Unlike Shen Congwen, Shen Congwen used the method of beautifying his hometown to resist the modern civilization of the city, and Xiao Hong reached the extreme in adhering to the position of enlightenment, exposing the profundity of ignorance, backwardness, and barbarism of the people, and showing the strong and dead struggles of the Chinese folk. Therefore, I think Xiao Hong is the best female writer in modern Chinese literature. Xiao Hong is not very smart, a little rough, a little naïve and simple, and has not shed her rustic wildness, but in terms of the stretching of life force, the richness and profundity she embraces are far above Zhang Ailing. Chinese readers like Zhang Ailing and don't like Xiao Hong, which I think is very sad.
——Professor Chen Sihe of Fudan University
01
Xiao Hong is different from others
Xiao Hong has written a long novel "The Legend of Hulan River" and a short story "March in a Small Town", both of which are very exquisite novels. But why do I want to talk about "The Field of Life and Death" today? It's not that I don't like "March in a Small Town" and "The Legend of Hulan River", "The Legend of Hulan River" is a fine work in Xiao Hong's art, almost reaching the state of pure fire, "March in a Small Town" is a mini "Legend of Hulan River", but I prefer "The Field of Life and Death", mainly valuing the impact of "Field of Life and Death" on Chinese literature. This work is not very mature, but it has a primitive vitality, a whole life beating, and a life experience that does not shy away from the harsh reality of life.
"The Field of Life and Death" is written very cruelly, it is all bloody and hairy things, and it is a young life rushing and shouting. I think such a thing is really a treasure! Her vitality bursts out in an overwhelming situation, as Nietzsche called "literature of blood." Such works have supreme value in the history of literature. This cannot be discussed with a general aesthetic concept, but with the concept of life. This "Field of Life and Death" is a book of life.
"The Field of Life and Death", by Xiao Hong, |, Tianjin People's Publishing House Fruit and wheat culture
I have written many articles on folk theory, but I have never written a single article on folk aesthetic ideals. What is folk beauty? It's hard to say at once, but it has the ability to transform everything filthy into a life force. Such a thing, it is difficult to say that it is beautiful, and whether it is beautiful or not depends on whether life is abundant or not. And the abundance of life is always beautiful, the abundance of life always brings a primitive flesh, a roughness, a kind of strength, in aesthetics, I think this is the highest state. The beauty of the first righteousness must come from primitive life, from the simple earth, from health and communication with nature. As for the beauty of mutilation, the beauty of pathology, the beauty of lung disease, this is the second meaning, the second realm. It's like we're talking about characters, like Lin Daiyu is of course very beautiful, but this is a kind of sick beauty, pathology is actually not beautiful, there is a psychological level, there is an emotional level, and many things are beautiful to talk about. A vast and lush primeval forest is the beauty of nature, more beautiful than a bonsai, a deformed freak with pine branches bent around, bending the branches twelve times, indicating that the handwork is very clever, but this is not the beauty of the tree itself, it is made.
But on the other hand, nature itself is terrible and cruel, and when we discuss its beauty, we must never forget its cruel side. When expressing nature, Ancient Chinese poetry and Western famous paintings always show idyllic and static things, and it only chooses a scene to freeze a natural scene, which is of course very beautiful. However, if you enter the field of life, nature itself is not static, nor can it be frozen, it is endless, it is beautiful, because it has life, life is life and death. Eternal things are not life, life must be life and death. This transformation of life is nature. Nature is always all year round spring, summer, autumn and winter, and there are always landslides, earthquakes and floods in nature, and countless cycles. People are like this, there is always death and birth. In this process, there is no static beauty. When we discuss natural beauty, static beauty is still the second meaning, higher beauty is a surging beauty, and living things that are always surging are the real beauty. Such a beauty must not be pure and static.
So I used a word, which is actually very bad, and I used it to use it, which is "hiding dirt and dirt.". Hiding dirt and grime is very scary, dirt and dirt are things that are eliminated in life, but nature must hide dirt and dirt. We look closely at the air, and the air is full of bacteria, dirty things, and so is the earth, and so is life. What is dead, transformed into humus to fertilize the land, is transformed into another kind of life. When you walk into the primeval forest, the first thing you smell is a smell of decay, a large number of leaves fall down and rot, and then produce fertilizer and nourish life. What we call a swamp is all sorts of dead things that decay and then form a new living world.
