Liu Zheng read "The Moon" – the story does not really end

"Moon", by Guo Shuang, Published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, Zhu carved culture in October 2021, 314 pages, 49.00 yuan

I don't like this era. You probably don't like this era either. I don't know who likes this era. If the times are like individuals, with their psychological states, I think it should be an era of depression, depression, anger, and depression. The black clouds that spread in the air are not formed at once, they are formed by the gathering of gray, dark gray clouds of you and me. The black cloud, in turn, blackened the gray, dark gray cloud, and the mental state was contagious. Black clouds pressed the city, and any kind of mental defense could be destroyed.

I. Get Out of "Resentment Literature"

In times like these, it is not at all surprising that there is such a kind of literature, which I call "resentful writing." "Resentment literature" is most often expressed in how an innocent, kind person can endure misfortune and pain, how he has been beaten by life, and finally... In the end, nothing came of it. "Resentment literature" is to portray the process and details of this person's beating, to describe his/her endurance or intolerability. The depictor dips the juice of resentment with a pen, writing about scars and pain. Sometimes, we don't even have to read it carefully, and in a full volume, two words emerge from the book: resentment.

Of course, this is not to imply that the authors' characters are not entitled to resentment. Of course entitled to resentment, their resentment is taken for granted and justified. Fang Siqi is entitled to resentment, and Jin Zhiying is also entitled to resentment. Even you are entitled to resentment, and I am entitled to resent, and resentment is our right and instinct. Times are bad, we instinctively hate it, and that's okay. My question is addressed to the authors, and I would like to ask: Do you write these resentments with any other intent than to express your resentment of your own time?

The literature of resentment—if this concept holds—can at least be traced back to Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Nameless Jude. That is to say, resentment literature is famous. But I'm not sure if some masterpieces like this are good literature, and I intuitively feel that they are not enough literature. "Not enough" means, I think, literature should not be just like this, literature should not stay on instinctive reactions, not that you are in the middle of the road, the heart of your contemporaries, your literature is good literature. Indeed, some contemporary literary works are, at best, tools for sighing for the reader. It seems to me that literature should be above and beyond instinctive reactions. If we all have resentments, and you only write about the resentment itself, how do you write differently from the curses or sighs of ordinary people? You sketch a generation's experience in the direction predetermined by the catharsis of emotions, and what you get is not the whole experience, but only the part of the experience that can be vented by emotion, and there is always something that will be lost in the process, and that may be what literature should really pick up.

Today's literature of resentment often mistakes some of the basic circumstances of life and society for something unique to these times. Resentment of poor intergenerational communication, resentment of the cruelty of competition for survival, resentment of tangible and intangible oppression of power, resentment of isolation in the group, resentment of not getting the rewards of giving... But the creators of these resentful literature never seem to have imagined that Homer, Dante, Balzac, and Tolstoy would never have written about these subjects, and they never had a grudge against them. Reading contemporary resentful literature, you will feel strongly that the authors have changed their tricks to convey nothing more than the idea that life has treated me badly. Because life has treated me badly, my resentment is taken for granted. I do not mean to deny the fact that life has treated you badly, I want to say only: life has not only treated you badly, life has also treated many people badly, and life has always been treated in this way; life never seems to stop treating people badly. So, it's not that you can't resent, but that resentment is useless and boring. On the other hand, if resentment is trivial, then it also insults the dignity of the word "hate."

In my opinion, the first and most basic task of contemporary literature is to get out of the shadow of resentful literature. To get out of the shadow of resentful literature does not mean that literature will give up its function of disclosure and criticism, but that literature should step out of the quagmire of subjective psychology, take a broader and deeper vision, and gain insight into more essential things in the torrent of society-history.

