She awakens the soul of Lu Xun's novels with her brilliant brushstrokes.
| Author: Xu Xiaodi
In 2021, the 140th anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, the hot broadcast circle of the TV series "The Age of Awakening" made Lu Xun, who stood at the door of the Ministry of Education, with one hand crossed his waist and the other hand holding the wooden sign of "no dry", repeatedly brush the screen among young people.
Compared with the towering "anti-feudal fighter" Lu Xun, over the years, a "lu xun in the world" is entering the public eye - from his pet gecko to his favorite sweet snacks, from his inconspicuous oil poems to those wind and cool words full of "grabbing bamboo shoots".
This does not affect Lu Xun's greatness. Just like when we watch "The Age of Awakening", it will leave a "hahahahaha" barrage for Lu Xun to face Chen Duxiu's frightened dodge, and will also be moved by a tear that falls from the corner of his eye after he finished writing "Diary of a Madman".
The scholar Chen Pingyuan once used "casting a sword to avenge" to describe Lu Xun's spiritual temperament. In "Cast Sword", Lu Xun wrote a story of revenge between the eyebrows of a teenager, from swinging the sword to killing himself to three heads tearing each other apart in the ding, resolutely pitying, and doing his best to do something extraordinary. This is exactly What Lu Xun said, "Happy laughs, sorrow screams, anger scolds, even if he is beaten by the sand and rough, his head is broken and bleeding, and he always strokes his own blood, feeling that if there is a pattern, it may not be as interesting as following the Chinese scribes to accompany Shakespeare to eat butter bread" ("Huagai Ji · Inscription").
In 2021, illustrator Saejo created a new graphic painting for the novel. Huang Hai, a famous poster designer, commented: "The magic of "Casting Swords" is like a green flame and a red seedling, and the deconstruction of painting is amazing. The coldest blue, the most decaying yellow, the most stingy black... These once-imagined colors and compositions have now been restored, which is heart-palpitating. ”
· Xi Jiu wrote and created "Cast Sword" for Lu Xun's original work.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="28" > forge sword revenge</h1>
"Casting Swords" is probably the most "ghostly" and modern story in Lu Xun's pen. The King of Chu ordered the sword worker to use the iron block born by the princess to create a sword. The knifeman forged day and night, and forged two swords in 3 years. Wang was suspicious and extremely cruel, and the knife worker had a premonition that this sword was more fierce and less auspicious, and left a last word to his pregnant wife, and only took the female sword to the royal city, never to return.
Sixteen years later, the widow of the year grew into a teenager who was "lukewarm and lukewarm" and could not even kill rats. After learning of his father's last words, he was determined to take revenge: "I have changed my gentle disposition, and I will take revenge with this sword." He came to the royal city, but there was no hope of revenge, and in despair, a "black man" with black hair, thin as iron, and a voice like an owl, wanted to avenge him. The black man asked the boy for his lively life, and without hesitation, he cut off his own head.
· Illustration in Cast Sword.
The bored king is throwing a tantrum, and the black man asks to see him, saying that he can relieve the king's boredom. He threw the head of the ruler between his eyebrows into the golden ding, and the head rose and fell in the water and sang. When the king approached Jinding to see, the black man raised his sword and fell, and the king's head fell into the ding.
When the enemy met, the two heads began to bite fiercely. When the king bit deep into the back of the brow, the black man also chopped his head into the middle of the roof. Three heads in a desperate battle. The ruler between the eyebrows and the black man were like hungry chickens pecking rice, biting indiscriminately, biting the king's head and eyes, crooked nose, and full of scales, and finally only out of breath, no intake.
The princes and ministers fished out three skulls from the ding, but could not tell which one was the king, and after racking their brains, decided to bury all three skulls in a golden coffin along with the king's body. At the end of the story, the people rushed to pay respects to the king's "great funeral". In the midst of the crowd of spectators, the avenger and the avenged, along with the noble and tragic revenge itself, have been dissolved and forgotten.
"Casting Swords" was written in the autumn of 1926, when Lu Xun was 45 years old. From the great wave of female teachers, the May Thirtieth Movement to the "March 18" massacre, he was caught up in the torrent of modern Chinese history, and he himself was blacklisted by the Beiyang government and took refuge in the south. In the premonition of the great change of the times, Lu Xun once again chewed to the "thick black sadness", and the revenge and resistance between his brows rushed to the end of his pen.
The black man in the story reflects Lu Xun's own shadow - on the podium, he is also bearded and dressed in black; he also likes owls, and often compares his articles to the annoying "owl". The black man avenges the eyebrow ruler, even if he dies with the enemy, even if he cannot escape the fate of being watched by the "spectators". The same is true of Lu Xun. He wants to be the "middleman" of history, "he carries the burden of attack, shoulders the floodgates of darkness, and lets them go to a wide and bright place" ("How We Are Fathers Now"); he is a "writer who is not three or four", strikes back in the old fortress, subdues the death of the strong enemy, and seeks the new era and the new self in the "same end" as the old self.
