Between literature and non-literature - Han Shaogong's "Changling Chronicle" four people talk

Interlocutors: Yang Houjun Zhang Wen Daniel Zhang Qi Xiaoqian

Yang Houjun: Han Shaogong's "new work" "Changling Chronicle" was published in furong magazine in the second issue of 2021. At the beginning of the article, Han Shaogong explains his original intention of compiling and publishing these 50-year-old diaries: "Turning out these yellow pages again is just an old man paying tribute to the distant youth, and it is also a recognition and remembrance of those who spent together in the past." However, as a writer who has always had a strong sense of practical concern, Han Shaogong chose to shoot this old "new work" at the moment, and the possible intention behind the so-called "tribute" and "remembrance" is still quite thought-provoking. In fact, when the "Chronicle of Changling" was published, it was destined to be a composite multi-text, and Han Shaogong's "collation" of the deletion and supplementation of the original text, the intervention of the editor, the reader's personal vision, and the current background of the times all constituted repeated reading and writing of this text, so that the text became more and more meaningful.

"The Chronicle of The Long Ridge" first presents us with a precious history that has been preserved, with obvious documentary nature. In the prescriptive text at the beginning of the article, the author says: "I have memorized on your behalf, remembered some fragments." The past accumulated by these "fragments" is mostly loose fragments of daily life and scenes of labor culture activities, which makes it distant from the political grand narrative and public discourse of the time. Of course, the political discourse at that time was inevitably shrouded in the mid-air of writing, and the Chronicle of The Long Ridge thus became a text mixed with mainstream and private discourse, and many times it was impossible to even distinguish between its public and private nature, which was the precious truth of the era it preserved for us. During the period of diary writing, the author was selected to engage in literary and artistic propaganda work, and literary and artistic activities stimulated his awareness of writing, but it also caused a certain squeeze on the personality, talent and rich expression of life required by literature, and the tension caused by the squeeze was alleviated and released with a relatively personalized diary.

In the diary, most of the space is occupied by rural life in Changling. The scenes and details of those production and life are open and stretched, and they penetrate into the cultural and spiritual background of the countryside and farmers. Han Shaogong's meticulous observation and in-depth exploration of the cultural resources of the countryside, the special situation and psychological characteristics of farmers, etc., present us with a complex and thus more credible world of rural life in the 1970s. This provides an important reference for us to avoid taking things for granted, modeling, and simplifying when writing about the countryside and farmers. We know that whether in the 1960s or 1970s or today, farmers were more or less constructed groups, silent themselves. At present, when rural revitalization has become a focus of society, "Changling" provides a way for people who want to understand the countryside, write about the countryside, and build the countryside in a sense. Considering that Han Shaogong has always been worried and dissatisfied with simplifying and conceptualizing history, the complex presentation of the historical scene may be a major embrace of Han Shaogong's launch of "The Chronicle of Changling".

Zhang Wen: But the remembrance of "The Chronicle of Changling" is still important. This old feeling of life, the "eternal sorrow" of the sentimental death from the Chinese context, has become extremely strong in Han Shaogong's long "Book of Day and Night" and "The Process of Revision" in recent years, and the title of his recently published essay collection "Life Suddenly" also expresses the nostalgia of "streamers are easy to throw people away". It is precisely because of the speed of life that the memorization and freeze-frame of literature become important, it is the way in which life is self-confirmed. "The Chronicle of The Long Ridge" captures the time spent together by many people, including his friends and lovers, especially those who once fell in love with each other, and those who were silent farmers. Life is equal in the sense of manifestation and passing, and pain and happiness are so bright and fleeting. Han Shaogong not only remembers these people, but also lyrically for them, because he has already integrated his life with these people. In Han Shaogong's action of publishing the "Chronicle of Changling", there is no doubt that there is a kind of pity and compassion for life that is indistinguishable after the existence of life.

