\”Man Sitting on the Edge of the World, Laughing\”: \”I open any door at will and look for myself.\”

In the autumn of 2018, the 36-year-old Austrian writer Philippe Weiss made a splash at the Frankfurt Book Fair with his debut novel \”Man Sitting on the Edge of the World, Laughing\”. This 5-volume, 1,064-page masterpiece immediately shocked the German literary world. .

In today’s era of fragmented speed reading, such a huge length itself constitutes a provocation. Correspondingly, Weiss also set up a sufficiently grand background for the unfolding of the story: spatially across the Eurasian continent, starting from France in the west and reaching Japan in the east; temporally, it began in the second half of the 19th century and ended in 2011 The Great Kanto Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Accident in Japan. Each volume of the novel has its own different narrator, all of which are first-person narratives, and adopt five different genres. They are about:

From a plot point of view, the five volumes of narrative are not interlocking and cannot form an indispensable narrative chain; from a genre and style point of view See, they are also independent and have no unity at all. What\’s even more unusual is that the five narrative volumes are not numbered. They are like five \”modules\” that exist independently and should also be related to other volumes in the network of meaning. Therefore, readers need to solve a double reading task: after accepting the \”modules\” given by the author, they actively lay out the \”modules\” the connection between.

The latter reading goal forms an interesting analogy with topological thinking. In 1697, Leibniz first elaborated on the concept of topology in his book \”Geometric Properties\”. He called the method he sought to study geometric figures \”positional analysis\” or \”positional geometry\”. Leibniz believed that the method of measuring geometric figures with coordinates was \”indirect\” and \”unsightly\” and only concerned with \”quantity\”, and \”I believe we lack another analytical knowledge…it directly expresses position (situs), Just like algebraic representation of quantities.\” Leibniz only made vague predictions at the time. More than 30 years later, until the mathematician Euler solved the so-called \”Seven Bridges of Koenigsberg Problem\”, topological thinking began to have practical applications: the water flowing through the small town of Koenigsberg There are 2 islands and 7 bridges in the Plugel River. How to walk through 7 bridges at once without repeating, and finally return to the starting point? Euler\’s solution was to abstract the island and the shore as points and the bridge as line segments. The problem was then simplified to how to connect 4 points and 7 lines with one stroke. It can be seen that the key to topological thinking is not to consider the specific geometric diagramInstead of focusing on the shape, size or distance between them, we focus only on the possibility of connectivity between objects and their positional relationships. In contrast, the \”topology\” of reading refers to opening up the continuity of each volume from different interpretation angles, thereby exploring the positional relationship between each volume. This article will follow this idea and try to order the volumes in different spatial patterns, stimulate meaning through the transformation of their positions, and unlock the gestalt of the novel as a whole.

Philipp Weiss Weiss), born in Vienna in 1982, novelist and playwright. His debut novel \”Man Sitting on the Edge of the World and Laughing\” was published by Suerkamp Publishing House in Germany in 2018. It was widely praised and won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literary Award, the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize and the Laureate Prize. Reese Literary Award.

Written by Chen Zao

\”Man Sitting on the Edge of the World, Laughing\”, author: [Austrian] Philip Weiss, translator: Chen Zao, version: East China Normal University University Press·Six Point Books August 2023.

Characters and Plot

For Weiss’s novels, the relationship between the protagonists in each volume can provide the most intuitive ordering model. Plastic artist Yona\’s lover Chantal suddenly disappeared. The overwhelmed Yona went to Japan alone and began his journey to find love. The memory and longing for Chantal constitute the first half of \”The Twilight Zone\”. Yuna failed to find her in Tokyo, but she accidentally met Abra, the protagonist of \”Happy Island\” while drunk, and experienced something rare with her in a century.Peking University earthquake. After the earthquake, Yuna went to the site of the Fukushima nuclear accident in person. Through Abelard, he met the radiation victim Tetsuo at the local hospital and accompanied him on the last journey of his life. Yona\’s acquaintance and dialogue with Tetsuo constituted \”The Twilight Zone\” the lower part. During his lifetime, Tetsuo once rescued two children from the ruins of a nuclear power plant, namely Akio, the protagonist of \”Akio\’s Recording\”, and his sister Keiko.