Reading Guo Shuang's novel collection "The Moon", I immediately realized that this is a kind of writing that has come out of the shadow of resentment literature. The pain is still faintly on the characters, but they do not choose to hide in the corner like a small beast to lick the wound, they struggle to get up, let go of the steps, step out of the door, whether physically or psychologically, they all go to the wider world. Compared with the characters in Guo Shuang's previous novel collection, "Stepping into the Flames of Light at Noon", the characters in the new novel collection have gained a larger range of activities: they have taken to the Netherlands, Russia, Japan, France, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong... "spread themselves out on the map". Of course, their journey is generally spiritual: they travel the world and all they want is to find themselves. Even the hero at the beginning of the novel "Eight Hundred Meters Away from Xiao Hong" adjusts the scale of Google Maps to overlook the city, or like the "moon base" that appears as a symbol in the novel "Moon", it is not an externalization of spiritual exploration. This spiritual journey, both spatially and temporally, is endless. "I don't believe in what bullshit the journey ends. Death is not the end. "Pain and pressure, since it is difficult to get rid of, simply carry it on your shoulders together, carry the pain and weight forward." Resentment is always associated with claustrophobia, while roaming dissolves hatred invisibly.

Second, reflect the "historical feeling"

The protagonist of "Eight Hundred Meters Away from Xiao Hong" is a man and woman who have been bruised by the times. Wei's and Mayfin's professional confidences sank with the decline of traditional journalism, and they staggered in the strong winds of both business and ideology. What pains them is not only the measure of dignity, which is only the dimension of money, but also that their sense of social justice is like a small fire in the ashes after experiencing setbacks, not outward but only inward, burning their own hearts. It is true that this sense of justice was originally slightly inflated by the journalism profession itself and the rise of civil society, but its atrophy, destruction and even annihilation is a kind of skin bullying, enough to deprive people of the most basic sense of existence. Therefore, although their sense of justice seems to have only a slight correlation between the fires, when it is lost, they suddenly find that the whole person seems to have been sucked out of their spines. However, in Guo Shuang's pen, pain is never the end. As Mayfin admits: "I'm trying, stitching myself up little by little." "Bury their ambitions, they pick up their spirits, and strive to stabilize in the world." This is not a choice or a decision, but a necessity to survive. In the posture of "burial" and "stabilization", there is both tenacity and perseverance.

In "Eight Hundred Meters Away from Xiao Hong", the decline of journalism is not portrayed from the front, but an indispensable background of the story. In fact, instead of directly fiddling with the superficial social issues of this era, choosing to push the great ups and downs of the times to the long-term vision, and letting the aftermath they cause sway the fate of the characters, this is the brilliance of Guo Shuang's narrative technique.

In my opinion, the novel collection "Moon" conveys a solid "sense of today". What is "today's sense"? "Today's sense" is not only today in the eyes, only the controversy of the moment. "Sense of today" is a sense of time that runs through yesterday and tomorrow. It is, of course, concerned about the present moment, but it is also concerned about the way forward in this moment, about the history that has brought us to where we are today, and it is also concerned about the future that we want to start from this moment. Today, without yesterday, is like the floating of a fish with only a few seconds of memory, which has been emptied of the essence of human existence. Today, when there is no tomorrow, it is like a well frog peeking into the sky, passively accepting the vision without a vision.

Many contemporary young novelists, in two different ways, have also deviated from history. One way is to glue to the present, aim at social hot spots, write about gender issues, write about class anxiety, write about intergenerational tearing... However, they only took a snapshot of the moment, and the worst thing was that they even pressed the shutter against the snapshot taken by the news media. Such snapshots, or snapshots of snapshots, have no depth of time, and only record emotions and fragments of reality that are not precise. In another way, contemporary history is regarded as just a stage set for one's rich imagination. History, in their stories, is like the "skin" of a video game, that can be replaced at will. History is anecdotalized and cut off from the objective logic of human action.

Of course, an important reason why young novelists deviate from history is that contemporary history is difficult to grasp, especially in the context of contemporary historicization efforts that are suppressed. With very few exceptions, such as the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics, the odometer of contemporary history is vague, and it is even more impossible to make a relatively accurate estimate of the momentum of historical movements. Thus, for young people who themselves are living in a constantly disconnected history, the decision to bury their heads in the present and ignore history has become a logical and convenient option.

I don't think Guo Shuang consciously cut into the narrative from the approach of contemporary history. But since the last collection of novels, "Stepping into the Flame of Light at Noon", Guo Shuang's novels have carried the following characteristics: she pays attention to the situation of people in flux, not only to the situation of people of her own generation, but to the situation of people older than her and younger than her as the same situation, whether good or bad, willing or unwilling, that is the situation we are intertwined with and share. Alasdair MacIntyre said, "The story of my life is always embedded in the stories of the communities from which I derive my identity." It can be said that the stories Told by Guo Shuang are always embedded in the stories of the community from which her generation acquired their own identity.

