Literature Guanlan Book Club
Starting from the offline reading clubs of colleges and universities and social organizations across the country, China Writers Network gathers literary enthusiasts, listens to literary voices, and transmits literary ideas. Whether it is a new work, a good book recommendation, or a classic re-reading, topic discussion, what jumps on the paper is not only a solidified text, but also a beating thinking. Articles come in a variety of forms, either discussion or commentary. Welcome more book clubs to join our big family, online and offline, and enjoy the collision.
Yunyou Book Club: Some book friends come from the "cloud", are they happy? Founded in May 2020, Yunyou Book Club is an online cross-school youth exchange organization planned by China Writers Network in the midst of the epidemic. Aimed at young people who love literature, this book club promotes cultural and academic exchanges among young scholars through online academic salons, reading sharing, keynote speeches and other activities, and strives to inspire ideas with literary friends. Time on the clouds, who am I to return to?
"One Day, Three Autumns"
Author: Liu Zhenyun
Publisher: Flower City Press
Publication date: 2021-7
"One Day and Three Autumns" is a magical novel that Liu Zhenyun sharpened a sword four years after "The Children of the Eating Melon Age" and presented us with a rather magical novel, which spreads out the sorrow and joy of two generations in this place based on the legend of the local flower second lady in Yanjin searching for jokes. The four friends of this issue of Yunyou Book Club have a dialogue from the white snake elements, magic realism techniques, "one day and three autumns" and "jokes" in the novel, presenting us with a variety of dimensions into this story.
Li Yang
The Legend of the White Snake and the Transformation of Everyday Life
Liu Zhenyun's writing path can be roughly divided into two: one is to write secular daily life, starting from his debut work "Tapu", and establishing the status of "new realism" on behalf of the writer's literary history with "A Place of Chicken Feathers", while "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences" can be said to be the culmination of such writing; the other is to write folk history, and the "Hometown" series published successively occupies a place in the trend of "new historical novels". In essence, the former focuses on the refinement, depiction and coordination of daily life experience, while the latter reinterprets history in a distorted, exaggerated and parody way. In the newly launched "One Day and Three Autumns", Liu Zhenyun strives to "take daily life as the keynote, using deformation, exaggeration, crossing life and death and gods and ghosts as the basis for laying and hot pot", which may be regarded as an innovative move to integrate the two writing paths to some extent. The key to completing this initiative lies in the personal narrative of "The Legend of the White Snake".
At the beginning of the story of "One Day and Three Autumns", it is arranged that cherry, the actor of the white lady in the Yu opera "White Lady", and Chen Changjie, the actor of Fahai, are married, which builds a strong contrast between the play and the outside of the play. However, the interpretation in the play continues to penetrate into the outside of the play, the protagonist's bright milk name is derived from the "out-of-the-box" Hanlin in the play, and the main story line that accompanies Li Yansheng's trip to Wuhan is related to the cherry buried on the mass grave and forced by the rapist murderer to dress up as a white lady to "fake the real thing". The fluttering of cherry souls that runs through nearly half of the book is inseparable from "The Legend of the White Snake". From the poster of "The Legend of the White Snake" on the wall of the store department, to the folded drama photo in the bright pocket, until it is thrown into the river, the cherry is still transformed into the white lady in the play. It can be said that after committing suicide due to a leek, Cherry always appeared in the image of the white lady in the play and "survived" through the play. In fact, the author also deliberately breaks the boundary between opera and folklore itself, and the flesh is pressed against the cherry waiting for Chen Changjie to save him, which cannot help but remind people of the white lady who was pressed under the Leifeng Pagoda and waited for Fahai to be released. The cherries that were salvaged ashore went to the time of the white snake story recorded in Feng Menglong's "Cautionary Tales" - the Song Dynasty. The spanning of the three worlds of legend, drama and outside the play gives full play to the charm of the novel as a fictional art, and The "negative and negative positive" that Bright said to Hua Erniang implies that the experience and perception gained in the process of reading the text are real and wonderful. This dialectical way of thinking about the true and false of the virtual continues Liu Zhenyun's thinking on the relationship between literature and history in the "Hometown" series.
