The Nobel Prize has just been announced, and it went to a German female writer, and everyone is in an uproar. As the Nobel Committee's enthusiasm for refugee literature and the principle of political correctness have intensified in recent years, the evaluation criteria of literature have been increasingly questioned, and the popularity of the Nobel Prize has become increasingly thin. The sea of ??books is boundless. What kind of sensitive sense of smell and clear judgment do we need to find the book that belongs to us - just like looking for a lover? Just like looking for a lover among hundreds of millions of people, what we are looking for is the fatal attraction, the voice that makes no one else. I think of fellow female writer Angela Carter, a British beauty with a witchy temperament, pale and cold, blond, thin, with high cheekbones and a forced smile. Critics praised her as "Salman 61 Rushdie among female writers, the Calvino of Britain". The arrogant and fierce Rushdie once paid tribute to her in a commemorative article, calling her "a great writer, Good witch, dear friend." She is a unique and rare creature. She writes about subjects that have never been attempted with an unprecedented tone and inspires countless writers. Like many truly great writers, she surpassed the understanding of her time and missed the Nobel Prize, but she left an eternal voice in the cold throat of literary history. For Chinese readers, Carter is a strange, novel and evocative name. Over the years, countless new publishers have been eager to try it, but have been stymied all the way. It was not until last year that "Magic Toy Shop", which was intended to please the majority, was belatedly released. Later, we saw "The Passion of New Eve" and "The Wise Child", which are similar to Taiwan's popular version. Their popular themes, bold writing methods, gorgeous rhetoric, and powerful accents have attracted countless young literary and artistic women. Overwhelmed with admiration. Angela, whose original surname was Stalker, was born into a wealthy family in South London. She had a sociologist father and a group of extremely strong female relatives. As a girl, she suffered from anorexia. She later followed her father as a journalist and entered Bristol University. When she was a reporter, she was a radical and was deeply depressed by the miners' strike and the failure of social reforms in the 1960s. During college, she studied English literature, anthropology, and sociology, with a preference for French literature, especially Rimbaud. Like an anemic witch, she spends her nights hanging out in coffeehouses and smoky underground poetry readings, indulging in bohemian nightlife. She is not a feminist man. She got married when she was only 20 years old and divorced 12 years later. At the age of 37, she married a man much younger than herself and gave birth to a son in her forties. In 1992, Angela died of cancer at the age of 51. Before she died, she said that these two "boys" made her unable to bear to die. The reason why Carter transformed from a punk girl who was first involved in poetry and journalism to the most original world-class writer after World War II was due to her bohemian world travel. In 1969, after winning the Somerset Maugham Award, she was able to leave her husband and travel to Japan, starting her first step around the world. In Japan, Angela was deeply stimulated by witnessing the strange living conditions of women in Tokyo and quickly became a radical "feminist." In the late 1970s and 1980s, as a writer-in-residence at universities, she traveled across Eurasia and the United States. Her wandering career of nearly twenty years has injected the diverse and mixed colors of a fireworks-like carnival into her creations. The background of "The Passion of New Eve" is set in the bizarre United States, which perfectly fits the crazy transgender drama. Maybe many people can live like her, but no one can write like her. Angela is an amazing writer. The reading experience she brings to readers is comparable only to Kusturica's films, Van Gogh's colors, Anthony Burgess's stories, Henry Miller's ravings and Picasso's erotic paintings. Her writing has no boundaries, and she hates gender boundaries in particular. She invents and uses language and rhetoric that have never been seen before, and writes magical stories that have never been told. Whenever you pick up a Carter novel, blinding fireworks will burst into flames before your eyes. She denies the existence of boundaries, uses language to expand the boundaries of this narrow world, and fills the gaps that the world has cracked due to being too dry. No wonder people wrote this in her obituary: "She was against narrow-mindedness. Nothing was outside her scope. She wanted to know everything that happened in the world and everyone in the world. She paid attention to every corner of the world and every person. In a word. She indulges in the carnival of diversity, she colors life and language." The narrow "feminism" naturally cannot cover Carter's life and creation. The revolutionary woman Beauvoir once said that women are not born, but created. However, "feminism" as a female awakening to "me" may be innate. There is a feminist in every woman. Regardless of whether you have a house of your own, whether you have enough money, whether you enjoy the status of a lady or a queen, the female body is born with a curse (the same word as "menstruation"), which is as inescapable as original sin. Among them, there is a secret similar to the "cosmic justice" mentioned by Aeschylus. It’s just that when a woman picks up a pen, she inevitably tells the story of her cursed life, and is inevitably called a “feminist.” Angela saw this early on. In "The Passion of New Eve", she created a hermaphrodite monster and gave him the hope of saving the world. The transgender drama was staged one after another, with colorful coloratura accompanied by the sound of bombing. At the end, she brought the sexual war to an end, with both sides hurting. In Angela's writing, the end of sex is the beginning of love.
If the aggressive and tense "New Eve" ends with this, it is surprising, then the little calmness and relief in her "Swan Song" are as smooth and clear as flowing clouds and flowing water. In "Wise Children", she asked the abandoned twin sisters to play a "wise" role, and finally, like an earth mother, she forgave a father who abandoned his wife and children and refused to recognize each other. There, Carter's narrative was free of hatred and all his frustrations melted away. In that father, she saw the narrow-mindedness of self-righteousness, the inability to be kind, and the inability to love, for which she smiled with pity. She left the impoverished twin sisters living on the streets, tumbling around and suffering humiliation, but they were always optimistic, knowledgeable, romantic, and retained a tender and compassionate heart. "How happy it is to sing and dance!" This sentence appears repeatedly in the twin sisters' narrations, which is both admirable and distressing. If you exclude the plot arrangements that make men stunned and women dumbfounded, the most charming and universal thing in Carter's novels is her words. Especially for female writers, Angela allows people to see the possibility of constructing novels based on language itself. Like Shakespeare, Flaubert, Nabokov and the Devil Poets, her eyes never let go of all the filth and immorality in the world, but her writing is so gorgeous, and she writes erotic and despicable things into a beautiful long poem. poetry. Born in 1940 and died in 1992, Carter's life was short. Her genius was wild and wasteful. As a storyteller, she was so generous, and perhaps it was in this burst of writing that her life accelerated. She poured out her talent, and it was a kind of writing that hurt. Only 51 years old, she passed away before the world could determine her status. In ancient Greek mythology, the witch Sibyl said to Aeneas when she lived seven hundred years: "One day, my body will shrink from what it is today to a little bit because I have lived too long. My aging limbs will shrink and become as light as feathers. At that time, no one will be able to tell that I was once loved by others and favored by the gods. Maybe even the sun will not recognize me when he sees me, or he will not admit that he has ever been. Loved me. I will definitely become like this. Although I will be so shrunken that no one can recognize me, people can still recognize it from my voice. The God of destiny will leave my voice to me. ." In 2006, Western readers began to revisit Carter's unique coloratura, sparking Carter fever again. People say that she is a genius, the most original writer after the war, a female version of a certain literary giant... Even so, people's understanding and discussion of the aesthetic value of her works have only just begun. As for Angela's true life story as a writing woman, she is always calling us to listen and search.
10-17-2009