"Live" attitude

Yilin Publishing House has recently launched the "Live Literature Series" edited by He Ping, selecting the works of writers under the age of 35, and has published five kinds: Chen Si'an's "Living Food", Zhou Kai's "The Future Book of Detective Novelists", Zhu Yi's "I Am the Moon", Sansan's "Russian Matryoshka Doll", and Wang Suxin's "Ma Lingzhi's Past and Present Life". Judging from the author lineup, "youth" is undoubtedly the attitude of the "live literary series". According to the "May Fourth" new cultural tradition, "youth" not only lies in the age of natural physiological attributes, but also points to the spirit and temperament of a social and cultural attribute, representing vitality, hope and development, and metaphorically refers to the metabolism of individuals, societies and countries. For literature, "youth" means the separation and reversal of the mainstream tastes of the literary world. Chinese literary circles once popularized "good-looking realism", but in fact, good-looking realism is often reduced to boring and boring realism, gliding inertia on the surface of social life, sacrificing "human emotions, motives and secrets" (James Wood, "Irresponsible Self"). The works of these authors of the "Live Literary Series" not only have the skeleton and texture of reality, but never crawl on the earth, but fly close to the ground, and when the earth and the sky, the everyday and the poetic, the physical and spiritual, the reality and the avant-garde collide, I seem to catch a glimpse of young people lighting the bush bonfire in the wild.

Regarding the appearance of literary newcomers, Li Jingze played an image metaphor: "The change in the 80s is to grab the microphone", at that time, the "microphone" was relatively single and scarce, and it may be in the hands of people who occupy the central position of the literary world, so a young person who loves literature and has talent, the first thing to do when he debuts is to grab the microphone; but today's era is different, "The microphone you hold, I don't want it", young people run to the other side of the world to sing and dance (Li Jingze, Jiang Xiaoming, "Li Jingze, Jiang Xiaoming" How to Face the Complex Experience of the Times"). This "other side of the world", He Ping has described on different occasions: in this piece of paper media, in addition to traditional literary periodicals, there are other revised editions of "Sprouts", "Novel Circle", "Youth Literature" and later "Tiannan", "Literary and Art Wind Appreciation", "Carp", "MOOK", "Sinan Literature Anthology", in addition to traditional publishing channels, there are houlang, Wenjing, Motie, Phoenix linkage, Boji Tianjuan, Chuchen culture, copy production, federal walking horses and other brands; the network this piece, from personal blogs to Weibo, WeChat self-media, From BBS to the literary community of Douban and from spontaneous writing to big capital controlling commercial literary websites... (He Ping, "The Practice of Literary Criticism in Reconstructing Dialogue and Action") The above-mentioned tribes and tribal junctions are likely to germinate new shoots of literature. In recent years, I have jointly convened the "Shanghai-Nanjing Twin Cities Literature Workshop" with He Ping (held five times so far), and the main theme of He Ping's workshop is "crossing borders and colonization possibilities", and it is precisely those young people who have crossed the conservative dogma and the solidification mechanism that can provide the possibility of colonization. These authors of the "Live Literature Series" are literary explorers in the above sense. It can be seen from this that landing on the "scene" is not to stand on the wall of pure literature, but to be sensitive to the changes of the times and literature, to treat and fully understand the literary practices of different circles and different tribes equally, and then cultivate the literary potential with a voice in the circle. The recommendation of Chen Si'an and Zhu Yi, two young playwrights, is an example of this.