The largest and most ambitious work in the novel collection "Moon", "Changing The Sun Line", the main story of the story is about two young women who know each other. Here, however, I would like to try to examine and analyze this novel from the perspective of contemporary history. In the context of the plot of the novel, Hong Kong is invisible as a contemporary historical and cultural phenomenon. I think that "Changing The Daily Line" wrote "three Hong Kongs": the first Hong Kong was Hong Kong as the engine of economic development. Ling Xi and Yingying started their careers in the general trend of Hong Kong's economy driving the Take-off of the Pearl River Delta region, and their spirits are full of vigor, including the natural squirting and vigorous development of young people, and the historical accident role of "good wind with strength". As the engine slows down, his career, life, and emotions are subtly shaken, and His Hong Kong boyfriend is the epitome of all this — "like the Mandarin he speaks better and better, he becomes more and more ordinary." The second Hong Kong is Hong Kong, which serves as a beacon of popular culture. Guo Shuang wrote that Ling Xi and Yingying first arrived in Hong Kong, and Ling Xi spoke in Cantonese: "People know how to speak English. Yingying quipped: "Cause Hong Kong is an international city." This hong Kong TVB TV slogan is used very well, and the taste is not easy for readers who are not in the hong Kong popular culture radiation area to understand, because it is of course a literal generalization without errors, but in the mouths of the people, it becomes a kind of ridicule, ridiculing that what should not be seriously said is seriously told. The two heroines are immersed in Hong Kong-style popular culture and unconsciously show their attachment to it, but the author also uses Yingying's eyes to show the scene of a Hong Kong female star being injured while filming in a night zoo in a slightly frightening way, in fact, unveiling the cruel side of the popular culture industry. The third Hong Kong is Hong Kong as a symbol of business culture. It's a one made up of Mong Kok and Central, The Peninsula And Disney... Spliced into commercial Hong Kong, it provides comfortable and moderate services, but behind this moderation is not the indifference of commercial nature, or rather, a certain degree of indifference is just one of the necessary conditions for service moderation. "When Disney dresses up as Mickey Mouse, yells when riding a roller coaster, and shakes hands with a blonde princess, you can enjoy the happiness of this semi-virtual time and space." How to say it, to enter the drama, to enter the type. However, the slender heroine obviously cannot fully "enter the play", she enjoys this mature business culture, and sometimes allows her thoughts to jump out of the body to examine the self she is enjoying. She knew that after all, it would be unreliable and would pass. As an outsider, she is more sensitive to cracks and gaps, and understands more the truth that "most good things are not firm, and the clouds are easy to scatter and the glass is brittle". Hong Kong, with its damp neon glow, seems within reach, but it is as far away as something that has been sucked away in a time tunnel.

Because Guo Shuang has always developed her narrative from the perspective of the contemporary situation, even when she has no intention of responding positively to contemporary history, her works still embody a real "sense of history", a sense of history not constructed from iconic events, trends of thought or ideas, but a sense of history intertwined with feelings, feelings and wishes. This sense of history runs through works such as "Eight Hundred Meters Away from Xiao Hong", "Changing The Sun Line", "Canyon Side" and Guo Shuang's previous novel collection, such as "Bougainvillea" and "Arch Pig", which are in human flesh and blood. History flows in people's veins and bone marrow. This deep physical history is a way of existence of history. In the Chinese the history of the deep flesh is a way of existence that Chinese history cannot but adopt.

Third, the novel is more real than reality

Because Guo Shuang wants to capture people's feelings, feelings and wishes, her novels are not known for their "storytelling". It is not difficult to note that in the novel collection "Moon", several of the best works often have the kind of story that is close to the length of the novella, but there is no short story that can accommodate it. This feature is closely related to Guo Shuang's creative method. She has no intention of telling according to the beginning and end of traditional narratives, and at the moment when popular narratives are obsessed with the plot of "reversal, reversal", her refusal to easily submit to "storytelling" is not just a kind of intuition, but a meaning of reversal and a lofty pursuit. To put it in the big way, the story is actually anti-life. Woolf and Joyce have long discovered that life is turbulent, complex, messy, and that it should not be reduced to mérimé, Maupassant-esque, clear stories. A good contemporary novel, like a body of water intercepted from the torrent of life, has its unique composition, speed, viscosity, stress tensor... It is unlikely that all this will be included in a clear story. Therefore, we should be glad that there are not many stories" in "Eight Hundred Meters Away from Xiao Hong" and "Changing The Day Line", and we should be glad that they only write people's feelings, feelings and wishes, and write so well.

