Lu Jingjing
Guillermo Martinez
Guillermo Martinez was the second person after Borges to publish a short story in The New Yorker. his introduction. The implication is that, by some standards of American literature , he is as noteworthy as Borges. However, there are so many very good Argentinian writers after Borges, such as Cortázar , but they did not win the same award as the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In today's world, Martinez is one of the most entertaining and profound writers writing about "knowledge" and causation, but this sentence is hard to put on the belt.
Martinez's best work, "The Oxford Mystery", is indebted to a short story by Borges. As a novelist, being influenced by Borges is nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, the best students have written Borges's name in their novels. The blind monk in Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" is called Jorge de Burgoso, and he is also the librarian. , as soon as this name appears, experienced readers should know that he is definitely not a passerby. "The Name of the Rose" references not only "Death and the Compass" but also "The Library of Babel". When Eco defended himself, he said, "Some things certainly belong to Borges, but Borges also inherited something from others. Why don't you think that I might have inherited something earlier and more essential?" He knows that in this way, this kind of learning behavior can become completely legitimate even in the eyes of particularly snobbish readers. He also said, I also studied Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" in this book, why can't you guys see it?
In addition to being a writer, Martinez also has another identity: , a professor of at the University of Buenos Aires. This is a very good university. Very few professors write novels that are remembered. Some people first write a few good books, and then are rated as honorary professors of and by any school, but this is a foul path. David Lodge used to teach at and at the University of London, and he has some interesting writings about his fellow liberal arts colleagues. In "Small World", structuralism is still a fashionable and mysterious knowledge, but now no one is willing to talk about it, and reading it feels like a world away. Coetzee is the pride of literature professors. "Shame" is about the professor's life, and he also won the Nobel Prize. But mathematics professors, they are like non-existent creatures in the literary world, except for Martinez. He was born in 1962 and has not retired yet.
一
The novel published in The New Yorker in 2009 is called "The Big Inferno", which was written by Martinez in 1989, when he was still a novice. This is also the name of his first collection of short stories. This collection of novels has various styles. This one is about a barber who has a charming French wife. Men in the town always go to her shop to get their hair cut. One day a strange young man came to the town, and people suspected that he had an affair with a French woman. It didn't take long for them to disappear. The troublemaker's eyes fell on the barber's razor. They frantically searched for the young man's body in the town, and ended up digging a big hole filled with unknown corpses. This is a very high-level debut article. It is hard to believe that the author was still a mathematics student at the time. It has Borges's deadpan flamboyant use of language and his recalling tone of mock indifference. On the surface, this story is about a benighted town with seemingly questionable relationships, a very dark past, and some unappealing exotic locales. The end of the story is:
The French girl came back a few days later, and her father recovered. As for the young man, no one in the town mentioned him again. That tent was stolen quickly, before the new season arrived.
This is a very efficient expression. The "new season" means that the football league will not be absent. Under the threat of the police, people kept silent and returned to the daily routine of football and television. But the novel is written this way, certainly not just to expose the darkness of society, nor to express Lu Xun's nostalgia for his hometown and town mixed with disgust.It touches on a theme that Martinez has repeatedly written about since: people's reliance on vulgar but stable daily narratives (in this story, a beautiful foreign woman is unfaithful to her husband, and the husband kills his foreign lover after knowing it). When this narrative is broken by unexpected events (mass deaths), they can't wait to pretend to be ignorant and escape back to the past order. In such daily life, everyone becomes complicit not because of the actual crime committed, but because of anxiety. This large pit with a large number of dead people is like the sudden emergence of Lacan's reality. It is a buried, unbearable reality that must be repressed. The police representing power force everyone to shut up at the end of the novel, seemingly to protect the government, because it is completely impossible for such a big death without the involvement of public power, but this is not necessary, because the people in this town are completely No ability to resist. The police is like ideological . He is there to protect the people in the town from losing the reality under their feet and let them live as before. Martinez later wrote many works with elements of detective novels, which is one of the reasons why he is enjoyable to read, but from this short story we can see that he was conscious from the beginning and could not stop being a detective novelist. "The Great Hell" does not lead to the truth, it leads to the blocking of the truth. And he intentionally identifies this blocking as an aesthetic effect.
