The big era of imagination 丨 New power

Editor

Imagination has always been the "birthplace" of literature. Throughout the past two years of youth literature creation, many writers have used fantasy, imagination and allegory to mix social history, daily experience and private historical memory, and to push and deform daily time and space with either strange and warm imagination or broad and calm imagination, reconstructing other realities of life. Imagination is like the tip of the iceberg that emerges from the water, showing its clean, profound, and light aesthetic creativity that connects with reality but is completely different from reality, and becomes a "magic weapon" to re-polish Chinese writing, through which the novel regains the superpower of heaven and earth, and has the free space to fly and breathe. It is true that fiction and reality are not binary opposites, but what kind of relationship should the fiction of imagination be to the real life of society? Can imagination be embedded in it to reflect the real life of inner, fragmented, high landscapes? In an age like this, is imagination a prism on the road to reality? This issue of "New Forces" invited Huang Panpan, editor of Chinese literature books, and young scholars Zhao Tiancheng and Fan Siping to talk about many topics related to this.

Zhao Tiancheng is currently working at the College of Chinese Minority Languages and Literatures of the Central University for Nationalities. His main research areas are the history of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and contemporary Chinese literary criticism.

Big times of imagination

Wen 丨 Zhao Tiancheng

If literature is recognized as historical, then the imagination as a key element of literature is also historical. Specifically, the position, function, and social meaning of imagination are not completely equivalent in different spatio-temporal contexts. In the century-old historical process of New Chinese Literature, there has been an implicit tradition of emphasizing imitation over performance, and emphasizing experience over imagination. Writing that relies on imagination is often seen as a lack of reality, or even a historical nihilism. As a representative of modernism, Proust's circle of life was not broad; Kafka claimed that his ideal life was to think and write in the cave all day. They were introspective writers with tensions with external life, but it was precisely because of them that, like Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, they developed a deep isomorphic relationship with their time. The times of complexity and chaos are historical moments when imagination reconstructs and provides meaning with literature in the broad sense.

The post-pandemic era, like the world a hundred years ago, is also a big era of vicissitudes. Life that remains static, day in and day out, whether we like it or not, seems to have become an unattainable luxury. This is the era of the rise of global conservatism, the imagination of a complete community is gradually shattered, everywhere is full of tangible and invisible "Berlin Wall" and "dimensional wall", people's sorrows and joys are not the same. In the case of consensus and truth in the universal sense that are not easily obtained, we can no longer pass through experience, but must be imagined to penetrate the cascading bubble of discourse and approach the intrinsicity of history and reality. This is like the distinction between words and meanings in classical Chinese literature, although words are not satisfactory and overwhelmed, that is, "words" are only an imperfect intermediary leading to "meaning", but "meaning" can only be accessed through "speech". At this moment, imagination is the "word" of reaching the "intention", and it is the only way for us to break through the wall and get close to the true intention. In a note earlier this year, I said: "If we look back at the future, we may be at the beginning of the great trough of the Three-Body Problem, or in the terminology of Forrest Gumpen, we will be in a worldwide 'state of exception' for a long time." At this 'breakpoint' in history, we can no longer interpret the past from the future according to a certain teleology, or even understand the present through the past. That is to say, imagination is not only a necessary element of science fiction literature today, because whether it is the far future, the near future, or even the "immediate future", imagination is needed to pry.

In such a karmic meeting, a group of young writers began to enter the field of vision of people—both inside and outside the literary circle, professional readers and ordinary readers—and gained the novelty of their styles with heterogeneous imaginations. Compared with their predecessors, they have fewer traces of Chinese realism and have from the beginning a vision that I call "new cosmopolitanism." This vision descends on novels, such as the "China" element in Kafka's "When the Great Wall of China was Built" or Borges's "The Garden where the Path Bifurcates", which is a symbolic, pictographic, and far-reaching "world". In "The Musician", "Submarine at Night", and the new work "Snow Mountain Master", young novelist Chen Chuncheng tries to challenge characters, stories and themes that are not limited to China, but more abstract. From this, the intellectual can spontaneously develop a small meaning at the cognitive level, and these works provide different opportunities and possibilities for understanding the relationship between the self, the country and the world, how to understand the past, reality and the future.

