Fu Xingwen |I digested the tragedy and pain in my life in this way."

Write on the front

The content of "Pyramid on the Top of the Mountain" created by Mr. Fu Xingwen, known as the "Little Prince of Golden Sentences", has been loved by many readers, so after launching the activity of reading wonderful quotations, many friends have left messages for our video numbers to participate in it. In order to facilitate everyone to communicate with us, we are attached with a group chat picture of the activity, and friends can show their "big style" in this "small family".

About the Author:

Fu Xingwen: Young writer and publishing planner. Born in 1983, a native of Liaocheng, Shandong Province. He published novels, poems, essays, and reviews in literary newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of the novel "Pyramid on the Top of the Hill" and the novella "Moonlight Tower".

(Author: Fu Xingwen)

1

"What's better? Is ordinary happiness better, or is sublime pain better? ”

This is a question posed by Dostoevsky in The Crypt Notebook.

Happiness, everyone yearns for. Pain, inevitable.

The male protagonist of the novel, Wen Hengyi, has always longed for happiness, and when he was young, he plucked up the courage to pursue the beautiful and beloved first love Wei Jiayi, but the obstacle he faced was not only the gap between the origins of the two, he knew that as long as he took the last step, he could walk hand in hand with his sweetheart, but he could not break through that barrier. Obstacles do not come from worldly prejudices, but from within him. It was a layer of mental barrier, as thin as a cicada's wing, broken at the first stab, but indestructible, as insurmountable as a mountain cliff. This gives rise to Kafka-esque absurdity, even more absurd: Kafka's "castle" is the external world that refuses you to enter, while Wen Hengyi is obviously able to easily break through the barriers of the inner world, but never dares to take that small step.

It was a tragedy of the heart.

It can be said that everyone has their own spiritual tragedy. The difference is that Wen Hengyi is a writer who can digest tragedies and pains for a long time and then sublimate them into literary works. Thus, a cycle of happiness, which may have been within reach, became torturous suffering, and finally condensed into literary crystallization, resulting in another kind of happiness with flaws.

Literature and art are monsters fed by pain, for which the sublime pain trumps ordinary happiness.

"Pyramid on the Top of the Mountain" Book Shadow 1

2

Flaubert said that Madame Bovary was him, so I could also say that Wen Hengyi was me. Of course, Wen Hengyi was closer to me than Madame Bovary was to Flaubert. "Literary works are all autobiographies of writers", although Yu Dafu's words are not without absolute suspicion, but to some extent they are not without reason: as the saying goes, the text is like its own person. Although many of the plots in the novel are fictional, who says that only what happened in reality is true and belongs to the autobiography, and the things that linger in the heart of the fictional fantasy are not real, not autobiographical? Stories can be fictionalized, but the love, thinking, sincerity and affection contained in them cannot be imagined, it is the breath of the soul. In this sense, I think that absurdity such as "Metamorphosis" is also Kafka's spiritual autobiography, loneliness such as "Border City" is also Shen Congwen's spiritual autobiography, just like the abyss such as "Basement Notes" can be called the psychological autobiography of Tuowon, the deep feeling such as "Dream of the Red Chamber" is Cao Xueqin's soul autobiography, and redemption such as "Resurrection" is Tolstoy's ideal autobiography of human nature - of course, to some extent, do not understand it absolutely.

The novel was originally written fifteen years ago, from October 2006 to April 2007, when the first draft of 70,000 words and a half was written, and due to the plot setting, the story gradually deviated from my original intention, feeling a bit cheesy, plus the savings on hand had been exhausted, and it was necessary to go back to work in order to make a living, so it was abandoned. This abandonment is more than a decade.

In recent years, at the end of each year, I always feel that time is wasted and my life is empty, so I pick up this novel that has always been haunting my heart and constantly chewing and brewing, and I painstakingly delete 40,000 or 50,000 words, retain about 20,000 words, and rewrite it on this basis. It's like tearing down a rotten building, redesigning it, rebuilding it. At the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of the "new crown" epidemic made the fragility of life and the shortness of life more intense, and the sense of crisis was stronger, so he stayed in his hometown in Liaocheng, Shandong Province, and concentrated on writing the main storyline of the novel in half a year.

It was originally completed last year, but it took a long time to try to integrate it with a novella written a decade ago.

From August 2008 to 2011, I wrote a 50,000-word novella about a deaf girl in North Drift and a boy in North Drift— the proposed title at the time was "Distant Love", which was later changed to "Moonlight Tower". The novella uses the method of the hero and heroine taking turns to tell in the first person, mainly to portray the inner entanglement of the two people full of contradictions and struggles. At that time, he had been serialized in the Tianya Community, Peking University Chinese Forum for most of the time, and won the favor of many young writers and readers. After writing for a few months, in order to make the content and theme richer and thicker, I planned to merge it with the novel that had been shelved before to form a new novel that reflected each other. However, due to the later self-employment, the limited time and energy - of course, this is actually an excuse for laziness and procrastination - has been shelved.