As a "collective sharing" story passed down through the generations, the white snake in "The Legend of the White Snake" is in the opposite situation of "what is a person" and "what a person should be", that is, there is a conflict between instinctive desires and social concepts. In this regard, the book borrowed Chen Changjie's mouth to break through: "The drama eye of "The Legend of the White Snake" is the trouble caused by the lower body. The brightness that supports the main content of the text and Ma Xiaomeng's emotional dilemma are in contrast to the situation of the white snake in "The Legend of the White Snake". The reason why Ma Xiaomeng was forced to hang, fled to Xi'an with Mingming, and was later humiliated and threatened by Sun Erzhu, until his son Hongzhi still had a big fight with his classmates because of his appearance, all related to Xiangxiu's exposure of her five years as a prostitute in Beijing. Bright chooses to accept Ma Xiaomeng's past, but the marriage relationship between the two does not tolerate Yanjin's secular morality, just as Xu Xian accepted the white lady's snake demon status, but it is difficult to escape Fahai's suppression of the white snake under the Leifeng Pagoda on the grounds of the demon's special path. Unlike folklore, in addition to the fierce contradictions and conflicts, daily life is composed of countless ordinary times, and the power of this time is enough to dilute or dissolve the collision of ideas. It is not difficult to see that Liu Zhenyun uses "The Legend of the White Snake" to metaphorically describe the theme of life's dilemma to be shown in "One Day and Three Autumns", and hints at the possibility of getting out of the predicament with daily life writing.
On September 24, 1924, the collapse of the Leifeng Pagoda provided space for anti-traditional people to imagine, and once became a metaphor for the May Fourth intellectuals to overthrow the feudal order. Lu Xun said in "On the Fall of the Leifeng Pagoda": "Now, if he actually falls, then what is the joy of the people under the whole world?" In Tian Han's revolutionary modern drama created in the mid-20th century, the temple where Fahai lived became a symbol of the decadent system, undertaking the historical mission of eliminating feudal dross, and continuing the sense of resistance and struggle since May Fourth. In the late 20th century TV series "The Legend of the New White Lady" (1992) and the movie "Green Snake" (1993), the emotions and desires in the text are amplified, satisfying the public's fantasies at the end of the century about love than JinJian or paper drunken gold fans. In 2021, Liu Zhenyun launched "One Day and Three Autumns", in addition to the narrative of revolution and desire, the opera of "The Legend of the White Snake" was integrated with the writing of daily life, and the legend of the White Snake was reinterpreted in an exaggerated and deformed way, realizing the breakthrough of writing style and self-transcendence.
Zhao Zhijun
The meaning of the magic central plains points
Just now Li Yang talked about the isomorphism of "One Day and Three Autumns" and "The Legend of the White Snake", his contemplation of the story is very delicate, and I want to continue to talk about the significance of the novel's method of breaking the magic and reality boundary at the text level. It can probably be asserted that most readers are not prepared for Liu Zhenyun to rewrite the Henan that people are already familiar with in this form, which is roughly for two reasons: First, Henan, as the core of the Central Plains, has an orthodoxy in the long timetable of Chinese culture, the so-called "sub-language strange force chaos god", the realistic spirit of active entry into the world advocated by Confucianism has become a formatted imagination of Henan, a solidified impression of rejecting and suppressing the words of witch gods and ghosts; second, as a representative writer of "new realism" novels. Liu Zhenyun's works have always continued a calm, deliberately dried language style with temperature and moisture, and life is always presented in the form of a broken, dry flat and worthless "original" form. The magical reality style of "One Day and Three Autumns" in which myth and reality, dreams and daily life penetrate each other, undoubtedly forms a great contrast with our habitual impression of Henan and the familiar style of writers. This contrast precisely shows that this work has a special significance in henan local writing and writers' survival thinking.
About local writing. The emergence and circulation of this form of magic realism (borrowed from marginal, ethnic, local, and religious writings) itself represents an attempt by repressed voices to break through in an abnormal way, and is therefore a "meaningful form." The Central Plains (Henan), which is a symbol of traditional (or even orthodox) Chinese tradition, is abstracted and singled out in the usual cultural expressions, which not only obscures its inherent colorful colors, but also makes Henan (Zhongyuan) as a part of China rarely regarded as a "place", but a template for the whole of China or orthodox China that is no longer imagined and created by imagination, so that the image of Henan is generally more rigid and monotonous. The small town of Yanjin in "One Day and Three Autumns" has very rarely restored the original appearance of "Henan Place", whether it is the Local Yu Opera "The Legend of the White Snake" that entangled the world outside the play, Wu Dazui who sells sheep soup with unclear boundaries outside the dream, the grandmother who sells jujube cakes in memory and reality, or the Flower Erniang who is difficult to distinguish between legend and reality, and Lao Dong, a fortune teller who communicates the yin and yang domains, all show the great richness of folk culture and folk discourse itself. Around Lao Dong, it is no longer the "Henan people" who carry cultural baggage of "no strange power and chaos", but a group of people in the city who are familiar with reality and superstition, who make the abstract "Henan" no longer orthodox and strange. The local legend of Hana Erniang, who looks for jokes in the dreams of the People of Yanjin, also makes Yanjin a different "unique one". That is to say, through the extensive connection of local symbols through the magic reality technique, "One Day and Three Autumns" has made the Central Plains (Henan) have a distinct locality.