Reading a writer's earliest works reveals the parts he eventually gave up on. There are also some articles in this collection, such as "Toast with Witold", which are also very interesting. Witold is not a character in the novel, but refers to his exile from Poland to Buenos Aires. writer Witold Gombrowicz , this article is clearly a copycat. Gombrowicz is good at the art of stopping time. He can seize any moment, stop it, stretch and deform it, and observe it with an extremely precise microscope until the moment appears to be magnified.
He lifted one of his leather shoes, the heel of the shoe hit the ground, and twisted in a half circle, crushing the earthworm... only from one end, within the reach of his feet, because he was unwilling to let go of the shoe. The other half of the earthworm began to twist and stiffen. He watched it carefully and with great interest. This is no big deal, no different from the dead fly on the tape or the death of the moth inside the lampshade - but Frederick's transparent glass eyes stared at this earthworm and killed all of it. The pain is clear. He looked very angry, but in fact, all he felt was the pain of scrutinizing the insect until the last bit. He catches, sucks, grabs, accepts - under the grip of pain, he becomes numb, aphonic , frozen - unable to move. (Gombrowicz's novel "Color")
Such things may not even occupy the space of a sentence in other writers' writings. Martinez's pastiche depicts a family that inadvertently sticks out their tongues at a certain moment, having an incestuous fantasy at that moment. As if to prove that he was qualified to toast the teacher, he wrote this moment longer, slower and more distorted than Gombrowicz. We can see more works with the temperament of "Bakakai Street" in this collection of short stories. We can also find Kafka, Cortázar, Borges... traces of these people are like the clothes belonging to different people scattered at a crime scene. But this is not the focus of this article. Martinez's best works so far are novellas. It can be said that he is a good short story writer. Among the writers of "short classics", he is Also one of the better ones, he has proven that he can use a variety of styles as adeptly as a formula. But what he will ultimately be remembered for must be those wonderful novellas.We know how good Gombrowicz and Musil are at making us linger on language (no one writes about the struggle of a fly better than Musil), and we marvel at it as if we were looking at a gorgeous piece of textile. The workmanship and its weird patterns are unforgettable and make people feel vaguely uneasy.
But starting from " Chess Boy ", Martinez seems to have begun to get rid of the temptation of the master and found his own tone. His sticky, weird, melancholic imagination of daily life suddenly gave way to a more abstract and confident temperament. This causes his sentences to speed up in time, and they cease to be compelling material, losing any room for sentimentality and reliably serving as featureless scaffolding upon which the plot is built. In fact, "The Chess Boy" is a very ambitious work, but its Spanish literal translation is just "About Rodler". It begins: "The first time I saw Gustavo Rodler was in the bar of the Olympus Club." The two protagonists of the story, both sides of the game, appear in the first sentence. . Then the author starts writing as if calculating on a blackboard.
"The Chess Boy"
二
Novelists admire chess, but like failed chess players, they enjoy seeing their top colleagues face misfortune. After Dr. B ( Zweig " The Story of Chess ") won a world championship, he began to lose his mind. The cause was the same as Luzhin (Nabokov's "Defense"). He was too immersed in the world of symbols. Over time, the body became a burden. When thinking reaches its end, the limit is the body. The pieces of chess are made of very light wood, yet the game brutally demands almost unlimited mental power. Even if you can see fifty steps later, the fifty-first step will still be in the fog. Fighting the infinite with the limited is a waste. Acheng 's " Chess King " ended with Wang Yisheng learning chess from the old man who collected waste paper and acquiring powerful chess skills. At the end, one versus three:
Everyone gradually dispersed, and Wang Yisheng was still a little confused. I suddenly felt that I was still holding the chess piece in my left hand, so I opened my hand and showed it to Wang Yisheng. Wang Yisheng stared blankly, as if he didn't recognize it, but there was a sound in his throat, and he spit out some mucus with a sudden "wow" sound, and whined: "Mom, today...Mom——"
like this The reaction was nothing more than winning a regional championship. Chess has no end and can easily be written as mysterious.