Stills from The Golden Age
The world depicted in "The Field of Life and Death" is a folk world that "hides dirt and grime". The opening of this work seems to be a very poetic pastoral picture:
A goat chews on the root end of an elm tree on the side of the avenue.
A long avenue outside the city, obscured by the shade of elms. Walking in the middle of the avenue is like walking into a large umbrella that is turbulent and shady.
The goat's mouth chews on the bark of the elm tree, and the sticky foam runs from the goat's beard. The scraped sticky foam seemed to be the foam of a pancreas, and like a thick floating silk strip; the sticky foam hung all over the leg of lamb. The elm tree was obviously sore, and the elm tree had a large scar. The goat slept in the shade, its white-sac-like belly rising and falling.
A child in the vegetable field paced slowly. Under the straw cap, it resembles a large fungus. Catching butterflies? Catching grasshoppers? Small children in the midday sun.
Within a short period of time, the farmers who had fallen down also appeared in the vegetable fields. The color of a slice of cabbage is somewhat similar to the color of a goat.
A forest of sorghum with green ears growing at the southern end adjacent to the vegetable fields. Children burrowed into the sorghum, and many spikes were hit and fell from the top of their heads. Sometimes it's also punched in the face. The leaves are intertwined, sometimes stinging the skin. It's a world of green sweetness, obviously cooler. Soon, the child scrambled to get out of the last plant. Immediately the sun burned his hair, and cleverly he buttoned up his hat, and the blue sky high in the sky covered the shining sunlight on the vegetable field, and there was not a single cloud.
Elms, goats, avenues, vegetable fields, sorghum fields, farmers, this is a unique scenery in the northeast, but you will immediately find that it is completely different from the scene written by Shen Congwen, "Border City" after saying natural beauty, and then write the simplicity of the folk customs, even prostitutes are with affection, but "The Field of Life and Death" first appears in "Luo Circle Legs", his sheep are lost, they have no head and no brains to find sheep, and they fight because they step on the vegetables of their neighbors. It is during the rest time after the peasants' labor, everyone sits together and chats, and the content is not warm, which cannot be compared with the story told to Cuicui by Shen Congwen's grandfather, the story told by the queen mother here is full of blood, it is about how she threw the three-year-old child to death:
I threw her on the haystack, and the blood flowed all over the grass! Her little hands trembled, blood steaming from her nose and out of her mouth, as if the larynx had been cut off. I heard a noise in her stomach; it was like a puppy crushing a wheel. I've also seen puppies get crushed to death by wheels, and I've seen everything.
It's a chaotic, dirty, even terrifying world.
Several times in the novel, the cemetery is written, the kind of place that is filled with the breath of death, which is a kind of visual display of the life state of the locals, and it is also full of metaphor. First of all, the scene of the mass grave shown by Xiao Jinzhi being thrown to death by his father: the child has been "pulled by the dog and has nothing", "Chengye saw a pile of grass stained with blood, he fantasized that it was Xiao Jinzhi's grass!" They turned their backs to the tears." "Chengye saw another grave where the skull reappeared." "Walking out of the cemetery, some coffins, piles, dead and silent impressions urge them to speed up their steps." (Chapter 7" "The May Festival of Sin") Life has disappeared and not even a trace can be left, which shows the value and weight of life. This is not a cemetery for the rest of the dead, but a restless world that can never be at peace, in which the so-called pain and sorrow have departed from their original meaning and become neither important nor deep into the marrow. In the ninth chapter, "The Contagion", the plague once again brings death to the people here, and the author writes about the cemetery in a very low tone, and behind this low tone is an emphatic force, a suppressed force to collapse, showing that life is as low as a mosquito, but also showing the resilience of life:
There are piles of graves, where dead bodies lie. No one buried it, and wild dogs were active in the carcass.
The sun's blood was generally faint red; from morning to dusk mosquitoes mixed with mist filled the sky.
……
After two and a half o'clock in the afternoon, the mother-in-law sent the child to the mass grave! She saw several other children with their hair covered in white faces, some with their limbs broken by wild dogs, and a few sleeping there.
The wild dog chewed on the broken bones in the distance. The dog felt satisfied, and the dog was no longer crazy for the pursuit of food, nor did he hunt the living.
It is a picture of life that lives on its own, that no one pays attention to and that no one cares about, and this is the picture of the freedom of the folk world. It carries a primitive savagery and flesh, like the wild dog biting a dead body written several times in the work, "chewing on broken bones", which is a ferocious devouring between life and life, a completely terrifying primitive state. As a female writer, Xiao Hong can feel this roughness and strength in life, which is also where she is different from others.
