The new scene | Han Songgang: The Moment of Beauty, and Its Secrets

Moments of beauty, and its secrets

——Sun Pin's recent novel reading

□ Han Songgang

Sun Pin's novels are always changing. From "The Night Feast of the Pine Forest", to "We Ride the Whale Away", to "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", and even more recently, "The North of the Gods", this change is almost visible and palpable. If, in "The Night Feast of the Pine Forest", Sun Pin tries to reach the depth of historical field through art, and in "Fish in the Middle of the Water", through the understatement of the narrative, to fight against a huge sadness, then in "We Ride the Whale", it is with the help of "drama" to explore the relationship between reality and fiction, and in "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", he turns around again and extends the perspective to man and the mountain forest - a larger proposition about the existence of man, and "The North of the Gods" continues to imagine and deepen this proposition.

Compared with the rampage "fierceness" in the early novels, Sun Pin's recent novels are more peaceful and sad. It seems that she has suddenly mastered the new magic of the novel, giving life the power of beauty and poetic meaning in one moment after another. For example, in "The North of the Gods", regarding the suicide of the mother, the novel writes: "Her body was found the next morning, and she committed suicide on the track last night." Alone in the moonlight, she walked ten miles in the wilderness, then sat patiently on the tracks and waited patiently for the train that passed in the middle of the night. The train came on time, and in the dark wilderness, a roaring locomotive could be seen running in the distance with a string of bright little houses, and the group of small houses was very happy, carrying the dreams of the travelers. She died wearing only one shoe, the other shoe was not next to the railroad tracks, it should have been lost when she was hurrying in the wilderness, but she was unconscious, and continued to hurry in the moonlight. ”

This description of Sun Pin reminds me of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" in which Anna committed suicide on the tracks. These are two diametrically opposed female characters. One lives for love, one fights for dignity; one loses reason for love, one fights with life; one swears an oath to the world with death, and one takes earthly comfort through death. But they also have something in common, they are all kind and compassionate, they are all subject to moral constraints and emotional guilt, and they choose the same way of dying. Toon's Anna is charming, and Sun Pin's "mother" is equally moving, which is a Chinese-style female figure. Her death, bleak and beautiful, that moment of silence, along with its secrets, was taken away. This is the "emotional" moment when Sun Pin's novel goes to the inside of the soul. In the process of reading, it was also from this moment that I felt that the internal structure of Sun Pin's novel began to undergo a new displacement, and all contradictions, entanglements, love and hate almost became tacit. Sun Pin is well aware of the duty of a novelist, that is, to use his emotions, thoughts, and techniques to establish a beautiful moment, and thus construct the secret world of a novel, rather than presenting a false truth or creating some artificial "myth".

But for the novel, to have a tenacious vitality, it is not enough to have characters, it also requires the creation of an illusion of the world, and in this fiction to realize the sense of time. For his early novel creation, Sun Pin has also been reflecting. Her recent series of novels can be seen as a strong practice of reflecting on itself. Sun Pin seems to be constantly refuting and transforming her early novel experience, narrative techniques, and ideological expressions in the hope of achieving a kind of self-innovation or rebirth. It was a difficult, torturous time. It is also in such moments that beauty begins to ferment and secrets begin to appear. Her understanding of the world began to bid farewell to a direct touch of pain and itch, and turned to a rational and broad imaginative horizon. She was still sober and stubborn, but clearly out of her emotional trappings.

