(At the event site, editor and writer Cheng Yongxin answered questions)
Cheng Yongxin's "If Only the First Sight" × Fudan MFA × creative writing at East China Normal University
The impact of individual experience on writing is deeply rooted in the bone marrow (II)
Question 2: Hello, Mr. Cheng. My question revolves around the vivid female character in If Only First Sight, the Queen. I would like to ask, why did the queen die of illness at the end? Is it a compensation for the imperfection of her moral character in the secular sense?
Cheng Yongxin: This question is very interesting, it involves one aspect related to writing, one related to ethics, and the other related to personal life experience.
1. Writing
Everyone learns creative writing in the Chinese department, and we all know that there are many ways to write. For example, Lu Xun can write where his mouth is and where his eyes are, and he uses a gentle way to turn all kinds of things into characters under words, a kind of character that is pinched together.
For example, the Latin American writer Llosa, Llosa's novels, novellas, short stories, including tomes, at that time we liked to read his not too long "Aunt Julia and the Writer", those writers who were not so famous in China at that time, everyone was very enthusiastic about reading this novel.
Why does he have such a great fit and affinity? It is because the character of "Aunt Julia and the Writer" is a real character in life, and it will appear in real life. But llosa's great point is that he reshapes the real human figure through his work to achieve the depth or height he expects.
I thought about Llosa's approach to writing for a long time. For example, when Wang Anyi, chairman of the Shanghai Writers Association, wrote, the most discussed question at the beginning was how to move from the "small self" to the "big me", from the world of literati to go out to express society and life, and their "small self" should be hidden.
We are accustomed to expressing the "big self" in this way through literary criticism and discussion, but through my understanding of Llosa's writing, according to my observations, I find that this is not the case, and it is possible to show the "big me" in the "small self", which I found after reading and thinking about Llosa.
He was completely different from Márquez. Márquez is a very imaginative, very powerful writer, he can imagine the details of life as images, everyone is familiar with being singled up into a flying carpet, he can turn the small things in life into grand images in his works, which is a great ability of his.
But Llosa is not like this, he is completely writing about personal life, individual experience, but do not think that he writes "small", in fact, through the surrounding characters he wrote "big".
2. Ethics
"Ethics" is also very interesting to talk about, how many years of human history? But why can works of love flourish for a long time? It is because people's emotions change too much, too subtle, too individualized. In such a long history, why have some excellent works about emotions and about love emerged and been recognized in every era? There are so many famous works about love in the long history of literature, and to this day, the topic of love has not been written, and the writer has never stopped exploring and exploring feelings and love.
But I think from the perspective of sociology and ethics, after China's reform and opening up over the years, everyone feels that life is richer than before, and our quality of life seems to have improved, but what about our spiritual life? Has our spiritual life also improved? Personally, I think it is necessary to grasp the depth of this problem, to dig and think.
There is also a complex problem, when human life is raised to a certain height, your requirements for emotions and spiritual life will change.
About love, about marriage, European philosophers, artists, writers, for example, I first think of sartre and Beauvoir's relationship, everyone must know these two people, they have never been married in their lives, these European philosophers, artists, writers, they have been exploring human relations all their lives, especially the various problems that accompany the interaction between the opposite sex.
I used to live with international students in my junior year, and I lived with a philosopher who studied existentialism, and he was a very fanatical follower of Sartre, so his emotional pattern was exactly the same as Sartre's.
What are they doing in China? They said to learn crosstalk. Why did the teacher tell me to go? I happened to be in the drama troupe, and the teacher said that you should communicate with them, but in fact, they had no interest in crosstalk at all, so they borrowed a name to come here to investigate.
When I first started living, because he had a wife, he lived in another room, which was equivalent to renting two rooms, and I was living alone in this room, and he hardly came. Sometimes I was sleeping, and he sneaked into the house and secretly read books to learn Chinese, in fact, he was not so interested in Chinese, but his wife's Chinese was very good.
That's when we started collaborating on a translation of Sartre's Confinement, and there was another translation called Basement, which had a variety of different translations. He said, "Your translation is wrong, your translator is wrong about Sartre's original meaning." "Later this work did not go on, because we began to argue before we could translate a few sentences, and he was particularly thoughtful.
For example, we once went to a wedding together and we were arguing along the way, and I have to admit that he looks at the problem from a very deep perspective, he thinks of all kinds of problems, so he will ask all kinds of questions. He was a philosopher who was particularly good at thinking and discussing, and he wrote many books, but he went to China under the cloak of learning cross-talk to investigate China.
As a bystander, I looked at his relationship with his wife and found it particularly interesting. For example, sometimes his wife would come to me alone and I would say, "What about your husband?" She said, "He went on vacation." "I feel like in their relationship, they're going to spend their lives exploring the various relationship angles of emotion, and there's an ethical conflict.
European philosophers and European thinkers, perhaps because economic and social development is hundreds of years faster than ours, so when they reach certain material living conditions, they begin to think about the complexity of human emotions relatively early, as well as human emotions, human personality, human character and ethics, confrontation and conflict with the social contract, with the law, and with all aspects of thought.
This international student pays great attention to the publicity of personality, he hopes that his personality will be fully free, but he must conform to human nature in emotional interaction, and in the process, there will be all kinds of problems and problems.
