. Similarly, you will question the way of telling stories like the audience in the book.

Authenticity and fiction

Novels are often fictional, but novelists should strive to enhance their authenticity, so that readers can believe in the content of the story and even believe in the existence of the characters in the story.

Novelists will add some elements that represent the truth to their novels, such as diaries, letters and manuscripts. Umberto eco's novel The Name of a Rose uses the element of "manuscript".

The opening of "The Name of Rose is Nature" is a manuscript, which tells that I got a manuscript called "Merck's Godsworn Adesso" (hereinafter referred to as "Godsworn Manuscript"), doubted its authenticity, and then did some research. Later, I found a book called Under the Mirror in a bookstore in Buenos Aires, and the contents in the book can prove the contents of the monk's manuscript.

The exquisite process is written in great detail. Go to the library to check the information, compare the time and analyze the content. The final conclusion is also clear-cut, inferring the mystery behind it from the monk's manuscript, determining the place where the book was written and calculating the creation time. Naturally, this is the style of the symbolist umberto eco, and this rather serious analysis also enhances the authenticity of the monks' manuscripts.

Judging from the title of the book, the element of "manuscript" is also used in the Zaragoza Manuscript by Jan Potoki. The difference is that umberto eco didn't use the manuscript as the title. The manuscript of Merck Godsworn Adeso was marked with the name of the manuscript, while Zaragoza's manuscript was marked with the name of the land.

Compared with umberto eco, Jan Potoki's writing style is a century earlier than his, which also shows that this writing style has become a writing tradition.

In the Zaragoza Manuscript, the author doesn't like umberto eco's textual research, but only tells the origin of the manuscript with short content.

I, a French officer, participated in the siege of Zaragoza. After the victory, I found an iron box in a small room in the city, which contained a Spanish manuscript. Soon, he was captured by the enemy and the manuscript was seen by the enemy captain. The captain found the contents of the manuscript and the story about his grandparents, so he translated the story into French and told it to me.

The following contents can be regarded as both the Spanish captain's translation report and the manuscript content.

In the postscript of the novel, the author wrote: "I copied this diary myself and put it in an iron box." I believe that one day, my descendants will let it see the light of day again. " This echoes the preface of the novel. A century later, the manuscript returned to future generations.

In addition to the "manuscript" element, adding some real events to the bamboo slips is also a means to enhance the authenticity. As mentioned earlier, "I" participated in the siege war of Zaragoza before I came to Zaragoza. In the original remarks at the bottom of the page, there will be corresponding explanations, such as "Zaragoza surrendered on1February 20, 809." This time marks the story with historical events, and we know when the officer "I" got the manuscript.

In the content of the whole novel, there are many attempts to integrate history and reality with historical events as the background, interspersed with historical events and characters who are the protagonists of historical events. And this period of history, it spans a wide range of time and space, from BC 10 to130s and 40s of the 8th century, from the Roman Empire to ancient Greece, Palestine, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and so on.

According to the narrative of the storyteller in the novel, we can know the family stories of the characters, and at the same time we can know some corresponding historical events.

The way of telling stories

The novel Zaragoza Manuscript can be divided into preface and manuscript as a whole. The preface is about the origin of the manuscript, which is the main content of the novel. The officer "I" in the preface only appears once, just to extract the manuscript, and then the descendants of the manuscript author tell him the contents of the manuscript. "I" was the discoverer of the manuscript and the first listener.

As readers, when reading the manuscript, we are equivalent to the role of "I". I'm listening to a story. We're reading a story.

What about the contents of the manuscript? From the catalogue, it is a supplement to the 66-day story and the postscript follow-up story. The content of the manuscript tells the story that Alfonso Van Walden met and heard in the first person. In fact, after reading the novel, you will find that Alfonso Van Walden is not so much the protagonist of the general novel as the witness and connector of the story, and there are not many stories that really happen to him.

How is the story told? It is similar to the familiar Arabian Nights and decameron. Two people are in the same place, and the same narrator tells a story or several stories to the same listener one day. Sometimes one story is related to another story, and sometimes there is another story in another story.