Reading Sun Pin's novel collection "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", we seem to be able to easily realize that the novel is a lasting and powerful aesthetic subversion. This is the artistic way of the novel, and it is also the value. The concentrated articles "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", "The Rider on the White Horse", and "The Ruins of Heavenly Things", from the overall novel structure, to the specific narrative execution, to the artistic expression of ideas, are all permeated with a true meaning of writing that does not stop until the goal is reached. These three novels, which have many things in common, can be regarded as a new systematic expression of the ideological nature of Sun Pin's novels. Yes, ideological, this is a very important quality and characteristic of Sun Pin's novels. Professor Zheng Heping said when talking about "We Ride Away with a Whale": "Ideological or philosophical, we rarely use to talk about novels, especially novels for young writers, but this may be something that Sun Pin has deliberately tried in recent years. So, how did the ideological nature of Sun Pin's novels come to fruition? Unfold and realize in life and death. This is the basic theme of writing, and it is also something that Sun Pin has been obsessed with for many years. In the Name of birds and beasts, there is a cloak of murder, but inside it is still about life and death, about human suffering and fate. "The Rider on the White Horse" relies on my search for "Tian Lisheng", but in fact, it is still an exploration of human life and existence, hardship and freedom. "Heavenly Creature Ruins" is to discover the secret of civilization and the growth of all things in the abandoned village, so as to realize the comprehensive thinking of nature, history and life. It can be said that it is precisely in the ideological interpretation of life and death that Sun Pin continues and enriches her novel journey, which is the moment when her novel breaks away from the almost silent psychological space and begins to move towards a more complicated "lonely" "thought" moment. Moments like this abound in fiction. "The setting sun began to set slowly, and the light became dull and soft. A thin old man looked back at the sunset in a cloak of light, his face was stained with golden light, he sighed and used up the day again. The crowd was like stone statues, bathed in the sunset, and they all did not move for a long time. In just a few moments, the sunset completely fell into the valley, the twilight became dark, and everyone got up one after another and began to slowly return to the nest. "I have the illusion of going back in time, feeling that I am walking toward the past, maybe walking in this deep mountain and running into my past self, or maybe walking and running into my father, who is so young that he has not been destroyed by life, and I am still just the seven-year-old child, and everything is still too late." (Heavenly Creatures)

Walking from the city into the mountains, Sun Pin's turn surprised many people. But counting Sun Pin's novel path, starting from "Pine Forest Night Feast", she is actually already doing some intentional exploration and experimentation. However, in the novel collection "In the Name of Birds and Beasts", the integrity of this novel art is more prominent. Sun Pin began to be fascinated by mountains and forests and yearn for nature, and her landscapes and people suddenly became poetic, which was rare in early novels. "The forest swept by the car window in pieces, scene after scene, connected into a flowing green movie, from time to time there were birds and flowers, walking, and suddenly a fiery red wildflower jumped out of the cliff in front of us, leaning on the steep, squinting at us charmingly. The river loomed and followed us intermittently. In the open, the river will suddenly emerge, and the grass on both sides will be sandwiched, and the river will shine golden in the sun. In the dense forest, the river will suddenly disappear, but even where the river cannot be seen, you can still hear the sound of running water all over the mountains. (In the Name of birds and beasts) "The river looms in the field of vision, and even if there is no trace of it in the willow bush, you can still hear the rushing water just around the corner." As we walked, the river came out again in the cold, glowing lively in the sun, the grass on both sides of the river sandwiched between the banks, and dandelions flew with umbrellas. Occasionally, there are white boulders blocking the middle of the river, and the river is also happily sideways, and does not come forward to provoke. Landscape depictions such as [The White Horse Rider] are almost ubiquitous in the novel collection In the Name of Birds and Beasts. Sun Pin has never been so full of aesthetic patience and poetic imagination as he does now. Various natural things are intertwined, becoming the narrative background of the novel and also becoming a fictional illusion of experience. These basic illusions draw the reader to connect with reality and life, so that these suggestive words go beyond their own imagery and have another complex emotional content.

I believe that Sun Pin is trying to make people gain some kind of liberation in nature. "The emancipation of nature is the restoration of the life-stirring force in nature, the restoration of the sensual aesthetic properties that cannot exist in the activity of the futile competition, and it is these aesthetic properties that reveal the new nature of freedom." But in fact, behind these natural, beautiful moments, there are still its secrets. The secret is that after man has been abandoned by the times, the great loneliness is almost insoluble. The return of the hometown is to get rid of loneliness, but absurdly, in the wandering of the hometown, deeper loneliness strikes in waves. Neither the "I" as the narrator nor the others are immune. "He was like a king, waiting every night for all the people to leave work, and the whole building became his own territory. The little light in his office kept oppressing me, and I was afraid that when he wrote it, he would suddenly turn into a giant and disappear into the dust. I was left in place, becoming more and more decadent and mediocre, and finally completely drowning in the crowd. ("In the Name of birds and beasts") "After the sunset, the night rose from the wilderness and gradually spread to the mouth of the hutong, Lao Wang stood up, poked the remaining lollipop back into his mouth, and then carried two hands on his back and slowly walked towards yulin court. Others also began to return to the nest, some people sighed, renting a house to do small business is not good, living in a building with a pension is not good. (The North of the Gods)