"The Chess Boy" restores the everyday side of chess without portraying the chess players as outsiders. At the beginning, "I" recognized Rodler's strange move as an unpopular move called Alekhine Defense. And respond calmly with the routine left by our ancestors. This already hints at the relationship between them: one is constantly trying to challenge the existing knowledge order, and the other is constantly learning and trying to defend with the wisdom of the ancestors in the order. The main structure of the novel is such confrontations. The physical chess serves as the first signpost in the novel. The battlefields for subsequent confrontations include literature, mathematics and philosophy. Each battlefield is enough to consume a person's entire life. In the end, Rhodes Le Zai felt resentful when he felt that he was about to make a breakthrough.
said before that this novel has a calculating feel. We have all seen the calculator fill the entire blackboard and then turn over a new piece to continue writing. This is like a unit of speed in writing. This rhythm is set from the beginning. As long as Martinez does not stop to explain what Alekhine Defense is, it will be impossible for him to tell readers why he wrote "Doctor Faustus" here, let alone Let’s explain what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is. These are all written by the author up to this point. His grand ambition forces him to intertextualize with some important texts in order to get closer to the essence of the problem; and the speed of calculation from the beginning makes him have to stop at the end. This kind of question is a dangerous trap for an immature novelist, because as soon as he starts to explain without confidence, the factual details will overwhelm the charm of the narrative, the rhythm will be messed up, and the novel will inevitably slide into a popular science article.Martinez demonstrated his talent for omission in "The Chess Boy". He not only made extensive use of intertextuality, but also used daily details to carefully mend the edges of these black holes.
In the second confrontation between the two children (the first game had a clear winner and loser, the narrator lost), they talked about Henry James's "The Pattern of the Carpet", which the narrator could no longer remember. The plot of the novel was revealed, but he forcibly tried to belittle the book his opponent was reading. Roederer said, "It should be read as a philosophical work," adding, "It is essentially like The Road to Wisdom." It's the same as what is said in "The Road": absorb everything, reject everything, and then forget everything." From Henry James to Nietzsche, Martínez immediately moves the two interlocutors out into the courtyard, hears the narrator’s sister laughing, and introduces her to Roederer. After a few words, she asked Rodler to kiss her on the cheek. But Roederer retreated in frustration. Then the chapter ends. This is a technique the author does over and over again in his novels: arousing plot curiosity in order to hide the parts that really need to be explored. In this way, he obtained a text that was smooth on the surface. Just like Borges did in "The Garden of Forking Paths", the last sentence of that story is: "There is no other way but to kill a man with that name. He will not Know (no one can know) my infinite regret and boredom." We then realized that what we just saw was the protagonist's escape, which was actually just one of all escape possibilities. As an abstract character, he has fled countless times, so in addition to regret, he is also "bored". But even without delving into this sentence, readers can feel that they have read a clever story. This is why Borges is sometimes criticized because he always has such a gorgeous sentence at the end. In "The Chess Boy," we realize that the narrator does not speak after Rodler's interrupted kiss, and Rodler's mention of Nietzsche is never mentioned again in the rest of the narrative. This was expressed in an implicit way, and he still lost the second round.
Before "I" left home and went to college to seek broader knowledge, I finally figured out what Roederer was doing: thinking about those areas that knowledge failed to reach. Is reason the source of wisdom? Can wisdom exist without reason? If so, how to seek it? This became Rodler's terminal illness, causing him to suffer from insomnia all night long. Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" touched on this issue, but he was not satisfied either: the devil is also the source of wisdom. Is there a way to achieve that wisdom without going through the devil? Talking about this problem face to face can also be regarded as a move. A year later, the narrator returned to Rodler's cabin with the wisdom of his ancestors, and he told a perfect mathematical theorem. We see that the narrator "I" lives on a continent with a stable epistemological world, and is accustomed to using the answers of predecessors to deal with real problems (Rodler made a strange move, and I happened to master the Alekhine defense. Rodler in Thinking about the boundaries of knowledge, and I learned Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in college):
I found that I still had a slight advantage at this moment. Rodler didn't know how much I had changed in the past year. This gave me a sudden feeling of a lucky escape.
Rodler silently put the last few pieces of paper together with the others, and then said a cold goodbye to me. When I left his house and walked under the clear afternoon sky and breathed in the warm air, I not only felt an indescribable sense of joy, a crazy joy... I felt that my life was full again.