02
Xiao Hong wrote about a group of people who don't look like people
The next question is also obvious. In such a folk world, is there any love between people? Some readers believe that in Xiao Hong's works, the love between men and women, the love between parents and children, and the love for the motherland, the meaning of these three layers of love is a process from affirmation to denial, in other words, love is devastating in Xiao Hong's works. This question actually involves the recognition of the phenomenon of folk culture, which extends to say that all the germs of love in our ordinary civil society in China will be destroyed by real life. This kind of life is sad. But this sadness is seen from the point of view of the enlightened people since the "May Fourth", Lu Xun said that China is a "silent China", all its vitality has been suppressed, that extreme poverty, that barbaric life, has snuffed out all human personality, and all kinds of psychological feelings and emotional factors based on individuals have been lost.
Xiao Hong's "Field of Life and Death" is first of all to write all his life feelings and life experiences unreservedly and nakedly to everyone, without this kind of life experience, it is impossible to write to this extent. For example, if she did not experience the pain of having a child, she would not be able to write such a terrible experience of having a child. Also not as cruel to her children as her mother, she could not write about the relationship between Jinzhi and her mother. (Note: One night in August 1932, Xiao Hong was rushed to the hospital in Harbin during the flood to give birth, giving birth to a baby girl under extremely painful circumstances.) Xiao Hong once recorded her own painful experience in the novel "Abandoned Child": "Qin's stomach hurt so much that she didn't know who to do, she rolled on the clay kang like a human, and her face was the same as white paper..." "This pain method is simply hanging her intestines, and her intestines are like being cut off." She was sweating and she was in tears. "The relationship between her birth mother and stepmother is roughly as follows: she was born into a patriarchal family, and at the age of three, her younger brother was born and died; at the age of six, her second brother was born. After the birth of her brother, her mother poured more energy and love into her brother and gradually became indifferent to her. When I was nine years old, my birth mother died, and within three months, my father continued, "This mother is very polite, not hitting me, it is scolding, but also pointing to the table or chair to scold me." Politeness is more polite, but cold, alienated, the same as people." We can't read these things in Bingxin's novel, Bingxin says "dream words" in the small poem: it rains in the sky, the birds hide in the trees, the storm in the heart comes, hiding in the arms of the mother... And Xiao Hong's depiction of all this, the pursuit and performance of truth, is a kind of strength, a kind of true heart. Xiao Hong very frankly told everyone her feelings about life and the truth of life in this work, she did not deliberately strengthen, although the characters she described were all barbaric, all of which we cannot stand today, but these people are precisely the ones with the strongest vitality in life, and everyone is dignified.
Just like Ma Mian Po, Ma Mian Po is a low-energy woman, but such a woman, she also knows how to work hard, knows to attract people's attention, she "heard that the sheep were lost, she went to turn over the firewood, she remembered that once the sheep drilled through the firewood pile." But, in winter, the sheep are for warmth. She didn't think about it, in June, only sheep as stupid as she were going to drill the pyre to keep warm. She flipped over, she didn't think. With some fine grass sprinkled all over her hair, her husband tried to stop her and ask her for any reason, but she never said it. She wanted to do a little miracle, and for this miracle, people would look up to her in the future. Show that she is not stupid, show that her wisdom appears when necessary, and thus play like a dog on a pyre! With her hand on the grass stalk between her hair, she sat down. She unexpectedly felt that she was not smart enough, and she was unexpectedly disappointed in herself." This description looks very funny, The Masked Woman is silly and clumsy, but the author's tone is very serious, and the Masked Woman has always wanted to try to do things better, which is the dignity of human life.
Including Jin Zhi, including the princess's husband Zhao San, and the two and a half miles, they were all very obscene people, but in the end, when the real key came, the pride of standing up to the sky also burst out. Zhao San said with tears in his oath to fight the Japanese:
"The country ... The kingdom is dead! I...... I also...... Old! You are still young, go and save the country! My old bones again... Never use it again! I'm an old slave, and I won't see you tear up the Japanese flag and wait for me to bury it in my grave... I also want to plant the Chinese flag on the top of the grave, I am Chinese! ...... I want the Chinese flag, I should not be a slave to the country, I am born Chinese, and I die as a Chinese ghost..."