During Yona\’s search, a former colleague of Chantal\’s provides an important clue. While talking to the latter, Yuna learned that Chantal had been writing secretly and there was an \”endless text\” in her computer. Why did Chantal leave Europe without leaving a word? Why does she want to write? What specifically did you write? These mysteries left blank in The Twilight Zone will be answered in Chantal\’s Notes.

Opening her notes, we will read that due to climate warming, the glaciers of Mont Blanc melted, exposing \”a well-equipped mummy of a young female\”, which belonged to \”1878 Among the items found by Paulette Blanchard, a French traveler in Japan who was killed in 2001, was a notebook that he had carried with him. The inner pages were damaged beyond repair, but the young woman’s name could still be found engraved on the leather cover.” This Paulette Blanchard is Chantal\’s great-great-grandmother. In order to solve the cause of Paulette\’s death and find clues about her life, Chantal decided to go to the Far East. In Japan, she not only found \”My Encyclopedia\”, the posthumous work of her great-grandmother, but also learned about the entire process of creation, publication, and translation of this autobiography. She also learned about her own family history. As one of the first European women to travel to East Asia during the Meiji Restoration at the end of the 19th century, Paulette married to Japan and became pregnant and gave birth to a child. Among her descendants was a granddaughter who returned to Europe, Chantal\’s grandmother; Paulette\’s other grandson stayed in Japan. , the surname \”Blanchard became Brosillo according to the Japanese pronunciation, and later Busiro. The last descendant was a certain Busiro philosopher\”, that is, the man who had a heart-to-heart talk with Yuna and eventually died in the nuclear bomb Radiated Fukushima accident victims.

Based on the arrangement of the above-mentioned character relationships, the first possibility of the 5-volume layout can be drawn:

However, this novel layout based on character relationships has unavoidable flaws. The story of the three protagonists Paulette, Chantal and Yona can be justified: from Yona\’s perspective, everything is about loss and search.In a cycle, Yona is looking for his lover Chantal who left without saying goodbye and disappeared suddenly. Chantal is looking for the cause of death of his great-grandmother Paulette and the meaning of his own existence. Paulette 130 years ago has been fanatically searching for the missing person almost all his life. The order and ideals entrusted to the soul; Taking Paulette as the starting point, this is a fragile family history that has endured for two centuries; with Chantal as the center, the theme of the story is the positioning of individual identity, and how the thin self can survive in tradition, genes, and the external world. Maintain independence amidst the coercion of love, love and passion. Whether it is the character relationship or the plot, the connection between the three volumes of \”My Encyclopedia\” – \”Notes\” – \”Twilight Zone\” can be regarded as clear at a glance. Without any one of the volumes, the story will be difficult to explain.

In contrast, the other two volumes are more like a burden that has been stuffed in. Yuna met Abra and Philosophy in Japan, and it was a coincidence that he rescued Akio from the ruins of the power station. If you like, you can By arranging for Yuna to meet countless other Japanese, Tetsushi would still have died from a large dose of radiation even if he hadn\’t saved Akio. Under this premise, the doujinshi comics drawn by Abra or Akio\’s recordings are even more unexpected. In other words, even if there is no \”Happy Island\” and \”Akio\’s Recording\”, the story line of Paulette-Chantal-Yona will not be affected at all. Therefore, if we want to integrate the five-volume narrative into an organic whole, we cannot stay on the surface of the plot. We must jump out of the far-fetched character relationships and find the deep paths of the textual connections in each volume.

Philip Weiss.

Box structure and narrative function

Topology has a popular and vivid name – rubber geometry. In plane geometry, two figures are congruent only if they overlap each other after translation. However, in topology, a figure can be stretched, twisted, reduced or deformed at will and still be equivalent, just like a piece of plasticine, whether it is stretched into a sphere, a cube or a cone, as long as it is not cut off or New connections occur, and the shapes transformed from this piece of plasticine are all \”homeomorphic\”. To perform a topological transformation on the novel layout deduced from the character relationships above is to try to open up other ways to enter the text while keeping the connection order of each volume unchanged.

