Criticism is a pass for critics| Lin Peiyuan

This article is a postscript to "Common Sense of Novels" (to be published by Yilin Publishing House).

Criticism means having something to say about the text.

The "text" here refers to the novel. Just as gourmets taste and taste the food they eat into their stomachs, novel lovers will also compare, refer to and judge works. Know what is a good novel, what is a bad novel, where it is good and where it is bad, and when you read it, you will have a reason for it. In my opinion, it is the prototype of criticism.

I write about literary criticism out of a penchant for foreign literature. More than ten years ago, I studied at Shenzhen University and loved to run the library. At that time, the new building ("South Hall") was not built, only the old building adjacent to the administrative building (later renamed "North Hall"). The world literature shelves on the first floor are often lingered and wandered by me. That layer was covered with felt carpets, which had long since turned black because of years of trampling and walking. World literature is classified by country, and the rows of browsing are dazzling. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling are not bright enough, and looking at the past gives people the feeling of being in an obscure cave. One semester, I took a foreign literature class and followed the teacher's list of books to read. I remember that the row of "French Literature" had a 7-volume set of Sartre's Collected Works (People's Literature Publishing House, 2000), hardcover, the cover had long been removed, neatly arranged at the bottom, and I had to lean down to see the title printed on the spine. I read "Nausea", "Wall", and "Literary Career" in the "Novel Volume", "Dead without a Place to Die" in the "Drama Volume", and "Existentialism is a Kind of Humanism" in the "Literary Treatise Volume". Most of them swallow dates and know nothing, but they always "read" and look at it. After listening to the lecture, there is a reading foundation, and those "literary overviews", "ideological trends" and "characteristics of works" are no longer abstract and distant terms.

One rainy night in June 2008, I finished reading Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo (Translation Lin Publishing House, 2007) in the self-study room of the dormitory building, and I was so excited that I wrote a "feeling after reading" overnight.

Isaac Singer believed that the world needed only one Kafka, one Joyce, and one Borges, and these modernist writers exhausted all forms of writing techniques, opening a door to a smooth road when traditional realist writing was about to run out.

Singer pursues an unpretentious narrative and is known as "the most storytelling master of the contemporary novel". However, it was not until I delved into Rulfo's world that I realized that this Mexican man from the small village of Sayola was far above Singh.

During that time, I first read Yu Hua's essay collection Can I Believe In Myself (Tomorrow Press, 2007), which mentions Isaac Singer and Juan Rulfo, and then Márquez's A Brief Remembrance of Juan Rulfo (the opening "Discover Juan Rulfo, like the discovery of Franz Kafka" as a aphorism), and then, according to Tusoji, Singh's "Jim Pel for Fools" (Yu Hua has a novel that pays tribute to Singh called "I Don't Have My Own Name") and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo" to read. Now it seems that the above statement is too biased and shallow. But this is an intuitive reading experience, which relies on susan Sontag's "sensitivity", unadorned, and has not been "eroded" by theory, which is quite valuable.

Critics should maintain a keen sense of and judgment about the text. This is related to artistic intuition, and it is inseparable from a lot of reading. Because I write novels, I pay special attention to narrative (perspective, personal name, structure, rhythm, language, etc.). For beginner writers, skill is the first problem to be solved. For a while in college, in addition to reading novels, I frantically searched for works by "novelists talking about novels": Henry James's The Art of the Novel (Shanghai Translation Press, 2001), Milan Kundera's book of the same name, Margaret Atwood's Consultation with the Dead (Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2007). Subsequently, the list of books was expanded: Amberto Echo (Umberto Echo) "The Journey to the Novel Forest" (Life, Reading, Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 2005), Foster's "Aspects of the Novel" (People's Literature Publishing House, 2009), Pamuk's "The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist" (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2012)... It's like a hungry wanderer, catching a book is a book.

These works are both novel theory, literary essays, and narrative science. After going to graduate school and majoring in comparative literature, I plunged into the forest of literary theory. In addition to writing novels, theoretical works are always desk books: modernism, deconstructivism, "zero-degree writing" (Roland Barthes), postcolonial... Reading books mixed, combined with their own writing experience, they used a scalpel to dissect novels, and they looked decent. The articles made at that stage, going around and around, are always text perusal and narrative analysis. Looking back now, it is nothing more than a narrow-minded, instrumentalistic writing. Does theory (especially narratology) help writing fiction? Will it hurt writing? These were the topics that my friends and I used to talk about and argue about at that time. To prove myself, I, in turn, riveted myself to write novels. In the martial arts world, this is called "left-right fighting", but I prefer to call it "one-man tug-of-war".

