《虚构》

　　马原

　　一、作者简介

　　马原，男，1953年生，辽宁锦州人。1970年中学毕业后插队。1978年考入辽宁大学中文系，1982年毕业后去西藏工作。 1989年调回辽宁，任沈阳市文学院专业作家。2000年，到上海，任同济大学教授。

　　马原于1982年开始发表作品，1984年发表的《拉萨河女神》引起了文坛关注。1985年发表了成名作《冈底斯的诱惑》。另有长篇小说《上下都很平坦》《牛鬼蛇神》《纠缠》等，中篇小说《冈底斯的诱惑》《虚构》《游神》《旧死》等，短篇小说《拉萨河女神》《叠纸鹞的三种方法》《拉萨生活的三种时间》《希玛拉雅古歌》《涂满古怪图案的墙壁》等。在同济大学任教期间，出版了文学讲稿《虚构之刀》和《阅读大师》。

　　二、作品梗概

　　我是一个叫马原的汉人，写小说，喜欢天马行空。我的故事多多少少都有那么一点耸人听闻。我用汉语讲故事，写了十几万字的有关西藏的小说.用汉语写。

　　我写了一个阴性的神祇，拉萨河女神;我写了几个男人几个女人，写了一些褐鹰一些秃鹫一些纸鹞，写了一些熊一些狼一些豹子一些诸如此类的其它凶恶的动物，写了一些小动物。还写了一些我的同类的生生死死，写了一些生的方式和死的方法。

　　这一次我为了杜撰这个故事，把脑袋掖在腰里钻了七天玛曲村。这是个关于麻风病人的故事。玛曲村是国家指定的病区，“麻风村”。

　　我进玛曲村认识的第一个人，是一个神秘的哑巴老人。我们一起爬山，他有一支枪，还用枪逼我把食物都交了出来。我没有把握得到医生的许可，是偷着溜进这块禁地的。病区没有任何形式的围栏，这样它既不能防止病人外出，又不能防止外人进入.我就是钻了这个空子。

　　我在村子里闲逛，我没见院子里有人，我走遍了村子没见到一个人影。我拿定主意不轻易走进人家的院子和房间。

　　第一个有人的信息是从村里最后一幢二层楼院里传出来的。我这时已经转到村后，这是村里唯一的楼房。我走上台阶推开门，看到了一屋三个女人，一个“鼻子已经烂没了，整个脸像被严重烧伤后落了疤”的会说汉话的女麻风病人和我交谈。她怀里抱着一个吃奶的男孩，她是村里唯一会说汉话的人。她带我在村里走走，看到了一群打篮球的男人。打球的人中有个小个子突出地灵活，我估计他有四十岁左右，他是所有球员中唯一知道运球和投篮要领的人。女人告诉我她怀中的孩子是这个男人的。

　　此时篮球忽然到了我的脚下，我运足力气，将球投出，空心入篮。我终于引起了玛曲村民的关注，所有的人都在为我叫好。我成了大家目光的焦点，也就是在这个瞬间里，我发现两个不那么友好的人的注视，一个是那个打球的小个子男人。另一个已经相当年迈，个子高高的，背驼得很厉害;他的干皱的脸上没有胡子，很像一枚陈年核桃。他是所有村民中唯一没有发滞神情的人，而且他皮肤晦暗，看不出麻风病人那种显而易见的征兆。

　　一次我发烧生病时，抱孩子的麻风病女人照顾了我。在一个温馨的夜晚，我和这个女人发生了关系，尽管我当时不甚清醒，但绝不会为此后悔。

　　我来到了位于村子西南角的老哑巴家，趁他不在的时候进入了他家，想要在这个有枪又装哑巴又说汉话的老人家里发现点不同寻常的东西。我翻出个旧军队的大檐帽，前面正中嵌着一枚青天白日大徽章，回到家的老哑巴对于我的到来并不吃惊，也不回答我的问题，并且一点也不戒备，一副痴呆相。我断定，他要么是个精神残废，要么是个了不起的演员，是个魔鬼和凶恶的杀人犯。