Last year, in order to integrate this small novel with "Moonlight Tower", the structure was repeatedly adjusted more than a dozen times, each time taking a lot of time and effort, and several inner monologues of the heroine Wei Jiayi and another character, Jia Zuozhen, were added. Because the two novels originally adopted an unconventional narrative method, and had different protagonists, different story lines, and different timelines, no matter how the structure was, it had a sense of rigidity and could not be integrated into a rounded whole. After painstaking attempts, it was finally decided to completely separate the two novels for the sake of artistic purity and harmony. After independence, considering the harmony of the overall structure of the novel and whether the portrayal of the characters' psychology is deep enough, several monologues of Wei Jiayi and Jia Zuozhen were later deleted. Therefore, this small novel, which currently has only 100,000 words, has actually cut 60,000 or 70,000 words.

In the more than ten years of this shelving, I have read hundreds of world literature classics in my spare time — I read books very slowly, I read them word by word in my heart, and I have read many novella masterpieces more than six or seven times — and I have watched hundreds of classic movies, and the arts are interconnected and can learn from each other. In addition, with the increase of age and the richness of experience, the understanding and understanding of love, life, society and other aspects is naturally not comparable. Therefore, the shelved more than ten years of time, seemingly vain, in fact, not always, the long time and brewing gave the novel new content, new meaning, new narrative structure, its emotional depth and other aspects of course will also be blessed, and finally make this novel compared with the first draft has a rebirth: just like Lu Jiuyuan's "I note the six classics" and "six sutras note me", if it was "I note the first love", standing in the first love to write the first love, standing in the love to write love, now it is "the first love note me", Because in addition to the important role when I was in love, I have now grown another identity and perspective, that is, to look back at love and first love after more than ten years of time and mental journey, and use my first love to reflect myself. Therefore, in addition to the theme of the novel, in addition to first love, love, innocence, heart, and heart disorder, there is also time, from which we can get a glimpse of how time and other themes have a relationship and influence each other.

On the surface, the novel is mainly written about innocent first love, in fact, whether it is "innocence" or "first love", it is only a dissecting object under the microscope and scalpel, with the purpose of extending the probe and the tip of the knife to the hidden darkness of emotion and human nature, exploring an inner struggle that is difficult to explain in words, presenting the conflict between spirit and flesh, ideal and reality, tearing and difficult reconciliation.

The story is not complicated, because what the author cares about is not the story, but the protagonist's unusual affection, the powerlessness and helplessness under the oppression of some fate, the subtle and delicate psychological flow, the interweaving of time and space when reminiscing like water years, and the reproduction and healing of a tragic version of the cruel story of youth...

I'm willing to spend ten years writing a novel that people want to see ten times, rather than spending the same amount of time writing ten books that others will only read once.

　　

I believe that in the face of a twenty-year-old altar of spirits, readers and friends will not be indifferent.

In addition to people like Milan Kundera, many writers have said that it is best for authors to avoid interpreting their own works, because once the novel is published, it is separated from the author and has its own destiny and chance. I've said too much, so I'll stop here. I look forward to this novel being able to meet more acquaintances now and in the future, and accompanying everyone through a lonely or bright journey.

Pyramid on the Top of the Hill Book Shadow 2

3

Dostoevsky has given the answer to the question at the beginning of this article unmistakably. Moreover, in his unfinished posthumous work The Brothers Karamazov, he asked Elder Zosima to say a sentence to Alyosha that further clarified his philosophy of life:

"Go to the sufferings of the world to find happiness."

In a lifetime, suffering is inevitable, even if there is no universal suffering caused by the general environment, there are hidden reefs and abysses of large and small in the depths of everyone's soul. We should not be thankful for suffering, because many people will be crushed into powder because they cannot bear it, but if suffering cannot be bypassed, then bear it, like Atlas, Sun Wukong, Sisyphus, carrying their own destiny, carrying their own five-fingered mountain, and pushing the stone that never stops rolling down again...

Although, including love, even the most beautiful things contain pain and suffering, after all, beauty is also one of the most tenacious background colors in life, as long as you immerse yourself, as long as you hold on, you can find the meaning and happiness of life in the interweaving of pain and beauty.

Finally, I would like to thank Ye Xin, Wang Zhaoqian, Wang Bin, Cheng Yongxin, Zhang Ling, Xu Zechen, Chen Ximei, Kitamura, Ye Kuangzheng, Han Haoyue, Pan Tsefu and other teachers for their warm recommendation; thank you to the Writers Publishing House and the responsible editor for the hard work of Teacher Ping.

Thank you to my mother and loved ones.

　　June 2, 2021 in Liaocheng, Shandong Province

November 3, 2021 was revised in Beijing Tiantong Court

(This article is the afterword to "Pyramid on the Top of the Mountain")

The Pyramid on the Top of the Hill