For example, if \”The Twilight Zone\” is enlarged and lifted off the paper, and the other four volumes are reduced andIf you press deeper, you will find that Weiss\’s five-volume novel is no longer just a tree-shaped bifurcated structure on the plane, but forms a three-dimensional \”box\” with a deep structure. Llosa once analyzed this narrative strategy in detail. The box structure means that \”each story contains another story, and the latter is subordinate to the former, arranged first, second, third…\”. Correspondingly, \”The Twilight Zone\” also contains similar metaphors. As a full-time plastic artist, Yuna’s series of masterpieces “World Sketches in Miniatures” and “Imaginary Landscapes” have a fixed creative process: choose an “unusual scenery” to take pictures, such as “an original copy of the Austrian village of Harsch” Tart\’s Huizhou Boluo or \”Paris-like\” Tianducheng, based on these real-life photos, \”miniature models faithful to the details\” are made, and then the models are lit and photographed. The model photos are finally processed by computers and enlarged for display. This mode of selecting scenes – taking photos – making models – and taking photos again, this \”photos of replicas of Paris replicas of replicas\” can be repeated endlessly. The concept is the same as \”a large set of boxes containing similar shapes but smaller volumes\” A series of box sets” are exactly the same. What\’s more interesting is that Jona\’s full name is Jona Jonas. In German, adding the letter \”s\” to the end of a noun is a plural sign. It can even be said that the signature of the protagonist and fictional author Jona Jonas on the title page of this volume has already hinted at the nested structure of the entire novel.

However, as Llosa said, the ancient and common narrative device of stories within stories is mostly just a \”mechanical\” thing like \”One Thousand and One Nights\”, a series of stories. It is a \”mere juxtaposition\” rather than a \”symbiosis or a combination of fascinating and mutually influencing effects\” with each other. A truly creative and organic box-set structure requires the emergence of \”meaningful reflections of the child body on the parent body\” in the process of story creation. Llosa\’s request is actually a more essential topological issue. It means that the connectivity between elements should not be the result of forced setting by external forces, but requires a more internal logical necessity. Therefore, if we want to regard \”The Twilight Zone\” as a first-level \”box\” that governs the entire novel, we need to further unearth evidence so that the other four volumes can be \”meaningfully\” included in it.

Una, who uses photography as a \”wordless narrative\”, provides a kind of outside space in his series of works \”Sketches of the World\” and \”Imaginary Landscapes\”. Those photos of miniature models \”at first glance, may make people think they are realistic shots. If you look closely, you will feel an awkwardness that observers often cannot explain.\” This \”awkward\”, this \”Hopper\” \”Style sense of alienation\” separates the viewer from the object he or she is viewing, and this separation is the premise for all cognition or reflection to be possible. The image narrative at this time is therefore no longer a simple record and reproduction, but a It is the ability to initiate abstract thinking.

Yuna’s other film show is titled \”Onion Fish\”. The onion fish is a small boat-shaped piece of wood that Yuna found among his great-grandmother\’s belongings. No one knew what it was until YunaWhen I read the letter, I discovered that it was the only relic left to my great-grandmother by my great-grandfather who died in the concentration camp. When Yuna experienced a major earthquake in Japan, suddenly lost his hearing and then regained his hearing without warning, he suddenly realized that all concrete things are uncertain and uncontrollable, \”things themselves are meaningless\” and \”any persistence is in vain\” \”So, in the bustling streets of Tokyo, he \”opened his hand, looked at the onion fish…let it fall, and never looked back. \”The only thing that can resist the passage of time is narrative.\” narrative\”. It is narrative, which performs the function of giving meaning in addition to information recording. It is what breaks time and space, \”snatches me (Yuna) out of forgotten memories\”, and is the \”anchor\” that allows people to gain a firm foothold in the unpredictable world. \”.

