Editor's Note
"Literature Guanlan" is a special issue opened by China Writers Network in "Literature and Art Daily", of which the special edition of "Mao Dun Literature Award Winning Writers Research" aims to summarize the award-winning works and the experience of contemporary novel creation, we invite writers, critics or review and revisit the representative works of the winners, or take the pulse of the overall style of their creation, or analyze their literary creations in recent years, and strive to form a new look of research for the winners of the Mao Dun Literature Award.
Writer Introduction
Jin Yucheng (1952~), formerly known as Jin Shushu, is a Native of Shanghai. In 1969, he went to Heilongjiang Farm to work as a farmer, and returned to Shanghai in 1977. Since 1988, he has been the editor, deputy director of the editorial department, deputy editor-in-chief and editor of Shanghai Literature Magazine, and began to publish his works in 1985. In 2006, he joined the Chinese Writers Association. He is the author of the short story collection "Lost Night", the essay collection "Shuffle Era" and so on. The novel "Blossoms" won the 9th Mao Dun Literature Award.
The novel "Blossoms" won the 9th Mao Dun Literature Award
Gamebreakers: Kim Woo-sung and his "Blossoms"
Chen Fumin
Brandeis used concepts such as "German Romanticism", "French Reaction", "British Naturalism", "French Romanticism", "Young Germany" to locate and present the ins and outs of the European literature of his time in his own eyes, and reduced them to the mainstream of nineteenth-century literature. His perception and approach is clearly valid and influential. In a sense, this influence of Brandeis has affected and even dominated the process of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and its expression, so that today's literary textbooks or the common sense dissemination of general literature are borrowing Brandeis.
The "new period literature" that began in the 1980s bears at least formal similarities with Brandeis's description. The "Obscure Poems" and later avant-garde novels are a tribute and response to the German Romantics who "soared", and although they used the techniques of "Lingbo Microstep" and "Fighting Cattle Across the Mountain", their bodies were erratic, but their invisible impulses to deconstruct history and hope to reconstruct historical narratives made them more like copies of "Young Germany" in many cases. "Root-seeking literature" is very much like the historical retrogrades who pay attention to "practicing one breath within", and to a certain extent we can find their shadow in the ranks of "French reaction". The vigorous "reflective literature", "reform literature" and various realisms, relying on the hard work of "external training", found great masters such as Balzac and Stendhal in the "French Romantics".
The above comparison is likely to be unusual, and the readers will listen to it in vain. What I want to say is that in the sense that many writers have their own "routines", we can compare the contemporary Chinese literary scene to a "martial arts jianghu", and all the masters are seeking their own "literary mainstream". In fact, whether it is Ling Bo's micro-steps, calm and relaxed, or vigorous, there is no absolute boundary between them. Although they claim to be the mainstream of "going to the future" and pose as incompatible with gestures, their socio-political and historical demands are directly or indirectly related to the expression of modernity.
This dominating pattern allowed fiction literature to roughly form its own "genres" and traditions. For more than 40 years since the 1980s, the dominant energy of this pattern has been exhausted. In fact, this consumption and fragmentation began very early, from the "farewell" and "fading out" and "market" of the 90s of the last century to the whirlwind-level rise of mass culture and online literary writing in the early new century, which is not only the knocking of the late modernity, but also the fate of cultural change. It's just that when they are in some crude form, most of the elite don't know or want to know them. This "politics of recognition" is also well understood, since mass culture, commercial culture, or everyday aesthetics are often considered a consumerist cultural product, or rather, something that is popular with one group of people and repugnant by another. Serious literature (or elite literature, paper literature, pure literature) is facing a dilemma, but this situation alone relies on popular culture is not enough to see the more intrinsic vitality of literature. Contemporary literature needs to gain its own internal growth space and possibilities, and is also waiting for this opportunity.