When he was young, he rebelled against the landlord unsuccessfully, and he nestled for a lifetime, and at this time his arrogance was aroused again. Didn't the two and a half finally inquire about "where is the 'People's Revolutionary Army'"?
Xiao Hong wrote about a group of people who did not look like people, but Xiao Hong did not say that such people who did not look like people had no right to live. These people do not live a normal life, but in this kind of life, people also have dignity. As Hu Feng said in the Afterword: At a sacred moment, "ants who lived for death are now giants dying for life."
"The Field of Life and Death" drama
In this way, many things may be clearer to understand the "love" of Chinese civil society. Love is originally a very abstract word, it can only be connected with concrete feelings, as a factor of feelings, we can bring it to the truth. But in different times, different environments, different spaces, people have different understandings of love. In the West, the definition of love, I think, was first associated with religion, the concept of God, love first of all began with love for God, complete devotion to God, this is called love. This feeling was later secularized into love, lust, desire, and so on, but even in the secularized sense, love, as an emotional factor, is still associated with devotion. When people define love, there is a concept, for example, some people say that the union of so-and-so is not for love, she is for a house, indicating that there is utilitarian and taking in this kind of love, and what is taken is not love; so love is a kind of dedication, it is a kind of dedication. When you like, not forced but willing to give everything to the other party, or willing to do what you can for the other party, even if you can't do it, such a motivation is called love.
So, where does this motivation come from? It's an emotional factor, but at the same time, there's also a factor of life. Returning to ethics, this is a human instinct. In the human instinct of life, there is a desire for self-sacrifice. Human life has no eternity, life begins with birth, every minute, every second is dying, and life energy is constantly being consumed. Life is not a process of growth, but a process of consumption, just like a pot of fire, it will not burn forever, after igniting, it is consuming fuel, and in the end, when the fuel is gone, the fire is extinguished. The universe and the earth are actually a process of consumption, and human life is of course also a process of consumption, which is essential, and life is this state. But life is different from other things, a book is torn up, there is no more, an animal or a person, although old, dead, but life has the ability to reproduce, will regenerate another kind of life, for example, man or animal through sexual mating, procreation, the transfer of life to the next generation, a person dies, but the child is still alive; a person's thoughts, spirits, energy can be transmitted to others, others inherit, this is immortality. Life has not only the instinct to consume, but also the instinct to regenerate. This is the basic state of life. Such a process is the process of the movement of life.
And love, I think, is the feeling of the essence of a person's life, which meets two criteria: one is the process of consumption, love must be to consume itself; the other is the ability to regenerate, through the form of love, the crystallization of this love can regenerate love, not to say that there are only two minutes of love in life, after the combination of the form of love has changed, will be more love, will always survive, this is also the power of regeneration. Human beings cannot continue life without love, and races need to perpetuate life by reproduction, by survival. In this process of continuation, the power of love condenses all the power, but love is a more abstract concept, and if we break down into primitive feelings, it is self-sacrifice, and the race needs this self-sacrifice in order to preserve life, and will sacrifice something to maintain a group.
However, as we have entered the age of civilization, especially the era of capitalism, people's religious consciousness has become very indifferent. With man's unlimited greed and pursuit of material interests, the stimulation of productive forces and the development of society, the meaning of human primitive life has gradually disappeared and been obscured. Later, the consciousness and understanding of love itself is modified, it is no longer an essential thing, it is a regeneration of various ideologies, including philosophy, literature, etc., where to deduce what love is, and then there will be all kinds of meanings of love that are infiltrated by interests and tampered with. This modified meaning of love is now universally accepted, so when people discuss the meaning of love, the first thing that comes to mind is the modified love under the standards of modern civilization, love should occur in a happy family, according to such a modified definition of love under certain material conditions and civilized environment, everyone feels that there is no love beyond the scope of the circle of civilization.
For example, we can't imagine that there will still be love in literary works like Xiao Hong? There are beatings and scoldings everywhere, all noisy and noisy, life is so easy to be destroyed, where is there love? When we read literature, we must have an energy to penetrate the obstacles given to us by the various civilized worlds that are obscuring our eyes today, and to go deep into the origin of life to grasp how human life embodies love. For example, under Xiao Hong's pen, the peasant first shows his love for the land, the love for the sheep, and the love for the horse, and in order to find a sheep like crazy, the queen mother leads a horse to go to the slaughterhouse, and that kind of deep feeling, I think, is love, which is the original expression of human life, because this is connected with the land, with survival, and with the primitive state of life, so it will have a kind of instinctive love.