In contrast to this is the decline of Rodler's life. When the characters go to the sky, the novel's pattern also expands from the chess game to the whole life. The essential difference between the two teenagers is that "I" sees knowledge as something that already exists, while Roeder sees them as something that has happened. "I" regard this exchange of knowledge as a chess game with a winner and loser, while Rodler thinks about his vocation to think. When the narrator uses the knowledge he learned about Germans in college to try to prove his opponent's mistakes, he is condescendingly exercising a terrible power of knowledge.Using this power made him feel full of life, but he did not even realize that he had made mistakes in knowledge, because Gödel's incompleteness theorem was not a purely negative force, it was also inspiring the emergence of new disciplines.
In the final round between them, Rodler responded appropriately but set himself an unattainable goal. Human beings think within logic and are accustomed to the binary opposition of and (Lévi-Strauss believed that even primitive people are like this), and he wants to transcend this boundary. He quoted the words from the Henry James novel mentioned in the second round: "Great and simple, simple and yet great." This was re-translated from Spanish. In fact, the English is just "Eureka! Immense" . Broad and profound)". This sentence means that he believes that he has done the most critical work ideologically, and he expects the narrator to record it in the language of modern science. Writing it down certainly meant some kind of acknowledgment. But the narrator, who thinks that the chess game is over, cruelly rejects him. This is the second murder of Rodler. The first time he used the power of knowledge ("This has been proven"), and the second time he used the power of knowledge. The daily order was used, and he said he had no time to record for Rodler because he was about to go home for dinner. We know that Roederer basically never leaves home, which is tantamount to a Faust who refuses to make a deal with the devil - the devil is embodied as a drug in the novel, and there is a large paragraph dedicated to its role in discovering knowledge - and a People are both despised ideologically and lose their place in daily life. Such a blow can be imagined. In the end, Rodler died of lupus erythematosus , and all the results of his thinking were in vain. The relationship between disease and knowledge in this novel is also carefully designed. There is a benign tumor mentioned earlier, but it grows inward rather than outward, so it is extremely deadly. Compared with "I" constantly looking outward (Buenos Aires, Cambridge), Rodler's knowledge is also inward. In the previous article, the school teacher mentioned that some people have a rare genius and can see weaknesses and shortcomings in the connections that people think are natural and necessary. Their knowledge and thinking are subversive, and some will be recognized by the world (such as Nietzsche ), but before that, they often had difficulty getting a foothold in the sun - lupus erythematosus happens to be a disease that cannot see light. Martinez's use of disease is Foucault . Disease is a form of knowledge. The result of one kind of knowledge being suppressed is to be killed by another kind of knowledge.
At the end of the novel, the narrator seems to have a hint of regret. Death is something beyond the chess game, and the power of terminal illness is more shocking than the power of knowledge.
In his eyes, Rodler has transformed from a ridiculous and outdated image into a saint. "He raised his hands with his palms open, as if he was knocking on some unknown door hanging in the air. , he whispered in his voice that already belonged to another world: Please open the door for me, I am the first person."
I resemble the image of God. I think that
I am close to the eternal mirror of truth.
I am wandering in the glory of heaven in the realm of clarity.
I have escaped from the mortal world - "Faust, Act 1, Scene 1》
Such lyrical description gives Rodler the image of a tragic hero. But does his theory have any value? Because it is not written down, readers can have different opinions. Chinese readers may see the widely ridiculed "people's science" in him. But the author is not without attitude. In the first half of the novel, a fat girl who fell in love with Rodler did not eat for many days in order to lose weight. She kept going up and down the stairs to slim down her legs, and finally fainted and died. This is the only person besides Rodler who dies in the novel. Judging from her purpose (to lose weight), skipping meals and constantly going up and down the stairs are taken for granted, and her behavior is pure consumption. Roederer did not appreciate this approach. His way of life is Nietzschean, learning everything, thinking everything, and forgetting everything. Rodler's thoughts and conversations about literature and philosophy used serious and precise language of popular knowledge. He made no mistakes in the use of these languages.
