Text / Zhang Yanmei
Discussing the creation of Haifei novels, the more common perspectives are "post-70s" writers, espionage wars, historical narratives, etc. Haifei is a writer with a clear writing direction, and is also a relatively successful screenwriter in the film and television of his works.
The dual identity of a novelist and screenwriter provides a pluralistic perspective for understanding Haifei. Works such as "Sparrow", "Sting", "Tangshan Sea" and so on have received wide attention, whether it is a novel or a TV series, they are full of the idea of home and country, the chivalry and beautiful temperament.
The new work "Jiangnan Campaign" has a narrative stretch and agility, and the emotional expression is more three-dimensional and rich. In Haifei's pen, the main tone is Jin Yong-style home country righteousness, and the "chorus" part is closer to the happy jianghu of Gu Long.
Reading Haifei novels is like walking through the gallery, Jiangnan ink breath is full of breath, black and white ink is bright life and death, almost every one has a specific historical background, traveling between family and country and personal identity, espionage and strange waves, martial arts thrilling, the test of human nature is always on the string, even if it is a love story that swings back to the intestines, it is also sharpened by sacrifice and righteousness.
He likes to torture, and leaves a free and open space, one after another, one suspense after another, hidden in the endless passion for fiction and the eagerness to explore the mysteries of history.
Open up the fading history and recreate the deeply buried colors of time, like archaeological excavations, full of mechanisms and rust. The process of restoring history and reshaping history is also the process of us looking at Haifei's inner order, fiction and truth are like a multi-sided prism, serious and solemn is the righteousness of the family and the country, and chivalrous is the personal disposition.
The historical background of "Jiangnan Campaign" is those things of the Ming Dynasty, and it is the Wanli years that we are familiar with, the Ming Dynasty, Jinyi Wei, Jianghu Chivalrous, and Japanese samurai are all familiar martial arts novel settings.
The novel starts with Tian Xiaoqi, the head of the Beidou Gate of JinyiWei, being sent by Zhu Yijun, emperor of the Ming Dynasty, to the Hangzhou Qiantang Firearms Bureau to take Zhao Shizhen's just-completed "Artifact Spectrum or Question" as the starting point of the narrative, the main line is the war against the Wu around Zhao Shizhen and the "Artifact Spectrum or Question", which is the family's national condition; the secondary line is to crack the case of the disappearance of children and the battle for the prince behind it, which is loyalty and righteousness; the auxiliary line is Tian Xiaoqi and Liu Yidao, Tang Rouge, Tu shu gun, auspicious, and Zhao Kexin fighting side by side, which is brotherhood and children's love.
The story takes place in seven days, the narrative opens and closes in a degree, like a folding fan, folded up tightly, unfolded can see the swaying scenery inside.
Narrative gives history a new meaning. Whether history is told or hidden behind the narrative, the separation between the two still constitutes the dilemma we face in history today. Narrative means the recoding of history, the connection between narrative and the essential attributes of history, with subjective experience and interpretation, and at the same time, the narrative also contains aesthetic preferences.
Haifei said: "Spy warfare" is a passage back to history and a path to get close to heroes. This road is not easy to walk, but it is worth going all out, and there are some of them that we cherish. Cross-media communication reshapes people's acceptance and aesthetic perception structures, and history can be more vividly presented as story scenes and empathy effects. Even if people know it's fiction, they're willing to experience history in immersive viewing and reading.
Consumerity exacerbates cultural aesthetic preferences, emotional belonging, idol effects, subject matter fever, containing complex receptive psychology and reading expectations, which include both rational psychological identity and irrational emotional input. How privatized historical narratives link the public threshold, how popular aesthetics are coupled with mainstream ideology, and how fictional history provides space and possibility for additional aesthetic pleasure and experience sharing.
