Text: Zhang Hua, Shangguan Wenlu| Anchor: Jian Ning
/ Part 01
"A Literature That Advocates The Loss of Self"
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"Please lose yourself." No matter in which era, a person can rarely read such words from literary books, but Teacher Cheng Hong shared with us in the "Thirty Lectures on American Natural Literature" that this is so rebellious to the purpose of life in the current era, it comes from the American female writer Mary Austen, and at this moment, it seems so appropriate.
For centuries, almost all of our expressions have been made in a hoarse way to summon the souls of writers who have been sealed by time, for Dostoevsky, Hesse, Kafka, the Homo sapiens who have spared no effort to reveal the loss of the human self and to try to find a way out. Nature literature, a literary genre that emerged in the American literary scene in the second half of the 20th century, gave another direction, emphasizing the dilution of the self.
Today, people are besieged by a contradiction in which, on the one hand, man's ego in the crowd is still slightly weak, and on the other hand, man's ego in the face of nature is becoming more and more inflated.
Natural literature conforms to all people's imagination of describing nature with the most flexible and beautiful words in the world, representing that the writer Thoreau once made it a travel mecca in the minds of countless people with a copy of Walden, but in such a literary genre, there was later a team of writers who entered the harshest and harshest environment, the forbidden area of human life, one of the ecological landscapes most closely related to death, the desert.
Would you choose to settle in the desert if possible? If you ask this question to someone who has lived in the green belt of the city for a long time, he will think that you are a little crazy. It is true that deserts, like all natural landscapes, can exist as aesthetic landscapes and can accommodate people to take revenge, but the difference is that only deserts are the least tolerant of people. Water is seen as the source of life, and a land with little water is doomed to a conflict with human interests, a root of hostility.
After all, the desert is not as beautiful and livable as Walden Lake, among the natural literature writers, Emerson and Thoreau had a romantic name for walking for a lifetime, and lingered in a relatively mild natural environment all their lives, while the American female writer Mary Austen went to the desert town for 12 years, creating a desert aesthetic that was not popular in the United States at that time.
Throughout her life, she was desperate to hold on to a private space, free from the compulsion of others, and she found that the desert was perfect for her. She was in awe of the plants there, which tended to grow alone, leaving plenty of room for each other. (River of Empires)
Before mary Austin's desert aesthetics, in the American West, the confrontation between humans and the desert was even more extreme, and in the 1840s and 1860s, about 300,000 people were caught in the California gold rush, and they had to travel through extremely arid regions, where some people became rich overnight and countless people lost their lives. It's the closest interaction between a man and the desert, and a gold digger who nearly died in a hot well can still recall every horrific detail of his trip to the desert at the age of 70.
Since then, the intervention of scientists in the desert in the 90s has opened the way for writers of natural literature to walk into the desert with the eyes of scientific rationality and artistic sensibility. This vision and experience of going deep into the desert has led to a change in people's attitude towards nature, from seeing nature as "a land that has been experimented and developed" to a "land that is admired and cherished."
So what exactly is the reason for the desert to be cherished? One would certainly question this question, but from the point of view of natural literature itself has a kind of anthropocentric arrogance.
This arrogance of mankind is clearly revealed by Donald Worcester in River of Empires: "They insist that nature lacks any consistency, order, or efficiency. When rivers reach the sea, or evaporate in arid desert air, which they call 'wasteful water', they assert that humanity must try to dominate this imperfect world and force these elements of nature to make better arrangements. ”
So what exactly should be the best arrangement? Should deserts be wiped out, and should the more vegetation cover in the desert be better? Since the end of the 1990s, the mainland's three northern shelterbelts and several major sandy areas in the north have often pursued more and better when planting afforestation land. After more than two decades, this approach finally had drawbacks: trees died in large areas and the groundwater level in sandy areas dropped severely. Such a phenomenon has led people to further explore the control of sand, and finally found that the previous sand control behavior pursued the ultimate sand control effect with high-coverage vegetation, but ignored an important factor - ecological water is difficult to support this high-density vegetation cover. Yin Weilun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a well-known forest cultivation scientist on the mainland, once said: "The vegetation covered in arid and semi-arid areas is low-coverage sparse forest or sparse shrubland, which is a natural phenomenon." Nature has created desert sand, and the theory and practice of sand control must also learn from nature. ”
The desert is almost the best medicine for man's arrogance and arrogance, and this is the moment when man has to bow his high head, in the face of the laws of nature that man cannot reverse with how much astonishing wisdom he has. In the face of nature, human beings have always regarded conforming to the interests of human beings as the highest criterion. However, if we do not consider the existence of man, what kind of place is the desert as an independent existence? How do we understand it? It has its own logic of operation, with creatures suitable for its own environment, and in this perspective, man's full self can finally be slightly withdrawn, giving people a chance to think about nature itself. Human beings are stripped of arrogance and genuinely willing to understand and respect nature itself.
/ Part 02
"All things are not beautiful because of people"
In human society, literature has always taken "literature as anthropology" as its banner in order to occupy a place. Yet the natural literature that writes about the desert seems to be the least concerned with people, and Mary Austen's Land of Little Rain "always puts the natural environment above those stories about man." Teacher Cheng Hong commented on its transcendence in the "Thirty Lectures on American Natural Literature": "What Austin shows in front of people is not a simple nature, nor a complex human being, but an inseparable community composed of animals, plants and people who adapt themselves to the desert living environment for the same needs. We can say that through this community, we are able to see the whole world, and even the epitome of the future world. ”
In this "community" perspective, when we deny the desert, we are not only denying threats and horrors for human beings, but also denying a valuable transcendent perspective. The American historian and writer Wallace Stegna once proposed a concept called "beyond green": you have to go beyond green. You have to give up the beauty that is only associated with the garden and the meadow, you have to adapt to the vision of no one, you have to understand the geological age. ”
When we can only appreciate the beauty that is easy to please ourselves, we will not be able to see the wholeness of things. If we can only appreciate the greenery and flowers, but not the existence of the desert, we cannot understand the complete and balanced ecological beauty of nature, which "never knows to love something", whose thoughts for the horned toad and rattlesnake are no different from those of the colorful butterflies of the beauty, and whose thoughts are generally the same as those of the desert and the valleys of flowers.
