Xu Chenliang, | of the new scene: the heart of the town and the body of the sea are symmetrical with each other

The heart of the town and the body of the sea,

Symmetrical to each other

□ Xu Chenliang

Around 2014, I met Lin Sen several times at the activities of young writers, one of which was held in his base area of Hainan, which was also my first experience of the warm sun and sea breeze of the early winter of the tropical island, and I also tasted the ice coconut that Lin Sen repeatedly mentioned in the WeChat circle of friends, and visited the shops in the town that sold shellfish handicrafts – it is said that soon after, the local government issued a ban on the mining and sales of bricks, and the resulting waves became an important clue in his novel "On the Shore in the Sea". At the forum hosted by Tianya magazine, the "generational difference" between post-80s writers and post-70s and post-60s became the focus of the topic, and I agree with one of the voices: a small number of first appearances cannot represent the whole, and more solid works will emerge in the future, constantly breaking stereotypes and updating people's understanding of this generation of writers. Today, a few years later, when the post-85s, post-90s and even post-00s, a wave of after-wave appearances, Lin Sen and his writers, who were born in the early 80s and are close to the age of confusion, have they also successively launched works with coordinate significance, so have we opened up enough distance to identify "this one" in a relatively complete coordinate system, explore its trajectory of debugging personal style and establishing subjectivity?

Regarding the relationship between individual creation and literary generations, Lin Sen has his own opinion. He confessed that at the beginning of writing, especially at the stage when poetry entered the novel, he did not agree with the popular youth writing, and deliberately adopted a posture of alienation or even reversal, wanting to write another post-80s who was still hidden in the shadows, and issued a "less fashionable, sweet, and shiny voice". From "Small Town" published in 2008 and subsequent short stories, to the two novels "Warm As Spring Breeze" and "Guan Guan Ju Dove" published in 2015 and 2016, he used his hometown of Hainan as a canvas and the experience of the town as paint to initially draw his own writing territory. The spatio-temporal background of birth and growth also provides him with a certain methodology of fiction, and oversimplified labels such as "vernacular" or "nostalgia" do not fully describe the meaning of "small town heart" for Linsen.

"Guan Guan Ju Dove" is his early summative work, and has also been appreciated by many writers and critics. Many of the core plots in the novel obviously come from the experience and experience of the growth period: "Crazy new things, not only change the city, remote corners are not spared, the town where I went to school, the yellow laser theater is blooming everywhere, the casino is rampant, the white powder is rampant, and the teenagers around me who are the same age as me, not to mention the fierce fighting, there are many people who have become victims of white powder..." But the focus of the narrative falls more on the protagonists of the two grandfathers, Lao Pan and Black Hand Yi. Lin Sen compared them to the old boss in the martial arts novel in his self-description - "When I try to show the changes in a small town in thirty years, it is impossible to hold my feet with young people as the protagonists", only by writing that the "old bones" who have experienced vicissitudes want to turn the tide in the face of the unprecedented "jianghu crisis", but they are powerless to return to the sky, can they produce some kind of tension or "poetry of decay".

I think the basic tone of his work in this period can be described as "the melancholy of the town". "Melancholy" is also a favorite word of Lin Sen, and his first book of poems was titled "The Melancholy of the Island", and there is a novel about "The Melancholy of the Narrator". However, here I want to interpret the meaning of melancholy from another context. Freud had a special article distinguishing between mourning as a normal emotion and melancholy as a disease: both stem from the loss of a loved one or an important object, but mourning has a clear object and can gradually subside over time, and people caught in the quagmire of melancholy cannot figure out what they have lost, when and where they have lost, and cannot understand and cannot relieve the pain that engulfs everything. The two protagonists in "Guan Guan Ju Dove" are melancholy people who are worried and unguarded: Hei Hand Yi is exhausted due to the repeated entanglements caused by the failure of his ex-wife's descendants to recognize their ancestors; Lao Pan "tightens his eyelids and jumps at every turn", and often rings a disturbing "whining" sound in his ears, and if there is a ghost in front of his eyes, he always "has to remember something, but he can't say it". Only at the beginning of the novel, at the last "Military Slope Festival" in Ruixi Town in 1994, the neat and powerful footsteps of the "armored army" team and the deep affection full of glory ignited the air of the whole town, and the fog in Lao Pan's heart was temporarily dispelled. But at this turning point, "the days of stability, silence, closure, monotony and chaos change frequently with the departure of the armored army", and the two old men also fell into a deeper melancholy, they clearly had a premonition that the strange things that had been blown into the town by the wind were pulling away the foundations of yesterday's world, "everything will collapse, everything is falling", but "there is no way to stop it, nor do they know how the disaster they are about to face will appear."

