Liang Xiaosheng's proud capital of the Chinese literary scene is his active use of Hugo's style.
Later, some commentators called Liang Xiaosheng "China's Balzac", which made Liang Xiaosheng feel strange. In any case, if Liang Xiaosheng is "China's Hugo", Liang Xiaosheng's self-feeling may be a little better, but he is related to Balzac, whose naked exposure of human nature is not Liang Xiaosheng's favorite style at all.
The misconception of Liang Xiaosheng is like the misunderstanding of Mo Yan in Chinese critics.
General scholars say that Mo Yan imitated the Novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Colombian writer Márquez.
In fact, Mo Yan scoffed at this.
Mo Yan said that he had only read a few chapters in the front of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and he couldn't read them at all.
Mo Yan's real imitation object is the former Soviet novel "The Quiet Don River".
In fact, Liang Xiaosheng also likes "Quiet Don River". This novel is mentioned many times in "The World of Man".
In "The World of Man", the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family actually have the shadow of Liang Xiaosheng.
The eldest son, Bingyi, has the experience of knowing the youth of the army, which is actually highly consistent with Liang Xiaosheng's personal experience.
Later, Bingyi went to work for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, and the official was not small, but there was also a sense of powerlessness, which basically transferred the powerless fact that Liang Xiaosheng was very well-known and had a high right to speak, but his influence on his relatives in reality was very small.
Zhou Rong, the daughter of the Zhou family, is actually a Wenqing, and at the end of the novel, she wrote a three-volume novel "Our Generation of Children", which is actually the content of this "Human World".
Just like the movie set in the movie, Liang Xiaosheng adopted the structure of the novel set novel in "The World of Man". In Zhou Rong's fictional novel, Liang Xiaosheng cites chapters from these novels to explain why Dongmei later remarried quickly after Bingyi's death.
Liang Xiaosheng gave his bad words to the analysis in the works written by Zhou Rong in the novel, which shows that Liang Xiaosheng basically agrees with Zhou Rong's mentality, and Zhou Rong's feelings of chasing dreams, self-respect and self-love, patriotism and concern for the people, to a large extent, have a great intersection with Liang Xiaosheng's creative appeals.
It can be said that Zhou Rong is a character that Liang Xiaosheng loves very much. Otherwise, Liang Xiaosheng would not have entrusted Zhou Rong with the difficult to decipherable psychological secrets of the characters in the novel "The World of Man" to expound.
Many viewers have misunderstood Zhou Rong and think that she is selfish, in fact, Zhou Rong has always had a pursuit of the spiritual level, so it is not tolerated in reality, and the contradiction between her and Feng Huacheng is also attributed to her self-improvement and unaccustomed to Feng's unscrupulous vulgar, mediocre, kitsch philosophy and attitude of life.
Although Bingkun's character in the novel is a tendon, not very smart, honest and honest, but a large part of his attitude towards life is Liang Xiaosheng himself.
Including what Bingkun did in the novel, many parts have a Wenqing ideal and thought.
For example, the novel mentions that during the Cultural Revolution, Bingkun read a box of books left by his brother, and then the novel describes his feelings after reading:
Among those writers, he preferred Hugo and Tolstoy, especially Hugo. The passionate and eloquent language charm of Hugo's novels intoxicated him because he felt that he was too lacking in passion. ”
Bingkun's reading impressions are exactly those of Liang Xiaosheng himself.
Liang Xiaosheng's early creations achieved a blockbuster effect, which is his use of Hugo's narrative style.
In "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng mentions Hugo's novel "Les Misérables" many times, and also quotes the metaphors and metaphors in "Les Misérables".
In the novel, Cai Xiaoguang was described as saying that around 1994, he used a mantra: "I am just a worm on the ground" to indicate that he "knows how many pounds he has."
The novel reads: "The words about 'worms' come from Hugo's novel Les Misérables, the benevolent mouth of Bishop Mirière... So for a period of time, everyone called themselves 'a worm', and some people even printed the words 'I am a worm' on the business card.
In the novel, it is written that this "worm" culture was as popular as Wang Shuo's invention of "I am a hooligan, who I am afraid of": "As a result, 'I am a worm' became a fashionable phrase among grass-roots cadres for a while, and soon became a phrase that intellectuals liked." On the university podium, professors can often be heard saying that they are a worm. Even, elementary school students' essays have the title 'I am a worm'. ”
It can be seen that Hugo was deeply impressed in Liang Xiaosheng's mind.
In fact, in "Les Misérables", Milière's original words are "I am a maggot".