Sometimes I see his wife in a very depressed mood and she looks very bad. Because she likes to watch Chinese movies, I sometimes advise her to go to Chinese movies, and you will see all kinds of interpersonal problems in the movies.
We see in the text and in the books that there are many problems between Beauvoir and Sartre, some of which seem to be solved, but more problems that cannot be solved.
3. Life prototype
Because my novel does have a life archetype (social archetype), I have to admit that it is also a very deep memory that I will never forget.
The archetype of life is some of the passing of the years, not that I deliberately arranged it this way, and I feel sorry for the departure of real people. As a friend, my heart will also be very painful, and this pain will last a long time. Because as you get older, you will become more and more nostalgic, and the years will bring you all the beauty, all the pain, all the entanglements, all the entanglements, will leave a mark in your heart, just like all birds flying by will leave a chirp.
So it's not that I'm going to deliberately arrange her death, she did die in life. She is a very sincere, very authentic person.
I wrote in the novel that she was very disgusted with others for being insincere, disgusted that others had cheated on her in their emotional lives, that she was a person who pursued a sense of authenticity, but that her emotional genes might not be the same as those of ordinary girls, and that she could not stand to be with a man forever. Don't say forever, even if a month, a week, a day, from morning to night to see the same man, she will be bored, she is such a person, I write a real state of life.
Question 3: Hello teacher, I would like to ask the protagonist on the journey to Inner Mongolia met a female teacher, I would like to ask what is the purpose of writing behind the role of female teacher? The female teacher and Moriko's girlfriend, and the queen are all called Qingqing, what is the purpose of the coincidence of the same name?
Cheng Yongxin: In the novel, it is written that the protagonist goes to the grassland and several female characters are called Qingqing, which is the design of the writing, and I want to write several characters who are also women, and some similar things in personality.
This is the design of the novel, which for me has a little bit of a redemptive meaning, and the protagonist ends up losing to the female teacher. However, the design of emotions in this way seems to be particularly shallow, and we think of it more detached.
He was in his dealings with the female teacher, because the female teacher was completely different from the queen in personality, but she was also called Qingqing, which was an illusion in his heart, and he felt that the female teacher was another Qingqing who came to make him feel uncomfortable.
In fact, the female teacher is a person who longs for a deeper, more dedicated love with a certain opposite sex. But because he didn't love her so much, because he had the consequences of the queen's great charm and influence in his heart, he always felt that the female teacher behind him was sent by the queen, which made him feel uncomfortable, guilty, and made him suffer.
Question 4: Hello teacher, thank you very much for this opportunity to communicate with Teacher Cheng.
Then the question of the classmate just now, if the setting of the two Qingqing is to change the male protagonist's understanding and position of love from the victim to the perpetrator, so as to deepen his understanding of love, he has appeared in the male protagonist's room on a drunken night, that clip I did not understand too much, is she the girl who appeared at noon the next day? Is she David's girlfriend Dabo?
If yes, David is obviously very angry, why does David look at the male protagonist with a bad smile? If not, why add a clip of a girl coming to your room? I feel that all the girls in the text must have some relationship with the male protagonist, there is a feeling of the male protagonist's aura, I don't know what is the reason for teacher Cheng you designed these clips?
Cheng Yongxin: Thank you, this student looked at it so carefully.
I found that there are many places in Zhejiang where the place names are particularly interesting, that place is called Jinyun, in Zhejiang near the mountains, more remote, but also more magical, if the students have not been, you can feel its atmosphere. At night it's not particularly brightly lit, but there's nightlife all over the streets, which is how I feel about that place.
In the novel, it is written that David likes the big wave girl, and then the big wave girl asks him to borrow money, he wants to develop a normal relationship with her, but when he arrives at jinyun, he has drunk too much supper that night, and then the big wave girl ran away with a group of girls, all in a drunken situation, there is no way to say too clearly, the protagonist is completely amnesiac.
So when you say that the person who sneaks into the door, or the person sitting on the bed, is a real person or a dummy, I don't know myself, I just want to create such an atmosphere, a state of mind, mainly to show that David is angry.
But the next day when we had lunch together, there was indeed a girl at the same table, but where did this girl come from, what exactly she did, I don't know, it is amazing that she left a pair of couplets.
This is also based on real life experience, once in Zhejiang there was a PEN club, I found that there is a girl like a peasant girl who has read a lot of books. I was very impressed, so I wrote her into the novel, as to whether she is real or illusory, I don't know, maybe it is true or false.
(To be continued)
"If Only the First Sight"
Cheng Yongxin
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
This book is a collection of novels recently completed by Yongxin, the main programmer of harvest literary magazine. The novel of the same title, "If Only the First Sight", starts from individual experience and shows the soul of the 1980s and 1990s; "The Shape of the Wind" tells the story of a college student's encounter after knocking on the iron door of an old house; "Qingcheng Mountain" explores the relationship between ideas, dreams and human nature; "Mahjong World" tells about friendship, love and life; "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" writes about Teresa Teng's relationship with an era. The five novels have different themes, which is the author's long-term understanding and practice of literary work.
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
Shanghai Story Club Culture Media Co., Ltd
Shanghai Chewing Character Culture Communication Co., Ltd