Guy Debo believes that "the world has been photographed", advanced capitalist society has entered a landscape society dominated by the production of image objects and the consumption of objects and images, and the landscape has become a materialized world view, and the landscape is essentially nothing more than "the social relationship between people mediated by images".
Debord emphasizes that the cultural landscape shaped by film and television is a kind of alienation of life; and the consumer orientation of the social landscape undoubtedly has a huge and deep impact on the production and dissemination of contemporary literature. Discussing Haifei's work in the field of consumerism, the visual landscape he provides is effectively embedded in time, and history is inevitably entertained after all.
Real events still have the attributes of the story, history is not like a well-written script will have a complete chain of cause and effect, more is accidental and fork in the road, historians tell history is accustomed to excavating cause and effect and essence, while novelists are not responsible for strengthening the sense of destiny while confirming the regularity and inevitability of history. Narrative is first of all to tell the story, but also contains the judgment of history, or the telling of historical consciousness, historical concepts, and historical order.
In addition to aesthetic feelings, researchers are more accustomed to exploring implicit author identity and value choices. The concept of "grand narrative" is closely related to historical epistemology, closely related to the law of historical development and the historian's exploration and understanding of this law of historical development, and implies the essence of deifying, authoritative, and legitimizing a certain world view.
"By treating all human history as one, unifying the past and the future in a coherent sense, the grand narrative must be a mythological structure. It must also be a political construct, a projection of historical hopes or fears that allows for the authoritarianization of an arguable worldview. "Grand narrative means persuasive expression of a causal chain over a longer period of time, with the aim of clarifying a public position and constructing an emotional or belief community of nations, nations, and societies; giving a concrete imprint of an era through dramatic scenes, environmental design, and color depths."
The branches and leaves, every thing and tile in "Jiangnan Campaign", those unique plants, houses, stages, towers, including folk clothes and food, are all mirrors of history, and we will be enveloped by the overall history, and we will be attracted by poetic details. For example, the character of Tian Xiaoqi, with the duality of entering the world and coming out of the world, the passion of investment and the exhaustion of withdrawal, constitute two sides of his spiritual world, one side is dazzling light, the other side is a low-hanging shadow.
Haifei captures the light and shadow in the depths of history, projecting his own rational cognition and inner emotions. The novel has a poetic halo, a delicate imagination, and a wonderful harmony with the surging heroic passion. Warm everydayness, superimposed wonders, and a clear and smooth timeline provide an open space for showing everyone's heart.
The charm of "Gangnam Campaign" lies in the clever plot design, speed of advancement, and suspense. What moved me the most was the emotion that did not elicit. Unharmed, long gone, and everywhere. This kind of hidden love, which is constantly discovered and reproduced from people and things that have disappeared, constitutes the desire and possibility of the living person to talk to the world. Many fleeting moments, choices and conflicts are interspersed with the emotional main line of the novel's narrative.
History is shaped, and we can shape all of this, write it over and over again, to combat the insurmountable sense of passing and nihilism, or we can abstract it into an emotion that integrates the individual person into the heat of life here and there. "Jiangnan Campaign" writes martial arts novels, spy novels, and jianghu legends into lyrical long tones, which is still a haifei-style narrative aesthetic.
At the ethical level, those heroes, chivalry, and children's love are constantly approaching the ideal realm of life; at the narrative level, through the personal situation in history, the fate of a city, and the complex projection of everyone's choices in the big era, reconstruct the aesthetic bond between story and history.
In the context of postmodernism, modernity is constantly encountering crises, polysexual entanglements, broken, scattered, burdened with a heavy history, which seems to liberate the self, but is actually a deconstruction of the self. In the tide of postmodernity, dilemmas are everywhere, and heroism and idealism are nothing more than imaginary Noah's Ark.
"Jiangnan Service" has the legend of martial arts novels, the five brothers (monks learn martial arts, almost the basic character of the male protagonist of martial arts novels) in the test of life and death to grow up, re-understand themselves, confirm themselves, Haifei designed such a general framework to be compatible with the legendary and secular worlds in his heart, which makes "Jiangnan Service" have some elements of growth novels.