We see in "The Chronicle of Changling" that many of these characters later entered Han Shaogong's literary world as "prototypes", such as Bing Cub and Zhang Tiantian. In Han Shaogong's works in the 1980s, his emotional connection to these character archetypes may be more obscure or obscured by the Enlightenment discourse of that era, but in "The Chronicle of Changling", we find a more complex emotional connection between the author and the characters, and even if he does criticize these people, he is often emotional. This emotional tendency became apparent in his 2000 book Shannan Shuibei, which he created after settling in Miluo, and "The Chronicle of Changling" lets us know that this "love and compassion" has a long history.

Daniel Zhang: The processing process that "The Chronicle of Changling" went through when it was published is noteworthy. This includes the selection of the contents of the diary (mainly deletions), the necessary additions (in parentheses in the text), footnotes, etc., in order to make it possible to identify "a pot or a pot" through these similar restorations of "excavated broken pottery pieces". Among them, the biggest treatment is to delete the excerpted poetic aphorisms that account for a quarter of the page. Readers may wonder what aphorisms, poems, beautiful texts, or anything else Han Shaogong copied that year. Aphorisms and aphorisms, often equivalent to the cultural or spiritual symbols of a generation, are meaningful for reconstructing the context of that time, if preserved, when they help us understand the atmosphere of the times. From the standpoint of preserving historical materials in their entirety, this cannot but be said to be a pity.

When Han Shaogong sorted out the "Chronicle of Changling", he was not only in dialogue with himself at that time, but also in building a bridge for dialogue between two different eras, which made his handling no longer a simple repair and paste, at least in the process of restoration, he needed to look back and forth between the 1970s and the current world. We notice that in the more than 20 footnotes of the Long Ridge Chronicle, a large number of notes contain a kind of "later tense", and when he explains and evaluates the past, he also leads the reader to feel the huge gulf that time has quietly formed in the stretch. And this, in turn, naturally raises the question of intergenerational dialogue. Han Shaogong has always paid attention to the cultural differences between generations, he once mentioned that in the past, cultural studies only paid attention to the division of "British culture" and "Chinese culture", "Hunan culture" and "Jiangsu culture", and in the future, we may pay more attention to dividing "80s culture" and "90s culture", "old three culture" and "small three culture". As far as the "Long Ridge Chronicle" is concerned, its appearance refers to the difference between the 1970s and the current culture, and in this difference, the kind of life recorded in the "Long Ridge" has become an ideological resource that provides reference for the current life.

Rural life in the 1970s was largely reminiscent of being gray and scarce and overstretched, but from another point of view, it was unusually rich. There are many places in the "Long Ridge Chronicle" that describe the physical sensations of labor, such as "tired and scattered, as if beaten up", "digging the ground, dizzy in the sun, eyes flowering", "barefoot in the field, cold like cutting a knife" and so on. Despite the distance between the ages and the text, the reader can still feel pain and fatigue. In the environment at that time, people were in an extreme state in all aspects, so the experience they received was particularly vivid and unforgettable. This is very different from the current warm, often tired and boring life. In that era, the relationship between man and nature was also much closer, and the relationship between people seemed to be more intimate and distinct. In this sense, The Chronicle of the Long Ridge has a certain critical meaning for the increasingly virtual, abstract, and tired life of the present, at least it tells us that there are other possibilities in life.

Qi Xiaoqian: What cannot also be ignored is Han Shaogong's identity as a foreign intellectual youth who has entered rural life. On the one hand, he has rarely entrusted himself to the rural life here, mingling with the peasants; on the other hand, he has always maintained the identity of an intellectual, constantly observing, reading, judging, learning and thinking. The Chronicle of Changling is a valuable record of the ideological status and cultural activities of young intellectuals in the 1970s. Han Shaogong's personal reading, debates with like-minded people, and quiet reflections on his own situation, the broad vision and ideal spirit of the world in the folk mind, are touching. Their group of intellectual youth, in the 70s of the secret underground cultural activities to read exciting, they are the brilliant 80s to be able to bloom the stage of storage, is the root system lying underground. Such abundant spiritual life is no longer possible today.

