What is the true knowledge of literature
Wen 丨 Ge Fei
The reader and the author look for each other in the work, and thus establish a certain aesthetic identity, which is the most fascinating part of the novel
I'm less willing to explain my work, less willing to give the reader too much inducement. When a work is handed over to the reader, it should be 100% fresh and mysterious, and the reader needs to intervene and find it. Writing is in a sense similar to the peek-a-boo we played as children, where the author hides, sets up traps, and waits for the reader to finally find it. Reading, in turn, is the process by which the reader seeks an author. The reader and the author look for each other in the work, and thus establish a certain aesthetic identity, which is the most fascinating part of the novel.
Why is reading always so important? To this day, I can still feel the infinite mystery in literary works, because I will imagine myself as a character in the work, and therefore feel that I am inextricably linked to the characters, events, and stories in the work. For example, when we read "Water Margin", for a moment we will think that we are a member of the good people of Liangshan, and we have personally experienced one hundred singles and eight generals going to Liangshan; the same is true when reading "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". In an instant, we have some kind of hallucination that the fictional character in the novel really has someone, and we can smell their smell, feel their habits, feel their emotions, and laugh or cry. This is the most sacred moment that the novel brings us.
And in this process, what is really reliable is the work you are facing, and the writer's words can only be used as a limited reference. Don't take the writer's word too seriously, on the one hand, because the writer sometimes deliberately lies to induce you, and on the other hand, it involves a very common phenomenon in reading, which is the separation of the writer's intention and the text's intention.
Any writer has an intention when writing: what kind of story to weave, what kind of character to create, what kind of thinking to convey, what kind of rhetorical means to make the work complete, and so on, we call this the writer's intention. And when the work reaches the reader, it will have another intention, which narrative science calls the textual intent. The textual intent is brought out by the text itself and is completely different from the writer's intent.
One of the questions that arises from this is: Why does what the writer envisions differently from what the actual work presents?
There are two reasons for difference:
First of all, any writer is a person with flaws, a person with limitations, and these shortcomings and limitations affect his position. When he began writing, he became what we call an "experienced author." The experience here does not refer to the experience of writing, but to the experience of life. He will put his daily life experience, personal temperament, thinking about society and his own values into his writing.
But at the same time, writers will go to the opposite side of themselves in the process of writing, such as not liking a character, and liking it when they write; or they who originally hate a certain idea and write that it makes sense. We call this situation "the emergence of a model author" who goes beyond the "empirical author" itself—such as Lu Xun, whose thoughts in real life are actually completely different from those presented in works such as "Scream" and "Wandering".
What does this mean? It shows that writers will become better, broader, and more receptive in the creative process. He would check his thoughts in a larger space, and would even abandon his original ideas. This is the first reason why author intent and textual intent diverged.
Second, writing is fundamentally an unconscious activity, and the parts that a writer can control are limited. Take the writing of novels as an example: the beginning of a novel is easy to write, there can be ten thousand ways to start, but it is difficult to end. Because all the characters and all the clues set by the writer have been decided, this means that they must follow the established logic in their later development, so as to strongly restrain the writer and make the writer not do what he wants.
But writers tend to write more and more ideas later, even more than they have some kind of prediction. For example, some characters will talk to themselves because they have been given character, grow content that the writer did not think of before, and automatically unfold the story. That is, the characters have an autonomous life.
Third, the reading and comprehension of a work is influenced by many factors, the so-called a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets. When today's readers are confronted with Rabelais's Tales of the Giants or Cervantes' Don Quixote, do they interpret them the same way they did when they were just finished hundreds of years ago? Of course it's not the same. Why are classics often read and often updated? On the one hand, because these works have immortal vitality, on the other hand, due to social changes, we will stand at a new stage of history to re-examine the stories that occur in the works, with the understanding of life in the present.
So, in the final analysis, reading is still to talk directly to the text.
As more and more writing is written to entertain readers, the best things in literature are blocked
What exactly is literature?
When I was writing in my twenties, I was fascinated by how to embody a certain knowledge and intelligence in fiction. Because of this fascination, I have no interest in stories that can be seen at a glance, and prefer to play an intellectual game with the reader in writing. So I will write some so-called unique stories, and "Lost Boat" was written in this mentality. Sometimes when I write, there are many big writers in my head, for example, when I describe a scene or describe a character, I may have in my mind how McVille wrote "Moby Dick", and I will want to break my wrist with these big writers: people have written so well, is it possible for me to write in another way. For me at the time, it was a very fascinating part of writing.
