Literature Guanlan Book Club
Starting from the offline reading clubs of colleges and universities and social organizations across the country, China Writers Network gathers literary enthusiasts, listens to literary voices, and transmits literary ideas. Whether it is a new work, a good book recommendation, or a classic re-reading, topic discussion, what jumps on the paper is not only a solidified text, but also a beating thinking. Articles come in a variety of forms, either discussion or commentary. Welcome more book clubs to join our big family, online and offline, and enjoy the collision.
Initiated by He Ping, a professor at the College of Literature of Nanjing Normal University, the tropospheric reading club usually takes a work as a wedge and revolves around a certain theme, not limited to a single work itself. The results of the general discussion will be sorted out and published in the public account "Send you a flower to wear", and the public account will open the comment area message function in the follow-up. The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, and every gust of wind and every drop of rain generated in it is closely related to the people on the earth, just like literature.
"Russian Matryoshka Doll"
Author: Three-three
Publisher: Yilin Publishing House
Online: 2021-11
Eight years after "Leaving the Soul", the story of twelve months of sansan returns. She shuttles between fiction and reality, using philosophy and poetry to shape one Russian matryoshka doll after another, rendering the endless loneliness of life with its repetitive essence.
The whisper of life
Zhang Linlin
Although there are various stories in the book, there are various characters, and there are also suspense, fantasy, absurdity, sentimentality and exploration of various colors and writing forms, I noticed that the bottom of these narratives slowly flows with women's life experiences, and almost every work has female discourse. Women's perspective may not be deliberately chosen, but it is natural and appropriate.
I also found your true feelings and confidence in life. The ghostly and evil feelings brought about by the early lady of the dove in "Only the Remaining Wilderness" may be diffuse and incomprehensible to the author of the nothingness, and can even form a style by writing a large book. But I see your subversion, you inject a slow sense of warmth. Mr. Shao's death is actually very sad, but your writing style is very poetic, and it leads the sadness to a very bright way out. Behind the emotional turn is a solid thing that is not false, but naturally and truly exists in the lines of life.
"Phoenix in Flight" reminds me of the people and things in my memory. You mentioned Grandma Bao's large front door cigarettes and the importance of rituals by some people whose lives were not so satisfactory, as well as Yan Yan's desertion, this life experience and human nature observation are touching.
Huang Li
Wen Hui
Many stories write about parent-child relationships, especially mother-daughter relationships, and most of them are almost "broken" mother-daughter relationships. Have you deliberately paid attention to these kinds of relationships when you were creating?
Three Three
The novel in "Russian Matryoshka Doll" was written at a more immature age, so the projection of the real world in the novel will be heavier. In fact, family relationships are really not good at what I am not good at in my life. The relationship between my mother and I is closer to the dynamic balance of "attack-guilt" mode. However, the novel's "gaze" will also add more drama to this relationship, making it extreme, and will be more attentive in the future.
The gaze of human nature
Horse Month
The only fairness of survival is that all people end up suffering from mental illness. Ichizo in "Patching Heaven" is a man who believes in miracles, and in reality he becomes a liar, and no one will be grateful to the tragic forerunner. He was the one in the cave who tried his best to get out, even if he would eventually be killed. The belief in making up for heaven is not the icing on the cake for him, but a way to sustain his life. As long as he does not perish, he will always survive from the lonely holy place that belongs to him completely.
The loneliness of Yizang and the silence of "me" are actually an inevitable loneliness. But one is to accept the loneliness of the moment, the other is to accept the admonition of fate, and when there is rebellion in the heart, and when it is impossible to objectify the essential power that life seeks, it simply remains silent and destroys a certain existence. Whether the sky is broken or not, whether it can be repaired, is not important, the important thing is to believe in itself. Believe, then there is a way to go. "Patching Up the Heavens" has the tragic beauty of Zhuangzi's "Mountain Wood": "Those who send the king are all from the cliff, and the king is far away from here." ”
Yang Yiwen
You have portrayed many young and degraded characters, and you have said that single-parent families are economically and spiritually barren. The absence of a parent or a child causes trauma and "barrenness" of the child's mind. Even as adults, they still fear loss. There are also some people who are spurred by fear to pursue the best life they can, such as Yan Yan in "Phoenix In Flight"; some people are radical and heretical and even fall into madness and take pleasure in self-abuse, such as He Xiaoyang in "Yesterday's Garden".