Contemporary historical novels, imperial generals, harem battles, jokes, and crossings, are far from the real history, not the history in the eyes of the common people, nor the real imperial family history. Haifei novels tend to the folk position, he writes court struggles, does not deliberately show the tiredness or tyranny of the emperor, writes about Liu Zhangtai, the tone is relaxed, slightly sarcastic, the temples and rivers and lakes in the parallel vision become mirror images of each other, and folk chivalry is always the spiritual main line of the novel. There is a vague layer of sentimentality floating in the pen and ink of ridicule, as if it was originally silent under the water of history, stirred by the wind, it will float to the surface of the water, looming, and the sacrifice constitutes a very different and indistinct double text.
Compared with the revolutionary historical novel series "Xiang Yan'an", "Qipao", "Homecoming", "Sparrow", "Sting", "Tangshan Hai", "Wind Catcher", "Chess Player", etc., Haifei's sense of history and values are very clear; the Stories of the Ming Dynasty in "Wind and Dust" and "Jiangnan Campaign" have more or less the heart of the game. Tian Xiaoqi is a small folk low-level person like Chen Shen and Chen Kailai, and he has become a big hero by chance. Homeland, love, life and death, placed in a specific historical space, reinforces the place and meaning of ordinary people in public space.
Writer Hai Fei
Haifei's novels have many best-selling elements, such as espionage, suspense, heroes, and each one is a good story. However, "espionage warfare" is only the background or cloak, the Republic of China is only a commonly used background, and what he pays attention to is the people in the depths of history, and the history of the deep hearts of the people. The idea of home and country and personal temperament cannot be completely distinguished, and Haifei likes to show the lives and experiences of ordinary people in major historical events whose situations, identities, and personalities are complex.
At the end of the novel, the auspiciousness that was originally outside the mundane world replaced Tian Xiaoqi as the Jinyi Wei Kunlun, and Xiaoqi faded out and lived in seclusion. Maybe this is "to leave the liver and gallbladder for two kunluns". Haifei is particularly sensitive to time, and there is a serious sense of history precipitated in his heart in the jianghu grievances, while the secularized historical fiction is rendered as scene, defamiliarization, mystery and difference. Through poetic storytelling, market choice, and consumer participation, perhaps there is no longer an exact connection with historical truth, but the gesture of looking at history, touching the perspective of history, understanding the path of history, and the temperature of writing history have jointly constructed a fascinating spy world with the label of Haifei.
This article is a book review of Hai Fei's book "Jiangnan Campaign", authorized by the Writers Publishing House)
Selected Chinese books
《Gangnam》
Haifei
Writers Press
September 2021
The time span of the novel "The Battle of Jiangnan" is only seven days. Jinyi Wei Qianhu Tian Xiaoqi received a secret order to go to Hangzhou to find Zhao Shizhen, the chief of the Firearms Bureau, to get a new book on firearms that he was about to write, "Artifact Spectrum or Question", and after arriving in Hangzhou, he encountered a large number of black bats continuously abducting children, along with the arms expert Zhao Shizhen also disappeared. With Tian Xiaoqi's tracking, these two seemingly unrelated cases finally coincided, and the mysteries pointed to the power struggle between Wokou and the court. At the same time, the Wukou dogs led by lanterns jumped the wall to blow up the restored Liuhe Pagoda, and Tian Xiaoqi and his brother fought with the officers and men of the Hangzhou garrison battalion to the death against the Wukou, and finally saved the Liuhe Pagoda and defended the safety of the Wanli Emperor who suddenly arrived in Hangzhou. The whole story is full of suspense and ups and downs. The writing is dense and light, with a surging classical atmosphere hidden in it, and at the same time, countless dangers, wisdom and tenderness are arranged in the water vapor.
Good books in Chinese
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