　　从老哑巴家里出来后，我来到了神树所在地，听到了悦耳的敲击声。树下有几个女人缓慢地绕着树基逆时针转经，我用相机记录了这一情形。在两棵树的夹缝中，我看到了打篮球的小个子男人，原来敲击声是他弄出来的。他正在用锤子敲击一块石头，制作雕像，他朝我摆手要我为他照相，并且表示要送我一尊石浮雕。

　　在讲完这个悲惨的故事之前，我得说下面的结尾是杜撰的。我有一尊石浮雕像，具体来历就不讲了。我到了西藏境内许多地方，激发了我的灵感，我从事新闻工作的老婆采访过一位在麻风病医院工作过的女医生，老婆把她听到的一些医院的事情告诉给我，我碰巧又读了一本法国人写的书.叫《给麻风病人的吻》，我对这个耸人听闻的题目很感兴趣。后来我不巧又读了另一本英国人写的书.也是写“麻风村”里的，叫《一个自行发完病毒的病例》。

　　不久前我去藏东南坐车返回拉萨，开车的司机是个朋友，他说他跑遍了全藏。有一段时间他不爱说话，我问他怎么了，他说刚才经过的地方向北走十里是“麻风病村”。他还说，他曾经在这里搭过一个病人，是个胖墩墩的女人，还抱着孩子。

　　这些事全让我碰上了，作为作家我运气不错，下面的结尾是我为了洗刷自己杜撰的。

　　第二天我在爬山的时候，遇到了老哑巴。他再一次开口说话，并且重复四天前同我说过的话，我害怕四天前的情景重现，但这次我过虑了，他始终没有从地上站起来，我先下山了。

　　我去找小个子男人，结果只有他的妻儿在家，于是我又去神树，终于看到了他，他将刻完的石像郑重递到我手上，并跪拜石像。

　　我原想第二天早上离开玛曲村，但当天晚上听到了枪声后,我跑去老哑巴的房子，发现是他开枪打死了他的母狗，最后他开枪自杀。

　　我决定连夜动身，走累了睡在了藏族养路工那里。夜里发生了泥石流，北边的山塌了半边，我再没看到玛曲村。

　　三、推荐语

　　《虚构》作为马原的经典代表作，挑战了传统小说写作模式，开启了先锋小说的虚构之路。这是纯粹个人化的写作，小说通过设置虚构的圈套叙述了一个离奇又诡秘的故事：孤身闯入被隔离的“麻风村”，邂逅女麻风病人并相爱，遭遇身份神秘的哑巴老人和小个子珞巴人……这一切奇特的经历犹如梦境，带给读者一种隐秘感和刺激感。

　　马原自己说：“我写的《虚构》应该既是现实主义又是幻觉。我写这个小说完全是在夜里写的，它有特别强的梦魇的性质，它太像一场梦了，整个气息都像一场梦”。小说一面建构故事，一面又拆除故事。叙述人不时跳出来强调这是虚构的是杜撰的，混淆着真实和虚构之间的界限。作品以不断变换的叙述视点、分解并置的故事板块、非线性的时空逻辑，形成了独特的叙事方式，被评论家称为“叙述圈套”。

　　马原的叙事方式，颠覆了现实主义对故事的依赖，开启了中国文坛先锋小说对叙事进行革命的序幕。

　　FICTION

　　Ma Yuan

　　Author profile

　　Male writer Ma Yuan, born in 1953, is a native of Jinzhou of Liaoning province. In 1970, after graduating from senior high school, he went to the countryside as an educated youth for rehabilitation. It was in 1978 when he pursued studies at Liaoning University within the Department of Chinese. Upon his graduation from the university, he began to work in Tibet. In 1989, however, he was transferred back to Liaoning, and pursued work as a professional writer at the Literary Academy in Shenyang, capital city of Liaoning province. Later on in 2000 he went to work at Tongji University as a Professor of creative writing.