This chapter in "Les Misérables" can be compared to the fourth time of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is considered to be the general outline of the entire novel, and it can also be said to be the point part of "Les Misérables".
The theory expounded in this section also profoundly influenced Liang Xiaosheng's novel ideas and composition.
In this chapter, Les Misérables summarizes the three great misfortunes of human society, that is, the tragic world: "the system of women's self-sacrifice, the system of slavery of men, and the unfortunate life of young children." ”
To some extent, "The World" has a high similarity with the name of "Les Misérables".
In the chapter in Les Misérables that says "I am a maggot," Hugo proposes the value of revolution, arguing that "progressive violence is called revolution." After the violence passed, people realized this, and humanity was reprimanded, but moved forward. ”
Hugo also believed that "knowledge is also a kind of power", writing in the book: "Mankind has a tyrant, and that is ignorance... Kingship is a forged power, and only knowledge is the real power. ”
Therefore, the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family, Bingyi and Zhou Rong, were admitted to college, and Bingkun also liked to read, in fact, he was very thoughtful, but compared with his brother and sister, it was a little dwarfed. In Liang Xiaosheng's original work, Bingkun's literary and artistic talent is extraordinary. He said that allegro, editing music magazines, organizing literary and artistic performances, and once had a scenery, all of which have been deleted in the TV series, only the plot of the bookstore he presided over and opened, which reflects the cultural content.
Hugo emphasized the important role of "goodness" in human society: "Goodness cannot be manifested by people who turn their backs on religion, and atheists are the bad guides of human beings." ”
Interestingly, there is also a corresponding master in "The World of Man", Yingxin, who is Zheng Juan's younger brother Zheng Guangming.
It is written in "The World of Man" that when Zhou Nan was shot and died in the United States, Zheng Juan was once in a trance due to the loss of her son, and later it was still guangming who used the power of religion to enlighten Zheng Juan, so that Zheng Juan walked through sadness and gradually became normal.
It can be seen that in "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng comprehensively inherits Hugo's ideas and ideas and integrates them into the blood of the novel. This can be roughly called the three themes of "The World": that is, social change promotes progress, knowledge changes destiny, and kindness supports life.
The early Liang Xiaosheng is more of an imitation of the Hugo body.
What is Hugo?
That is a large section of philosophical whiplash, sharp as a knife of precision metaphor.
For example, the famous metaphor of Javert in the novel: "This wolf-born puppy, with a human face, is Javert." ”
Early Liang Xiaosheng liked this style of language, we look at a section of "Snow City" Liang Xiaosheng deliberately imitated the sentence: "Thirty-three-year-old women," they are ripe fruit, life is a fruit storehouse, family is a plastic bag, age is the storage period. ”
With such a Hugo body and hugo wind of the ocean, and the passionate description of the plate, Liang Xiaosheng is indistinguishable for a while and leads the way.
But in "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng abandoned Hugo's passionate language and no longer spoke for the characters and times like his earlier works.
Liang Xiaosheng, who was young and vigorous, always couldn't help but jump to the foreground, omnipotently using God's perspective and grammar to describe the times and outline characters.
In "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng has cleaned up the problems of the young age of good discussion and finger-pointing, and has become much deeper and more subtle.
In "The World of Man", he used more of the chinese novel's language, recording the dialogue of the characters in large sections, and did not evaluate the discussion of each person, thus enriching the flexibility and capacity of the novel's content.
The narrative in "The World of Man" has an omniscient and all-powerful part, but about the secrets of human nature, the novel is more vague, vague mentality, just let all kinds of characters, show their external language and dialogue, and for their inner mentality, they are non-committal and undiscovered.
It is this kind of blind spot that Liang Xiaosheng always revealed in his early years, and now in "The World of Man", according to the white narrative in Chinese novels, many blind spots have given the adaptors a place to show their skills. In the TV series, the vacant parts that Liang Xiaosheng did not reveal in the novel have been supplemented and repaired, so the TV series looks more humane and earthy, which also makes the TV series add many plots and details that are not described in the novel.
In fact, the TV series also deleted Liang Xiaosheng's chapter that was not carefully set up in the original novel. Judging from the trade-offs of TV series, the adaptor is more like a judge of Liang Xiaosheng's novel, and the success of the TV series can reflect the shortcomings of Liang Xiaosheng as the original author of the novel when he hangs on a leak when he creates it alone, and he cannot write everything, so that the TV series adaptor seems to be more intelligent than Liang Xiaosheng.
This may be explained by a reason, that is, standing on the shoulders of giants, taste can be taken to a higher level.