In addition to Nietzsche, Henry James is quoted again at the end. The story of "The Pattern on the Carpet" is about a critic who was rejected by a writer, thinking that he did not grasp the essence of his writing, and has been troubled by it ever since. Another critic thought he had figured it out after thinking hard, and claimed to have been recognized by the writer. Unfortunately, he died in an accident. As the novel slowly progresses, the inheritors of the secret die, and so does the writer. By the end of the novel, critics still don't know what this essence is. If this writer is vicious enough, he can come up with such a riddle without an answer and make people guess for a lifetime. This is the writer's privilege. Even if the so-called essence is an empty mystery, it still carries a certain authority. This authority is all the more intriguing because it remains secret. But in the final analysis, modern literary theory has long regarded this as common sense - there is no such essential essence, and critics do not need to compete for favor with writers to admit it. The thing after Rodler Eureka is probably also dispensable. If another writer, out of sympathy, wraps the weak satire of the characters in this intertextual way, it is also a clever literary strategy.
三
Carlos M. Dominguez's "Paper House " makes the genius discovery that for some people, the existing body of knowledge is too banal:
For centuries, we have all Confined to a rigid system that lacks imagination. Let us be ignorant of the true relationship between books. For example, " Pedro Páramo " and "Hopscotch" are both written by Latin American writers. But one of them takes us back to William Faulkner , and the other one is derived from Moebius. To put it another way: Dostoevsky To put it bluntly, it is closer to Roberto Arte than to Tolstoy. Also, the relationship between Hegel, Victor Hugo and Sarmento is far greater than that of Paco Espinola, Benedetti, Felisberto... Hernandez comes closer.
We don’t know who those last names are, but this ability to make connections reminds us of Roederer. Some people are always better than others at making connections between knowledge, and this ability to make connections can produce new or knowledge that only the people making the connections can recognize. The bibliophile who said these words later moved to the seaside because of an accidental fire in his study. He used rough materials to break up these connections that were waiting for recognition, and reassembled them into an inwardly closed form. To be precise, he used cement and books to build a house to live in. This can be considered another form of suicide. This paper house certainly provides a strong, poetic picture, but it can also be said that the author gave in to sadness here. In the face of boundless knowledge, sadness is normal. "The thoughts are flying around, and the chapter is confused at the end." If you don't know what to do, sadness can also be a way of saying goodbye.
"The Oxford Mystery"
Martinez's best work, "The Oxford Mystery" effectively avoids this sadness and wraps it in a more entertaining form: a detective story. The story takes place after "The Chess Boy", "I" came to Oxford and became a student of the great mathematician Selden. In the setting of "The Chess Boy", it was Selden who proposed Gödel's incompleteness theorem. After the murder, Selden takes the narrator to the hospital, where he tells a story like a play within a play. The patient French lying on the bed is a continuation of Rodler or the bibliophile described by Dominguez. French discovered that the inevitability of the number sequence is not reliable. The last number in the sequence may be any number, and a rule can always be found to explain its rationality. Later, he determined that it was a problem with human beings' existing knowledge system, and hoped to get help from somnambulism patients and mental patients, because they had a "pre-civilization" unaffected state. After a period of experimentation, Frankie shot himself in the head with a nail gun , hoping to reach the area unpolluted by civilization in person.Of course he fell into a coma, but in the end he just wrote a woman's name on a piece of paper over and over again. This story has a kind of cruel humor, which reminds us that human nature may be a destructive factor for knowledge; on the other hand, it can be traced back to Benjamin Shuvarkin and Potemkin. The signature story of . A repeated string of names is like a dead but alive sequence. Benjamin begins with this story giving him a comment on Kafka: The world is like a labyrinth, and at the center of a labyrinth is another labyrinth.