Let's take a look at the emotions of man and livestock written in the third chapter, "The Old Horse Goes to the Slaughterhouse." The author first wrote a desolate scene in late autumn with falling leaves:
The yellow leaves brought by late autumn drive away the butterflies of summer. A leaf fell on the head of the queen mother, and the leaf was quietly lying there. The queen mother drove her old horse, with falling yellow leaves on her head; the old horse, the old man, with an old leaf, they walked on the road into the city.
The fallen leaves in late autumn are a symbol of the end of life, and the old man, the old horse, and the old leaf are both real scenes and interconnected lives. This was the time when her heart was the weakest, and she met Two and a Half Miles on the road and asked her what she was doing when she drove her horse into the city, and the expression and movements of the princess very accurately reflected the vibration and grief in her heart:
Zhen Yi shook his sleeve and stroked the hair around his ear back, and the queen mother's hand trembled and said, "It's time!" Let's go to the soup pot! The queen mother was in no mood at all, and she watched the horse eating the leaves beside the road, and she drove forward again with a short branch.
Two and a half miles felt very sad. He convulsed. After a moment he turned around and caught up and said, "You can't get off the soup pot,...... The soup pot is not allowed to be lowered..." But how to do it? Two and a half miles without even half a sentence of language! He twisted his body and stepped forward, touching the horse's sideburns with his hands. The old horse immediately shook its nose! Its eyes were crying, moist and blurry. Sorrow immediately swept through the heart of the queen mother.com. Dumbing her throat, the queen mother said, "Forget it! Forget it! Don't go down to the soup pot, are you still waiting to starve to death? ”
We see that the queen's movements have become very mechanical: "vibrating", "stroking", "trembling", to "no mood", which is a tremor in the heart. The horse was not from the family either, and it should have nothing to do with him, but his first reaction when he heard that he was going to be slaughtered was not only "very sad", but also "spasmodic", and he panicked. This is entirely a peasant's natural affection for livestock, and this emotion is not at all pretentious, and it is sincere to see him touch the sideburns of the horse with his hands. Here, livestock are tools for man to make a living, but they are not simple tools, they are the companions and family members of the peasants who have no one to rely on, and they treat them with the same feelings as if they were children. The last scene of the old horse is rendered everywhere, and it is seen with the compassionate eyes of the queen mother, and the mood of regret and self-blame:
The old horse is gone! It went to the small ditch in front of it to drink water! This is the last time it will drink water! The old horse needs to drink water, it also needs to rest, and it lies down by the ditch! It breathes slowly. The queen mother called out in a bass, kind tone: "Get up! What's the way to go into town? ”
Whispering and pleading with Lao Ma to say this, she was also speaking to herself, and she was alleviating her inner guilt. To some extent, the princess also saw her own fate from the fate of the old horse, which was the end she had to face after her life was exhausted. The following passage makes this meaning more clear:
Five years ago it was also a young horse, and in order to farm, only the fur covered the skeleton. Now it's old! It's late autumn! The harvest is over! Useless anymore! Just for a horse skin, the owner could not bear to send it to the slaughterhouse. It is the value of a horse skin, and the landlord will take it from the queen mother-in-law.
The most poignant thing is that the queen mother experienced the memories and tortures of the terrible execution site, and finally sent the horse to the slaughterhouse to escape, the horse did not know anything, it only wanted to go back with the master, so it followed her out again:
Unable to do so, the queen mother walked back to the courtyard, and the horse followed her back to the courtyard. She scratched the top of the horse's head, and it gradually lay on the ground! Gradually I want to fall asleep! Suddenly, the queen mother stood up and ran toward the gate. At the intersection, I heard a knocking sound.
In the end, the queen mother returned home like a funeral. It's like a picture in a silent movie, a scene of life and death. If their lives are extremely rough, then in this life, there are also delicate and moving emotions.