　　Ma Yuan began to publish his works in 1982. “The Goddess of the Lahsa River”, one of his short stories released in 1984, attracted the attention from the literary world in China. In 1985 he published The Seduction of the Kailash Range, which instantly brought him to fame. His novels include The Above and the Below Are Both Even, Monsters and Demons, and The Entanglement to name a few. His novelettes include The Seduction of the Kailash Range, Fiction, The Wandering Spirit, and The Death of the Old. His collections of short stories include The Goddess of the Lhasa River, Three Ways of Folding Paper Harrier, Three Kinds of Time for Living in Lhasa, The Ancient Ode to the Himalaya, and A Wall Fully Painted With Weird Designs. During his teaching tenure at Tongji University he published his lecture notes on literature called The Fiction Knife and The Reading Master.

　　Synopsis

　　I am a guy of the Han ethnicity and my name is Ma Yuan. My hobbies include writing stories and I am also very fond of imagining wildly, creative thinking, and woolgathering. My stories can be defined as quite hair-raising and I always tell stories in Chinese. I have jotted down hundreds of thousands of words. Those stories are all about Tibet and are all written in Chinese.

　　I once wrote about the female deity the Goddess of the Lhasa River. I also wrote about several men and women, some brown goshawks, vultures, and paper harriers. I also wrote about bears, wolves, leopards, and other ferocious and monstrous animals of the same kind as well as smaller creatures. In addition, I also wrote about the life and death of my fellow people, their ways of living, as well as their way of dying.

　　This time around, however, in order to hammer out a new story I inconspicuously spent some time in the Maqu Village. I was there for full seven days, and did my best to blend in. This story is about patients suffering from leprosy, and the village is a ward area, or more commonly said a sort of leprosy village, designated by the state.

　　The first person I encountered when coming to the village was an old and freakish dumb. We climbed the mountains together. He had a gun with him and he forced me to hand in all the food I had brought with me. Worried whether or not I was able to obtain a permit from the doctor to enter the village, I sneaked into this forbidden place instead. The ward provided no fences in any form. Hence there was nothing preventing patients from going out, or to prevent others from coming in. The lack of proper enclosure of the area allowed me the chance to slip in without a problem.

　　I was walking around the village and did not see any persons in the house yards. I then continued to walk elsewhere throughout the village and still did not see a single soul. I made up my mind not to walk into any yard or any room casually.

　　The first obvious sign that there were people there came from the second floor of the last building in the village when I went to the back of the village. This was the only tall building in the village. I walked up the steps, pushed open the door, and saw three women in the house. One was a woman with leprosy whose nose had rotten away and whose entire face had supposedly been gravely burned. The burns had left many scars. She could, however, speak in Chinese with me. The woman was carrying a baby boy and was breast-feeding him. She was the only person who could speak Chinese in the village. She walked me around the village and we saw a group of men who were playing basketball. Among them was a short man who was prominently agile. I gathered that he was around 40 years old and that he was the sole person who knew the tricks of running the ball and making the shot in a proper manner. The woman told me that the baby in her arms was this man’s.

　　At this point the ball, all of a sudden, rolled over to my feet. I gathered strength and made a shot. The ball flew exactly through the very center of the basket. At long last I caught the attention of the villagers. All the people were now cheering me on and I had now taken the focus of all attention. Also at this point I noticed two not so friendly-looking guys staring at me. One was that short man who was playing basketball and the other was a tall but considerably aged man. The latter’s back was terribly hunched, and his beardless face was dry and wrinkled similar to that of an aged walnut. He was the only person among the villagers whose face wore no dull or dim-witted expression and whose skin looked dark, which was an indication of no obvious signs of leprosy.

　　Once I fell ill and ran a high fever. The leper woman carrying that baby boy in her arms took care of me and on a warm night I made love with her. Although I was not very sober-minded, yet I do not have any remorse for this act.

　　I came to the old dumb’s house, which was located at the southwestern corner of the village. I took advantage of the time when he was out and entered his home. This was all in the hopes that I could discover something unusual in the house about the old guy who possessed a gun and who both pretended to be a dumb and spoke Chinese. I ransacked the house and found a peaked cap used by the old armies with a blue sky and bright sun insignia embedded at its front center. When the old dumb came back and found me in his house, he did feel surprised or answered my question. He was not even on guard against me, just putting on a stupid expression on his face. I deduced that he was either a mentally retarded man, a great actor, or a monstrous and sinister murderer.

