Pure literary writing

Pure literature is a kind of literature compared with popular literature. Different from the commercial type fiction, pure literature is more artistic. Writing human emotional experience and questioning spiritual value are the common pursuit and remarkable features of pure literature. In this lesson, we will learn one Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, a great master of literature, to see what can be learned from the writing of pure literature, which made the author win the Nobel Prize in literature.

First, let's look at the construction of narrative space: how to switch between truth and fiction.

When the author chooses the narrative space for the novel, the first question to consider is: what is the main object to be represented by the novel. The narrative space under the pen of realistic fiction writers is often the reproduction of a specific country or city, such as Dickens's London and Balzac's Paris. On the contrary, if the main goal of the novel is to express a certain mental state, then the space of the novel is often imaginative and imaginary.

Garcia Marquez sets the narrative of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in a place that does not exist in reality -- the town of Macondo, which becomes the starting point of his novel's magical reality. Macondo first appears in the short story "Dead Wood" but is best known for "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Macondo has also become a literary symbol in the works of Garcia Marquez and even the whole school of magical realism. "Macondo is not so much a place in the world as a state of mind," Garcia Marquez said. As the author said, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, most of the author's description of space in Macondo focuses on the interior of Buendia's family, while the description of public space in the town is relatively small. Collective, social expressions are weakened, and individual mental states are infinitely magnified. One might even say that in Macondo, everyone is alone in the universe.

However, from another point of view, Macondo is not completely fictional. Through various descriptions in the novel, the author places this unknown town clearly in Latin America. Mr. Garcia Marquez recalled that his novel began with stories told by his grandmother as a child, and that the folktales of the Caribbean region had a mysterious and fantastical quality that formed the tone of the Macondo family story. The seemingly inconceivable description in the novel is actually derived from the author's real experience. The author uses a kind of magic brushwork to reproduce his true feelings about his hometown, which may not be a narrative truth, but it is a psychological truth. That's why the fictional town of Macondo is a representation of the real loneliness of Latin America. Loneliness has a progressive meaning of cultural criticism. By writing about the loneliness of the nation through the family, the work has the color of the national fable.

Fictional narrative space is a technique often used by many modernist novelists to distance themselves from the real society and express some abstract or philosophical themes more easily, such as Yoknapatawpha, a small American county that runs through Faulkner's novel. Kafka's "castle" is more abstract. This is a very useful spatial architecture idea. When the realism and sociality of narrative space are weakened to the extreme, its symbolic significance can be maximized, and the issues discussed are more universal in human spirit.

Second, from the perspective of narrative time: break the linear narrative and write mental time.

If the setting of space is the concrete support of the theme of the novel, then the arrangement of time is the more hidden and deeper expression of the theme. The narrative modes of time and space in novels are often closely connected. In order to cooperate with the symbolic space, the author also needs to arrange an extraordinary time system for the novel. The time of traditional realist novels is usually linear, from the beginning to the end according to the development of time. Even if certain flashbacks and flashbacks are sometimes set, it is necessary to ensure that the time clues are clear enough and try not to disturb the readers' understanding of the narrative reality. For modernist novels that focus on the expression of mental state, it is an inevitable choice to break this linear and uniform time. The most extreme examples are "Ulysses" and "Remembrance of Things Past", masterpieces of stream of consciousness, which use extremely long stories to describe very short events in reality, so as to maximize the conscious feelings of the characters.

However, Garcia Marquez is not so extreme. His novels are more story-oriented than streamof-consciousness works. Especially, One Hundred Years of Solitude is also burdened with the grand task of depicting family history, so it still adopts the way of chronological narration as a whole. But at the same time, the author creatively uses a lot of time and space jump narrative. The narrator often twists the past, present and future time together in a sentence by way of recollection. Many readers are sure to know by heart the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Years from now, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will think back to the distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice." The narrator is not standing at the end of time to begin to tell, is talking about the future; But "Looking at the ice cube" is a story of the past, so the narrator has a "now" to tell the story, but this is not a specific time, it is a virtual "now". That is to say, when the author places the starting point of the narrative in an uncertain present, he can not only point to the future but also look back to the past, and all three dimensions of time are included in the first sentence at once. The sentence pattern at the beginning of the novel is repeated throughout the book and constitutes the basic way for the Buendia family to feel time, and this chaotic, multi-dimensional narrative of time is coordinated with the mental states of the characters. Only in this way can the novel show the historical vicissitude of Macondo town and the loneliness of the family, which has the color of magic reality.

