Interview with Chen Yan|The story behind the new "Starry Sky and Half a Tree"
Writer Chen Yan
"No matter how we want to live a wider life, even if it can only be in one part, or even finally have to retreat to a village or town to look up and overlook, in which the crawling, desperation, landslides, and repeated trial and error have a unique significance in the history of the evolution of a big era." Chen Yan sighed with emotion.
After eight years and nine drafts, Mao Dun Literature Award winner and famous writer Chen Yan's latest novel "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" was published by the People's Literature Publishing House this year. This is Chen Yan's new full-length work after the "stage trilogy", "Stage", "Protagonist" and "Comedy".
The disappearance of half a century-old tree triggered social shocks in a village deep in the Qinling Mountains. The head of the family, who owns the property rights of half a tree, is Wen Rufeng, and under the ridicule of those around him, he embarks on the road of finding self-respect and justice; An Beidou, a small-town civil servant who loves astronomy, was assigned to "persuade" Wen Rufeng, "I always want to look up at the starry sky, but I have to deal with only half a tree under my feet."
With vivid and vivid narration with strong dialect characteristics, the writer has completed the laying out of the geography of mountains and rivers, birds, insects, flowers and plants, human customs, birth, old age, illness and death in a village and town in the Qinling area, and deeply explored the relationship between man and nature, society and ecology, grassroots and center, earth and universe from multiple dimensions. The novel has successfully created a group of vivid and vivid characters, and the portrayal of grassroots civil servants with different personalities such as An Beidou, He Shoukui, and Nan Guiyan is particularly intriguing.
"Starry sky" and "half a tree", one represents the scale of the universe, the other represents the scale of human morality, entering the scale of the universe, what is the significance of the baht in the world? However, it is the contradiction between the starry sky and the world, the ideal and the reality, the vastness and the subtlety that constitute the narrative tension of the entire novel. Chen Yan told the Nandu reporter: "In many cases, our spiritual life will show a rich situation of division and overlap between the body walking in the mud and the soul flying in the sky. Life must be down-to-earth, but also empty, this is our helplessness, but also our weather. ”
Interview with Chen Yan: He has migrated to five townships with his father as a civil servant
Nandu: What is the meaning of the title of the novel "Starry Sky and Half a Tree"?
Chen Yan: The title of "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" comes from the actual life behavior of the protagonist of the novel. The protagonist's name is An Beidou, who fell in love with astronomy when he was in college, and always as a hobby, along with the dilapidated and cheap celestial telescope, he brought it back to the countryside after being admitted to the civil service. But the countryside is a small environment full of fireworks and full of all kinds of contradictions, which is narrow and narrow, and he looks up at the starry sky, which brings a lot of very meaningful embarrassment to life. For An Beidou, his most important reality is to help villager Wen Rufeng find the missing half of the tree. If you don't find it, Wen Rufeng will make a disturbance up and down. Because in the scale of the value of life as warm as the wind, this half tree is related to his rights and dignity.
Nandu: "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" is set in Beidou Village, vividly showing the human physics and sentient beings of the mountain village deep in the Qinling Mountains. You grew up in a township deep in the mountains south of Xi'an, and lived with your father in several townships when you were young, does your depiction of Beidou Village incorporate various impressions of childhood and adolescence? Can the characters in "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" have life prototypes?
Chen Yan: That's for sure. The labor of writers is most easily branded with the life of childhood and adolescence. I followed my father, a civil servant, on his way to five townships. At that time, it felt very far away, but today, it is actually going around in a small area. The landscape characters there gave me endless writing resources. Of course, fiction is pure fiction, and no character or event is real. I am transforming and creating literature in a wide range of life. Writers always want to show the whole world as richly as possible in their buildings. Any life can not directly complete this building, this architecture is creation, creation is bold imagination, reasonable fiction.
Nandu: "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" has created the image of a series of small-town civil servants working at the grassroots level, such as An Beidou, Nanguiyan, and He Shoukui. Why do you know so much about the daily life of grassroots civil servants? Have you conducted any research and interviews?
Chen Yan: Such a group of grassroots civil servants, not only my father, my uncle, but also many of my relatives. I have flesh-and-blood contact with them. In the past, I stood directly on that land, and then I was far away from the township, but there was always a constant family affection there. In my opinion, research and interviews are still a lower level way to obtain the spiritual imagery and materials of life, and the most important thing is that the state of flesh and blood is connected or even blurred.