　　After leaving the old dumb’s house, I came to where the sacred tree grew. A pleasant striking sound came upon my ears. From under the tree several women were slowly turning the prayer wheel anti-clockwise around the base of the tree. I used my camera to record this scene. In the crevice between two trees I saw the short basketballer. It was he who was causing the striking sound. He was now striking at a stone with his hammer and making a sculpture. He waved to me and asked me to take a picture of him. Moreover, he expressed his intention in giving me a stone sculpture in relief.

　　Before finishing this sad story I had to say that the following ending was a fabrication of sorts. I had a stone sculpture in relief and I wanted to leave out the detailed story about it here. I had been to many places within the Tibetan territory and gotten inspired by what I had seen and experienced. My wife, a journalist, once interviewed a female doctor who had worked in a leprosy hospital. She recounted to me what she had heard in some hospitals and I happened to have read a book written by a French person called Kisses to Patients with Leprosy. I took an interest to the hair-raising title of this book and later on I by chance came across a book written by a Briton which was also about a leprosy village and whose title was A Case Who Automatically Cured His Virus.

　　Before long I went down to the south of Tibet, planning to take a car to get back to Lhasa. The driver was a friend of mine and he said that he had driven across every part of Tibet. For a time he did not like talking and I asked him why. He replied that ten miles further from where he had just passed there was a leprosy village. He then added that he had once given a lift to a patient who was sturdily fat and carrying a baby in her arms. As a writer, however, I was fortunate enough to having come across all these accidents and incidents. In addition, the following ending was cooked up only to clean myself up.

　　The following day when I was climbing the mountain, I bumped into the old dumb. He spoke once more and repeated what he had told me four days before. I was for a while fearful of the resurfacing of the scene that had occurred four days before. However, this time around I was obviously unnecessarily worried, as he had never risen to his feet from the ground. Additionally, I went down the mountain first.

　　I went off in quest of the short man, only to find that his wife and son were at home. Again I went to the sacred tree and spotted him there. He solemnly passed on the already finished stone figure into my hands and before it he knelt down to pay his homage.

　　I had originally intended to leave the village on the following morning. However, on that evening when I heard the gun reports, I went to the house of the old dumb, only to find that it was the mother dog that he shot dead. Thereafter he finally committed suicide by shooting himself dead.

　　I decided to set off on that night. When I was too exhausted to continue I spent the night in the house of a Tibetan railway maintenance worker. Later on at night a mudslide occurred and half of the northern part of the mountain tumbled down. That was the last time I saw the village.

　　Reviews

　　Fiction has been taken as Ma Yuan’s classic, for it challenges the conventional way of writing novels and opens up a fresh avenue to avant-garde novel writing. |It is a purely personalized writing. This novelette narrates an outlandish and mysterious story through fictionalized traps. This refers to a person who alone sneaks into an isolated and segregated village, where people with leprosy are confined. There he encounters a woman with leprosy that he with time falls in love with. He also comes across a freakish dumb whose identity remains a mystery, as well as a short Lhoba man. All these outlandish experiences similar to that of a dream, give readers at once a sense of mystery and thrill.

　　Ma Yuan himself said, “Fiction, one of my stories, is both realistic and illusory. It is completely at night that I wrote up the novelette. It is strongly tinged with the color of nightmare. It is very much like a dream, and the whole atmosphere in it is dream-like.” On one hand, the novelette constructs a story, but on the other it deconstructs it. The narrator now and then detaches himself from the story by emphasizing that this story is both a fiction and a fabrication, whereby blurring the boundary between fact and fiction. The novelette keeps on altering its narrative perspectives, dismantling and juxtaposing the chunks of story, and adds non-linear logic of time and space. All of this leads to the forming a unique narrative style, which some critics call “narrative loop or trap”.

　　In short Ma Yuan’s narrative style subverts the reliance of realism upon story, and opens up the prelude to the revolution of narration by avant-garde novels.