"The Viscount Divided into Two": Beyond Split and Incompleteness

Division is a common human condition.

We have heard too many stories of schizophrenia: from Plato’s myth of sexual dissociation to the astonishing story of Billy, a man with schizophrenia, to today’s popular meme “I am split.” ”, divisions are everywhere.

What is schism? Schism in the dictionary means the fragmentation and separation of the whole. Split is often accompanied by incompleteness. What is incompleteness? Incomplete means missing a part, which is a concept relative to the whole.

In 1952, the Italian writer Calvino wrote a story about division and mutilation, "The Viscount in Two", which is the second part of the long trilogy "Our Ancestors".

This absurd and bizarre story took place in the seventeenth century. At that time, the war between Ottoman Turkey and Austria was ongoing. Viscount Medardo, who responded to the call, went to the battlefield in confusion and was blown up by a cannonball. Two halves, one half became a great evil person, and the other half became a great good person.

The evil half returned to his hometown of Terralba to inherit the title. With an extremely twisted mentality, he was accustomed to seeing the world from a split perspective, splitting the flowers, plants, insects and fish in nature into two halves. ; Use the most extreme punishments to punish thieves, and even send the wet nurse who gave birth to him to a leper village... Such vicious and evil behavior disgusted the people of the territory, but they dared not speak out in anger. Later, the kind-hearted Half-Viscount also returned to his hometown. His seemingly good behavior was in sharp contrast to the evil Viscount. He quickly gained people's love, but at the same time, he also aroused the fear of the evil Viscount.

The direct conflict between the evil and good halves of the Viscount originated from love - they fell in love with the same girl, the shepherdess Pamela. Pamela was afraid of the Evil Viscount, but she didn't like the Good Viscount's boring moral preaching, so she devised a small plan to cause a duel between the two. In the final duel, the Good Viscount and the Evil Viscount thrust their swords into each other's bodies, and both fell to the ground. The two halves of their bodies were sewn together, and the complete Viscount Medardo returned. Pamela accepted the intact Viscount and everything was back on track.

Calvino did not fall into the conventional trap of falling into the binary vortex of good and evil. He tried to tell the old moral story in a new way. In his writing, the evil Viscount is "so unfortunate and pitiful", while the kind Viscount is "so guilty, pedantic and ridiculous".

There is no need to say more about the pitiful and absurd actions of the evil Viscount, but it is necessary to talk about the good Viscount. The morality of the kind-hearted Viscount, in Chairman Mao's words, is "the stupid pig morality of Song Xiang's formula" (that is, the monarch who did not attack the enemy crossing the river in order to gain glory during the war and was defeated). At that time, the security forces secretly contacted him and plotted to overthrow the Evil Viscount, but the Good Viscount rejected this "unjust" approach. He even hoped to have a good talk with his other self (at this time, the other self had issued an arrest warrant), and finally As a result, the incident was revealed and all the rebels died. He went to the leprosy village to persuade people, promoted the so-called "morality", and interfered in the lives of the patients. In the end, everyone complained.

Although the two broken halves of the Viscount lived a life of absurd drama, Calvino did not completely deny them or describe their fate in an extremely ironic tone. On the contrary, he never Starting from two opposing concepts, both sides praise division as the true way of survival and denounce "stupid wholeness". Don’t forget, what this work really explores is not good and evil, but division and wholeness.

"If everything could be split in two, then everyone would be freed from his stupid notion of wholeness. I was whole. What did I see then? It's all natural and chaotic, as simple as air. I thought I could see everything clearly, but in fact I only saw the surface." The Evil Viscount said.

"This is the benefit of being half a person: understanding the pain that everyone in the world feels due to their incompleteness, and understanding the flaws caused by everything's incompleteness. I used to be complete, then I didn’t understand these truths at that time, and I turned a blind eye and turned a deaf ear to the pain and scars everywhere,” said the kind-hearted Viscount.

Now we can finally understand why Calvino would rather choose division and incompleteness than "stupid completeness". Everyone starts their life from "stupid completeness", that is, "seeing mountains as mountains and water as water." At this time, individuals are in a pre-reflective and chaotic state, and they have not yet been enlightened. .

But this does not mean that we cannot continue to move forward. The second stage is "looking at mountains but not mountains, and looking at water not as water." At this stage we have acquired some knowledge and have our own position. We try to see the world through our own perspective. The world we see is fragmented due to "parallax", and the truth is competitive and incompatible. If we are kind, we are accustomed to giving moral lectures to so-called "evil people"; if we are pessimistic, we will point fingers and mock optimists; if we study psychology, we are accustomed to trying to understand people's psychology and behavior. It ignores how people live in society, ignores how people live in history, and ignores some of the more basic laws and rules of how the world operates.