From the instinct of life, man is meant to survive. Life disappears second by second, and in this process of consumption, human beings have an instinctive resistance, which gives rise to the opposite concept - survival. Survival has become the first task of human ethics, and we often say "survival first", because it is the most original life, knowing that its life is disappearing day by day, but people have a consciousness to pull it. Here appears the tension of human life, this tension is a very difficult and relentless struggle between man and his own consumption, the first factor in human life, and it is in this work what Lu Xun called "the struggle for the strength of life and death." This is a force for people to survive silently under the oppression of the shadows of death, hunger, disease, etc., a force to persevere and not be defeated, as a sentence in the work says: "Dead people die!" The living calculate how to live. In winter the women prepare the clothes for the summer; the men contemplate how to begin the next year's cultivation. "It can only be expressed in extreme forms. Cheng Ye fell to death Xiao Jinzhi, if he was a person with an iron heart, why did he have to go to the cemetery to see it? The queen mother fell to her own child, if there is no emotion, why do you keep talking about it? Their hearts are hurting, and they are constantly squeezing out their pus and blood to heal the pain. There is not much warm pulse in "The Field of Life and Death", it shows the cruelest and most real side of life, and the emotions it contains are the great love, hatred and great pain of human beings.
03
Xiao Hong's Paintings of Chinese Peasants
Some people use van Gogh's art to illustrate Xiao Hong's creation. Whether it is Van Gao or Xiao Hong, they are not preset as an art form, their creation is entirely to find a way to express their emotional world. Van Gogh wanted to express an irrational exuberant feeling, and could only paint like that. Painting is mainly space art, in the European tradition from Leonardo da Vinci, there are a series of ways of expressing space, such as perspective, far and small, near and large. But in Van Gogh's work, all the inner things are opened, all are displayed on a flat surface. This kind of creation method, there are many in the history of Chinese painting, Chinese landscape painting has no perspective method, shaanxi Huxian peasant painting is also like this, the peasant has no concept of space in his head, he is happy to paint a house on the corner, just paint a house, happy to paint a flower in this place, just paint a flower, what appears in his mind is the plane of inner life, and all the images are displayed in a space at the same time. Xiao Hong's novel gives people this feeling. Novels are the concept of time, there must be first and then, the narrative of the novel should be clear about which year it took place, and then follow the time clues all the way down, if you write about the previous things, there must be a flashback. But in Xiao Hong's works, it is difficult for you to find a time clue. Although on closer inspection, she has a schedule, but the overall feeling is that she writes this and that, and the scenes are shown at the same time, and she is showing her kind of narrative art on the same plane.
We usually say that Xiao Hong's work is a kind of prose novel, or a poetic novel. In fact, the novel originally does not have a fixed form, but we artificially define, the novel must have a time clue, a center, a climax and so on. Joyce wrote Ulysses or later Finnegan's Vigil, and for a short time, he expanded it infinitely, and after infinite expansion, he could have written juxtaposedly written a multitude of time periods, which were displayed in the same scene. He completely shattered his previous understanding of the novel. Western stream-of-consciousness or psychological novels, although there is no time clue, but there is psychological time, in Xiao Hong's works, she even abandons psychological time, showing a personal scene, these scenes scramble to appear. For example, in the previous paragraph, she wrote that the old woman led a horse to slaughter, and the next paragraph suddenly wrote that a little girl was dating a man, had nothing to do with it, could not find the clues inside, and there was no need to find it. She feels like a Chinese peasant painting. This is a way of expression that brings infinite tension to the space of the novel, and the capacity of expression is also very large.
Old photo of Xiao Hong
Why does such a form of fiction appear? My feeling is that female writers have different narrative characteristics from male writers, and of course they are not absolute. In general, male writers have a very strong narrative temporality. The concept of time is very important in the thinking of male writers, so his narrative is often straight lines, one or two straight lines to write to the end, the general long river novels are written by male writers, four volumes and five volumes, basically a clue continuously, other branches and branches can be extended out. Of course, he will also deliberately disrupt narrative time, write streams of consciousness, and so on. The thinking of female writers also has such a linear development, such as Ding Ling's novel "The Sun Shines on the Sangan River", you can hardly read that it is written by a female writer, and her thinking form is exactly the same as that of male writers. However, Xiao Hong's novel reflects another narrative style with the characteristics of female thinking.