At the same time, we should also pay attention to the youthful texture of this diary, the enthusiasm, brilliance and poetry that come from the good years of life. "If it comes, it will be safe... Wherever people go, they can create a new environment" "Please cancel the words 'hardship', 'sorrow', 'despair' in our dictionary forever" "Life is to resist, hold on, bite and hold on!" "A strong man must 'wash three times in clean water, boil three times in lye water, marinate three times in brine', and so on. These enthusiastic words not only have the face of that era, but also come from the body and mind of youth, the confidence and strength of self-strength. In the diary, one moment it is still telling the pain of planting seedlings at the bare feet, but it does not prevent the next second from discovering the beauty of spring in the countryside. Even the most rudimentary environment is to set up a row of books, plant a few wildflowers, and talk about poetry and philosophy. This is a culture of youth, full of joy in pain, always high in confusion, and it is touching to read.

Yang Houjun: Although "The Chronicle of Changling" is Han Shaogong's "few works", the characters full of personality, interesting stories, vivid imagery, humorous language, and the active speculation and delicate emotions contained in the text show literary ability that is not in line with his age at that time. Although there will also be very mainstream discourse expressions in the diary, its non-mainstream marginal discourse also exists in large quantities, which constitutes the most vivid and literary part of the "Long Ridge Chronicle". From a genre point of view, "The Chronicle of Changling" is a private diary, but it can also be seen that in the process of Han Shaogong's original writing, there was actually a potential sense of publication, as he mentioned, his interest in writing a diary was partly due to the teacher's appreciation and reading of the diary. So from the beginning, his diary was not a highly intimate text, but actually implied a desire to be read. This is why we find that in the process of writing his diary, he has a strong pursuit of language and rhetoric, and occasionally exudes a sense of self-satisfaction in controlling language. The language of "The Chronicle of Changling" is extremely concise and expressive, and the description of personnel is extremely accurate in pen and ink economy.

Daniel Zhang: Speaking of language, in fact, "The Chronicle of Changling" has documentary value for studying the formation and development of Han Shaogong's literary language. In the "Chronicle of Changling", Han Shaogong began to discover the expressiveness of the dialect and local language, and from the entry of the dialect to the deep cultural and psychological structure behind the dialect users, this way of thinking directly penetrated the later "Maqiao Dictionary" and "Hints". For example, in the "Chronicle of Changling", we can see that Han Shaogong is already tasting many entries in the "Maqiao Dictionary", such as "sugar", "iodine tincture", "alkali", "treasure gas", "flame" and so on.

Qi Xiaoqian: We all know that the life of Zhiqing is the source of Han Shaogong's creation, but it was not until the "Chronicle of Changling" came out that we could truly intuitively see the relationship between this life and the source of the work, and identify the clues of the history and reality, language, symbols and other issues that Han Shaogong was concerned about later. Of course, it also includes the correspondence between the personnel in "The Chronicle of The Long Ridge" and his novel works. This correspondence is clearly explained by some authors in the text through annotations, and some are not explicitly stated or explicitly realized, but we can imagine, such as the connection between the "Sister-in-law of Yue'e" mentioned many times in the text and the heroine Yuelan in the novel "Yuelan".

Zhang Wen: As a highly personal text, "The Chronicle of Changling" not only allows us to see many blueprints for the characters and plots of Han Shaogong's novels, but more importantly, it gives us a more "cordial" understanding of Han Shaogong. The space shown in "The Chronicle of Changling" is not only a small place like Changling, it feels very open to read, because it connects the spiritual world of Han Shaogong at that time. Geographically, he traveled to and from cities, towns, and villages; spiritually, he traveled in ancient and modern Chinese and foreign customs. From these texts, we can see Han Shaogong's intellectual background, artistic vision, emotional style, and ability to observe speculation and language in his youth. The strange critical state that Han Shaogong showed in "The Chronicle of Changling" and maintained under the impetus of various subjective and objective conditions, while involving multiple space-time realms, and the vision and pattern that were out of it, have also been maintained after he left Miluo. All of these, like genes, continued in his later writing career, providing us with a large number of important clues to better understand Han Shaogong, and its documentary value is unquestionable.