"The novel shows the state of human life and the complex spiritual world by describing the mundane life of man. This dooms the soil of the novel to be life, to those worldly people in life, trivial things, subtle feelings, those cyclical, inexplicable cold and warm lives. ”
This is a passage published by Mai Jia in Chinese Literary Criticism, which shows his dedication to the authenticity of literature. When it comes to the Mai family, people think of "Decryption", "Dark Calculation" and "The Sound of the Wind", but they more or less carry some "legendary stories", and the Mai family has also been beaten into a "suspense novelist".
But in fact, the suspenseful elements of spy warfare are only the skins in Mai Jia's novels. If you really understand the Mai family and read the Mai family, you can see the truth in his works. See clearly the things that we think have never appeared in life, but are "in the human heart, in human nature", "in logic", "in symbols", and "in common sense". Mai Jia's masterpiece "The Sound of the Wind" is the best textbook to understand his writing style.
1
Knock on the door of literature with genre fiction
The serialization of "The Sound of the Wind" in people's literature occurred 4 years after the Mai family won the Mao Dun Literature Award for "Dark Calculation". But contrary to the time of publication, Mai Jia said that it was actually "The Sound of the Wind" that influenced "Dark Calculations", and the source of "The Sound of the Wind" was even as early as 1998.
At that time, the Mai family had just transferred from the army to Chengdu Television Station, where he worked as a screenwriter, did not sit on the shift, and did not have much work. He spent eleven years in television, and these eleven years forced him to become a novelist, in his own words, "Life is ruined, the novelist lives, and he is on his way." ”
In 1998, his second year on television, the leader asked the Mai family to write a script to welcome the 50th anniversary of the founding of New China. The layman's Mai family temporarily found a movie script for "American Beauty" and understood the style.
When he conceived the story, he remembered the afternoon when he first read Borges at LuYang's house in Nanjing: "At that time, I knew nothing about Borges, so the initial reading was careless, as if I just wanted to stuff something in my eyes to dispel the boredom of living alone in his house." But before I could read a single page, I was shocked, felt its preciousness and wonder, and was as excited as a wanderer who had just seen the land shore.
Mai Jia talked about his feelings about reading Borges for the first time: "What I hold in my hands is not a work or a writer, but a mysterious and exquisite, distant and real world. ”
The later story is very familiar to everyone, mai jia used the inspiration drawn from "that world" to write "Underground Sky". A few years later, he expanded this half-scripted and half-fiction work into a TV series, titled "Dark Calculations". After the broadcast, not only the TV series caught fire, but also with this theme, the Mai family also naturally became the "father of espionage".
This title brought a lot to the Mai family, but it also obscured too much light in his works. When people go to read Mai Jia's works, they always have the mentality of reading suspense and spy novels, and the most concerned is of course the result, such as who is the "murderer" among the characters who appear in the novel? How did the story go on? How did the protagonist escape? After all, we are so passionate about detective fiction because it can bring some thrilling experiences to our boring lives.
Mai Jia won the 7th Mao Dun Literature Award for "Dark Calculation"
It is precisely because of this that genre novels are always turned away by the serious literary world. But gold always shines, and Poe and Hitchcock have won both recognition from the world and the literary world for their successful combination of suspense and literature. The Mai family finally knocked on the door of the Mao Dun Literature Award in 2008 with "Dark Calculations".
Why was the Mao Dun Literature Prize unexpectedly awarded to a popular novel? This may be seen in the acceptance speech of "The Sound of the Wind" at the Chinese Literature and Media Awards Novelist of the Year Award: "Mai Jia's novel is a labyrinth of narrative and a lament of the human will; his writing is both a search for a possibility of human nature and a reliving of a heroic philosophy." ”
2
He is "the ghost of Borges in China"
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"The Sound of the Wind" McCord Award winner masterpiece ¥39.9 purchase
The reason why Mai Jia said that the origin of "The Sound of the Wind" was in 1998 is because this work is most closely related to Borges, and Mai Jia is also known as "Borges's ghost in China". On the surface, the plot design of "The Sound of the Wind" and "The Garden where the Path Splits" is indeed similar:
Set in World War I, The Garden of Forked Paths is a Chinese who passes information on to his superiors when he is being chased and killed by enemy spies. The first part of "The Sound of the Wind" takes place before the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, and the underground party undercover "old ghost" who was imprisoned in Qiuzhuang with other suspects wants to find a way to hide the eyes and ears and send out information at the same time.