Thinking about survival. The effort of magic realism to visualize and concretely explain the invisible confinement that pervades the fate of individuals and ethnic groups is undoubtedly a deformed contemplation of man's existence, which escapes from the logic of reality and does not point to the final solution to the problem, but aims to arouse attention to existence. In Liu Zhenyun's new realistic novels represented by "Chicken Feathers in a Place", many characters do not consume life in a serious and broken reality, and human existence is shrouded in a physical cage of a plane without meaning, except for exposing people and the cruel nature of their lives, history, and society, and the writer seems to lack interest in the categories of spiritual sublimity and soul redemption. However, in "One Day and Three Autumns", the characters' attachment to the cause and effect of the past life, this life, and the next life at least proves that the writer has the desire to present and explain the spiritual existence of the characters. Whether it is the reversal of the relationship between the character relationship and the real character in "The Legend of the White Snake" as the source of the tragic fate of many characters, or the interpretation of the keeping of Bright and Ma Xiaomeng in this life as the continuation of the past life's grudge, or the various good deeds of Lao Dong based on the bright wishes of the future life, it is the writer's attempt to give a "sympathetic understanding" of people's various survivals, which makes the story that was still broken and calm gradually have a rare warmth in the narrative process. From this point of view, "One Day and Three Autumns" may become a key turning point in Liu Zhenyun's creative genealogy, if this effort to explain existence can be continued in future creations.
Of course, Liu Zhenyun has made it clear that the narrative of the gods and ghosts that travel through life and death is only to lay out the paintings of Uncle Liu as a complete story, and the meaning that breaks through the author's preset framework may only be the potential self-meaning generation in the writer's creation "as a form of content", but this "accidentality" undoubtedly also represents the possibility of the above important turn, which we can verify in Liu Zhenyun's future creation. At the same time, it must also be pointed out that the writer's consistent realism style and magical reality techniques have indeed caused inconsistencies in the style and atmosphere of the various chapters of this novel, and some dramatic clues (such as two suns and two goods) have not been fully opened, which has also left a lot of regrets for the novel.
Cui Tao
The fate of "one day and three autumns"
The theme of life dilemma pointed out by Li Yang on the metaphor of "The Legend of the White Snake" and the tragic fate of the characters mentioned by Zhao Zhijun on the survival thinking, I think can all get clues in the expression of "one day and three autumns". Although the novel has pointed out that this is both "the meaning of not seeing one day, such as every three autumns, which is a sentence of ten thousand sentences between people and people", but also "the relationship between people and places, living here for one day, is better than living elsewhere for three years". But paradoxically, this sense of intimacy with people and the earth is ruthlessly dismantled in the novel, so that "one day and three autumns" itself becomes an ironic "joke", and then presents a sense of fatalism that hangs over various characters and is powerless to break free.
This is first reflected in the relationship between Hua Erniang and Yanjin and the Yanjin people. For three thousand years, the people of Yanjin knew that Hanajiro had died in Yanjin, but no one confessed to Hanajiniang, leaving her trapped in Yanjin and looking (forgetting) Yanjin in the waiting. The price that the People of Yanjin pay for it is that generations of people have to prepare jokes before going to bed, in case the second lady of the flower takes them in her dreams, otherwise there will be a risk of life. This fatalistic "three autumns and one day" is "one day, three autumns and three bitter days" for Hua Erniang, but for the Yanjin people, it is "one day, three autumns and three autumns and long days". Secondly, the fate of the "white snake" cherry is also the same, after all, outside the play, it is subject to the hands of "Fahai" Chen Changjie, and even after death, it is trapped in the "joke" and cannot be reincarnated, and the trapped relief is all involuntary. In addition to the brief coexistence with bright and short, the intimacy of "one day and three autumns" is almost non-existent for Cherry, and the fate in the play and the hardships of the Yanjin people have become the bondage of her ghost for a lifetime.