Either outwardly, or internally depleted, these people who fear loss are always suffering from gain and loss. The emotions of loss are like a black hole devouring their ability to think, their struggling efforts, and even their cynical gestures. Like the Layers of Russian Matryoshka dolls, their core has been infinitely vacuumed. And black holes can't be filled, and making black holes disappear can only be bleached – forgetting and compromise. When they are obedient to the secret social order like ordinary people, they still repeatedly expose their spiritual martyrdom, just like the self-statement of "I" in "The White Tower": "I cannot change my past, I have lost the opportunity to regain my dignity forever." ”
The deformed symbiotic relationship between the hero and heroine in "Yesterday's Garden" and the imagery of the night in the ending are reminiscent of "White Night", is it borrowed from "White Night" from some angles?
In fact, when I was creating, I was not aware of the flaws of the characters in the novel, and I did not deliberately associate the defects with certain reasons. Taking a step back, the defects are not necessarily caused by family reasons, but also related to the circumstances of their growth and the changes in the overall environment.
The story of "Phoenix In Flight" is most likely a fusion of real life experience, and the characters also have prototypes. The main story takes place with a friend of mine whose grandmother is depressed and wants to die with her grandfather; but after killing her grandfather, grandma attempted suicide. I was very touched, not as a kind of strange feeling, but because it could happen so plainly in daily life, and I wanted to write this novel, but only took the sequence of relationships in this event. The old couple in the novel has another prototype, the grandmother couple who brought me when I was a child, they adopted a lame girl, and later there was a third generation of Yan yan. Yan Yan and I did not meet a few times, and only knew some information about her in the conversations of the adults, including the news of her marriage later. For poor and old-fashioned people, marriage is a very grand celebration, and the significance of this moment for Yan Yan is very touching to me. How to let these characters carry the relationship of murder is another question to think about.
"Yesterday's Garden" is an early work, probably written in 2016. The tone of the novel is the mood of a melody in the translated Advent. This article was written very quickly and took only two days to write. The writing of "Yesterday's Garden" is mainly a playful nature, without borrowing from "White Night". I haven't read White Nights yet, and I'll look at it when I'm done. Of course, the capacity of "Yesterday's Garden" is certainly not comparable to that of "White Night".
Liu Deyang
"Evil has evil newspaper" writes about the ghosts and cunning of human nature, what is the opportunity for you to present these human natures?
"Evil has evil retribution" and "Patching up the sky" are the only themes I define as "urban aliens", and I originally wanted to write another book, but because I was lazy and did not write it, I moved it to this collection of novels. Both have something higher than life, relatively romantic, between realism and mythology.
"Evil has evil retribution" actually wants to write about pure evil. This is not entirely the category of human nature, which is only selfish and distant from pure evil. Writing out this evil is also an attempt to discern, but looking back now, I probably shouldn't have used this overly playful way. Regarding the letters in "Evil and Evil", for a while, I made a public account with my friends, taking turns to update it every day, and I was scheduled every Thursday. At that time, similar columns were written, and many letters to M were written, although the form was letters, but in fact it was more like muttering to themselves alone.
"Unwinding" for Writing
Wang Zhimin
What do you think is the relationship between talent and skill? You're currently reading creative writing at the National People's Congress, how has that changed your work?
This happens to be something I've discussed with my friends around me. We all tend to think that talent does play a big role in the early stages of writing, but its proportion will gradually weaken in later writing, and a person who is tenacious and hardworking is entirely more likely than a person who showed a certain talent in his youth. In the renmin university, there are many opportunities to communicate with teachers and friends, which is of course very important for writing. But opportunity is one thing, and in the final analysis, you have to rely on your own efforts to understand.
How do you view the problem of input-output imbalance? Are there good suggestions for consciously converting inputs to outputs to avoid the input flowing too fast than the output?
In my own case, there are definitely more inputs than outputs, and there are pros and cons. The advantage is that a greater focus on input makes the self more solid in the intersection of external information flows, and the input provides a stable basis for output. The downside is that if the output is stagnant, it will also fall into a kind of emptiness, or anxiety.