It is said that Potemkin suffered from depression , and would have attacks more regularly. When he was ill, no one was allowed to approach him, and entry into his room was strictly prohibited. No one in the court ever mentioned the disease, mainly because everyone knew that even a hint of it would displease Queen Caterina. Once, the minister's depression lasted for a particularly long time, which resulted in big trouble. The office was full of documents, waiting for Potemkin to sign them, and the Empress was pressing for them. Senior officials are at their wits' end. One day, an insignificant clerk named Shuvarkin happened to come to the front hall of the Prime Minister's Office and found that the staff were still gathered here as usual, dejected and lamenting. "What happened, sir?" Shuvarkin asked diligently. The ministers explained what had happened and said it was a pity that he could not help. "If it's just this little thing," Shuvarkin said, "I ask the adults to hand over these documents to me." Anyway, nothing would be lost, and the staff agreed to this request. Shuvarkin held the document under his arm and walked through the corridors and passages to Potemkin's bedroom. He turned the doorknob without knocking or even stopping; the door was unlocked. In the semi-darkness of the bedroom, Potemkin was wearing old pajamas and sitting on the bed biting his nails. Shulvakin walked to the desk, dipped his pen in ink, then without a word thrust the pen into Potemkin's hand, and at the same time placed a document on his lap. Potemkin gave the intruder an expressionless look; then, as if still in a dream, he began to sign—one, then two, until all were signed. When the last name was signed, Shulvakin held the document under his arm and left the room just as he had entered without making any unnecessary movements. Staff rushed over and snatched the documents from his hands. They held their breath and leaned over to see. No one spoke; everyone seemed stunned. Shuvarkin stepped forward again and asked tentatively why they looked so depressed. Just then, he saw the signatures. I saw that every document was signed Shuvarkin... Shuvarkin... Shuvarkin...
Experienced readers saw Franky's story and knew that he was another different person who wrote "The Chess Boy" Such a likable, but more likely ending. The development of knowledge is a sequence, but humans are on this sequence and belong to an irreversible reality created by the sequence. Trying to get back to where you started is impossible. In this way, he ended Rodler's questioning and focused on the forward sequence again.
It was mentioned above that Selden took the narrator to the hospital. The parts of the novel related to the case are all in this "Selden takes" mode. The narrator is carried around by him, acting as the reader's eyes and brain. Agatha Christie 's brother-in-law once wrote to her, hoping that she would write a case in which a Watson-type character was the murderer, and then "Roger Mystery" came into being. This is one of the earliest narrator's tricks. "Oxford Mystery" allows the smartest man, the mathematician Selden, to act as Sherlock Holmes, and also lets Sherlock Holmes continue to mislead Watson and us to the wrong answer along the way. This is even bolder. In the final analysis, detective novels are just a means of exploring epistemological issues. There are many writers who like to use detective novels to write about intellectual issues. Borges and Eco are both masters of this. In the sequence of human cognition, the causal relationship is the strongest and most stable link, and the person who most often pursues this relationship is the detective.
"The Oxford Mystery" was born out of Borges's short story "Death and the Compass", in which the detective found a note at the crime scene: "The first letter of the name has been pronounced." The detective looked The deceased was a Jewish doctor, and he automatically thought: This name that cannot be written directly must be the name of God. In Judaism, God's name is four letters: YHWH. Two subsequent cases have confirmed his judgment. The detective thought he had figured out the murderer's secret, but when he rushed to the location of the fourth case and tried to prevent the murder from happening, he realized that these cases were all designed to trap him. He was the victim in the fourth case. This novel uniquely discovers that if the murderer's purpose is not to escape, he becomes the active party. He can give the detective enough false clues to make the latter sniff forward like a dog. But Borges's sequence is closed, with the starting point clearly leading to the last one. The interest of narrative drives him to make the prey appear in the image of the hunter. His work is a mocking intertext for traditional detective novels, "It's easy, Watson..." The moment when Holmes begins his performance becomes the wrong starting point for Borges. We feel that criminals are the dual masters of thought and action. It is not that there is no sequence of cause and effect, but that there is a more advanced sequence that cannot be seen by detectives. The detective's thinking is Baconian, thinking that nature is an old prostitute, torture and question her, and she will reveal the truth. To this Father Brown, written by G.K. Chesterton, would say that this is just foolish arrogance:
"I think I see the connection," said Father Brown. Grengall was strongly opposed to the French Revolution. He was passionate about the Ancien Régime and tried to fully return to the lifestyle of the last members of the Bourbon family. He took snuff because it was an 18th-century luxury; he lit candles. , also because they are lighting supplies in the 18th century. Those iron clocks and clocks represent the hobby of locksmiths in the Louis XVI era; and those diamonds represent the interests of Marie Antoinette, Queen of Louis XVI. Diamond necklace".
...
