◎ Wang Jiuguan
Li Weichang collectively refers to several of his books as "reading essay collections", and he reviews the books with a look-up perspective and a lagging tone. In most of the passages, he abandons frame-by-frame analysis of the text and tends to snake along a path of characters deep into the forest. Instead of trying to stand on a high ground and take charge of the overall situation, grasping the core of the book to excite the text, instead of surrounding the writer's characters, building a new space between reality and text.
A typical example is Bullock's Ideal Life. The author directly states that he wants to write Lawrence Bullock's work "The Thief Who Thinks He Was Bogart", the core of which is the protagonist of the novel, Bernie Roddenbal. But soon, the book disappeared from the article, leaving only Bernie alone. Li Weichang rewrites Lawrence's Bernie's life with an extremely realistic tone.
"There is nothing more familiar to us about thieves and books than Kong Yiji. ...... Who is Bernie? Kong Yiji's peer - a professional liang shang gentleman. ”
"Bernie not only loves books, but also opens a second-hand bookstore on Broadway avenue and is a sole proprietorship."
"Stealing, as a disgraceful industry, has always been divided into big and small, the so-called thief hooker, the thief of the country Hou."
This is one of the most brilliant places of Li Weichang. Not satisfied with the horizontal comparison between the common fictional characters, the extra realistic discussion disintegrates the distance between fiction and reality. The former paragraph is still discussing the characters in the book, and the latter paragraph directly jumps out of the characters and grasps the key words to start the discussion. After removing the superfluous modifiers, Bernie appeared directly on the stage of reality because of the affirmative tone of the narrative.
It's not easy to do that. According to ordinary people's thinking, the text should be withdrawn along the route from virtual to real, but Li Weichang went back and continued to write bernie likes the "Bogart" mentioned in the title of the book, which exists in reality! In this section, through the real person Bogart, Li Weichang connects the fictional character Bernie, the real writer Naipaul, and Naipaul's fictional character, Perxings, nicknamed "Bogart".
When the author withdraws from the identity of the recorder or rewriter, the reader also withdraws from the identity of the appreciator or onlooker. Between biography and book reviews are Lawrence Bullock's The Thief Who Thought He Was Bogart, and the recurring entanglements of reality. It is not polite to investigate whether it is a "Strange Literature Shared Appreciation" shooting case, but this pen suddenly blurs the focus of the article.
Perhaps this is the inevitable result of looking up, or looking up itself means a trade-off: abandoning sharpness and choosing moderation.
Conventional criticism is like a circular inner triangle: starting from a point and deconstructing the inner part of the first text with a self-consistent new theory; Li Weichang's reading essay is more like a straight line through the circle: the two are only in contact in relation, and tangential, intersecting, and passing through the center of the circle are only subtle divisions under a concept.
This is even more evident in the writing of The Troubled World of Kiyoharu Matsumoto. Li Weichang seems to have used three small chapters to clean up the basic spoilers of the book "Brilliant Displacement" as the core, but if you read it carefully, you will find that this is not the case: the twelve short stories collected into a book are only named "Castle under the Sunset" and "Ticket". For the rest, Lee chooses to revolve around Kiyoharu Matsumoto, where the discussion of the motives of the crime, the analysis of speculative literature, and the lamentation of death and the chaotic world are intertwined, and the storyline is integrated with the biography of the characters. It seems that the author has said everything, but for the reader, "Brilliant Displacement" is still strange but charming.
All this, the author told the reader to feel for himself. He didn't say it, but he wrote it meticulously. ...... So the reader punches into the work and becomes a harmonious mess without intervals, or, whatever you want, an attraction effect. ”
Li Weichang quoted this passage from Li Kengo's comment on Shen Congwen's "Border City" to comment on Matsumoto Kiyoharu's "SandWare". If we extend it a little, isn't it okay for readers to treat Li Weichang's Matsumoto Kiyoharu's "SandWare", or even to Li Weichang's "The Chaotic World of Matsumoto Kiyoharu"?
So if you take a step back and look at Li Weichang from the perspective of commentary, it is indeed very tricky: you want to be sure that this is a very good review, but the article obviously does not have too many comments; you want to criticize this is a very unqualified comment, but you can't turn a blind eye to the research he has done outside the text, the criticism that occasionally flashes within the text.
"That's the beauty of fiction, and the compelling impossibility is what novelists focus on compared to the unbelievable possibility."
"The most interesting way to interpret a text is to imitate it the way he does it."
"The novelist is not the storyteller, but the one who creates the narrator, and the narrator tells the story."
……
Writing about the works and personalities of the masters is not a very easy task. As Li Weichang himself said, in some movies, "the story becomes an assassin and successfully kills the novel", and the comments on the master will easily become bone spurs because of the lack of their own education. Li Weichang is still "shrewd" - when he needs to be sincere, he defends Naipaul and reinterprets the helplessness of life from Naipaul's point of view; when he can be flexible, he "parodies" the works of the master in an almost rude way, allowing his talents to be freely exposed.
What is good literary criticism?
The Guangdong People's Publishing House once produced a set of "Chinese New Literary Criticism Library", which gathered a number of famous artists such as He Guimei, Zhang Xinxin, and Kuang Xinnian. Each book in the series does not have a generally common preface and is replaced by "My Critical View". I've always thought it was some kind of clear-cut orientation: the word chosen to be used was "criticism" rather than "comment."
In literary criticism, there is no personal thing, only the choice between analysis and viewpoint support under the theoretical framework. Clear and concise, but also indifferent.
In literary criticism, there are ups and downs throughout the mood. The factors that make the object contaminated with emotion become the fusion of the "objectification" of the subject and the "subjectivization" of the object.
Literary criticism is not necessarily devoid of emotion, it can be passionate, but it must not be sincere: it cannot be true to the text, but hypocritical and polite; it cannot be true to the text, but you and me.
Literary criticism does not have to have emotion, it can be objective, but it must not be completely objective: from the beginning of the Spring and Autumn Brushwork of "Zheng Boke Duan Yu Yan", our words have always been filled with the temperature of emotion, although this emotion is subtle, restrained and points to the end.
But Li Weichang seems to be different: he is writing criticism, but it always makes people feel that he is writing commentary--this is not to say that he has no wind and bones, on the contrary, his sensitivity and profundity under gentleness and calmness, the shuttle between the subject and the object, as if he is doing his best to hatch a dewdrop. The posture of looking up and looking down blends with each other, the ontology of the text and the mirror image of the critic are intertwined, and the fire of thinking is lit up and stretched endlessly.