The critic James Wood has expressed his appreciation for Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" more than once in his articles. "Kiss" is about a short, unflattering officer who is mistakenly kissed by a girl. It is not surprising that James Wood appreciated the novel, and I think it is worth noting that he pointed out this: He asked the officer in the dimly lit room, "the window was wide open, and there was the smell of poplars, cloves and roses", was this the officer himself smelled? Also, the place where the officer was wrongly kissed "had a slight, comfortable, cool itch, like the kind brought by mint", which the officer himself felt? James Wood is actually suggesting that the sensibility of the characters in the novel cannot catch up with the sensibility of the author, and the author has given some of his own sensibility to the characters. This kind of "sensibility" is not uncommon in contemporary works, such as my previous reading of Shibasaki Yuka's "Sleep or Wake Up", which makes Shibasaki's heroine's perception more slender than she may actually have. However, Ryusuke Hamaguchi later adapted the novel into a movie, but he was unable to present this very delicate perception visually, which was the main reason for the failure of his adaptation, but it also proved from one side that the novel's strength lies in its more sensitive and slender, and the parts that belong to feelings, feelings and wishes are difficult to visualize.

In Guo Shuang's new novel collection, compared with her previous novel collection, "sensibility empowerment" is more and more obvious. Perhaps, the proximity of the novel's characters to the author himself in terms of age, identity, social class, etc., makes this "endowment" more logical. If James Wood had read Changing The Dayline, he might have asked if the narrator's tidal sensations were her own. Of course, in my opinion, the sensibility of the fictional character does not necessarily fail to catch up with the author's sensibility, but it should be said that the fictional character (we may as well temporarily imagine it as the kind of person who lives in the real world) will always be a kind of shaping in the novel, and she is not a person in the real world, and this does not necessarily hinder its authenticity. The characters who have been given some of the sensibility by the author may be more real in the sense of the novel than the archetypes of the real-world characters. This is because, although the world of the novel cannot exist separately from the real world, the world of the novel is actually larger and more free than the real world, and the authenticity of the novel is often not to see the degree of "reproduction" of reality, but to see how well it combines the sense of reality with the breadth and freedom. This means that, in my opinion, Asako in "Sleep or Wake Up" and Yingying in "DayShare" may be more real than the two East Asian women who "actually may" be.

In "Changing The Dayline", Yingying's thoughts travel back and forth between the present and the past, the number of times and the frequency may have surpassed Mrs. Dalloway, and the reader is likely to not perceive any reading resistance when reading it. Why does Guo Shuang make frequent time tracing so smooth in the narrative? I think one of the reasons is that what really comes naturally is the feeling, the mood, the hope, not the "clear story." When the author follows the feelings, moods, and hopes of the characters to write, she is going down the river, and she is unfavorable. If she expects to manipulate the reader's expectations with narrative tricks, it is tantamount to rolling stones up the mountain, difficult and paradoxical. From this point of view, we can say that Guo Shuang is very skilled in writing because she has achieved her goals well, and at the same time, we can say that she has no skills, because she is just in the direction of the heart.

Guo Shuang did not write a story of ups and downs, but wrote several people with a lot of intentions, and female characters such as Mei Fen, Ling Xi, and Yingying were particularly unforgettable. They unload the burden of resentment and entanglement and go light. That feeling of light and wind, in contemporary creation, can be said to be a long time gone. Their lives are not a story of beginning and end, this is because they seem to be striding through one room after another composed of stories, towards the outside world. This is as Nabokov said of Chekhov's novel: "The story does not really end, because as long as man is alive, it is impossible to draw concrete and definite conclusions about troubles, hopes, or dreams." "The only thing that is clear is just to go down.