"I'm pretty sure that's not the case," Father Brown replied, "but if you insist that no one can make the connection between snuff ashes, diamonds, clockwork and candles, I just gave the connection casually. ...Ten pseudo-philosophies can explain this universe." (G. K. Chesterton: The Mystery of the Earl's Life and Death)
Father Brown realizes that the beginnings of sequences are always dangerous entrances. The connections between the items he gave were accidental and random, but he was manipulating these weak connections to guide them deeper into the maze. Although "The Oxford Mystery" is Borgesian in story, its thinking is more indebted to Chesterton.
Selden did not create deaths, but collected them, gave them symbols, and arranged them in a sequence. In the process of reading, the reader and the doctor are misled by their tutor, and they feel that the serial killer they are facing is a math enthusiast. He hopes to challenge the academic community with a sequence that has not yet been revealed - wasn't Fermat's last theorem also about sequences? It took more than three hundred years to prove it. But we also know that he has no chance of success academically, because the great Selden will solve the puzzle and make him quit. Martinez touches lightly on the paradox of serial killing, which is, in reality, very rare. People tend to have psychological explanations: the murderer suffers from some kind of mental illness and has to kill people in order to relieve stress or obtain pleasure. The stimulation becomes weaker and weaker, resulting in the intervals between committing crimes becoming shorter and shorter... But here, serial The killer is like a question maker on a variety show. Only when the detective can't answer it will he continue to announce clues. In this novel, the reader's IQ is assumed to be slightly higher than Sheriff Peterson (he holds this psychological view), but his mathematical knowledge is slightly lower than the narrator's PhD in mathematics, but the reader, like the latter, is eager to Let the murderer kill again as soon as possible to get the final answer. This is where the novel quietly puts us into immoral situations.
But Selden's sequence has no answer.He improvised symbols based on objects on site. While imagining a murderer who loves mathematics, he is already prepared to retreat in front of mathematicians. In this case, the case will not be solved because of the interruption of the sequence.
"Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the woods."
"If there were no woods, he would make one. If he wanted to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest."
"If A man who had to hide a dead body would create a field of dead bodies to hide it in." (G. K. Chesterton: "The Revelation of the Dagger")
A professor of mathematics at Oxford University, would have been. represents the guardian of knowledge, but Martinez wrote him as a great wizard who manipulates these symbols just like the author manipulates the reader's curiosity. As long as a suspense is set up first, they will... Between the reader and the writer The relationship is the relationship between the narrator and Selden. He needs a certain knowledge background to read this book, but the writer needs exactly this knowledge background to mislead him. Martinez convincingly portrays the math doctor as a modern-day Pythagorean who knows that numbers cannot correspond to reality because of the existence of irrational numbers, but firmly believes that truth is mathematical. Just like when ordinary readers read this book, they will easily think that this story is about a detective story. But what the solving process of "The Oxford Mystery" really shows us is that truth is not mathematical, but truth is absurd, chaotic, random, disorderly, and disturbing. In other words, if a detective fails to catch the murderer, it may be because there are not enough clues for reasoning, or because he is not smart enough - but what the novel shows us is that people have a strong tendency to distort it and return it to simplicity. Desire for facts. The novel quotes Marx's sentence in "The German Ideology": "Historically, people have only asked questions that they can answer." - In the same way, detectives will only be tempted by clues that better fit the pattern of solving crimes. The perfect crime is not a crime without traces, but a crime that tempts the detective to construct a wrong chain of reasoning.
Compared with "The Chess Boy", "The Oxford Mystery" is written more loosely and calmly. It shows all the author's doubts about mathematics and philosophy, and he himself thinks it is no big deal. The world operates according to other laws. After any event, it has a strong desire to return to itself. Whether it is through active forgetting in "The Great Inferno", or like Selden, using such a complicated method to protect his daughter with mediocre qualifications. From "The Big Inferno" to "The Chess Boy" and "The Oxford Mystery", and even later "The Slow Death of Luciana B" (in this novel, in addition to not believing in the sequence, he began to doubt even the points in the sequence) ), reading a series of Martinez's novels, you can witness the changes in his style, and it is like watching a man who finally learned a lot and finally shook his head and said, forget it, how useful it is. We find the sequence in order to fight against the chaos of the world, but the world does not care about the sequence, and will eventually erase the traces on its own. The last sentence of "Oxford Mystery" is:
As far as the eye can see, the road ahead stretches out and becomes clean again , clean and empty.
Q. E. D.
Editor in charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Ding Xiao