The last thing that needs to be explained about whether the desert should be cherished is that the desert can be appreciated as a landscape and as an aesthetic object. In his famous book The Desert, Kidd writes: "The barren land; the land of ruthlessness; the land of warmth and sincerity; the land of the prophets and the gods—ah! The desert of suffering, the desert of glory, I have loved you fanatically. At the end of the desert aesthetic is a sufficiently complex and contradictory understanding of imagery.
China also has desert aesthetics, the earliest appeared in the poetry period, in the Tang Dynasty became the popular side of the poem, the desert lonely smoke straight, the long river sunset round, in 737 AD, Wang Wei went to the West River, looking at today's Tengger Desert to write a magnificent poem, this is a corner of The Chinese desert aesthetics, but also the heyday of the desert imagery of the Border Plug poetry.
Looking at the most well-known narratives about the desert in contemporary China, such as Xu Ke's "New Dragon Gate Inn", the desert as a typical situation helps the screenwriter to complete the dramatic tasks such as shaping the character and acting logic. The desert is what people call "the land of ruthlessness and injustice", which makes the city servants of the city who are nourished by gold and jade fierce. Zhou Huai'an, who already has a crush on the person he already has, zhou Huai'an's sentence "I don't have the courage to face this desert" also makes the audience understand that he is doomed to fail to appreciate the bold temperament of the golden jade desert. The desert as a soft thing to show the romantic atmosphere, thanks to the female writer Sanmao's Sahara Desert and her love legend. Most of the time, people use love and humanity to give meaning to the desert, and the desert appears as an embellishment of people.
And people's acceptance of the desert is basically treated with a playful attitude.
Thoreau would not have thought that although he achieved the fame of Walden Lake, he may also have caused it to be destroyed, tourists flocked to Walden Lake, while enjoying the beauty of nature, while using urine to invade the green transparent lake, Walden Lake has ceased to be Thoreau's scenery, almost become a human urinal.
However, human beings treat themselves as tourists and guests of nature, and play with the beauty of nature in their hands, an attitude that nature literature opposes. Nature does not exist for man at all, it is not beautiful for you, and certainly has no obligation to provide for man. Mary Austen wrote in The Land of Little Rain: "Of all its inhabitants, it is the least attentive to man." It is also in the face of nature, which is the most repulsive and cruel nature like the desert, that we know that beauty is the essence of nature, has nothing to do with the goodness and morality of the human world, it is not given by man, and human appreciation is only their own wishful thinking.
In this kind of literature, human beings will regain a visual perspective on nature, which may be a heads-up, or even upward view, rather than leaning down and treating nature in a fortunate posture.
【Topic of this issue】:Which of the various natural landscapes do you like the most? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section.
Recommended Reading List of Natural Literature in This Issue: Thirty Lectures on American Natural Literature
About the Author:
Cheng Hong, Doctor of Literature, is a professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Capital University of Economics and Business.
He has been engaged in the study of natural literature for many years, and has published many papers on natural literature and ecological criticism, published a monograph on American nature literature " In search of the wilderness " , an Anglo-American natural literature essay " Quiet and Priceless " , and "American Natural Literature Classics Translation Series" ("Waking Forest", "Distant House", "Consolation of the Soul", "Low Groaning Wilderness") and so on.
About the author of this article
Zhang Hua, Ph.D. in Literature, is a professor at Beijing Language and Culture University and a doctoral supervisor. He has published "Review of Leading Figures of birmingham Cultural School", "Ecological Aesthetics and Its Construction in Contemporary China", "Reading Harvard", "Global Ethics Reader", "Interdisciplinary Research and Cross-cultural Interpretation", "Chinese as a Foreign Language: Theory and Practice", "Humanistic Scholarship: East and West", "Eastern And Western Transmission: Sinology and Sinology", "Culture and Globalization", "Essays on International Chinese Education", etc.
Shangguan Wenlu, Doctor of Literature, post-80s writer. He is the author of novellas such as "Cripple, Life", "Joy of Life", "Time Song", "Rusty Crane", etc., short stories such as "Baby", "Gambler", "Fig", "Marriage Master" and so on.
He once served as a reporter and host of Beijing Television and other media.
In 2015, he began to establish literature and music Internet radio, "Shangguan Wenlu Reading Club", "Sunshine Bookmark", "Bowen Night Reading", "Those Songs" and other programs, which were listened to more than 3 billion times on the Internet.
Ren Dahua Urban Emotion Series Micro-films "Beauty and Mistake", "Come On! Brahms" screenwriter, the micro-film "Beauty and Mistake" won the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Awards first micro-film unit outstanding micro-film nomination award, the 2014 Beijing International Micro Film Festival Best Creative Award, "Come on! Brahms won the Best Actress Award at the 2013 Beijing International Micro Film Festival.
The poem "Letter" (outer one) was selected for the "2020 China Annual Excellent Poetry Selection". The novella "Happy Life" won the first Liang Xiaosheng Youth Literature Award.
About the host of this article
Jennings
Voice control, radio anchor. The world is so noisy, may you use sound to give you the peace of mind of this moment.
Audio Production: Shangguan Wenlu Sound Studio - Haoze