When I was a freshman, an old professor cared about my studies and asked me what books I liked to read.
I told him that I like to read Agatha Christie's detective novels. He pouted and said nothing. At the time, I was still wondering why I would be despised if I liked reading Grandma's novels.
However, at the time, I really liked to read Grandma's detective novels the most, and I still like them now.
"The Tragedy on the Nile" is my grandma's first novel I read. The conception is exquisite and twists, and the sense of immersion is very strong; other works are equally interesting, plus the freshman professional teacher is a young man who often talks about ancient literature as In ancient philology, for example, when it comes to "Kong Yiji wrote fennel beans", she would not analyze this sentence, but would only say that there are several ways to write "fennel" for fennel beans.
It was very painful for me to take her class. Every time I was in pain, I would find an excuse to go to the toilet, and then rush to the fourth floor of the library to borrow two of my grandmother's novels and read them among the books of the professional class.
At that time, I was accompanied by Agatha Christie's novels all day long. It was not only an excellent pastime for fishing in class, but also the only ivory tower that could allow me to escape the troubles of reality.
Therefore, I have never understood why Grandma, who is the best-selling author in human history, whose books have been translated into more than 103 languages and has sold more than 2 billion copies, is despised.
It was not until the third year of my junior year that the textbook revealed the answer for me - it was written that "detective novels belong to sub-literature".
The case was solved, and it turned out that grandma was "not in the mainstream" in the academic circle.
I was at a loss for words. I wanted to find proof of my grandmother's identity, but I couldn't.
Until I saw Roland Barthes' S/Z --
Balzac's novel "Saracin" tells a bizarre love story. The sculptor Saracin met the singer Zambira in the Rome Opera House. However, Zambira kept rejecting Sarasin. Sarasin was in great pain. After repeated questioning, she learned that "she" was not a woman, but a male actor who had been castrated since childhood and devoted himself to opera. Sarasin was so angry that he wanted to stab Zambira to death with a dagger, but he stabbed himself in the chaos, and finally died.
This novel is no more than 30 pages, but Roland Barthes has devoted a thick book "S/Z" to discuss it.
He decomposes the original novel into 561 lexical units, and believes that it is just an entanglement of signifier fragments, without a fixed main idea, just an emergy field with a sense of "diversity".
For example, when reading the work for the first time, the reader thought that Zambira was a girl, and the description of Sarasin kissing "her" would make the reader emotionally agitated, and felt deeply for love; but when reading the second time, Readers already know that Zambira is actually a eunuch, so Sarasin's kiss to "her" will only be disgusting.
Barthes denied that the text has relatively stable connotation and meaning. He believed that reading the same text repeatedly only saw different aspects of the text, rather than getting a deeper understanding from the initial impression.
I thought that Barthes just replaced the general with the special, after all the average male lead doesn't usually fall in love with the eunuch. However, if you explore the essence of the plot of "falling in love with eunuchs", you will find that it is actually the "discovery" and "sudden turn" that almost every narrative work must involve and at the same time the most important.
This discourse is also true in Grandma's detective novels - after the first reading of the amazement, the text has evolved into a collection of signifier fragments, which is a multi-dimensional semantic field.
When I read it for the first time, "The Massacre on the Nile" also tells a strange story. The husband of the heroine, a wealthy heir from the United States, was her (former) best friend's fiancé, but he fell quickly after seeing the heroine. Fall in love; the two get married in a flash. The best friend thinks that the heroine has won her love, so she follows the two everywhere.
When the hostess and her husband came to the Nile River for their honeymoon, their best friend also followed, making a scene with her husband in the bar, and shot and broke her husband's leg. Afterwards, the best friend also fell ill because of guilt. On the same night, the heroine was beaten to death in her sleep; Detective Poirot and the Colonel began their investigation. At this time, everyone on the ship was suspected, but witnesses and physical evidence made them exclude the husband and the best friend. In the process, Salome, the maid and erotic novelist related to the case, was also killed one after another.
I followed Poirot to investigate the case, and I was confident that the murderer was lawyer Andrew Pennington, who intended to embezzle the property of the heroine; however, when the answer was finally revealed, I was shocked. It turned out that the murderer turned out to be the husband and best friend of the heroine who were first excluded. When the husband approached the heroine at the beginning, it was arranged in advance. He conspired with his girlfriend to pretend to abandon his girlfriend, fall in love with the heroine, get married with the heroine, and then kill her to inherit her large amount of property logically.
After knowing who the murderer was in "The Massacre on the Nile", and reading it again, I noticed every move of the heroine's husband and best friend from the very beginning. In my first impression, the heroine's husband is neither too good nor too bad; and my best friend is just a high IQ, infatuated, and pitiful weak woman, when she says "one must follow one's star whenever it leads" I also felt sorry for her for a long time.
However, after learning the truth, looking at what the two did, they only felt contrived, hypocritical, cold, and disgusting. The behavior of her best friend subverts and ridicules the sense of holiness she has carefully created before, and the heroine has also changed from "arrogant" and "proud and selfish" to a simple, outspoken and sympathetic object.
The reversal and dislocation of identities and the play of sublime love caused by the pursuit of superficial money have formed the deconstruction of the text to the greatest extent; the novel suddenly changed from a love triangle popular to the masses to a critique of the evil capitalist concept of money. It forces readers to explore the diversity of textual meanings, and leads to multi-level interpretations of the works.
At the same time, when dividing the signifier fragments, Barthes also pointed out that these fragments are dominated by five codes, one of which is the symbolic code - which is regularly repeated in the text and formed in the development of culture. imagery models with specific meanings.
I don't know much about other types of codes, so I don't dare to say that, but if you look at the various characters in the works from the perspective of symbolic codes, you will find that they represent various societies that were popular in the 1920s and 1930s. trend of thought. (The novel was serialized in the American Saturday Evening News from May to July 1937, and published in November 1937.)
The heroine Lynette - the heir to a million-dollar fortune from the United States, symbolizes the capitalist system of naked worship of money; in the book, almost everyone has a greater or lesser hostility to her. And her best friend and husband, not to mention her closest relationship, was originally a top student at Cambridge University, but under the lure of money, she became a murderous devil without blinking an eye.
There is always a nasty American in Grandma's books; the United States is the epitome of capitalism, and their philosophy is money first; Grandma is dissatisfied with this kind of value that only depends on money, so she deliberately writes something in the novel. Uneducated, rude, arrogant but rich Americans come to tease.
However, just because she doesn't like capitalism doesn't mean her grandmother has embraced communism. There is also a laughable character in the work, Ferguson, a rambunctious communist who always shouts to get rid of the "vampire" Miss Lynette, but when he sees the blood on the heroine's husband's legs, his feet are frightened. Soft, find an excuse to get away. Granny used Ferguson to ridicule those communists who were only talking but were afraid of real bloodshed.
In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, when Freud's psychoanalytic theory prevailed, Agatha created the female erotic novelist Salome Otterbourne to ridicule her "pansexualism". Salome Otterbourne is drunk all day long, and always likes to talk about sex and say something that is not ashamed. At the same time, the word "Salome Otterbourne" is actually a mixture of the initial "o" of Oscar Wilde's name and his representative work "Salome". Poirot often exclaimed, "Oh, these artists."
Salome was finally shot and killed by the murderer because she discovered the real murderer, reflecting the ambivalent attitude of the grandmother to the academic views represented by Freud, Wilde and others.
Rather than saying that what Agatha Christie wrote is just "sub-literature", it is better to say that she is using "sub-literature" to express her helplessness against money alienating human nature, and to sing an elegy for the noble and romantic values that have passed away.
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