Each year's novels are numerous and have infinite richness. Assuming that someone has so much energy that they can read it all through, then each year's work can actually constitute a literary history. Today we seem to have an infinitely rich literary life, but the other side of the coin is that in the spiritual life of the masses, pure literature is hovering between the ming and the dead. This state has a long history, "half is flame and half seawater" has long been not only at the level of phenomena, but also a mechanism and perspective for us to understand and deal with literary problems.
"Fictional Genealogy":
Revolutionary history and life show
So many people live: illiterate, talented
Bandits, small owners... What kind of marriage
Passed on me, have I ever wandered the imperial palace of the Han Dynasty?
A night of swords. Trafficking Night
Death also failed to stop the dawn of respite
I made up the names of many ancestors and shouted them one by one
There was always some voice in response; but I
I can't see them, just like I can't see my own face
- Nishikawa, "The Fictional Genealogy"
In the river of genes, I am the reincarnation of the souls of the ancestors, and when I wander, can their footprints confirm my future? This is not only the poet's natural question, but also the emotion that is easy to produce after reading a large number of novels.
2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, and there are countless great Chinese stories in the centenary history of the Party. Zhu Xiuhai's "The White Horse Gone" is written about "thousands of people who paid the sacrifice for victory in those years and are still bearing the price of victory after victory"; Yu Zhiyan's "Superposition of Life and Death" writes about the spy personnel who have devoted their lives to "password warfare" from the Republic of China to the present, and they are full of bows and snake shadows, grass and trees are soldiers, but they are unswerving; Lao Teng's "Northland" writes about the fathers who built the Northern Wilderness decades ago; Wen Yanxia's "Tiger Calf" writes about the soldiers of the Young Communist International Division who shed every drop of blood; Long Pingping's "Age of Awakening" Write about the revolutionary course of the early Communists and benevolent men... 2021 is the "big year" of theme creation, and a number of excellent novels with both literary and political nature have come out. How to tell history well is a lifeline running through the creation of contemporary novels, and countless writers and theorists have made achievements on this road and have also taken detours, and the balance between politics and literature still occupies a vital position in the literary ecology. The reason why works such as "The Distant White Horse" have reached a fairly high artistic standard is that they write about the encounters of heroes on the sensory level of ordinary people in peacetime, giving romance a sense of reality and writing tragedy with a posture close to the reader.
In contrast to the creation of the theme of party history, a batch of novels depicting daily life at present in 2021 are interesting. Liu Zhenyun's "Three Autumns in One Day", Wei Sixiao's "Wang Nenghao", Luo Weizhang's "Who Is Knocking on the Door", Li Zishu's "Flowing Customs", Zhong Wenyin's "Don't Send", Shi Yifeng's "Crossing the Ocean to Send You", Zheng Zaihuan's "3" and so on are all impressive. The commonality of these works lies in the depiction of the hardships of daily life and the respectability of ordinary life. "One Day, Three Autumns" and "Farewell" are all in the atmosphere of reincarnation, writing about how much loneliness, parting and inner struggle people have to go through in order to complete their lives; "Wang Nenghao" writes about the lonely and early-dead people in the withered countryside, the men and women in the novel, the young and old, the parents are short, the red and white happy events are readily available, the teenagers who are confused and can't see the way out, the men and women who admit to leaving the home after the well, the elderly who are sick and doomed, gathered into a rural world character history or demise history; "The Vulgar Land" also sees the entire community through one person. Through the life of the blind girl Yinxia, she has insight into human feelings and vast beings. "Who's Knocking" and "3" both write group portraits of characters, and the fate of wading in the sea of life may not be great, but it is by no means simple.
Reading works with historical themes and realistic themes, the marchers on the streets of semi-colonial and semi-feudal society in 1921, or the soldiers who died and froze to death in the War of Resistance, the War of Liberation, the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, if they suddenly traveled to today's era away from cold, hunger and war, would they feel that they had come to "paradise"? If the lonely, wandering, and anxious people of the present have traveled to the past, will they feel that the things that have bothered them are not worth mentioning? Simply put, will having people in the background of the two stories swap identities collide with more unique aesthetics and ideas? "Crossing" cannot happen in practice, but the novel is a fictional art that realistically and historically, to some extent, can dominate time. So is such a question or assumption more helpful for us to understand history and reality?