But my thinking has changed a lot in recent years. As more and more writing is written for the purpose of entertaining readers, the best and most central things in literature are blocked. This thing, I call true knowledge. Flaubert tells us a lot in Madame Bovary, including the true knowledge of what literature is. Literature provides a medium that requires us to understand life and then acquire a certain sense of life.
And such a true knowledge is missing in the creation and reading of current literature.
On a creative level, the biggest difference between modern writers and writers of Shi Nai'an's time is that the resources we can use are not history, myths, and folktales, but our daily experiences, because we are going to describe everyday life. The question involved here is: What is the relationship between the writer's character and the writer as a real-life person? That is, the so-called autobiographical relationship with actual life.
The Japanese critic Hideo Kobayashi has a view that since Thackeray and Dickens, the novel has established countless paradigms to describe the so-called objectified and objectified social life, and the variety of social life provides a steady stream of material for writing, which makes the novelist almost omnipotent: there is no role that can make you difficult, there is no field that you cannot touch. In this case, most realist novelists are not writing novels, but are being written by novels.
This statement struck me very hard, because it revealed a problem: an author's specific cultivation, specific origin, his own emotional structure and social cognition, and even his own despair and pain, seem to be useless today. That is, the "experienced author" I mentioned above is becoming less and less important in writing. This leads to the biggest problem that the novel encounters today is that it does not have any sense of mystery, does not carry any real emotion, and all the characters are interchangeable without specificity. A writer can make up a story very complex and bizarre, because today there is a lot of social news to provide templates for it, and it does not require much skill.
In this case, assuming that a person has good language skills and the ability to tell stories, is it necessary to become a good writer? My answer is no. No matter how high the talent, no matter how good the storytelling ability, can not help a person to really write even a little bit of the true knowledge of life, full of light. In Hideo Kobayashi's view, what really matters in literature is "unique characters," not "characters who look like real." The reason why we cannot forget some characters in literature is precisely because he is unique, he has strong characteristics. These folktales that we remember when we are children, these historical legends, the characters in them fly over the wall, have a very great energy, have a certain legend, whether he is real or not, he is unique.
This ability to portray characters, along with such characters, has been lost in today's fiction writing. We treat the character as an object that has nothing to do with us, but we orient him and turn him into a part of society, and we describe him, not as Kobayashi emphasized: to write a good character, we must have three things, first respect the character, second, understand the character, and third, love the character. In fact, this is not Kobayashi's opinion alone. Wang Zengqi also said that the most important premise of literary writing is that you must drill into the hearts of the other party; Hemingway also made a similar request when teaching students to observe characters, that is, you must communicate with the hearts of the characters.
How do you understand a person's heart? Only through love, through understanding, through real interaction, so what you have to mobilize at this time is your real experience, which I call true knowledge in literature. This true knowledge is largely obscured today. But if such knowledge is not relevant to your world, how do we make a real connection with our readers?
The lack of true knowledge also exists at the level of reading. Many people imitate novels after reading them and use them to guide their lives. Emma in "Madame Bovary" is a very typical such reader, she read a lot of romantic novels, feel that life is full of romance, life should be lived like this, her outlook on life has been laid before she entered the actual life, so dreaming all day, dreaming of a handsome, personable person, dancing with herself under the lamp, but she is married to a veterinarian, this person is very wooden, half a day without saying a word, can not earn a few dollars, which led to the final collapse of her life.
Reading is not for imitation, and for the reader, what is really valuable in literature is that little bit of truth. It is in this sense that literature is closely related to our lives. It can help us change our lives, and it should help us change our lives, but it is by no means that we directly imitate the characters in the novel, but we need to comprehensively understand the wisdom in the work, find the writer's attitude to existence and understanding, and then obtain a certain perception, apply this perception to your actual life, if it is confirmed, it can really help you, and it will become a really useful thing.
Only in this way can we truly reshape the relationship between literature and life and life, and can we establish a certain profound connection between literature and life and life.
(Source: Wen Wei Po)
Ge Fei was born in 1964, a disciple of Jiangsu Sultan, a famous contemporary writer and scholar, a professor of literature at Tsinghua University, and a winner of the Ninth Mao Dun Literature Award. He is the author of more than 40 short and medium stories such as "Lost Boat" and "Encounter", six novels such as "The Banner of Desire", "Peach Blossoms on the Face of Man", "Dreams in Mountains and Rivers", and "Spring in Jiangnan", as well as many treatises and essays such as "The Face of Novel Art", "Novel Narrative Research", "Invitation to Literature", "The Face of Borges", etc.