Third, let's talk about dialogue and action description: the outward expression of the spirit.

The inner emotion and mental state of the characters can be conveyed through a variety of character description methods, and the choice of specific methods should be decided according to the personal perspective of the narrative and the style and temperament of the work. When the author uses the first-person narration, he can often directly show the protagonist's psychology through the introspection of the narrator, so the psychological description will assume the main way to show the character's mental state.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is different. The use of the third person and the perspective of the prophet creates a natural distance between the narrator, characters and readers, and the author rarely uses the psychological description and monologue that private novels rely on. So, how is the character's mental mood conveyed in this situation?

Garcia Marquez's way of dealing with characters' emotions is very similar to Hemingway's. I believe you are very familiar with Hemingway's famous "iceberg principle" : only one eighth of the iceberg is exposed on the surface of the language, while the main part is hidden, implicit and depends on textual guessing. A famous example is Hemingway's short story "The KILLERS", in which two killers walk into a shop and ask the cook and the clerk about the character they want to kidnap. The novel is almost entirely made up of dialogue, and the language of the characters is subtle but mysterious and thrilling to contemplate. The dialogue in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is also characterized by this simplicity. I don't know if you remember the telegram that Herineldo Garcia Marquez sent to Colonel Aureliano, which said, "It's raining in Macondo," and the colonel replied, "Don't be silly. It rains in August." In two short words, the sadness and loneliness of Herrineldo's heart, the coldness and cruelty of the Colonel, were expressed.

In addition, the author arranges many behaviors to show the mental state of the characters in the book, that is, repeatedly doing meaningless things. Colonel Aureliano, in his later years, was obsessed with making small goldfish: "he would make two every day, and when he had enough, he would put them in the cauldron and melt them again." The boring action reflected the loneliness of the character. The same logic of action applies to Amaranda: "She seems to knit by day and unstitch by night, not to beat loneliness, but on the contrary, to hold it." "Unbutton it and sew it on, so that the wait will not be so long." Insisting on repeated meaningless things is the most vivid and direct action description of the character's inner loneliness.

In general, the writing of pure literature not only requires the author to deeply explore the psychological description and emotional expression of the characters, but more importantly, to unify the whole work in the same tone through various narrative techniques, so as to make the expression of the theme more complete and the work more appealing.

Just now, through sharing the writing experience of One Hundred Years of Solitude, we have learned how Garcia Marquez expresses the emotional and mental state of characters from the aspects of constructing narrative space, narrative time, describing action and dialogue. Here are some practical tips for creators:

First, if you want to increase the readability of the work, you can creatively use the narrative mode of time-space jump, so that the narrator can recall the way, the past, the present, the future time in a fact, so that readers can experience new discoveries in the repeated reading.

Second, if the author wants to create more three-dimensional characters, he can directly show the complex contradictions in the spiritual world of the protagonist through the introspection of the narrator.

Third, if the author wants to express some abstract or philosophical themes, he can use the technique of fictional narrative space to distance himself from the real society.

Finally, in the writing of pure literature, similar emotional experience will cause great differences in the style of writing because of the different ways of writing. Also writing loneliness, Lu Xun, Camus, Tazai Zhi and so on and Garcia Marquez's work temperament is very different. The author needs to further consider whether the emotional experience will be affected by other factors, such as the background of The Times and the ideological trend of philosophy, and comprehensively deal with it in the writing. At the same time, it is better to form the author's own personalized expression way, so as to make the work more charming.

The imagination question of this lesson is: According to "One Hundred Years of Solitude", imagine if the Grand View Garden in "A Dream of Red Mansions" existed in "Macondo" in China, and make a paragraph describing how the past, future, and present of several generations took place in the garden are tied together.