In the "fictional genealogy", the subtle and deep spiritual blood between the ancestors and the present people flows, but on both sides of the river of time, the eyes of the two sides look at each other with strangeness. Since the beginning of seventeen years of literature, the creation of "main themes" has often caused controversy due to authenticity and artistry; since the decline of avant-garde literature in the mid-1980s, the vision of "pure literature" has been constantly collapsing to a depressed and limited daily life, and it has also been criticized. The former is as deep as fire and the latter is as deep as water, constituting a macro picture of contemporary novel creation. What is between flame and seawater? The sky occasionally has a flash of inspiration, and the endless stream is popular literature, genre literature, and films, games, animations, and short videos that are constantly infiltrating inward. This landscape is by no means magnificent and gorgeous, but there are still gaps. The speed of change in reality is not inferior to that of a hundred years ago, when the blood of the revolutionaries still continues to be the forerunners in all walks of life and in all fields today. At the same time, the sorrow and joy of human beings are not only starving and cold, but also having new survival dilemmas and spiritual problems after the improvement of material life, and entering history with the richer and more delicate perception of today's people, we can obtain a more holographic understanding. The blank space of contemporary fiction may lie in the fusion of fire and seawater, and in the case of the 2021 novel, we can fully expect this day to come.
"Standing reading" or "sitting reading":
Literature in the spiritual life of the times
In 2021, there are many novels that make people read a lot of cheerful and enjoyable novels. Ma Boyong's "Lychees of Chang'an" writes that Li Shande, a minor official of the Tang Dynasty, was framed by people to carry "impossible tasks", exhausted his knowledge of arithmetic, geography and hydrology, and transported fresh lychees from Lingnan to Chang'an before they deteriorated under the pressure of life and death of power operation and people's hearts. "The Lychee of Chang'an" is not a "cool text" of "workplace counterattack" or "small people opening and hanging". From a literary point of view, the narrative of the novel can be called exquisite, the protagonist in just a few months to fly Guanshan, which is not only a race between space and time, but also a war between the individual and the world; from the perspective of learning, the author is familiar with historical materials, behind the bizarre and tortuous plot is a wealth of historical details, the novel is both imaginative and solid; from an ideological point of view, the impossibility is turned into a microscopic incision that may be even more ingenious, leading to the rise and fall of the dynasty, and the people's hearts are cold.
Chen Yan's "Comedy" tells the absurd and tortuous acting career of clown actor He Gabe. Half of the novel is an ugly man chasing a beautiful woman, unable to seek it, tossing and turning, the absurd things that are implicitly in line with human nature constantly provoke the nerves of desire, and half is the history of the development of comedy and even the entire stage art in recent decades. He Gabei has changed from an old-school artist with equal emphasis on art and character to a comedy star, and then to a chess piece in the operation of big data comedy and capital operation, behind which is the change of his comedy art from persuasion to kindness to vulgar kitsch, and then purely to stimulate the physiological response of "laughter". "Comedy" is written as both a personal history and a social history, which has both the indoctrinating significance of traditional literary works and the aesthetic temperament of modern tragedy with black humor and absurdity.
Wang Song's "Flying Flower Tune" is written about anecdotes of the Republic of China and strange talks about the rivers and lakes, and "tune" is one of the "businesses" of the rivers and lakes such as "golden skin color hanging jury tuning willows", and it is a living to set up bureaus and cheat. The collision of thousands of masters is interesting, and the interlocking story is under the steaming, pyrotechnic Republic of China. With the help of the "rare knowledge" dictated by the predecessors of the jianghu and the rich fieldwork, coupled with the authentic Tone of Jinmen, "Flying Flower Tune" fills in the gaps of history.