In recent decades, scholars in different fields have continued to excavate and re-read, the gap between the lines of Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy" has been widened, and even flipped, melancholy is no longer regarded as pathological, nor is it equivalent to sentimental nostalgia, the "ghost" of the past lingers, but is seen as a potential contained in melancholy: to remain open and actively relate to the past - "The past in mourning is solved, completed, and dead; in melancholy, the past has always survived to the present." (Woodyao, David Kazankyan, "Mourning the Remnants") also provides another clue to understanding Linsen's creative context. In the "Small Town" series and "Guan Guan Ju Dove", his contemporaries grow up in a hurry in the hustle and bustle, and the ancient town is in decline under the hurricane of the times, and from the overlapping parts of the two main lines, a re-narrated "90s" can be recognized. In Lin Sen's later novels, Ruixi Town is not erased from the map like Macondo in "One Hundred Years of Solitude", but like the "90s" that has not yet been completed, it is haunting, still "living" in different ways in the plot vision and the prehistory of the characters, and his writing has a meaning beyond the region. In recent years, critics have included Lin Sen in the genealogy of "New Southern Writing", and the relevant interpretation is undoubtedly enlightening, especially the search for a connection between Hainan, which is also a tropical island, and the "south" of MCA writers such as Huang Kamshu. However, in my opinion, if you change the perspective and read Lin Sen's writing based in Hainan with Ban Yu and other contemporaries in the northeast, you may also find a response, they all try to find the shadows or ghosts that remain in the present in yesterday's world from their own experience, refuse to accept death, say goodbye to the past, and refuse to let the spiritual wounds heal, so that the novel echoes with a certain "melancholy of the narrator".

The "Junpo Festival", which was written in heavy ink at the beginning of "Guanguan Ju Dove", is a unique folk festival in Hainan, in order to commemorate the heroine Lady Xian, to imitate the ancients to gather troops, parade, go out of the army scene parade, there are gods-possessed "male children" who have performed volcanoes, climbing knife ladders, iron rods and wearing cheeks. In Lin Sen's work to date, the collision of ancient rituals, mysterious forces and the present time and space has been repeatedly written, almost becoming a kind of personal logo. The ritualistic procedures of throwing cups, asking for blessings, descending children, disasters, requiems, and sea sacrifices are also related to his background in local knowledge and folk religious rituals. He mentioned more than once that the ancestors of the gods were part of the daily life of the Hainan people, and what he wrote was not a specimen of folk culture or a landscape that showed regional colors, but the elements that promoted the development of the plot, often related to the storms that swirled inside the characters and the undercurrents of social and historical evolution. At the last "Junpo Festival" before Ruixi Town was suspended due to superstition, the "rising boy" ended in failure, and the miracle never came again. Even though many years later, the local government tried to restart the festival, but the overall order behind the miracles and the human world, the community and the individual, the history and the present, and its mysterious healing power, have been completely broken and dissipated, just like the process of the town being swept by the historical hurricane, irreversible. In the novel "Island", published in 2020, the fishing village of the protagonist's hometown has a thousand-year history, but its future is "robbed of a planning map, and a dream city will be born here". The villagers who settled here faced a dilemma, whether to resist the advance of the excavator with their flesh or to succumb to pressure from all sides and sign the demolition agreement. The uncle of the village soul figure "I" gave another solution: the untimely sound of gongs and drums sounded in the village temple late at night, and the villagers were gathered to witness a cup-throwing ceremony in front of the statue of General Fubo, and he asked the gods to make a choice for everyone. The hurricane that uprooted everything, down the flow of time, did not stop for a moment, and the ancient ritual of stripping the foundation and core and leaving empty shells in vain was held again, more like a hopeless resistance.

However, after the hurricane swept through, the people did not stop praying for the protection, enlightenment and appeasement of some hidden force, because Lao Pan's descendants, who once harbored chivalrous dreams and fantasies about "carrying bamboo swords on their backs to Longtang", lived in a ruined urban village and "held an ice coconut for a long summer", and after entering the adult world, they would still be entangled in various sounds, illusions, smells and nightmares. In the novella "The Sea Breeze Is Cold This Year", the former "prodigal son" Qingyi now has a worry-free livelihood, but he often loses his soul, because he always dreams of the baby he beat up in the dense forest, so he and his friend Kitten go to seek the help of the mysterious pottery man Lao Lin, who is said to be able to burn pottery for those children who have not yet died before birth, and after holding some kind of ceremony, smash the pottery and bury it, which can soothe the uneasy soul. In the eyes of the kitten, the short, shabby, wrinkled craftsman, with murderous eyes, was shrouded in a lonely and mysterious atmosphere, although there was an amazing craft that could be exchanged for fame and wealth, he chose to stay away from the crowd and live alone in the dilapidated shed, just like the self-exiled prodigal son in Gu Long's novel, "This can't help but remind me of this old forest, who is also a frustrated person full of heart, otherwise how could he play with mud in the wilderness for a lifetime?" The almost crazy boiling breath at the "Junpo Festival" contrasted so sharply with the lonely figure of Lao Lin. When the long-standing overall order collapses, miracles no longer come to the place where people gather, how to awaken the chaotic and rushing secret energy inside life, so that the ant-like mortals and the vast heavens and the earth have a counterpart, becoming a problem that lonely individuals need to face.