Taking Xiao Hong's "Field of Life and Death" as an example, each small stage has a melody, and the transition to another stage is another melody, so it is constantly advancing, but there is no relationship between the melody and the melody. Such narrative characteristics also have contemporary characteristics, to take a very ready-made example, female writer Lin Bai, Lin Bai's novel is Xiao Hong's thinking, Lin Bai also writes long, novella, but it seems that there has never been a novel's story narrative is very complete, a line is consistent to the end, her story will also develop, there will be a protagonist, but her narrative, her emotions, always a small climax, a small story. The spatial scenes that appeared in her mind were fragments, many, many spaces juxtaposed on top. This is very different from male writers, who are always a clue and have a complete and rigorous logic. Regarding this feature, Lin Bai or Xiao Hong are still in the stage of more sensual and natural form. Another example is the British female writer Virginia Woolf's "Waves". When I read this novel, I had the feeling of being pressed under the seabed, as if the body felt the waves constantly coming up, wave after wave, life from birth to death, just like the waves, generation after generation from young, to old age, and finally to death, life is the melody of the circle, the melody of the wave. The rhythm of this novel is very strong, but in Woolf's work, if you want to find a central character, a central event, a main line, you can't find it at all. Her whole story follows the melody of life.
"Waves", by Woolf, translated by Cao Yuanyong, Shanghai Translation Publishing House
The same is true of "The Field of Life and Death", at the beginning of each chapter, it is often a static picture and emotion, but the characters appear, they all move, and when the inner conflict of the person reaches its climax, the natural picture is inserted again, forming a whirlwind, and then rushing forward to form the next reincarnation. Judging from the whole work, the first nine chapters show the different life scenes in the countryside, not a flat and direct narrative, but a fierce conflict inside the juxtaposition of the picture, and the magnificent drama of life and death is unfolded in this calm narrative and in an atmosphere with a little dead silence. For example, when the plague spreads and people feel that "the world is going to collapse", the first half suddenly ends, and the middle is inserted into the tenth chapter "Ten Years" and the eleventh chapter "The Year Plate Has Turned", these two chapters play a role in the whole book, but they are by no means dispensable, it not only gives the previous story a buffer, starts the later story, and plays a key role in the rhythm of the whole book, it makes a small pause, such as a small whirling of the low movement, but also brews the arrival of the latter climax. The tenth chapter has only four paragraphs, but Xiao Hong is very accurate in grasping the rhythm of language:
Ten years ago, the mountain in the village, the river under the mountain, and now it is still like ten years ago. The river is flowing quietly, the hillsides change clothes with the seasons, and large areas of villages are reincarnated as they were ten years ago.
It is this unhurried tone, and then the new variations begin to be slowly launched:
On a snowy day, the flag that the villagers have never seen before flutters and rises into the sky!
Interestingly, this is inserted in the middle of the encounter of the golden branch to make a living in the city, which not only makes the content of the second half related to the first half, not to be separated, but also makes the narrative of the second half of the novel present different levels, not monotonous. At the end, Jin Zhi wants to become a nun, which actually lowers the tone of the narrative again, and the two-and-a-half-mile journey gives people a lot of expectations and conjectures, and it rises again, but not high. The whole rhythm of "The Field of Life and Death" is like this, singing three sighs, back and forth, very characteristic. In Western literature, Virginia Woolf is an outlier, and in Chinese literature, Xiao Hong is an outlier.
Xiao Hong, one of the most stylistically conscious writers in the history of modern Chinese literature, once clearly expressed: "There is a kind of novel science, the novel has a certain way of writing, it must have some kind of things, it must be written like the works of Balzac or Chekhov." I don't believe in this set, there are all kinds of authors, there are all kinds of novels. In the short creative process, Xiao Hong often has a bold "deviant brushwork", which can be seen from "The Field of Life and Death", and later "The Legend of Hulan River" and "Small Town March" have formed a unique style, that with poetic strokes, lyrical sentences, and swirling emotions, Xiao Hong's unique stylistic characteristics have been formed. But our mainstream criticism and research are in accordance with a more traditional mode of thinking, we first care about whether the plot of this novel has a climax, whether the clues are clear, what is the main line, what is the side line, whether the contradictions and conflicts are fierce, we use huge rational thinking to interpret the "Field of Life and Death", there is no way to explain, she is not expressed in this aesthetic category. But if you carefully read "The Field of Life and Death" and understand and get close to this novel with a different perspective, you will really feel Xiao Hong's heart beating, Xiao Hong's blood is rushing, you feel her soul calling there, you seem to hear Xiao Hong's voice. This is art, this is the impact of art.
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This article is reproduced from "Phoenix Network Reading", excerpted from
Fifteen Lectures on Famous Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature
Author: Chen Sihe
Publisher: Peking University Publishing Co., Ltd.
Publication year: 2013-2