Looking back, I'm grateful for my obsession with theory at that time. After that, it was the Doctoral stage - still majoring in comparative literature, but doing modern literary research. Because of my long-term immersion in foreign literature and world literature, when I was an undergraduate, I was not interested in ancient literature or modern and contemporary literature, and I always did other things in class (temporarily hugging the Buddha's feet before the exam). After painstakingly being admitted to the Doctorate, I found that I had obvious knowledge blind spots, so I desperately tried to make up for the course - reading overseas studies of Chinese modern and contemporary literature (Xia Zhiqing, Li Oufan, Wang Dewei, An Mincheng, Liu He... At the same time, reading modern literary classics (until now, only a small part of it has been read), a little twist and correction of the path of learning. This means that it is necessary to break free from the old knowledge framework, way of thinking, and reading interest, which is a painful process of putting on a "tight hoop" and torturing yourself. After some exploration, he gradually found the doorway and wrote articles on "Four Generations Together" and the late Qing Dynasty "educational novel" "Bitter Student". They are between criticism and research, and they inevitably retain a sense of rigidity in stitching novels and theories (academic papers later published in the Literary Review and the Journal of Modern Chinese Literature Research Series are not included in this book).

Writing literary criticism also officially begins at this stage. They are more like the words that I write in my cautious and disciplined dissertation (my doctoral dissertation is zhao Shuli's research), a kind of text that is "short and close" and "expresses my opinions" in the novel. Criticism does not need to seek source word for word, nor does it need to talk to past research, so it can boldly abandon the "prescribed action" of literature review; it must get rid of the academic style, do not write empty words, clichés, flattery, try to stick to the text, and talk about the most important issues. Of course, this generalization is crude. The ideal is to combine the rigor of learning with the style of criticism that is directly critical, positive and negative, and to connect the roles of "scholars" and literary "critics" - the former pays attention to "historicization", similar to archaeology, sweeping away rock layers and dust, revealing the true body of cultural relics and relics; the latter pursues "live" intervention, judging the literary and aesthetic value of the work (Joseph North's "Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History" has informative explanations). In my opinion, criticism needs to be stripped away. My concern is "why is the novel so and how effective is the narrative?", and here I might quote Eagleton:

The formal relationship between criticism and text is similar to that between the bard in the tribe and the king for whom he is to be praised, or between the bourgeois political economist and the capitalist producer. In each case, the "segregation" between discourse and reality resembles the ghost of the same thing: the function of discourse is nothing more than a conscious consciousness of its historical situation. This is precisely the function of criticism — to provide conditions for the text to know itself, rather than to provide conditions for what the text does not know and cannot know to be revealed.

This slightly tongue-twisting and obscure passage is from Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (Beijing Publishing House, 2021). I like the saying that "the 'separation' between discourse and reality is exactly like the ghost of the same thing.". Criticism is not simply about "making a wedding dress for others", but about providing conditions to "let the text know itself" and also to let the reader know the text. Therefore, criticism is more like an "intermediary", grafting the relationship between the author/work, the critic and the reader. The person who writes the criticism, incarnates as a psychic, casts spells, summons the ghost possessed within the novel, and makes it speak.

I wrote novels for more than a decade, the first "non-fiction" work (a collection of review essays) with 23 essays (including 1 appendix, all of which had been published before). The earliest of these began in 2015 and was completed at the latest in 2021, and the places of writing were scattered in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and the United States, and some of them were contracted manuscripts, and more were spontaneous writing. Each essay strives to give insights and insights into the art of the novel, both as a prose and as a whole. Over the years, I have often thought about the "common sense" of novel writing (the experience, reasoning and knowledge of "what is a novel and how to write it"), which is not only found in novel works and "creation talk", but also more through the use of comments on the works of others, in the confrontation, mediation, and consultation with novels of different forms.

The objects of criticism and discussion in the book include Contemporary Western novelists (Saramago, Robert Arte, Enrique Bila-Matas, Jupa Lahili, Ron Rush, etc.), as well as Ge Fei, Yu Hua, Xue Yifeng, Mai Jia, Ah Yi, Ge Liang, Zhang Chu, Zhao Song, Zhang Huiwen, Zheng Xiaodonkey, Sun Yisheng and other contemporary Chinese writers who have attracted much attention. In addition, there are essays that talk about the narrative and reading of the novel. The manuscript is divided into five series: "Extraterritorial Voices", "Seductive Landscapes", "Reading Novels", "Traditions of Storytelling" (two series), and the "Appendix" is an "interview" with Ge Fei on "WangchunFeng". The more arbitrary and sweeping essays are "Distance, Time and Silence: The Three Tones of Modern Novel Narrative" and "Seductive Landscapes: Overseas Chinese Novels and the "Chinese Complex"" in two essays; "Text Reading" includes "The Ideal" of the Short Story (according to a novel class lecture, on Ron Rush's "Difficult Times"), and the writers and writers talk about the novel are "Ge Fei in "Far Reading" and "Near Reading"; "Writer's Theory" includes "Literati Novelists and Their Creations - Ge Liang's Theory"; and a commentary on long novels There are four articles commenting on "Looking at the Spring Breeze", "Life in the Sea and the Sea", "King Lear" and "1979", and "The Land of The Vulgar"... It can be said that picking out the favorite articles from the dozens of criticisms written in six years is not only a self-review, but also to find a confidant.

Criticism is the passport of critics, the ticket to squeeze through narrow doors and open literary roaming.

22 January 2022, The University of Hong Kong

Author: Lin Peiyuan

Editor: Qian Yutong

Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.