It's hard to say whether Kim Woo-cheng and his Blossoms came uninvited or as promised. His way of writing and his sudden "appearance" is a very special and interesting phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. The de facto veteran writer wrote and published the novel "Blossoms" in 2012 as a "literary newcomer". After the literary world and readers were caught off guard, the welcome of Jin Yucheng and his "Blossoms" almost reached a "white-hot" level. After the novel was published, it successively won the first place in the list of novels of the Chinese Novel Society that year, the first place of the 2013 Chinese Good Book of the China Book Critics Association, the 11th Chinese Literature and Media Awards Novelist of the Year Award, the 2nd Shi Nai'an Literature Award, the First Lu Xun Cultural Award for Annual Novels and other honors, and in 2015, it was not surprising that it won the 9th Mao Dun Literature Award. This phenomenon and achievements are difficult to replicate, to say the least, in the contemporary Chinese literary circles of the new century. It should be pointed out, however, that on a more playful and in-depth level, Kim Woo-cheng is not the natural successor to the literary landscape that has been formed since the 1980s, and although he has many entanglements with this tradition, and although contemporary literature has accepted and welcomed him with unprecedented enthusiasm, he has still wandered away from this tradition in the sense of Brandeis.
He's a game breaker.
As a game-breaker, Kim Woo-sung is a professional literary editor. He has been in this industry for 30 years, and he should have seen and heard a lot. Judging from some of the works he wrote in the 1980s, he had a "literary dream". According to this logic, our common script is that the editor and the author mingle with each other, but from the available information, he seems to rarely use this identity to follow the trend of any "big writer" or trend of fame and popularity. This intriguing action must have personal reasons for Jin Yucheng's personality temperament, and it is likely that he is not a person who is keen on personal interaction, but I still can't avoid speculation, and it is more likely that he has maintained a fairly independent personal attitude in terms of literary identification with trends. Before "Blossoms", few people knew who he was, and because of this, "Blossoms" was written smoothly, without any sense of anxiety in terms of structure and performance, which was completely logical. It is not in the tradition of the "new era", it is not the kind of Lingbo microstep that can be defined steadily, it is calm and relaxed, nor is it powerful and heavy. Of course, "Blossoms" is not "British naturalism". If one must find some sort of understandable origin in a figurative sense, it is probably "French naturalism", because with the exception of Dickens's "Difficult Times", "Flowers" is more likely to be reminiscent of Flaubert and his Madame Bovary.
The novel "Blossoms" does not seem to be a novelty in terms of content. To borrow a phrase that is so popular that it is close to routine, it is a personal history, but it is also a condensed history of the times. It should be said that in the past 40 years from the new period to the new century, there have been endless works with such interesting intentions and intentions, but only "Blossoms" can stand out and become a popular and influential work in the literary circles and readers. The novel does not have strong dramatic conflicts and legendary stories, and abandons the superficial pursuit of the philosophical spirit and the secret meaning, on the contrary, the novel tells the story of the human world with an innate ordinary and real temperament, neither sensational nor indiscriminate, especially not to make strange and chaotic words. These evaluations sound extraordinary, but to actually do so, it takes a lot of groundwork.
The literature of the new period, which developed in the 1980s, also has its own outstanding traditions. For example, in the name of imagination, some supernatural and super-historical sentimental elements are deliberately added to the text to pretend to be a ghost; for example, some cold and blunt "philosophical thinking" is taken to deceive others; for example, it replaces serious historical thinking with large-scale historical smearing of "tomb robbery"; of course, there are psychological habits that cling to small words and righteousness, and so on. In this regard, whether Jin Yucheng avoided it through careful reflection, or whether the nature of artistic accomplishment caused him to take the road, this is difficult to discuss, but he and his writing are not in these traditions, but it is an obvious fact. "Blossoms" intersperses various men and women in addition to the three male protagonists of Husheng, Ah Bao, and Xiao Mao, and the time is written from the 1960s to the 1990s, the friendship and hazy emotions of teenagers, the reading and social observation of young people in an era of war and chaos, and the constant switching between real desires and false feelings in a transformed society, all of which are intertwined in the longitude and latitude of the times and characters. Those exquisite stories that are human and touching to the heart are truly and appropriately like every lane and every attic in the city of Shanghai. In other words, the narrative of the novel is reasonable in human nature and has no violation of the world.commensurate with the world. This is a writer's respect for reality and history, as well as respect for literary differences.