Zaragoza's manuscript tells a bigger and more complicated story than these two, and the stories are more closely related.

The narrator is not a fixed person, and the people in the story will tell the story. One narrator tells a story to the listener, and another narrator tells a story to the listener. Sometimes, there is only one floor, and at most, there will be four floors. Just like Inception, we enter the dream layer by layer, and we enter the story layer by layer.

"Through this continuous nesting structure, Potoki created a novel form of continuous nesting."

The story of sixty-six days can be divided into three parts. From the first day to the tenth day, Alfonso Van Walden met a supernatural phenomenon in a Quemada store and met two cousins. From the tenth day to the sixty-first day, Alfonso Van Walden set out with the Gypsies, and mainly listened to the Gypsies leaders telling their legendary lives along the way; From the sixty-first day to the sixty-sixth day, Alfonso Van Walden listened to Chief Gomez telling family secrets and his own stories.

The first and second parts are relatively simple, with few levels. A person tells a story, and the story can quote at most one story from a book.

The second part is a little more complicated. In addition to the long stories of gypsy leaders, there are also stories of Jewish ronin and Velazquez, all of which are relatively long. As for the life legend of gypsies, there are not many stories of his own, but more stories he heard from some people when he met them, and the people in the stories told stories again.

This way of telling is a feature, but it also has some shortcomings. In the novel, people who listen to gypsies' stories criticize them.

Velazquez said: "The first story will cover the second story, and the second story will cover the third. It seems that the original story can be divided into points until it becomes a sequence, and in some cases it even becomes an infinite sequence. In fact, there is still a way to tell all the stories together like a summary order; Otherwise, as it is now, let me sum up what the gypsy leader said, and I can only sort out a clue. "

As readers, there is a layer between us and Velazquez, which makes it more difficult to sort out the context and connection of the story.

The line connecting stories

When you finish reading Zaragoza's manuscript, you will find that Alfonso van Walden is just a line, a line connecting all kinds. And how did he do this thread, that is, as an audience, to listen to stories.

Although the novel is very rich in content, it can be simplified as Alfonso van Walden's journey to discover the secrets of the Gomel family from the perspective of Alfonso van Walden.

Alfonso van Walden met two cousins and heard some information about the Gomel family. His cousin asked him to change his religion, but he didn't agree. He has always been curious about the true identities of his two cousins and questioned what happened around him, which seems to be tempting him to change his religious beliefs. Follow the gypsy leader all the way, listen to many stories all the way, and always be careful not to waver. When I arrived at my destination and met the head of the Gomel family, I found that everything was a test for him. He passed the test, recovered his beauty and got a lot of money.

Along the way, so many people told stories, on the one hand, to convey some family information, on the other hand, to tease Alfonso Van Walden. Alfonso van Walden met his cousin and went to Alfonso van Walden to get the family heirloom. This is a line. And all stories, like hooks, hang on Alfonso van Walden's road.

This is a bit like the narrative mode of Journey to the West. In the first part, master and apprentice learn from the scriptures together. In the second part, they took the west route, passed through various countries and met monsters. In the third part, they become serious and return to their motherland. One story after another hangs on the road to acquiring western classics, which is the so-called "eighty-one difficulty".

The difference is that most of the stories in Zaragoza's manuscripts are about the past, not the stories that happened on the road. They are also told in very similar patterns, such as "He started talking like this" and "At this point in the story, the gypsy leader asked us to allow him to stop here until the next day".

The ending of the novel is a little anti-climax. The gold mine, which originally represented the family secret, faced exhaustion, and finally the underground world was blown up. All the secrets about the Gomel family were buried. There is no way to revive this family. Alfonso van Walden is the biggest winner. He has money and a family, so his test was not so obvious.

This explosion reminds me of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although many flashbacks are used in the novel, the timeline is relatively clear. A huge family has gone through seven generations. Finally, the town of Macondo was swept away by the hurricane, and the family disappeared from this land.

At the end of the story, everything seems to be zero, whether it is the Gomel family or the lonely family for a hundred years. All that remains is the "manuscript" story we see now.