But I will not rush to classify Sun Pin as naturalistic literature or the current popular ecological literature because she has turned her vision to the mountains and forests, I think that Sun Pin is still modern, a solid "flowing modernity" quality, which will always be the essence of her novels. However, Sun Pin is unique in that she is also full of modern vigilance and thinking about "modernity". This vigilance, in The Name of the Bird and the Beast, is an awe and trust in the natural world. "For the mountain people, the mountain is a religious existence, and all the birds, animals, plants, and trees on the mountain, all the customs and habits are our refuge." In The White Horse Rider, it is a fascinating imagination and insight into the vastness of history, "At this time I am already sure that this village has secrets. However, in this mountain, there may be a secret hidden in every fold. Some secrets are like the grass and trees in the forest, from growing up to withering to decaying, no one will know that they once existed. Some secrets are like beasts lurking in the mountains, and even if they are far away, you can smell them in the air. In North of the Gods, there is a nostalgia for the traditional "order", "I even began to miss the order here, the order and customs that I despised very much when I was young, and I began to miss it at the beginning." Here is not only the operation of the sun, moon and stars, but also the haunting of various gods and ghosts, a space where gods, people, and ghosts coexist is not only lively, but also very romantic, just like a big family, there are all kinds of rules and taboos hanging on the wall, because with taboos, you can produce a lot of awe. ”

In fact, in the tumultuous background of the times, the strange emotions brought about by the disappearance of the homeland and the division of the family make us more frightened and uneasy, and this uneasiness poses an imaginative challenge to art, including fiction, that is, how we express, experience, and digest these emotions in an artistic form. The significance of the novel in the present may also lie in this. It seeks to create a broader illusory space to accommodate these indigestioned emotions and emotions, its form can be flexible, simple, complex, the structure can be changeable, linear, polyphonic, it is developed and rich, it provides sincerity, theme and possibility for life with various "modernity" characteristics, and promotes the contemporary reproduction of the illusion of life. Sun Pin said in a conversation with Luo Xin: "I think the valuable thing about the novel is that it has sincerity to speak of, that it is a living body with a heartbeat and body temperature, and that there are truly moving things condensed in it, rather than a 'false voice' or 'saint' that has been whitewashed and twisted. I have seen different landscapes at different stages of life, which are not necessarily satisfactory, and are not a solid existence, but all have a unique vitality, and I would like to sincerely write out the limited cognition of each stage. ”

Compared with before, another change in Sun Pin's novel is to strengthen the possibility of "moving", whether it is the title of the novel "We ride a whale and go", "Riding a white horse", or the non-stop wandering of the characters in the novel, all of which have such a quality. She makes us more deeply aware of the changing world, and the equally unpredictable and lonely fate of man under the siege of various forces, and the various gorgeous and poignant dances displayed by these fates. "A true illusion of art, a kingdom of 'forces of all kinds', where pure imaginative people who radiate life force are creating a whole world in dynamic form through attractive physical and mental activity."

Sun Pin's novels have always been full of controversy. But we have to admit that among the post-80s writers, Sun Pin is one of the few novel writers who rebels against "himself". She dared to abandon the various urgencies she had created, and even completely left the usual aesthetic dimension, and jumped into a broader spiritual zone without hesitation. She seems to be convinced that in the writing practice of novels, there must be some kind of narrative that can awaken a thing, can become a voice, and can achieve a moment.

—END—

Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 1, 2022

Responsible Editor | He Ziying Xiong Mengrou

▲Han Songgang |

Han Songgang, born in Shandong in 1985, doctor of literature, invited researcher of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, research areas of Chinese contemporary novels, Jiangnan culture and novel creation, youth writing, etc., author of "Contemporary Jiangnan Novel" and literary criticism collection "The Acquiescence of Lies". He is currently working in the Jiangsu Provincial Writers Association Innovation and Research Office.