Later, on the ruins of Fukushima, the extreme experience made Yuna realize that \”there is violence in the act of taking pictures\” because the photos \”leave the viewer outside. He saw the pain, but There was no way to mitigate it. He couldn\’t get into the frame, couldn\’t hug the photo. A crying person, or a glass of water for a thirsty person.\” Facing the dying philosophy, Yuna not only gave up objects with symbolic meanings, but also further gave up on the use of technical means to narrate images. He left \”the camera behind.\” In the hotel room, buried in a suitcase, between underwear.\” At this time, he is no longer an outsider watching with cold eyes, no longer making value judgments on disasters, human nature, or death. He no longer indulges in intellectually dominated monologues, and no longer tries to freeze shocking events that have nothing to do with him. He listened, he tried to understand, he had an equal and calm dialogue with philosophy and history. For the history of philosophy, this kind of straightforward \”narrative\” that is unobstructed and unmodified, because of its instinct and simplicity, has achieved an incredible function – it exudes warmth and becomes the last comfort for the history of philosophy before his death, accompanying him to the end of his life.

The above three narrative functions – creating a distance between cognition and speculation, serving as a fulcrum of existence and providing comfort, make \”Twilight Zone\” connect the other four volumes at a level beyond the plot. In other words, what is not clear in \”The Twilight Zone\” and is still in the metaphorical stage has been proven and enriched as the text in the other four volumes gradually unfolds.

In the 19th century, Paulette followed the example of D\’Alembert and Diderot\’s \”Encyclopedia\” and \”cut and rearranged\” her life experiences recorded in thousands of pages of diaries and \”classified them according to concepts.\” , compiled into entries in alphabetical order, and published the autobiography \”My Encyclopedia\” in the form of a dictionary. In a letter to the editor, Paulette explained that she wanted to \”completely shatter\” the diary written in natural time and turn it into a \”completely unfamiliar text\”. Only in this way can she calmly \”observe herself and just It feels like I am standing completely outside myself.\” Finally, I can clearly analyze \”how I have changed and why I appear to be different or even extremely contradictory at different times.\” 130 years later, Chantal, who also wanted to study himself through writing, did so in a way that almost mocked order. Compared to Paulette, Chantal\’s narrative resists any structural elaboration, but the life experience it unleashes is more sober due to cynicism. For ShangFor Tarr, writing is \”the training of thinking and self-questioning\” and \”critical self-investigation\”. She \”constantly questions and exposes her bifurcated, complex, but also mediocre and ordinary self\”, intending to use This \”determined the boundaries in her thinking and feeling me, the parts of me that were patterned and tracked by language and socialization from those other, unique and ineffable parts of me that were still me.\” part\”.

Completely different from Paulette\’s writing purpose, Chantal does not want to draw conclusions about herself by piling up details. She has long seen that no matter how true, sharp, and rich the narrative is, it will not Possibly allowing her to fully identify herself, because the self \”is not a rigid sum of properties and events. It is not a thing. It is a process. A recursive pattern. A story that is always self-inventing and telling itself.\” Chantal is not statically dissecting and integrating the self, but dynamically recording the process of thinking, and \”formalizing the non-material spiritual movement\” through narrative. In the opposition between construction and deconstruction, data and model, conclusion and process, \”My Encyclopedia\” and \”Notes\” almost become the debates of two eras; it is also in the sharp contrast between the purpose, content and style of the two. , the cognitive and speculative distance provided by the narrative can be emphasized and highlighted through the surface of the plot.

Compared with the power of speculation, the existential significance of narrative is more obvious in the two volumes of \”Happy Island\” and \”Akio\’s Recording\”. Abra, a girl with prosthetic limbs who lost an arm and a leg in a car accident, decided to get rid of her body, upload her spirit to the memory, and enter a virtual digital world of selflessness and bliss. In this boundless world that abolishes finitude and is perfectly optimized, she is everything, absolutely free but always lonely. Abra, who has no fixed point, can only \”float in nothingness.\” She cannot land, escape, or wake up. In this bliss that is \”more terrifying than all horrors,\” narrative becomes the only support for existence.

The text of \”Happy Island\”. The text reads: I am walking through the city, and the pain is always there.