Lu Jiaze
Many of the characters in the novel have trajectories beyond your actual age, how did you construct these characters that went beyond your life resume? I usually try to write novels, but I always feel that my works are very mediocre, only telling some superficial stories, and it is difficult to touch social contradictions and human souls. How do you dig into the depth of your work as you create?
The first question is still related to imagination. I remember that I used to misunderstand "imagination" and think that it referred to a fantasy ability, but now I think that in addition to fiction/fantasy, it is also an ability to speculate on the truth of fiction. Imagination is indispensable when you need to build a situation in which you have not been involved. The second question, in fact, do not worry, I think the best state is that writing is for self-amusement, do not have to consider its effects in the outside world. If you always consider depth, writing can become difficult to stick to.
There is a "Patching Up the Sky" in "Russian Matryoshka Doll", and Mr. Lu Xun also has a work of the same name in the "New Compilation of Stories". Your previous collection of novels, "Leaving the Soul", also wrote "old stories" in the form of new stories, do you think there is any difference between a new story compilation and a new work based on an existing story?
The key to "new story editing" is to see if there is a new perspective to look at the story, and it is necessary to tap the unique value of the story. At that time, when I wrote "Patching Up the Heavens", I was thinking about the following question: When you were told that the heavens would collapse in three hundred years, would you choose to make up the heavens? If you go, then you will give your whole life, but no one knows your efforts; if you don't go, you can also live your life in peace, because the sky will not fall until you die. When faced with this problem, how will people choose?
I think that "Patching the Heavens" is the theme of the first, does it contain your thoughts on the process of life from birth to aging, from believing to believing in certain things and then returning to believing?
The most original writing opportunity of "Patching Up the Sky" is: I often go to the Internet to search for some contemporary novels, which are difficult to search, and generally can only find a beginning, unless someone deliberately types it word by word on the Internet to find it. As a result, I found that a lot of the novels were found in a private blog. The blogger's avatar was a monk, very mysterious, and had no other information than fiction—I thought it was interesting. Regarding "believing", I think that faith should be a dynamic process, every moment is changeable, facing the torture of self-doubt, and simple belief is a simplification. What "Patching the Heavens" constructs is an attempt at "faith".
Lu Yuewei
Compared with "Leaving the Soul", "Russian Matryoshka Doll" is less rough and more delicate. At first reading, I felt the author's repeated deliberations on the layout and wording. Various sensory impressions are cleverly captured by rhetoric, presenting abstract feelings beyond figuration, which at first glance seem novel, and the details experience aesthetic pleasure. The story is based on the Yoshimitsu Kataba in life, mostly for the helpless dilemma in daily life. Although there is less universal experience, there is no lack of personal experience and thinking awareness unique to the author. Many unexpected plots separate the story from reality, but the author's formulation does not focus on the truth of the plot, but on the activity of human consciousness. The protagonists are mostly young women, with a vague appearance, but the inner world is clearly visible. They are not given the strong initiative to change their lives against the sky, but they are always keenly aware and independent of the people around them, showing pain and laughter, cruelty and softness, extremism and rationality, and have both absurdity and black humor in the stream of consciousness. Novel language patterns and specific imagery also add interest and temperature to the desolate and lonely narrative background, and together with colorful metaphors and contemporary consciousness, they construct a sad but imaginative, indifferent but skeptical novel world.
How did you conceive of the structure of your novel when you wrote it, and did the existing theories constrain or help you?
It took me nearly two years to realize that structure is not an independent element, but should be viewed in conjunction with the subject matter of the novel. If you decide the novel you want to write, the structure will naturally emerge. For example, in the novel "Russian Matryoshka Doll", the experience of scientists who studied the Riemann function in history is to divide the narrative at the novel level. Most of these scientists end in madness and suicide, and the last paragraph is about Riemann himself, who also mysteriously disappeared from this world. Stringing up stories with scientists is also a hint that when the story is revealed, the reader can revisit the experiences of these scientists.
Whether theory is a constraint or a help to the writer may be both, and a good writer should strive to turn it into help.
(This article was published in the 7th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" jointly organized by China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily on December 22, 2021)