Lu Xun's whole life has been "forging swords for revenge", not afraid of being a lone ghost, nor is he willing to use so-called "forgiveness" to abandon justice and gain the acceptance of orthodoxy and power. At the last moment of his life, he left behind the famous article "Death", in the seventh article of the "Will", which reads: "My enemies are many, if a new type of person asks me, how will I answer?" I thought about it for a while, and the decision was: let them resent it, and I will not forgive any of them. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="115" > stream of consciousness and mosaic</h1>
When he graduated from college, Xi Jiu read "Cast Sword" and "felt that the direction of this story was magical, like a grotesque dream full of allegory." In 2016, she began teaching painting lessons online, choosing some texts for students to use their imagination to draw. Most of the selected stories are a bit "strange", such as Kafka's "Village Doctor", "Baby Ning" in Liaozhai Zhiyi, and Lu Xun's "Casting Swords", so she read the novel again.
Three years later, in the autumn, the editor gave Sasaki an image version of "Ten Nights of Dreams", and the original text of Natsume Soseki was cut open, and a sentence or paragraph corresponded to a complete picture, which was very comfortable to watch. She also wanted to draw a book like this. The editor asked what to draw, and she quickly went through it in her head, almost instantaneously, and selected "Cast Sword".
In October, Xijiu began to write. The story of "Casting Swords" takes place in the Chu Kingdom, and she has traveled several times to copy cultural relics at the Hunan Provincial Museum. The curtain pattern hanging on the cart when the King of Chu traveled refers to the T-shaped painting of Mawangdui; the scene of the palace ladies teasing the leopard comes from the pattern on the four-story coffin unearthed by Mawangdui. There is a page where the King of Chu is drinking sullenly, and there is a small handle of beer cup-like things below, very contemporary, in fact, borrowing from the lacquerware style of MaWangdui.
When creating, the old wine is often "contemporary". On one page, she drew more than a dozen swords forged by her father, some of which were seen in the museum, and some of which were scribbled "imagining herself as a blacksmith." "If I'm forging a sword for The King, I might do something funny when I'm bored." She pointed to the swords, "You see, this one is particularly thin, this one has serrated teeth, and this sword has a pattern on it." ”
Xi Jiu felt that this was the same as the ancient people's pottery. Workers will fill the gaps with small animals and small clay figurines that are pinched at will. The gadgets unearthed in these tombs, now lying in the museum, are the free world of the craftsmen of that time outside the "order" of "Party A".
In the novel, king Chu is a "fat man who draws clothes". Xi Jiu didn't want to paint those classical dragon patterns on his clothes. Her design is similar to the tone of the Japanese eccentric female painter Yayoi Kusama, and the yellow robe is embellished with large clusters of purple polka dots, "fancy and golden".
· The King of Chu painted by Xi Jiu.
There is also a ruler between the eyebrows, the original text is a 16-year-old teenager, xijiu painted him as a fat child, the corners of the eyes drooped, "it looks like there is no opinion", wearing a pair of jumpsuits.
· The ruler between the eyebrows painted by the old wine.
Xi Jiu did not want to paint "Cast Sword" as a pure ancient story that covered up the modernity of Lu Xun's text; nor did he want to "look at the picture and speak" compared to Lu Xun's text. She wanted to make some of her own articles in Lu Xun's blank space.
In the novel, Meijian is depressed because of the failure of revenge, sitting under a large mulberry tree, taking out two steamed buns to fill his hunger, eating and eating, suddenly remembering his mother, his eyes and nose are sour. "It touched me a lot here." Xi Jiu said, "At that moment, the eyebrow ruler walked down from the strange story and became us in the moment of frustration and confusion. ”
At the moment when the eyebrow ruler sacrificed his head, Lu Xun only used a brief stroke, and Xi Jiu specially drew 8 storyboards. In this second, the eyebrow ruler thought of the sound of rats scratching the pottery, thought of the steamed bun given to him by his mother, thought of the coolness of his fingers touching the tip of the sword, and thought of Wang's contemptuous eyes... The moment of self-destruction is pulled into a black and white pull page full of memories and unwillingness. In Xi Jiu's view, this is something that makes the eyebrow ruler more like an ordinary person, from weakness to determination, he finally chooses to take on his own fate.
· Xi Jiu used 8 storyboards to show the moment when the eyebrow ruler sacrificed his head.