The above three works, as well as Yu Hua's "Wencheng", Dongxi's "Echo", Fan Wen's "The Sun Turns", Zhou Daxin's "Los Angeles Flowers Falling", and the above-mentioned "One Day and Three Autumns" and "Wang Nenghao", belong to works that can be "read standing". The ideas the author wants to express are presented in a state close to the reader, with engaging openings, continuous conflicts and narrative climaxes, and a lingering and addictive finale. It is entirely conceivable that the reader will find such a book in a state of only freedom of thought, a bus, subway, airplane, or any other state of freedom of thought, immerse himself in it for a short time, and then return to reality endlessly, and literature can become one of the most important spiritual companions in contemporary life.
At the same time, in 2021, there are also many long articles that must be "sat and read" - eliminating selfish distractions and all kinds of distractions, setting aside a paragraph from the busy time plan that is not invaded by water and fire, and reading it calmly. Lin Bai's "North Stream" and the above-mentioned "Who is Knocking on the Door", "Customary Land", "Don't Send" and so on are such works, readers need to calm their minds, let the thinking and enthusiasm tilt to the work for a long time, in order to appreciate the personality of the author's language, enter the atmosphere created by the work, and experience the mystery. "Standing reading" or "sitting reading" is like the history or reality, exalted or calm discussed above, with differences in categories and personalities without superiority or inferiority, let alone either/or. But in the vision of half flame and half seawater, the distinction between the two and the complex issues involved may be worth discussing.
In today's era when literature needs to share audiences with film, television, anime, and games, the less time people can "sit" and face literature, the more it becomes a question worth discussing whether the work is easy to read and readable. Most of the above works that can be "read while standing" involve the history of different eras or the situation of all walks of life and all walks of life, so it is easy to read - "cool" reading is not necessarily the core quality, so that readers can deepen their understanding of history, reality, and life, and have a sense of "worth the trip". At one time, this was not a question worth mentioning, and it was even thought that too much emphasis on indoctrination or cognitive function would weaken the literary nature. But today, the pitch relationship between literature and reality, authors and readers is changing, and although ordinary readers are difficult to write and spend, the gap with writers in terms of cognitive level, information acquisition, and life experience has been significantly narrowed. Writers may have to make more efforts, in addition to properly handling traditional tasks such as characters, plots, and languages, to spill their cognitive tentacles into literature and personal daily life, and spread them to various fields such as history, society, politics, economics, law, and popular culture, in order to create works that are of interest to ordinary readers.
The novel and even contemporary literature as a whole have made great efforts to expand their influence, one of which is to combine literature with film and television. This relationship can be traced back to the relationship between ancient variations and scripts and speaking and singing performances, and at the beginning, long fictional narrative literature was to a certain extent subordinate to stage performance. Later, the screenplay became an independent genre, and the excellent works of the novel were still adapted into film and television, but this was not the original purpose of their creation. In the 1980s and 1990s, the film and television of some works brought amazing benefits to writers, and a generation of writers who grew up under the conditions of new technologies watched film and television works from an early age, resulting in changes in the relationship between novels and film and television. More and more novels tend to be "imaged", writers pay more attention to writing things that are easy to generate a sense of picture, can be captured and framed by vision and space, and the continuity of long novels in time is often disintegrated by spatial paragraphs. This trend is really normal, as long as literature does not give up its own subjectivity, this trend also brings new room for development. However, in 2021, the original novels of some film and television works came out in the form of a script outline rather than a novel, which made people have to be alert and rethink the relationship between literature and film and television, literary reputation and market efficiency.
"Standing reading" and "sitting reading", the world and personal life, imaging and writing, as well as more complex market benefits and literary reputation, capital operation and artistic creation, all construct the current state of literature that is half seawater and half flame in different dimensions. The scenery divided in two is dazzling, but even more reverie is the time when the two mingle. There are thorns and discords between the flame and the sea, and it also gives birth to a huge space for literature to change its thinking and extend itself. Whether it is the gilding of the ocean surface by the chixia, or the fire reflected in the deep blue sky, it is worth our expectation.