At the end of "The Sea Breeze Is Cold This Year", the kitten began to wonder: Maybe Lao Lin has never existed? In the novel "Island", Wu Zhishan, who has lived alone on a desert island for more than forty years, has a real prototype. Lin Sen had met himself before writing this novel, and had also climbed to the real-life Fire Pai Island and seen the dilapidated houses on the island. The same is full of heart, self-exiled people, Lao Lin is just isolated and isolated, Wu Zhishan has approached the ultimate loneliness, and the isolated island has become one, becoming a "dead man living in the human world", a lone ghost. Regarding this story that Lin Sen has been brewing for many years and hopes to write, which is "the most marginal and central, the most unique and the most universal", he himself and many commentators have deeply explained it. As I understand it, the novel seems to contain two slightly different voices from "I", the "old man who keeps the island", who listens to the story. With the temperament of a "prodigal son", eager to find an escape exit " , listening to Wu Zhishan's forty years of isolated island life, "like a big hard disk" greedily backed up a super large file, to be left in the dead of night to slide the mouse to read, in his eyes "quiet island with only one person, beautiful everything is very illusory." In Wu Zhishan,however, "loneliness" is not a kind of data that can be copied and smoothly homogeneous, but a concrete physical experience year after year, day after day. I am more interested in the part of his narration that "rubs" with the slowness of time, that is, the alternation of morning and dusk, the rotation of cold and summer, hunger, thirst and euphoria, which is also the labor of callos, building houses, building fish ponds, and rebuilding after repeated damage. If you borrow the key words of the uncle's clue in the novel, Wu Zhishan does not use language, but uses his body to "create the world".

Near the end of "Island", Wu Zhishan dives into the water over and over again, looking for the closed door of life and death in the depths of the sea, and he imagines that by pushing this door open, he can open another world. In Lin Sen's latest novella, "Only Water Is Young", the underwater photographer dived into the deep sea and found the gate of another world, leading to the shore world he was familiar with. "Only Water Young" and the previously published "On the Shore of the Sea" not only expand lin sen's personal writing in a geo-spatial sense, but also respond in a potential way to his previous works. Compared with the existing maritime writings of contemporary literature, these two novels have largely shed the symbols of romantic imagination and overload. Lin Sen's sea is frightening and full of temptation, vast and magnificent, beautiful and charming, violent and dangerous and warm, and these complex feelings are presented through sensory experience and the realistic livelihood of the sea people. In Lin Sen's place, the sea is no longer a distant landscape, but a "sea of embodiment" endowed with flesh and blood, and with the body of the sea, it will naturally be contaminated with human fireworks, joys and sorrows, intertwined with the living world on the shore, and also undergo the wear and tear and reshaping of time. In the symmetrical relationship between the sea and the shore, the problems that had plagued Lao Pan, Qingyi, Lao Lin, Wu Zhishan and others also reversed their new meanings.

Lin Sen describes himself as "a plant that cannot move north, can only be nourished by the soil of the island, and can only breathe in the moist air of the island", and his works certainly have the imprint of "soil" and "air" in a specific environment, and he is also the editor of Tianya magazine. This magazine with the slogan of "Heaven has infinity, thinking endlessly" has been deeply involved in the observation and thinking of the times for decades, extending its tentacles to the surrounding fields of literature, and undoubtedly giving him a subtle influence. From Lin Sen's various plans after serving as the editor-in-chief, such as "2010-2019: My Decade and Me", "Live Broadcast and Digital Life", "Life in the Post-epidemic Era", "Unborn" Science Fiction Series, "Island Writing" Small Series, we can observe the inheritance and extension of the tradition of "Tianya", as a literary editor, his understanding of literature has never been limited to isolated islands, but towards the vast field. However, all abstract ideas still have to land in the air. In a speech to a literary editor's award, he specifically mentioned that to "return to the desk, to return to the coexistence, friction and competition with an journal, an album, an article, a paragraph, a line of sentences, a word, a punctuation", and that "such an effort is meaningful". Such an expression may also form a symmetrical relationship with his "embodied cognition" from a cutting-edge writer to middle age.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 2, 2022

Responsible Editor | He Ziying Xiong Mengrou

▲Xu Chenliang |

Xu Chenliang, born in Tianjin in 1979, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Tsinghua University. He was the executive editor of Novel Monthly and the Selected Chinese Literature, and is currently the executive editor of the People's Literature Publishing House Contemporary Magazine.