But more importantly, the boundaries and order of "imagining" itself are broken in the works of novelists such as Chen Chuncheng, and then restructured at a new level. As Wang Fuzhi said in his "Poetry of Jiang Zhai", poetry can be happy, can be observed, can be grouped, and can be complained about, and the author uses consistent thinking, and the reader is comfortable with his feelings. For example, at the level of acceptance of the novel collection Submarine at Night, I noticed subtle differences between different groups. Publishers favor the more "literary" passages (such as "Eponymous Title" "Submarine at Night"), while critics value the more "thick" Zhufeng Temple, The Musician, and Dream of the Red Chamber Mass. In my opinion, in the following novels, the author's literary imagination, historical imagination and sociological imagination have reached a higher degree of synthesis and balance. History and reality exist in a highly abstract, but by no means, vacative way. "Zhufeng Temple" has a personal and independent view of historical violence, "The Musician" on totalitarian politics, and "Dream of the Red Chamber Mass" on ideology, but these views cannot be simply classified into a certain position, attitude, theory or conceptual form. This is where the potential of the imagination to be soft, rich and extremely sustainable lies. Not only Chen Chuncheng, But also Zhou Kai's historical novel "Moss" and his new work "Youth, Rouge and Spirit Monster", Li Tang's fantasy novel "The Sea Outside the Body" and the new novel collection "Tiger in the Vegetable Market" and other works, either from the present and the past, or with empirical fiction, all excavate and extend the comprehensive potential of imagination from different aspects. The widespread impact they have also led us to rethink avant-garde writing since the 1980s from another perspective. Both defenders and critics generally regard the artistic characteristics of "non-history" or "de-history" as the conceptual core of avant-garde novels. But in fact, the representative works that gained a high reputation at that time or later, such as Mo Yan's "Transparent Carrot", Yu Hua's "Eighteen-year-old Going Out and Traveling", Remnant Xue's "Cabin on the Mountain", Ma Yuan's "The Temptation of Ganges", and Ge Fei's "Lost Boat", are actually a synthesis of imagination, formality and history. They all touch history from a particular path, and some kind of reality in the continuity of history.

In addition, the imagination of young writers also presents the dialectical interaction of the two dimensions of internal and external, that is, the problem of the connection between self-imagination and social imagination. At the time node of public space barrier and disorder, what needs to be understood and constructed by the imagination is not only the two ends of individual existence and public life, but also the imaginary relationship between "me" and the world, the individual and its actual existence. Camus's famous phrase "it is important not to live better, but to live more" is still in the ear, but as mentioned earlier, today we have (or still) difficulty in living more by "experiencing" the way, but only through reverse movement, with imaginary wandering to "occupy" more life. Some young novelists' novels are obsessed with the creation of confined spaces — such as submarines, urns, and other "caves," and thus give rise to a whole set of "Hidden" methodologies. In the dimension of internal and external interaction, I think the poetics of "Tibet" provides intriguing inspiration on two threads. First, the poor are left alone, and the individual first confirms "I am" through "I think" (interestingly, it is said that Descartes spent his early years in Bavaria in the cold winter days, that is, he went into a furnace to meditate all day), and then "according to my thinking, I can understand people", and sealing became the precondition for understanding; second, the so-called use of the house to hide, it can be said that the house is a special use (intervention), and tibet is a special kind of practice (practice). Thus, taking the sacrifice as the use and the hiding as the action has become a special linkage between the individual and the collective in a special era, a life form that is passive but not passive. Or as Chen Peihao said, the blue whale's body, the inside of the flower bud, the back of the moon, and the snowflake glass ball in "The Musician" all become the concert hall of the protagonist Gulyov in the world of "inside", and the imagination has the meaning of life redemption.

See nothing in all eyes, be saved in hopelessness. However paradoxical, I would like to share with young writers the belief that the potential energy of human imagination to break through walls, synthesize and link will take on an important mission in the great era that has begun, even never before.