And the climactic scene of "three-headed fighting", if it is written like the original text, "in fact, there is no way to watch". She used four pairs of pages, the first of which was three heads entangled in a fight; then the red, white, and black vortex of the stream of consciousness; the next, the head was gone, and only the eyes, nose, tongue, and teeth were left, one piece in the east and one in the west.
As for the last one, when Xi Jiu first came to the publishing house with the first draft of "Cast Sword", everyone couldn't help but ask: "Is this painting deliberately handled like this?" Didn't print it wrong? Xi Jiu nodded, it was her "bad taste"—the man shattered into a mosaic, red, white, black.
The back cover of the book is printed with the words of the ruler between the eyebrows: "I will change my gentle disposition, and I will use this sword to avenge." "This is the sentence that makes the wine the most touching." Each of us has some kind of hatred on our shoulders—not narrow or dramatic, but rather a responsibility, which may be foolish to say, such as making the world a better place, or adding a grain of sand to the castle of humanity instead of destroying it. But we do not have the courage to take on these responsibilities, and what is even sadder is that sometimes we do not even have the ability to do so. But can we still be brave without great strength? Can we still say like Nezha, 'You give me back to you,' or without hesitation like a ruler between your eyebrows? ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="117" > "not too smart temperament"</h1>
Many people can't read "Casting Swords", but Xi Jiu feels that stripped away the grotesque shell, its core is the most "Lu Xun" - strong resistance, cold sobriety.
As a "post-90s", Xijiu did not have the same age as his peers, because the stereotypical analysis of Kong Yiji's one action or a leaping expression in the language class caused Lu Xun post-traumatic stress disorder. When the new language book was issued, the first thing she wanted to read was Lu Xun's article.
Under the test-taking education, her youth was extremely free. When she was a child, her family lived in the refinery area, and she played with mud every day, planted sunflowers, and raised chickens and rabbits. In elementary school, all kinds of strange classes are taught, and one classroom is full of stoves, and children bring pork liver and potato chips to show their cooking skills. Together, we painted murals on the walls and made sculptures out of flour. Xi Jiu remembered pinching a crab himself, and when it was time to hand over his homework, the noodles were fermented.
His father was an art teacher, and He had learned from an early age. At that time, children liked to save money to buy Japanese manga and draw them. I used to paint wine, but I never really liked it. Compared to Sailor Moon, she prefers quirky niche comics, such as how a girl with AIDS came out of the haze. There are several sets of comic strips at home, and she often follows them, and when she draws more, she "thinks she can draw stories."
In those years, the old wine practiced the basic skills, but the talent was limited, "the sketch is the worst, the color is also very poor, just sketch a little better." She preferred to make up stories, so she applied for the Animation Art Major at the Beijing Film Academy.
In the four years of college, she was interested in many classes, but she was very confused about learning, and the most impressive thing was the acting class. She also remembers those "very awkward" sketches, playing a person who draws animation, and paints to the end of the insanity and nosebleeds. "Blood" is ketchup, whether to get around or look fake, simply turn the video to black and white.
In college, Xi Jiu began to take over the manuscript, and at first he drew illustrations for some young boys and girls' novels, 200 yuan per page. The original pen name was "011", her student number in middle school, and the editor asked her to change it to an easy to remember, so she had "Former Wine". Then one day on a whim, she changed her name to "Li Juduo" on Weibo, but she couldn't change it back, and it took a year or two. Now, from the different names, she will remember when and where, and through which works she met them.
The material reward of creation is always lagging behind, drawing an illustration can receive money in 3 months; drawing a book, it takes about two years. After graduating from university, Xijiu has been successfully subsisting on this, "not feeling poor", until 2016, when he planned a new work "Long Live". It was a big project, and you didn't have to think about anything in return for 5 years. At that time, when buying toothpaste, she would calculate which was the cheapest according to grams.
· A new work "Long Live" that Xi Jiu is working on.
Now, thanks to the twice-a-year online classes, Xijiu can create with peace of mind. In the past, you could draw 10 hours a day, but now you can only draw 4 hours, "but the time to think has become more."
When I was in elementary school, Xi Jiu had a table with him, and the characters he drew were flowing and agile, "and I, although I can't say that I don't paint well, always feel dull and laborious." This feeling has been haunting her for many years.
When painting "Cast Sword", this stupid and clumsy style is just attached to the novel's avant-garde and mysterious tone. With the courage and confidence of Mr. Lu Xun's blessing, Xi Jiu was relieved - her style may be this "temperament that doesn't look very smart".
Biography:
Xi Jiu, formerly known as Li Xixi, illustrator and picture book writer, born in 1990 in Yueyang, Hunan Province, graduated from the Beijing Film Academy majoring in animation art, and began commercial creation in 2009. In July 2021, he created a new image painting for Lu Xun's novel "Cast Sword".