Nine-year-old Akio lives with his great-grandmother, parents and mute sister Keiko in a coastal town in northern Japan. In March 2011, the black tsunami swept away his grandmother, washed away the house, and destroyed the nuclear power plant. Akio drifted at sea for several days, walked through the destroyed coastal areas, and finally returned toAround parents. Along the way, in order to fight against fear and cheer himself up, Akio kept talking to the recorder. When the tsunami flood swept him into deathly silence, when he floated on the sea with his mute sister Keiko and iguana Chen and struggled in the ruins, \”Only talking can help me.\” He made wishes, asked questions, and described dreams into the recording pen, Talking about his fear, he recalled his great-grandmother and mother, ice cream and cherry blossoms. He made up stories one after another to tell to his sister. He was most afraid of running out of battery, because the little recording pen was his \”comfort box\”. After finding his parents, Akio gave his extremely cherished treasure to Zheshi and said to him: \”If you are sad, it may be useful.\” When Zheshi was dying, he heard \”that little singing voice\”, \”The dull face that was lifeless just now has changed.\” In the end, when Zheshi\’s body completely collapsed, when his flesh and skin were separated, blood oozed all over his body, he was surrounded by roaring and screaming machines, and he lost his ability to communicate forever, there was only \”the little voice in the recording pen\” day and night. Talking\”, only narrative, still comforting.

Arranging each volume of the novel from the perspective of narrative function, the following layout pattern can be derived:

Utopian narrative and narrative space

The independence that Weiss gives to each volume of the novel is not only reflected in The divergence of plots, heterogeneity of styles and genres clearly break readers\’ expectations of traditional novels.

Paulette intends to organize what she has seen and thought throughout her life through detailed data, artificially segmented concept entries and alphabetical order, in order to \”dissect and rearrange the muscles of my soul\” . But what she chose to include were almost all exciting social events, from the Paris Commune to women\’s liberation, from the vigorous coal trade driven by the Industrial Revolution to the Vienna World Expo where mechanical technology was in the spotlight, from the turbulent urbanization in Europe. , the capitalization process reaches its full potential Japanese society in the Meiji period sought to abandon tradition and fully westernize. Although the revolution was full of blood, although the ruthlessness of industry and capital had devastated nature, and although Paulette herself wandered throughout her life and hit obstacles everywhere, her writing was from beginning to end. They are all steeped in the dreamy atmosphere of Utopia. She had doubts, but she could not give up her longing for the future.

The grand promise of reason and progress makes Paulette optimistic and fearless, almost became the weapon and comfort for her to bounce back and regain her courage to enter the world after being beaten to death by life again and again. However, on the other hand, Paulette\’s firm belief in reason and progress made Paulette despise and even hate his own sensitivity and sentimentality. This irreconcilable contradiction is also powerfully expressed in the narrative form adopted by Paulette. An encyclopedia that embodies the spirit of enlightenment and scientific rationality. This set of knowledge treasures that boasts objectivity, absoluteness, and all-inclusiveness once brought her the ecstasy of \”the world is at her feet, no longer a mystery.\” The reason why Paulette is This is a role model because she is trying to analyze herself and observe herself calmly and comprehensively with the same goal. She wants to \”discover some universalities\” and discover those \”moments when the world comes to me fiercely\”. That is to say, she wants to alienate, suppress or even eliminate the part of herself that cannot be reconciled with reason in her mind, because \”that me has been shattered under the weight of the world.\” She wants to \”simplify\” a highly condensed and shaped by necessity. Understandable to me.

A century and a half later, the certainty that Paulette believed in, maintained and even worked hard to construct has disappeared from the artist Yuna’s living experience. As a hermaphrodite, Yuna has been wandering about the most fundamental identity since childhood. The grandfather who died in the concentration camp, the mother who died mysteriously, the lover who left without saying goodbye, the abnormal glacier collapse in Greenland, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that never happened in Japan in a century… fractures and impermanence replaced stable and eternal beliefs and became the basis of survival. Color and normality. Recalling his childhood, Una spoke of his first \”metaphysical fear,\” which was an \”illustration of a journey to the moon, depicting Munchhausen on a bean plant, about to reach the moon, looking at the planet Earth floating in space. , he seems to be just hanging from the thin stem of the plant He could fall into the boundless nothingness at any time. This fear that he could never get rid of made Yuna keep asking: \”How can people stand if the ground no longer supports it?\” It was also this fear that made him. The imagination is \”possessed, possessed by turmoil and destruction \” Whenever he \”tried to imagine something whole, sacred, and solid,\” such as the \”Art Nouveau vase\” on his mother\’s bedside, the late 19th-century heirloom would \”melt, collapse, and dissipate like wax. \”in the air\” or even \”floating on the ceiling\” Crash into millions of pieces.\”

