Reality, imagination and positivism
□ Xie Youshun
A writer is a person who writes time, but also a person who changes and creates time. Benjamin argues that time is a structural concept that is not entirely linear, but may be a juxtaposition of space. When the writer is aware of a certain spatiality of time and tries to write about the obscured, unknown parts of time, he actually changes time—he associates this present time with another form of time with what we often call eternity, with real history.
For example, the experience of the past four decades of reform and opening up is certainly the days and reality experienced by many people, but how it will eventually look, and how the latecomers will recognize and understand this era, actually depends on the artistic creation of writers. Writing these forty years is actually recreating these forty years on an imaginary level. The reality of the past cannot be reproduced, but the reality of art can live on forever. The daily life of the Ming and Qing dynasties can no longer be reproduced, but through the artistic creation of "Jin Ping Mei" and "Dream of the Red Chamber", we can see the life scenes and life details of that era; the people and events before and after the Xinhai Revolution have passed, but to understand the spiritual outlook of people of a certain class in that period, only through the novels of Lu Xun and others can we know how people like Xianglin Sister-in-law, Yan Tu, and Ah Q lived and thought. This is the meaning of writing, a creation that looks fictional and imaginary, but can record and restore a real life, reshape a group of real people.
And all of this is done through imagination.
Some time ago, I saw a news that Liu Cixin, the author of "Three-Body Problem", won the American Science Fiction Award - Clark Award, and he won one of the awards, called "Imagination Serves Society". This award is still very important in the science fiction world, especially Clark, whose most famous work is probably known to everyone, that is, "2001: A Space Odyssey". This work had a great influence on Liu Cixin. Liu Cixin said in his acceptance speech: "This award is a reward for imagination, and imagination is a human being's ability that seems to belong only to God, and its meaning of existence is far beyond our imagination." Some historians have said that human beings were able to build civilizations beyond other species on Earth because they were able to create things in their own brains that did not exist in reality. In the future, when ARTIFICIAL intelligence has more than human intelligence, imagination may be the only advantage we have for them. ”
Clark famously said that imagination is the most powerful tool for human beings to shape the future. Imagination is also a core ability of writing, which both expresses reality and mutates reality, creating new realities.
There is a question worth asking, why is it that the virtual world created through imagination, some things that look unrealistic through aesthetic perception, will directly affect our values and spiritual world, and even affect human imagination and prediction of the future? Anyone who has read science fiction knows that many aspects of the world have been fulfilled as Clark predicted, communication satellites, orbital flight, etc., which were predicted in Clarke's earliest science fiction novels. But Liu Cixin said that when science fiction becomes reality, we don't seem to be surprised, because today we are more and more entering a world that has lost imagination, blindly indulging in the trivialities and illusions of reality. We no longer have such a strong enthusiasm for exploration in outer space and for a vast universe.
This also says from one side that human beings may face a problem in which imagination is challenged and imagination is weakened. In this context, the meaning of the existence of literary writing is only to emphasize that life is not like this, the world is still the original way, and there are new possibilities for our existence. That is to say, it is to assert an indeterminate aesthetic by constantly rebelling against what has been determined, solidified, and even procedural—a vision that looks vague and ambiguous, but at the same time very real in the spiritual and aesthetic sense.
Some time ago, I read a view by Zhang Xuecheng, a famous scholar of the eighteenth century, that since the Warring States, the power of the liturgical music religion has declined, and the most dynamic and most influential of the Six Classics is poetry and poetry. This judgment shows that there is a conflict between a certain knowledge represented by ritual and music and the uncertain, aesthetic, and ambiguous knowledge represented by poetry and poetry. One might say that one is rational and one is emotional, but from another point of view, one is certain and the other is uncertain. The aesthetics of poetry, including personal feelings, invisibly participate, influence and shape the values of Chinese. How we live and what our souls look like is influenced by poetry. It can be seen that in the face of an increasingly solidified era, how to deconstruct and reshape the world through seemingly uncertain, individual, aesthetic, and imaginary things is a major issue. This contradiction and struggle in the spiritual realm has always been the underlying theme of literature. Human beings have entered an era of increasing superstition of precise knowledge, superstitious technology and intelligence, and some people even think that intelligent robots can write poetry, write calligraphy, and do artistic things. Technology may be able to decide many things, but it is not yet a substitute for aesthetics and imagination.