Nandu: Why did you add the owl's God perspective to the novel? What function does an owl perform in narrative? Have you considered that the appearance of drama and owls may interrupt the coherence of reading?
Chen Yan: The drama and the perspective of the owl narrative in this novel are obviously intentional. The novel opens with a larger orientation, and the play is intended to condense some particularly important focal points. I am often struck by the beginning of some great dramas, as an all-encompassing novel, it should not be unusual to use a dramatic technique, or even an artistic technique, a musical technique, a film and television technique, a philosophical technique, a physical anatomical method, etc. Who made its life so open and majestic? Moreover, drama and literature have a natural interdependence, and literary history has never been separated. And I always advocate that drama should learn from fiction, and novels should learn from drama. In the endless trivialities and daily life of life, our writing will naturally carry dramatic logical conformance and self-consistency, otherwise, it can only be a piece of scattered sand. In the endless literary classics, we read endless drama, this is not a shortcoming, in today's era when literature is increasingly lost readers, it is very necessary not to embarrass readers, and even to find them a better reading pleasure.
As for owls, I think all creatures on earth have spirituality. They are always talking, saying things that we don't understand. In my village, the owl is not a good bird, and when it calls, it is about to die. I just let it go through in the novel. It is a member of nature, cursing and cursing about the destruction of nature, and constantly warning mankind that whoever is in your village may die. Attention, won't it not die?
Probably how complex the starry sky is, how complex human nature is.
Nandu: In the novel, Beidou Village actually leads to ecological destruction in order to seek development, and the construction of roads has led to the bombing of mountains and the digging of rivers. Many places in the west, as the novel says, have no resources, so they rely on agriculture. What can literature tell readers about the development of these places?
Chen Yan: Any development comes at a price. The price paid by human beings in development constitutes the entire historical and survival context of our existence. It is more difficult for the western part of China to develop than the central and eastern regions. There are traffic problems, there are conceptual problems, etc., but in finding a way to break through, they are full of frustration and wisdom. Neither can it grow resources nor facilitate transportation, it is a perspective of spiritual experience and observation, allowing us to dig out the body walking in the swamp and the soul soaring in the sky, and continue to move forward. Success and setbacks, wealth and poverty are relative. I don't think that a rich man who already lives in a golden house must live a happier and more meaningful life than a miner who is sweating and digging coal. This is literature, and this is what the literature I know is going to give to the reader.
Nandu: You are an astronomer yourself, what does a glimpse of the universe mean to you? Do you have a favorite star or zodiac sign?
Chen Yan: That's a hobby. The essence of astronomy is observation. All discoveries are made by observation, just as science comes from infinite experiments. The essence of astronomy is similar to literature. I like astronomy, and its essence is curiosity, learning more secrets about the Heavenly Palace through observation. Human nature, like the sky, is a never-ending labyrinth that needs to be observed from generation to generation. Probably how complicated the starry sky is, how complex human nature is, and because of this, I think there will always be drama in literature.
Nandu: In the novel, there are some dialect sayings with western characteristics, such as "嫑", "Duanzhi", "loose and dry" and so on. Please talk about the use of dialect in this work, and what effect do you hope the language of the novel will show?
Chen Yan: The use of dialect slang in the novel is a good tradition. When we read classics like Water Margin, we are often amazed by those vivid dialects. My novels and dramas have always insisted on salvaging some local dialects and sayings that are about to be lost, and I think it would be more appropriate to write about the water and people of that side, and express them in the language of that side. The language of the novel must be vivid and expressive, and the novel should be more like speaking, a narrative that clings to the ground.
Nandu: "Starry Sky and Half a Tree" is an eight-year, nine-year-old work, what was the biggest challenge you encountered in the process of writing this work? How was it overcome?
Chen Yan: Because I want to write about complexity, but I am often confused and troubled by complexity, I have to stop again and again to think, examine, and straighten out. Of course, there is the problem of the advancement of the novel itself, and there is also the problem of the creation time. In short, it is not too long to write a long story for such a long time, it can be regarded as normal.
Nandu: Tell us about your future writing plans.
Chen Yan: Not yet. It takes a long time to read to learn to fill.
Nandu reporter Huang Qian