If Paulette\’s \”My Encyclopedia\” once cheered for the ideal of modernity with rationality and progress as its main characteristics, Yona used his own life to survive. and aesthetic experience cast a shadow of doubt on this ideal. He instinctively sensed the fragility of order and witnessed the out-of-control technology with his own eyes. After losing his hearing without warning and suddenly regaining his hearing, the crowded streets of Tokyo became an apocalyptic metaphor in Yuna\’s eyes: \”Any persistence is in vain.\” .\” This anti-teleological insight manifested itself into the ancient Eastern wisdom that fascinated Yuna during another image: gold tapering. During the Muromachi period, shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu “broke his favorite tea bowl, […] and ordered his shogunate artists to invent a new method. Cracks, scars, and gaps were not concealed but artistically emphasized, showCome out. Fill with paint mixed with gold powder. Accident, patina, disability, history. Kintsugi has elements of the aesthetics of imperfection and fading. The beauty of brokenness. ”

With an artist’s sensitivity, Yuna recorded the ruptures and uncertainties he experienced in a gentle, chronological linear narrative. This aesthetic sense of crisis is reflected in Shanta It was further developed in his \”Notes\” and turned into a speculative and philosophical vertical. Deep field. As a theoretical physicist and meteorologist, Chantal deeply explores the changes in scientific understanding in the post-industrial era since the 20th century, with \”uncertainty\”. Concepts such as duality, \”probability\” and \”chaos\” shattered the industrial revolution The classical mechanical paradigm that dominates the era of destiny, and the revolution in cognitive means promoted by the rapid development of science and technology have not allowed people to observe \”the objects and forces, causes and their inevitable consequences that unfold on the basis of space, time and the constants of universal natural laws\”. \”interaction between\”, but repeatedly It proves that fluctuations, accidents, paradoxes and complexity are everywhere. \”The world picture of physics has long been changed. Radical changes have completely separated it from the world that can be accurately described and calculated by simple, universal and eternal laws.\” The universe has no constants, “it escapes in all directions. \”Neither stable nor durable\”, \”without any overriding scheme, without center, without God or vitalist principle\”, the world as it is, dethrones the lofty position of classical scientific knowledge, in Chantal\’s view , the result of this cognition will inevitably reduce the humanistic tradition to nothingness, the light of enlightenment and reason is like the truth that blinds Oedipus, so she playfully predicted in an apocalyptic tone: \”Destroy you.\” Own! ”

In addition to the subversion of the legitimacy of the classic scientific narrative itself, the omnipotent technology, absolute freedom and spiritual love that Paulette believed and pursued in the 19th century are also shattered under the pen of Chantal in the 21st century. For mean irony and helpless self-deception, technology without reflection is like Pandora\’s box, and its unbridled expansion brings about a warming climate. , deteriorating environment and nuclear radiation that shredded genes; individuals who got rid of family and tradition did not get the freedom they expected. Instead, they lost their way because of the disappearance of their bonds, and fell into a cold and bone-chilling loneliness in the endless floating and escape. ; Love that makes people think they have a complete soul collapses into genetic lies and hormone manipulation in evolutionary and physiological explanations , so it will eventually push people into the abyss of cowardice, jealousy and pain after a brief moment of ecstasy. Not only the content, but Chantal\’s fragmented manuscripts also spare no effort to deconstruct the order of time and logic in form. She is cynical. It jumps between emotional catharsis, scientific deduction and rational speculation, allowing true knowledge, consensus, complete or unified serious appeal. Seeking averageness has become a joke, giving way to randomness and emergence.