Those definite knowledge, those things that are ordered, instrumentalized, and technological, always want to tell us that everything is beyond doubt, and that the future must be moving in this direction. Literature and imagination have for many times been constantly rebelling against this indisputable, constantly stressing that the world may not be the case, that the world may be another way of being; at the very least, literature should make it feel that those superfluous, uninhibited imaginations still have irreplaceable meaning and value of precise knowledge.
One of the greatest characteristics of contemporary China is change, and everything is changing. People who are superstitious about exact knowledge are sometimes more suspicious than those who are addicted to aesthetics and uncertainty. When commenting on Zhang Ailing, Xia Zhiqing said that one of the differences between Zhang Ailing's writing world and the writing world of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is that "Dream of the Red Chamber" writes about a society with unchanged basic values, while Zhang Ailing writes about a rapidly changing world. Change has become the greatest feature of this era. When studying Greek epics, Lukács also said that the reason why Greek epics are great lies in the fact that people of that era could grasp the world. By looking at the starry sky, you can know where the direction of the world is. How do we name today's changes that bring about more and more rich, complex and ungratchable experiences? How do you describe it? Is there a ability to name and describe? It's a very significant event. Therefore, imagination is not superfluous, aesthetic and uncertain things are not optional, but precisely an imaginary, descriptive, including fictional experience, which powerfully changes our perception of the world. When I talk about this topic, I often think of Elon Musk, who launched heavy rockets. I have read in detail several interviews and self-descriptions of Musk, who told him that when he was a child, he was an autistic child, and the reason why he had the impulse to explore the universe and confirm the meaning of life through this exploration also came from the science fiction novel series of "Guide to the Galaxy" that he read as a child. It's hard to imagine that the impulse and origin of a person who launches a heavy rocket and has made a major breakthrough in science and technology today would be a science fiction novel. Musk once told reporters: "I have always had a sense of crisis of existence, and I want to find out what the meaning of life is and what the purpose of all things exists." In the end, it was concluded that if we had a way to make the world's knowledge more and more advanced, and to expand the scale and scope of human consciousness, then we would be more capable of asking the right questions and enlightening wisdom and spirit. So, I decided to study physics and business. Because to achieve such a lofty goal, it is necessary to understand how the universe works, how the economy works, and to find the most powerful..." I was touched by these words. There is also the familiar director Christopher Nolan, who can make the famous science fiction movie "Interstellar", which also comes from his special imagination of space.
Imagination is the source of almost all creativity. But after the 20th century, it seems that literary writing is confronted with only one reality, that is, the daily reality that can be seen and imagined, as if people can only live in this reality and be enslaved by this reality. In fact, literature is required to write only about reality, only about common sense and common sense in reality, which is just a literary concept in the past hundred years, and in the longer history of literature, writers' writing, openness, and imagination of people are far richer and more complex than they are now. Literature, as a product of imagination, should restore these rich situations in the world of human life. Not only is human nature realistic, but many times, divinity is also realistic. Especially in the countryside of China, who would feel that sacrifice, worship the heavens, worship the gods, fear ghosts, and talk to the souls of ancestors are unrealistic? It is another reality, a spiritual reality that can be realized in the imaginary world.
But I also don't want to emphasize only the meaning of fiction and imagination. As far as literary writing is concerned, many times we also have to be alert to an imagination that has no boundaries, no constraints, no empirical basis. It is necessary to pay attention to the corrective effect of empirical evidence on imagination itself. I feel dissatisfied when I read the works of many writers, not because he does not have a wild imagination, but because he does not have the empirical support needed to realize this imagination. These are actually two sides of the same coin. Excessively ethereal, unbridled imagination sometimes requires empirical limitations.