It seems that all hope of breaking through or reconciling fate converges on Bright. But even after settling in Xi'an, he could not escape the bitter luck of asking for jokes in Hua Erniang's dream. His life, still vaguely continuing the "White Snake Legend" story of his parents' generation continues to be interpreted, saving cherry at an early age is secretly combined with "Xu Shilin saving his mother", after becoming an adult, he and the snake wife Ma Xiaomeng with a long tongue and then leave his hometown, and after successfully returning to Yanjin, he faces that things are not the same as the old people withering. In the spatial circle of Yanjin, Wuhan and Xi'an, he tried his best to adapt in an attempt to break through the cage of fate, but in the end he could not escape the dilemma of the Yanjin people, and the intimacy of "hometown is better than three autumns in other places" can only be woven in dreams. Selectively filtering and sifting through memories is nothing more than a futile form of self-deception, and the "three autumns a day" that would have meant a sense of intimacy finally takes on an absurd irony after all hopes are dashed.
The "one day and three autumns" of the Yanjin people carry a variety of fates and dilemmas of "the ghost world of the divine realm, the drama outside the drama, the historical present, the dream outside the dream, and the hometown", which shows people's helplessness and submission to fate. The author peels back the appearance of "a place of chicken feathers" in daily life, and integrates the world of gods and ghosts into the ups and downs of the human path, but behind the story is still the undisturbed pool of fate, or the invisible force silently squeezing life and human nature.
Ding Yongjie
The care behind "humor"
Liu Zhenyun has his own unique views on "humor". At the end of 2020, Liu Zhenyun talked about "humor" in an interview with Southern Weekend, believing that real humor is not humorous, and we should pay attention to the truth behind the joke and the truth behind the truth. The new work "One Day, Three Autumns" is a further reflection and extension of the essence of "jokes" and "humor".
Take a look at a few shots from the Preface: "See him in the painting, under the moonlight, a handsome girl smiling forward and backward"; "See another painting, painting a group of men and women's heads, gathered together, laughing with their mouths open"; "In one of the plates, there is a fish head left, and the fish head is laughing", and even "Yan Luo in the painting is also laughing". The clue that Hua Erniang looks for jokes in the dreams of the Yanjin people runs through the entire novel, but it is not difficult to find that there is almost no joke in the whole book that can make Hua Erniang really satisfied, even the most telling jokes. If there are indeed many fragments in works such as "One Sentence top 10,000 Sentences", "I Am Not Pan Jinlian", and "Children of the Eating Melon Era", "One Day and Three Autumns" has almost no plot that can make readers laugh. For more than three thousand years, Hua Erniang has been looking for "funny" jokes and can't help it, and the "things" that Bright tells about her wife in Beijing for survival, which is hidden in the depths of her heart and unspeakable pain, but she successfully teases Hua Erniang, and the divisions and paradoxes in between make the reader's heart tremble.
"One Day, Three Autumns" explains the survival trajectory of two generations. Not long after the previous generation entered the reader's field of vision, it was shrouded in a lifeless life. Chen Changjie and Cherry had unlimited scenery when they were acting in the County Yu Opera Troupe, and after the troupe disbanded, they fell into a life of chicken feathers, so that Cherry hanged herself because of a handful of leeks; Li Yansheng became silent soon after marriage; Wu Dazui did not smile all day, and was finally crushed to death by "heart matters"... Most of the lives of this generation have been teased by "jokes": Chen Changjie, who is old and unambitious, thinks that he has "lived himself into a joke", and Li Yansheng also lamented that "I have lived myself as a joke". Liu Zhenyun pinned his hopes for "jokes returning to Yanjin" on the next generation. The melancholy teenager Bright dropped out of school early to learn cooking at the "Marshal of the Canopy" restaurant, but unexpectedly created conditions for the later change of identity. Ma Xiaomeng saved 100,000 yuan on his disgraceful "things", but he exchanged his life for himself and Bright. The joke tests from Hua Erniang, which the previous generation of Cherry and Wu Dazui could not escape, were also dispelled by the humorous jokes that bright and seemingly ingenious, but were actually full of "contradictions". Presumably, this is what the author tries to find for us in the novel to face the attitude and method of facing life.
This reminds me of Shaftesbury's statement about "humor": humor is the best test of truth and the best way to guard against fanaticism, hypocrisy and dogmatic stubbornness. In his opinion, the subject that cannot withstand the joke must be suspicious, and the false cannot withstand the test of a joke. "Humor" is not just a simple "joke" that makes people laugh, it often has an indescribable ambiguous relationship with "truth". Liu Zhenyun is good at creating a "sense of humor" in this novel, but rather than saying that the author is helping us to find the "lost humor" through the stories of two generations, he is emphasizing that every "humorous" little person should be cared for.
(This article was published in the 8th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" jointly organized by China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily on February 21, 2022)