But in fact, no matter Paulet’s construction, Yuna’s crisis writing, or Chantal’s deconstruction, the three protagonists from Europe are all the same. Those who have not escaped the utopian discourse of modernity, no matter how significant the differences in attitudes, are always centered around reason, progress, and certainty.discuss common themes of sexuality or universality. The ones who really break through this discourse system in the novel are the two protagonists from Japan. On the one hand, narrative forms with more sensory impact, such as images and audio, have impacted the dominance of written texts with more normative significance. From the beginning, doujinshi comics and private recordings were private words that did not care about public effectiveness. On the other hand, the use of the mentally disturbed non-mainstream girl Abra and the 9-year-old Japanese boy Akio as the narrators also intuitively reflects the heterogeneity and diversity of the narrative subjects.

The text of \”Happy Island\”. The text reads: I open any door at will and look for myself.

The virtual Tokyo that Abra travels through like a sleepwalker is an alternative space where numbers have eroded reality, I am the world, spatial location has become invalid, time has closed loops, and concepts are spinning like echoes. It is weird, strange, and illogical, and has an exact correspondence in the narrative form: Japanese comics are in the opposite order to ordinary Western books, with \”back to front, right to left\” pictures, providing a different story from the popular The special reading experience of linear text, the symmetrical mirror structure, seems familiar, but inverted and paradoxical.

The Japanese boy Akio is blessed with the \”animism\” privilege of children. Therefore, he can confidently regard all things as equal interlocutors with independent lives that need care and awe. He is lively and sincere. His ability to empathize instinctively transcends hostility toward confrontation, control, or subjugation. Because the cognitive habits of opposition between people and things, subjects and objects have not yet been established, he can always enter the aesthetic world with a pure and non-utilitarian attitude like a game, without having to overcome any anthropocentric value judgments or the conventions of disaster narratives. of aggressiveness. In this anti-heroic Odyssey, Akio uses his free perception and innocent imagination to easily melt the closed world of adults dominated by modern rationality, creating a heterogeneous space where all things coexist and are interconnected. After the utopia of grand narrative encounters deconstruction, \”heterotopia\” emerges and takes its place, whereby narrative \”frees itself from its ancient obligation to time\” and language becomes \”a thing of space\” (Foucault).

Invent your own reading order

The uncertain text volume number encourages reading as you please: readers can \”in their own way\” \”Reading,\” you can skip and read, you can read each volume side by side, you can choose one volume to read, or you can read it in a classic linear way. On the other hand, if you want to integrate the five volumes into an organic whole, It needs some kind of Effective meaning patterns connect the originally independent volumes. Like a topological question that needs to be answered, the novel\’s apparently discrete state invites and makes demands on the reader. It calls on the reader to \”invent his own order\” and actively arrange the positions of the volumes. Actively participate in the construction of text meaning during the reading process. The wonderful thing about the game is that the author Weiss does not set a standard answer, so the reader has full freedom to assemble different complete texts according to his own interpretation.

Connect At the invitation of Weiss, this article attempts to arrange three different reading modes:

1. From a plot perspective, the flat tree mode based on character relationships provides a horizontal view of time and space. Related, but this connection is loose and far-fetched, and cannot integrate the various volumes of the novel into an organic whole

2. From a meta-narrative perspective, the texts of each volume. There is a deep recursive pattern between them (recursive pattern), this pattern entered the public consciousness of literature due to the description of Chinese boxes by the Peruvian writer Llosa. However, the recursive strategy of Weiss\’s five-volume novel is not a simple story within a story, but an in-depth exploration of the function of narrative: \” The three narrative functions proposed in a metaphorical way in \”The Twilight Zone\”, namely, providing a distance between cognition and speculation, providing a fulcrum for survival, and providing comfort, are each developed in depth and concretely in other volumes.

3. From the perspective of utopian narrative, the five volumes of novels play an important role in utopia. Coherence and unity are achieved in the construction, crisis, deconstruction, and description of the two heterotopias.

However, regardless of character relationships, metanarratives, or utopian narratives, every angle is just an attempt to enter the text. , there is absolutely no conclusion on how to interpret it. . I hope that smart readers will develop more unexpected paths, making every reading full of surprises and unknowns, becoming an adventure and a mystery.

Written by Chen Zao

Editor by Zhang Jin.

Proofreading/Zhao Lin