At this time, we are separated from the other side of ourselves and the other side of the world, leaving only incomplete souls.

At this time, we are sharp, but also light. In the final analysis, this model cannot withstand testing. There is an impressive scene: the kind-hearted Half-Viscount is reading poetry to Pamela, hoping to cultivate her cultural literacy. It's a pity that the village girl who is naturally playful can't listen at all. The evil Half-Viscount came and split the book in half with a sword, and the pages of half the book fluttered in the wind:

This is a metaphor, the writer is reminding us: incomplete soul, split recognition Knowledge may be able to see very deeply, but it lacks a sense of thickness and harmony. We are thus isolated from others and the world.

Calvino understood that people's pursuit should not stop here, so he created the third part of "Our Ancestors", the famous "The Baron in the Trees". The Viscount in the second part strives to remain intact in order to survive the ravages of society; the Baron in the third part truly moves towards self-realization.

That is the third stage, the stage of "seeing mountains as mountains, water as water". We are back to wholeness again: a higher level of wholeness. We integrate perspectives that were originally separated and opposed. We realize the complexity of the world and the multifaceted nature of the truth. We learn to understand the viewpoints of dissenters and integrate different disciplines to form a more complete and comprehensive view of the world. A unified perspective. This is the three stages of negative dialectics: affirmation, negation, and the negation of negation.

However, the fragmentation and disability of modern people are not only due to cognitive fragmentation. What is even more frightening is the fragmentation of existence. Marx called it "alienation" and Freud called it "repression." In short, the ancient harmonious state has passed away, and division and incompleteness have become the "new normal."

In today's era, many people are afraid of loneliness because they dare not face themselves alone. If so, they will be horrified to find that there is a hole under the layers of armor of the "social self". Their ego is gone. The first part of the "Our Ancestors" series, "The Non-Existent Knight", tells such a story. The knight who has lost his entity relies only on the title of a knight for his survival. When the title is gone, his faith collapses.

What happened?

Marx said that it is all the fault of alienation. What is alienation? Alienation means that people's own labor, as something objective and independent of people, something that controls people through autonomy that is different from people, is opposed to people.

The most intuitive alienation is emotional alienation. Sociologist Hochschild pointed out that workers in the emerging service industry (such as flight attendants, telephone operators, etc.) provide "emotional resources". In the day-to-day work, people are alienated from their own emotions and feel that they belong to the work rather than to them. own. Since women are stereotyped as more emotional, these industries tend to favor female labor. Female practitioners are required to produce a positive emotional state to ensure customer base. Under capitalism, human emotions are commodified and have a negative impact on the market. People process it, and the product is a state of mind.

Specifically, there are two sources of emotional alienation. First, the fusion of private self-sense and public self can easily lead to emotional and psychological burnout; second, it will produce a kind of self-alienation: trying to manage There is a conflict between the self-perception and the emotional state aroused in the customer, and either one resents the self or resents the job. From this point on, "emotional resource" workers will find themselves disconnected from their emotions, their true selves from their socialized masks.

Following Marx’s theory, Lukács emphasized the concept of reification (see "History and Class Consciousness" for details). The so-called materialization means that people have acquired the properties of things. In the capitalist commodity society, a rational and quantifiable value evaluation standard system has been constructed. Human labor, human value, and interpersonal relationships are all under the scrutiny of this set of standards. . Corporate HR recruitment looks at how much value and profit you can bring to the company, while blind dates and even marriage partners look at your economic status... From then on, real and complete people disappeared, replaced by incomplete souls under commodity fetishism.

Just like Kafka's classic "The Metamorphosis", the protagonist Gregor, who turned into a beetle and lost his livelihood, was rejected by his father and sister in various ways, and died in loneliness. We realize that even family ties have become a relationship of interest. In the relationship of interests, we are separated from our former selves with ideals and enthusiasm, we are separated from our relatives and loved ones, and we are separated from the real world.

However, in "The Divided Viscount", this split of modernity appears blurred. We all know that Calvino's work is to use the past to describe the present. What he hopes is to use metaphors and symbols to express the plight of modern people in an ancient narrative space. It is precisely because of this that Calvino He also admitted that "all the types of defects of modern people cannot be placed on the protagonist", although "Marx's alienation" and "Freud's repression" are also included in his writing framework.

In this regard, "The Divided Viscount" is not as successful as the first "The Non-Existent Knight" in showing the inherent division of human universality. But if many critics only focus on the dichotomy between good and evil, they will go astray.

In my opinion, the greatest value of "The Viscount Split in Two" is that it provides a window that triggers people to think about division and incompleteness. Of course, we all yearn for wholeness, but today, when fragmentation and incompleteness have become common phenomena, perhaps it is more important to return to the problem itself and see how fragmentation occurs in individuals.