Tracking the changes of the moment does not mean abandoning classic care. Today's youth creation often has a colorful interface, so as to interact with the fashion experience and cutting-edge technology of this era, which has its own inevitability; at the same time, behind the popular labels of the flowers and fans, there may be a very classical theme hidden. It is as if Agamben reveals that his contemporaries "were able to read history in unexpected ways and 'enlist history' in any way, not out of his will, but out of a urgency to which he could not fail to respond" (Argent, What is a Contemporary?). The strong ability to "recruit" can replace Li Bai and Shakespeare with contemporaries. Zhu Yi's screenplay "Tromarque" (Flower City, No. 4, 2017, included in "I Am the Moon") is like this. The first four volumes of the Odyssey tell the story of Tromack, the son of Odysseus, who went to sea to find his father, traveled to various countries under the guidance of wisdom (accompanied by the incarnation of the goddess Minerva), saw different types of governments and customs, experienced hardships, and finally returned to his hometown with the eyes of the king, and joined hands with his father to reorganize the dynasty. Ostensibly, Zhu Yi's Tromark eliminates the great themes of the epic—the education and soul growth of the future king—and the protagonist Tromech is pale and thin against the backdrop of penelope, Helen, and even the glorious image of the old nurse Yurikria. Trial of fathers (from leaving home in search of a father to shutting him out), equality (Penelope came out of Odysseus's shadow to win back the respect and understanding of his son), feminism (Penelope joined hands with his mother to defeat many suitors with poisonous wine), and from heroism to daily life and family – these elements are collaged together, as a comment by Douban, this is "the story of the only child of an elite middle-class family who has grown up in an adventure", and it is also in line with the atmosphere of the domestic theatrical stage, especially small theater art, in recent years. However, we cannot ignore that Zhu Yi buried a bone spur like a fish in the throat: in the twelfth scene, the stubble-faced and ragged Tromark led the Trojan men to sing the labor trumpet ("Brothers, the future is in our hands") while opening up the land... This is the most heterogeneous scene in the whole play, and it seems to indicate the reversal of Tromaker's image. Ironically, Tromaker's wife, who was watching from the sidelines, was conceiving, "When my baby is born, we will move to Itaca together." Ithaca's schools are fantastic", and that's how standard the middle class envisioned a better life. In the end, because of the death of his wife, Tromaker was greatly stimulated and had no choice but to return home, ending a period of deviance. Inside the script, Tromaker's pioneering looks hot, but it is still static, closed, abstract, fleeting, and unable to continue to intervene in the depths of history; outside the script, Zhu Yi can capture the pain points of the times, but it is like being trapped in the "array of nothing". The confrontation that arises from within is placed in a safe zone to provide "just the right" stimulation and creativity, like an itch, to avoid laziness and to perpetuate self-reproduction, yet the whole order of reality remains untouched and even this is the trick of its arrangement. From Zhu Yi's Tromark to Zhu Yi himself, generations of aspiring young people are facing common difficulties. Raymond Williams once said with great affection that as the crisis of the times continued, the concepts and sense of responsibility of the predecessors were not only not limited to their period but seemed outdated, but "more like the voice of their peers who struggled together" (Raymond Williams, Culture and Society). The significance of Zhu Yi's new story may lie in this, in the face of a common dilemma, carrying the "urgency of not failing to respond" to recruit classical heroes, because "we are still seeking answers with them".

I understand the above-mentioned youthfulness, current changes and classic care as the attitude of "live literary series". Since 2017, He Ping has presided over the "Flower City Concern" column and the "Shanghai-Nanjing Twin Cities Literature Workshop", coupled with the newly planned "Live Literature Series" book series publishing, three-legged, and its "literary curation" (which is He Ping's self-created word, strengthening the main initiative of critics, juxtaposing the multiple roles of contact, promotion and sharing to express distinct aesthetic choices and literary attitudes) The great cause has begun to take shape, and has formed an organic linkage: "Flower City Attention" discovers new people and new discourses with the attitude of immersing in the first scene. The workshop theoretically discussed the symptomatic problems in the process of newcomers and new discourses, and the "Live Literature Series" provided long-term support for literary newcomers who had withstood the test of appearance. The main thrust that runs through it is to focus on "the new forces that grow barbarically outside the traditional literary horizon, to explore the boundaries and possibilities of contemporary Chinese literary creation" (Chen Xi, "He Ping: Deeply Involved in the Literary Scene"). This possibility of breaking the line can be answered by Zhou Kai's words: "The novel of the twenty-first century is the antonym of Hugo, it must be the antonym of Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola, the antonym of Thomas Mann, the antonym of Mark Twain, the antonym of D. The antonym of H. Lawrence is the antonym of Faulkner and Márquez, the antonym of Kundera and Haruki Murakami..." (Zhou Kai's "Tattoo") I think that the so-called "antonym" is not a simple subversion, but when it is in the sense of Eliot, the "past" and "now" are constantly "deciding" and "modifying": when the later works are added to the original structure, the pattern in the structure will inevitably shake and reorganize. It is expected that the authors of the "Live Literature Series" will become strong interlocutors of the old tradition and courageous pioneers of the new tradition.

Content source: Literature and Art Daily, January 12, 2022, 3rd edition

WeChat Editor: Lv Yimeng

Second instance: Ren Jingjing

Third trial: Xu Jian

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