Some writers and their works in the contemporary literary world always have a sense of rave reviews as soon as they come out, and there is a sense of great fanfare in the media, which is a familiar operation routine. However, whether it is a really good work, whether it can really stay in the history of literature and benefit the hearts of the world, in fact, few people are willing to seriously and responsibly discuss. In the extreme case, the vast majority of today's famous writers and their new works have not experienced real literary criticism. Thousands of novels are written and published each year, and those that can be remembered and liked by people are completely disproportionate to each other. When "Blossom" was born, Jin Yucheng did not have the symbolic capital of "famous writers" to use, nor was he a person with other market appeals, and his "Blossoms" ultimately had a position in the literary world, which was established by real literary criticism and readers who loved literature with word of mouth. When talking about "Dream of the Red Chamber", Lu Xun said, "Although the whole book is written, although it is nothing more than sadness and joy, the traces of gathering and dispersing, and the character accidents get rid of the old set, which is very different from the previous love novels. ...... Cover narratives are authentic, smell and experience, just because of the realism, turned into fresh. ...... As for the value of "Dream of the Red Chamber", it is really rare in Chinese novels. The main point is that it dares to describe truthfully, and there is no concealment, which is very different from the previous novels that tell good people and bad people are completely bad, so the characters described in it are real characters. In short, since the "Dream of the Red Chamber" came out, the traditional ideas and writing methods have been broken. - The beauty and lingering of its article is secondary. "From Lu Xun's argument, "Blossoms" departs from the novel tradition of the new period, or is almost close to it.
When talking about the serial update of "Blossoms" on the Lane Tang Network, Jin Yucheng said, "The reason is that I wanted to write about the deeds of some nameless and nameless people on the Internet, so I gave up the online name and went up to open a post. I lived through the era of handwritten manuscripts in the 80s, where novels were written on lattice manuscript paper, and editors read handwritten manuscripts and got feedback from readers, the process was slower, and they waited longer. Now that anonymous writing is online, there are opinions, which bring strange promotional effects, which are completely different from the feeling of closed doors and walls. As a writer, his appearance is also very interesting. He went from being a de facto old writer to a "literary newcomer" to happily write anonymously, and later it was known that the writing process of "Blossoms" was completely free and non-utilitarian. This point is mainly to say that Jin Yucheng does not have to bear the expectations and pressures of famous writers for his "next part". In the process of writing, he especially does not consider factors other than the narrative art of fiction. Of course, Jin Yucheng's extremely special writing experience this time seems to be difficult to replicate, but the non-utilitarian aesthetic freedom it suggests obviously has important enlightenment significance.
As a Shanghai writer, Jin Yucheng is very conscious of his own and the sense of identification with the urban civilization experience presented in "Blossoms", which can actually be understood as the contradiction between Jin Yucheng and the literary tradition of the new era. This aspect is not only the difference between literary experience and literary concepts, fundamentally speaking, Jin Yucheng has unabashedly expressed his love for urban civilization and his rejection of local civilization, and in a dialogue, Jin Yucheng was open and frank: "Let me seriously say that the cause of "Blossoms" is to pay tribute to this great city. I have always disagreed with the argument that 'cities have no culture'." Chinese literature has always been proud of and obsessed with its long and profound agricultural civilization tradition, claiming to be the source of abundance that nurtures life and spirit, but from the modern "local literature" so far, it has been blooming all kinds of sad and poor "evil flowers". The gift of this historical civilization to literature, whether pastoral or elegy, is still endless to this day. The doubts and introspections of this profound inner contradiction are not limited to Jin Yucheng himself. Writer Wei Wei once expressed similar feelings: "Chinese novels, especially vernacular novels, have not read them for many years because of their outdated concepts and heavy earthy taste. In fact, there are many kinds of earthy tastes, but in China, in the end, only a bitter taste is left, which of course involves the past of a nation, and suffering has become a collective memory, but with literature, I still feel that writers are not strong, unwilling to use their brains, and rarely have new discoveries. Maybe it's changed over the years? ”
Whether Jin Yucheng after "Blossoms" can bloom again, readers do not expect extravagantly in their expectations. After all, to be able to meet Jin Yucheng and his "Blossoms" once is already a literary windfall. His historical essays, such as Looking Back, show that he has a deeper concern for the authenticity of non-fiction, and has continued to tell stories and the rigor and precision of language in another dimension. The acceptance and praise of Jin Yucheng by the mainstream literary circles especially clearly shows a respectable fact, that is, people who have been committed to diligent work in this field actually know very well the achievements and shortcomings in this field, but they are suffering from unable to say it. Jin Yucheng and his "Blossoms" have brought opportunities to this kind of "speaking", which is a long-awaited expectation of game breakers.
Source: China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily jointly organized the 5th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" on January 24, 2022
Editor: Deng Jiefeng
Second instance: Liu Ya
Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang