Original Edition, Shanghai Literature, January 2022
Fiction measured by the soul reserves enough world
Zhao Song
Milan Kundera once wrote, "God died and Don Quixote left home." ”
If I remember correctly, his words made me realize more than a decade ago that when he associated Nietzsche's famous quote with the event of Don Quixote's ran away from home, it seemed to understand that the novel began to gain more and more freedom as the value system of traditional Christian society gradually disintegrated.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Balzac, who wrote The Comedy of Man, tried to write about that era of upheaval in fiction, as historians and sociologists did. He divided these ninety-one novels into "custom studies", "philosophical studies" and "analytical studies", transforming the lives of various characters of all walks of life in Paris and other provinces at that time into a long river of novel pictures.
It's easy to think that writers like Balzac sometimes really are like God, able to see human destiny, earthly life, and the state of the soul from an "omniscient perspective."
Shouldn't a writer be omniscient about his novel? This seems to be a self-evident question.
However, if you really throw this question to writers, it may not be so easy to answer. Because a considerable number of writers think that if they can't think clearly, they can't write novels. But there are also many writers who feel that if everything is clear, I may not write novels.
Not long ago, during an online conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro, we also talked about this topic. He admits that he takes a lot of notes and small experimental writing beforehand in order to be in control. Then he would go all out to write the first thirty or forty pages to perfection, and then write the rest. This approach found incredible to some of his fellow writers. He also knows that many writers only have a general idea at the beginning of creation, or a certain scene, and others are slowly grown. At the end of the day, every writer has his own way.
In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois revolution and the innovation of printing technology spurred the prosperity of the publishing industry, and the novel ushered in an unprecedented peak. At that time, newspapers could serialize novels, and there were a large number of middle-class female readers at home, which brought a large reading market for novels. On the contrary, the development of the Internet in the twenty-first century has led to the decline of traditional media and the dilemma of the publishing industry, and more importantly, a change is that the novels that have been snatched away by television and movies have once again been easily defeated by the Internet and its terminal tools.
Once, I went to a university in Shanghai to give a lecture on fiction. There are probably more than two hundred publishing students. So I did a live reading survey: from the nineteenth century Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, all the way to the twentieth century Proust, Joyce, Kafka, as well as Hemingway, Faulkner, as well as Camus, Sartre and others... I was surprised by the results, none of them had read the works of these classic writers, and only a few said they had heard of them. This made me realize a problem: the "common sense" imagination shaped by literary history is actually very different from reality.
In the face of them, these young people who have never read the works you mentioned, talk about novels, about the history of modern novels, as if they were talking about things in another world. How does it resonate? At that time, I turned to a more characteristic of the Internet age — there are many novels of the nineteenth century, but two of them are the most highly evaluated by later generations: one is Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which is called the origin of modern novels. Flaubert influenced many twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, until the later French "new novels" and even many contemporary writers, when talking about the history of the influence of novels, almost all return to Flaubert.
The other, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, slightly later than Flaubert, was called the perfect work by the mean-tongued Nabokov, the pinnacle of nineteenth-century novels, and of course it is recognized.
Why did I talk about these two novels? Because the two perspectives and story archetypes they offer are far-reaching and contemporary. "Madame Bovary" writes about a provincial petty bourgeois family woman who yearns for the fashion life of Paris, in order to live a romantic and exciting life, she frequently cheats, owes a lot of money, and finally commits suicide by poisoning, paying the price of life. "Anna Karenina" is just the opposite, the protagonist Anna is a nobleman, Madame Bovary envies the life she has no interest, even disgust, she wants love, real love life, and later elopes with Vronsky, is abandoned, and finally lies dead.
Both Flaubert and Tolstoy accurately captured the situation of women in the nineteenth century. As vassals, they have little right and freedom to pursue their personal lives. Both of these great novels point to women's desire to seek their own individual existence. In fact, I don't want to use the term "derailment", I prefer to call it "derailment" - they have to jump out of the existing track and enter a state full of uncertainty and even risk.
When I throw such topics to students, I find that they are actually interested. Of course, this is related to the shaping of people's acceptance patterns in the contemporary Internet age, and people are particularly prone to pay attention to sensitive words such as "derailment" and "derailment". However, when I say "derailment" or "derailment," I am actually a very serious word, not a moral judgment, and I do not use them to criticize the female characters in these two novels. I am going to say that at the height of the nineteenth-century novel, an even greater change was brewing, preparing for the derailment or derailment in the sense of the twenty-century novel that would follow. Works like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are the bombshells for this change. Because what will really have an impact is not only such a storyline, but the topics contained in it about what the novel is, what people are, and new novel concepts and writing methods.
Flaubert said something very important: "Madame Bovary is me." Why did he say that? Because Madame Bovary has a rich imagination, full of curiosity and yearning for the unknown life, the unknown world, and even pays everything for it, in a sense, this is not fundamentally different from a writer and artist who devotes herself to creation.
In the 1960s, Robert Grillet, the standard-bearer of the French "New Novel", quoted Madame Bovary about the view that it was completely out of touch with the previous half century. But even more significant than that is that "this 'new novel' is first 'a field of blankness and misunderstanding,' and then literature." He noticed that Madame Bovary could conceive through the Viscount's cigar mouthpiece, "imagining the embroidery lady panting through the huge mesh of the embroidered base cloth stretched on the loom, and the colored threads coming out of one needle's eye and entering another, so that the broken shuttles were constantly intertwined to form the pattern." To be precise, this is not also for a modern novelist (Flaubert, that's me!). A metaphor for working according to the piercing clues of reality? Isn't writing like later reading that it is from blank to blank that constitutes the narrative? ”
We're always talking about what fiction is, why it exists, and do all people need fiction? Novels have never been a necessity of life. About ten years ago, at a new book event by Peruvian writer Llosa planned by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, a middle-aged female audience member asked a question, she said, Teacher, can I ask a topic that may be a little off topic? Why should I read such a thick novel? I was tired enough to work every day, and I had to cook and take the kids home, and when everything was done, I was lying in bed holding a five-hundred-page novel, which was terrible. My answer surprised her a little. I said that in fact, you don't need to read such a book, in fact, a reader's relationship with a book has some kind of serendipity. Sometimes the reader finds a book, sometimes a book finds its own readers. Why did she have such anxiety? The truth is that although she still has a certain curiosity about such a thick book, the reality is that she does not have the time and energy to bear such a complex and heavy world of words.
Fiction occupies a far lower place in real life than many everyday things. This has to do with the nature of the novel, which is a very personal state of experience. Usually people go online, look at mobile phones, and the information obtained is easy to share and communicate with others. The connection between a person and others can be rebuilt through the network and through the media, and the solidification of people in this way is very strong, and the state and mode of communication between everyone are completely shaped by the network. This means that now people's sense of existence as an individual is becoming more and more blurred, connected by invisible nets and various functions, but not in a state of self-individuation, so now people are lonely than ever, and they are afraid of loneliness.
The novel, on the other hand, is a very personal experience. When you read a novel, you can only face the world in the book alone. It can temporarily and quietly strip a person from the daily life of group association, and send you into a strange world that only you can experience, which is the function of the novel.
Sometimes, in everyday life, people say that someone reads too much fiction and is detached from reality. This seems to be a criticism. But in fact, reading that is not so realistic is still a reality in the course of one's life. Because we know that what we experience today, when tomorrow comes, is not fundamentally different from the dream we have had. And people's memory is unreliable, when you forget some things, you have to make up for others, and even invent some things. When an old man recalls the past, no matter how rich, do not forget that there is an element of fiction here, as well as forgetting and omission. To a large extent, when we talk about the relationship between fiction and personal experience, we are actually confronted with such a world of forgetting and memory.
Kazuo Ishiguro is also very concerned about this topic. About memory and forgetting, what we can remember, what we will forget, what we should remember, but what we forget... All human problems, all anxieties, are often related to memory and forgetting. According to the American sociologist Herbert Mead, we are always "in the present," reconstructing our past according to our circumstances, moods, mental states, and memory states.
What does this have to do with fiction?
Before the twentieth century, novelists, of course, told stories, about the fate of the characters, about the sufferings, happiness, dreams of the characters, and began to pay attention to the inner life of the people. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, when writers like Proust emerged, real change took place. By rediscovering and recognizing memory, he gave the novel a whole new form. He found that memory was closely linked to something concrete, and that without that thing, memory would not be found. If those moving details and moments cannot be presented in the novel, it is impossible to construct intertwined time states and create a world for the reader that can be experienced repeatedly.
Another of his discoveries is that in people's memory, time is often confused, and memories do not unfold in an accurate chronological order, but often recall according to the intensity of impressions. The intensity of memory is the intensity of experience. He revealed a key point of human existence, that is, people live in memory, and the way of memory also constitutes a person's way of existence. This had a huge impact on the changing conception of the twentieth-century novel.
Another European novelist who had a profound influence on twentieth-century fiction was the Irishman James Joyce. It's hard to say which of his Ulysses is more complicated than Proust's Remembrance of a Time of Water, but in terms of difficulty, it's definitely the former. In this astonishing masterpiece, which alludes to the structure of Odysseus and condenses the life of ordinary Dublin people in twelve hours of the day, he does a great deal of textual experimentation, such as large monologues without punctuation, and a mixture of news, drama and other genres. The most important point is that he has grasped the great expansion of man's consciousness. If Proust discovered the significance of time in memory for the way the novel is renewed, then Joyce reveals that twelve hours in the novel can become infinite, and even a minute may be an eternity. In other words, the intensity of the experience of reading novels determines the state in which time appears in people's memory, perception and imagination.
When we talk about a person's imagination, when we talk about the old literary concept of "stream of consciousness", it is often easy to ignore that consciousness is the most unpredictable ability of man. In what way will human consciousness flow to what extent? When you wait at the station, how many things do you think about in ten minutes? It all depends on your inner state and the factors that trigger your associations. When Joyce writes about Bloom, an ordinary dubliner, let us discover that the world is so vast, and this character is like the key to Dublin. The revolutionary nature of Ulysses lies in the fact that it offers a whole new way of existing and a broader possibility of the novel, not through storytelling, but in a more complex and rich stylistic way to present the extremely infectious state of existence of an ordinary person. Proust and Joyce, with their astonishing subversion or liberation of the traditional way of the novel, give the novel a whole new possibility.
Many people say that now the novel is dying. Because in this era of escalating Internet, many people have formed a short reading habit - no longer accustomed to reading thick and long novels, even complex short stories, and their attention can not last for a long time. But, in this time, we find that the novel is still alive, as if it still bears the characteristics of when it first appeared, like a miracle to be rediscovered.
This brings us back to the very old topic: Why do people read novels? Why do people write novels?
In fact, the answer is always there. Because whether you are writing a novel or reading a novel, it will eventually involve the most fundamental question: How can a person exist? Man always has to face the ultimate irresistible reality that human life is limited, and no matter who you are, you will die. It is precisely this finiteness of life that determines that man's understanding of self-existence is not self-evident, but full of uncertainty.
When we realize that human life is limited, such as going to Longhua Funeral Home, seeing that there are so many farewell halls that are full every day, it is easy to feel nothing. You watch a movie and you know when it's going to end, but you can't know when you're leaving this world. Of course, if you know, it's also terrible. Because they don't know the end, people will live in this world with some kind of hope or luck. The tragedy of life is that it is irreversible and nothing can be repeated. Nothing stops time, and there's no way you can stop yourself outside of time.
The reason why the novel was born must be related to this dilemma. The reason why the novel has existed for so long is that it can make people temporarily get rid of the anxiety of daily life, temporarily forget the finiteness of life and the existence of death, and experience a different life, a different experience, and a different fate in the world constructed by words. Then in the process of such an experience, people will somewhat dissolve some anxiety about birth and death. Although everyday life has left you without much time and energy to roam the world, at least you can roam the world of words.
A novel can be opened at any time, closed at any time, and can be reread. This is a trait that life does not have. The same novel, read at different ages, the experience is different, which in turn constitutes a certain echo with life itself.
An important change in the twentieth-century novel is actually related to the perception of "people". The concept of "man", shaped by capitalist development and scientific and technological progress, gradually disintegrated after two world wars. What is "man" and do we really understand "human nature"? When Foucault said "man is dead," he was actually referring to the disintegration of the concept of "man" that had been formed since humanism. In the illusion and illusion of social civilization in the continuous progress of today, people suddenly find that the whole world is in a question mark, and everywhere is full of problems. The various experimental creations made by modern and postmodern novels actually occur in such a problem context. Like the "New Novel" school that appeared in France in the 1950s, when it violently denied the practical significance of traditional realist novels, it was actually re-examining what "people" were and their situation with new ways of thinking and novel concepts.
When we discuss the masters who ushered in a new era of modern fiction, in addition to Proust and Joyce, there is also a highly respected figure , Kafka. His unique perspective on the human condition and his profound revelation of its essential meaning have had an impact that goes far beyond literature. In his works, he conveys the reality and spiritual dilemma of human beings in a fundamental sense.
The cruelty of the real world is that it often strikes in a seemingly random blow, suddenly shattering the good things in people's hearts. Some people will say, isn't this something that many ordinary novelists are revealing, and even Hollywood movies are making these things? So, what is the difference between Kafka and the average writer and a Hollywood screenwriter? The latter two actually have many different types of story modes, and all the stories must eventually be presented as some kind of mode that can meet the empathy needs of ordinary readers or viewers. But novels written by writers like Kafka are precisely not stereotyped. Traditional narratives always try to construct "the meaning of people" and "the meaning of life". But what Kafka, beginning with Kafka, revealed by the best novelists of the twentieth century is that the unmistakable "meaning" does not stand up to scrutiny and will collapse in a harsh reality.
In such a rich practice of novel innovation in the twentieth century, accompanied by the constantly refreshed conceptual cognition of "man", is the establishment of "narrative space". What is the difference between narrative and narrative space? In daily life, man's state of existence is clearly projected into the public and private spaces in which he lives, to all the objects he uses, touches, and even observes. Therefore, all the spaces and objects related to a person will naturally contain their personal information and reflect the individual's state of being, and they have a powerful narrative function. Even if you don't say anything, they can tell your story, which is the "narrative space" in the most general sense.
In addition, we will find that perhaps the most boring is a complete story that seems to tell everything clearly. Often the most intriguing is the inexplicable story that doesn't seem complete. In fact, people's interest in narrative is largely related to the sense of space and spatial richness provided by narrative. In the construction of narrative space, from sight to hearing, to sensation, illusion, hallucination, and dream, all play a role. I think that novels after the 1950s are actually more concerned with the construction of narrative space, reconstructing the narrative space through various trivial things such as human behavior, speech, and silence. Kafka's focus on topics that later writers are still paying attention to, but the way of dealing with it is constantly changing, becoming more complex and subtle. They can reflect changes in the state of the mind of the character by describing the environment and things they see, requiring the reader to feel it in a more attentive and sensitive way, because everything in it is subtle, ambiguous, and blurred in the boundaries of consciousness. Contemporary fiction thus has a very wide range of possibilities.
In the Internet age, in fact, the most important thing is the story. Every day there will be all sorts of bizarre and quirky stories that arrive at you through your mobile terminal. What is really lacking is the rediscovery and excavation of contemporary human beings' state of existence, personal situation and spiritual dilemma. Contemporary people may be in the most difficult situation ever. The continuous progress and improvement of science and technology and productivity has not brought people more freedom and healthier life, but has led people to fall into an increasingly instrumental state. Nowadays, people are more and more like tools, like the parts of an incomparably large perpetual motion mechanical system, which can only continue to rotate with it. Everyone is fixed in a system that is constantly running at high speed. Another dilemma corresponding to this is that people are beginning to become more and more commoditized, and people are becoming more and more like commodities, and they are also being consumed at any time.
We know that all important emotional relationships must be able to transcend the functional level of usefulness and uselessness to make sense. However, now not only the technology has iterative upgrade and elimination, because of the state of instrumentation, people are also undergoing iterative upgrading and elimination. This leads to an increasingly simple functionalization of man's relationship with this society. This means that the way human society is structured is likely to undergo unimaginable upheavals. I am afraid that this will be a phenomenon that has never been seen in human history. The whole world is now filled with an air of uneasiness, impetuosity and anxiety. Today's novels are confronted with such a dilemma, these unavoidable problems.
In today's Internet age of information overload, why read novels? Because fiction can put you back into a state of personalization, it can make you realize that "I" am an individual, not someone who is submerged in a group. Only by returning to the state of individualization, people's knowledge and understanding of the world will have a clearer basis of their own, will they have their own way of life and state, and build their own spiritual life. Since human life is limited and will end our journey in this world sooner or later, what really makes sense is that we can experience and know the world in our own way. This is also the responsibility of the novel. Today's novelists work on the human condition, the sense of dilemma, and how to construct one's own existence.
So, how do I think about fiction in my own writing?
In my first book, The Gap, I basically used all the techniques I had learned about the modern Western novel. Later, in the "Fushun Story Collection", I pretended to be a storyteller to fiction. I make up characters like I tell someone I know very well. The fictional world is also a real world. What is true? In fiction, what can strongly touch you is the truth.
Whether it is "Building Block Book" or "Yichun", it is very different from "Gap" and "Fushun Story Collection". I have been in Shanghai for almost twenty years. I often feel like Shanghai is like a bunch of cities, not a city. Each area of the city feels to me not as synchronic, but with distinct temporal differences, much like cities from different eras coming together. Human feelings and experiences will be faulted in this city, and there will be a strong state of fragmentation.
In Shanghai, when sitting in a car and driving on an elevated highway, or riding a light rail or maglev, there will be a feeling of floating, a huge city unfolding around, a person floating alone, like the almost hovering state when the plane just flew up and climbed upwards. Man is no longer really interested in the end itself, but in a little gap in the process, where he feels precious to experience things that are not known only to himself, even if they are extremely boring in the eyes of others.
In today's Internet age, from mailbox, QQ, WeChat to smart phones, the emergence of these new tools has led to great changes in people's imagination and anxiety. This diversity of communication methods has also contributed to the virtualization of human role identities. In the novel, I explore what kind of state the "people" that can be virtualized, and why are there such a big contrast between the "people" on the Internet and the "people" in reality? How complex have human relationships changed, and why have they become so uncertain, ambiguous and contingent? These are all topics I'm trying to explore in Yichun.
One of the earliest pieces written in "Yichun" is "Neighbors", which is a ghost story improvised at the request of a friend, and it took only four hours to write. So why should I leave it in this book? In fact, I am just expressing the idea that improvisational imagination is extremely important to the novel. While you still maintain the joy of improvisational imagination and narrative, the writing of novels is truly meaningful to you. Because many times, a lot of reading and writing training will easily make an author fall into a very self-disciplined, very conscious, very full of technical awareness, he wants to control the whole, to control those technical links, to go all out to write a work perfectly. Of course, this is necessary, even necessary, but it is necessary to be vigilant that this state of affairs is particularly prone to becoming a mode of production. And improvisational imagination and creation, there is a lot of uncertainty in the fun, I think this is something that should not be thrown away at any time when writing a novel.
How can a fiction writer keep himself in a good state of writing? In my opinion, the premise is to practice with those previous masters and constantly face their classic works. This is the homework I have arranged for myself for more than ten years, and I have written many book reviews because of this. I hope that through my research and discussion, I can draw readers to those great works. I hope that more people can realize that the charm and significance of novels lie in the fact that they can still reserve some space and imagination space and possibility for you who are tired and anxious in such a harsh reality, which is very precious. This is also the vitality of the art of the novel, after more than two hundred years of changes, which can still live today.
As for what kind of existence "writer" is, it doesn't really matter at all. In my values, writers should be more conscious of hiding behind their work, rather than running to the reader to explain their writing, which I don't think is a very decent state. So I'm willing to interpret other people's work, but I'm not willing to explain my own work. The work has its own destiny. In today's age, most things can be measured by technology, but the novel is measured by the soul, which always maintains enough open space and vision and reserves them for everyone.