Novel writing, in particular, is certainly the art of imagination and fiction, and without fiction and imagination, writing cannot be discussed. The writer's most important endowments are experience, observation, imagination, and thinking, but since the 20th century, fiction and imagination have gained dominance in fiction writing, and observation and thinking have been relatively neglected. As a result, the phenomenon of novelists thinking wildly and making things behind closed doors has become more and more serious, and they have forgotten that writing is also a science - the study of life. This kind of science also needs to investigate, study, and examine, especially the analysis of life and the examination of people's hearts, without the spirit of drilling like learning, it is impossible to obtain the real feeling that writing should have.
Attaching equal importance to fiction and positivism is the true way of writing. The writer must have a special study of the life he depicts, and through research, investigation and argument, establish a basic common sense of these lives. With this common sense, the life he wrote will have credible material evidence. Matter is not only the framework of realism, but also a kind of reasonable positivism, ignoring the examination and writing of matter, the materiality and sense of reality of literary writing cannot be established. In writing, it is impossible to construct an indestructible material shell, and the soul of the writer, no matter how tall, the reader will not believe it. People who despise the world and the material, who have no professionalism, cannot write novels well. Many writers despise the empirical work of the material level, and do not care about the artifacts and hearts of the world, writing is only to run towards an idea, as a result, the novel will be full of logical, reasonable and common sense flaws, unable to convince the reader to believe what he wrote, let alone move people. This failure is often not because the writer does not have great writing ideals and literary ambitions, but because in the process of executing his own writing contract and building the foundation of his novel, he does not follow the discipline of writing well, and fails to find a suitable and rigorous container for the spiritual problems he wants to express—as a result, many of his ideas are destroyed by a hollow and lack of empirical writing.
Good works of art, both imaginative and professional. Anyone who has seen "Interstellar" knows that it contains a wealth of scientific knowledge about time and space, and novels such as "The Three-Body Problem" also have a wealth of physics knowledge. Without expertise in space-time and physics, people like Nolan and Liu Cixin could not create their novels and films. The imagination must be made more precise and more real through empirical means. We can't talk about creation, only emphasize those fantasies that have no empirical evidence, especially the current TV series, including many online novels, the spirit of positivism is extremely lacking, and there will be so many random plot designs. And I think that empirically based imagination can only be narrative persuasive and can move people's hearts. After Making Interstellar, Nolan made Dunkirk, two completely different films. One is a super imaginary picture, and the other is to restore a historical fact with the precise perspective of anthropologists and historians. A director, a writer, if he has both abilities, he may create important works.
This reminds me of What Hu Lancheng said in the "History of Chinese Literature" that once he visited a potter in Japan and found that this potter burned a lot of daily necessities such as bowls, plates, cups, etc. Hu Lancheng was very surprised and wondered how a big artist could burn so many daily things. The Japanese potter said to him: "Pottery, which is only used for ornamental purposes, will gradually become small and thin, and as for eccentricities, I myself feel that I should make more pottery for daily use." "By burning these usual bowls for eating, drinking cups, and dishes for dishes, to balance your artistic feelings, so as not to make your feelings go narrow, poor, and eccentric, this is really a good artistic view." The artist cannot always glide in an imagination that looks pure art, he needs reality, day to balance and develop his artistic feelings. Too everyday, may lead to the work lack of imagination, has been creeping on the ground, can not soar up; but too floating, without empirical evidence, details of the support, will also make the work become illusory, hollow. How to balance matter and spirit, how fiction and reality merge, is the ultimate question of art. Good writing has always been a perfect combination of positivism and imagination.
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Excerpted from Fujian Forum, Humanities and Social Sciences Edition, No. 2, 2019
The original journal is responsible for editing | Chen Jianning
The journal is responsible for editing | Yu Xiang noon
"Yangtze River Literature and Art : Good Novel", No. 2, 2022
▲Xie Youshun |
Xie Youshun is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of Chinese of Sun Yat-sen University. He is also the vice president of the Chinese Novel Society and the vice chairman of the Guangdong Writers Association. He was selected as a national cultural master and "four batches" talents, and a young "Yangtze River Scholar" of the Ministry of Education. He has published more than ten books such as "Becoming a Novelist" and "General Views of Literature". He has won awards such as the Feng Mu Literature Award.