McGirlberg: Borges is the sun in my reading life
At the core, "The Sound of the Wind" still has the shadow of Borges. In the second part of "The Sound of the Wind", the author suddenly begins to narrate in the first person, and one of the protagonists of the story, "Gu Xiaomeng", suddenly asks "me" to visit, saying that the story written by "I" is complete nonsense. Then, she used another story to completely overturn the first part of the work, shocking the reader.
In the last part of the story, the Mai family himself incarnates as a narrator, using real and credible historical materials to complete the story for the reader. However, at this time, the reader can no longer distinguish whether this is the person in the book or the real author, cannot distinguish between the true and the false, and does not dare to believe it.
And this blurring of the line between fiction and reality, and the tireless creation of doubt, is the most beloved motif of Borges's life. The core of "The Garden where the Path Splits" is Schrödinger's cat, or the concept of "parallel space" that we often see in film and television works now. Every choice we make is a fork, and behind every fork is a world. And "The Garden where the Path Splits" is to let the reader see what a strange scene it is when these different time and space overlap together.
Borges's novels, which weave between yes and no, are not just "The Garden of the Forks of the Path", and "The Garden of the Forks of the Paths", from the same short story collection, is also a person who thinks he is the owner of his artificial objects, but is actually created by others. There is a bit of a taste of "Zhuang Zhou Meng Butterfly, Butterfly Dream Zhuang Zhou".
Nolan's famous work "Inception" travels between dreams and reality, and the inspiration also comes from Borges
This technique of using the intersection of virtual and real makes the work difficult to distinguish between true and false, and is respected by many masters. Famous film director Christopher Nolan's famous work "Inception", including his latest masterpiece "Creed", has a lot of "Circular Ruins" shadow.
3
"Working against the history books is one of the tasks of literature"
This kind of writing is what makes "The Sound of the Wind" stand out, but "The Sound of the Wind" is beyond other suspense novels and does not rely on the way it is written.
The purpose of Mai Jiahua's use of this form is not very different from that of Borges. Borges spent his life chasing the "infinite", the pages in "Book of Sand" are random and infinite, in "Circular Ruins" life is cycled by fate, and "The Garden where the Paths Fork" is the infinite space-time created because of different choices.
The Mai family is different, "The Sound of the Wind" is about the fate of things, all history has already happened, and all history is still uncertain. Maybe the intelligence was really sent out by the "old ghost"? Maybe not? Maybe the whole story was made up by the author... Mai Jia lets the story pass through whether it is yes or no, in fact, he is acknowledging the "infinity" of the truth, and the first part he wrote, whether it is the second part, even if the third part seems to be the author's description of the historical materials, it is just a fragment of history.
The movie poster is designed to be unambiguous when viewed alone, and it can only be recognized as the "sound of the wind" when combined, alluding to the theme of the original work
Just as Su Shi wrote that "horizontally looks into a peak on the side of the mountain", the Mai family is like a lighting engineer, and literature is his beam. He put history on the stage, and when the beam of light on the east side lit up, the audience looked at the side face of history and thought they had the truth; who knew that when the beam of light on the west side lit up, the history on the stage had changed its appearance; finally, the beam directly opposite the beam was sprinkled, and the audience who should have seen more clearly hesitated, would they admit it again?
Doubt, yes, the Mai family just wants the reader to have doubts. Mai Jia likes to depict Kafka-style environmental oppression and small people struggling. And he is also unswervingly convinced that in the face of a high-pressure order where voices are popular, we need other voices, a voice of doubt, a spirit of doubt. Balzac said that the novel is the secret history of a people. Working against the history books is one of the tasks of literature.
Doubt never hurts the truth, it only makes the truth clearer.
The Mai family also regards this as his mission, leading the reader to build a kind of conviction while quietly disintegrating this conviction. The same as the Mai family's evaluation of their idol Borges: Perhaps when you know how to doubt, it is equivalent to liking the Mai family.