The original novel of "Human World" actually has a very obvious similarity with Liang Xiaosheng's TV drama script "Year Ring" created in the early 1990s.
This similarity is manifested in the following aspects:
First, the narrative structure is similar.
"The World of Man" was written from 1969 to 2014, but it did not cover all aspects, but focused on selecting several time periods.
This characteristic has been formed in "The Ring of The Year".
Stills from "The Rings of The Year"
The "Year Ring" is roughly divided into the student era on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the young years, the early reform and opening up in the 1980s, and the early 1990s.
The time period of "In the World", except for the "student era", is basically consistent with the time period of "Year Ring", but according to the progress of time, a time period after 2001 is added, which can be called the "new century" time period.
"The World of Man" is outside the time period of the key performance, like "The Ring of The Year", which is omitted through the way of "time frog jump", and the progress of the events that occur between these is mainly supplemented by the tone of retrospection.
This structure, which Liang Xiaosheng calls a "paper clip" structure, has been skillfully used as early as "Year Rings", and now in "The World of Man", it has once again been added to the timeline of the "New Century", which constitutes the narrative characteristics of "Man in the World", which is also a new willow branch, and there is nothing surprising about it.
But the obvious fact is that the "paper needle" structure avoids the linear narrative of the flowing account, and in the novel with a large time span, it is indeed a life-saving straw. After the author wrote "The World of Man" for more than 20 years, the writing structure of "Year Ring" was used again, and it can be seen that Liang Xiaosheng never forgot the "paperclip" structure that emerged in "Year Ring", adding a more complete and in-depth reading of the period drama novel.
Second, the character structure is similar.
A group of young characters in "Ring of The Year" can see the corresponding translation composition in "The World of Man".
Wu Zhenqing in "Ring of the Year" (called Liu Zhenxing after the filming of the TV series), after returning to the city, engaged in the construction industry and was responsible for the transformation of the old city. This can be equated with the revitalization of the complete transformation of light character films initiated by Bingyi in "The World of Man".
Liu Zhenxing in "The Ring of The Year"
Wu Zhenqing relied on the advantage of building a near-water building in the new district to get a new home for his friend's family. This is like the righteousness in "The World" to help the poor families in the poor neighborhoods to get a satisfactory new house.
Zhang Meng in the novel, whose father was the secretary of the district party committee at that time, suffered during the Cultural Revolution, which is similar to the character setting of Hao Dongmei in "The World".
Liu Zhenxing and Zhang Meng
When Zhang Meng was in Zhiqingdian, she gave birth to a daughter named Xiao Yue, who had been fostering in a local family, and later the little girl grew to be eighteen or nineteen years old, went to the city alone to look for her mother, and returned to Zhang Meng's side.
Xiao Yue in "The Ring of The Year"
This is also the same as zhou rong in "The World", who gave birth to a daughter, but has not been around, either in foster care at her grandfather's house or in Hao Dongmei's house.
Moreover, it is interesting that Zhang Meng's daughter is called Xiao Yue, and Zhou Rong's daughter is called Zhou Yue (called Feng Yue in the TV series), which is not a fuel-saving lamp. In "Ring of The Year", after Xiao Yue returned to the city, she provoked trouble everywhere, making Zhang Meng and her friends of Zhiqing miserable. Similarly, in the original novel of "The World of Man", Zhou Yue did not let the Zhou family feel at peace. It seems that the girl named "Yue" is not the lord of peace of mind.
Feng Yue
This also reflects Liang Xiaosheng's distrust and potential mentality of the next generation of Zhiqing. He put his heavy brushstrokes on the Zhiqing generation, while their next generation thought they were the Beat generation. It should not be a coincidence that the two girls named "Yue" in "The Ring of the Year" and "The World of Man" have the same situation of causing trouble and embarrassing people.
Of course, the setting of Feng Yue in the TV series has been completely changed, and Feng Yue has become a window for the next generation to affirm the values of the fathers, and the importance is self-evident. In the original novel, Liang Xiaosheng is very pessimistic about the next generation, and there is also a macro theory of the "IQ cycle" in the family in the novel, believing that "the IQ of a family has a dormant period, an active period and a peak period, and then it will enter the dormant period again." Fortunately, this general theory is placed in the mouth of Cai Xiaoguang, who is "not serious at all" in the novel, and will not cause a more real backlash, but this kind of "bloodline theory" that is in line with "dragon and dragon, phoenix and phoenix" appears openly in the novel, which can more or less explain the qualitative reason why Liang Xiaosheng is full of distrust and unfriendliness to the next generation in the novel.
Gong Weize
Gong Weize, who went all the way from the police to the director of public security in "In the World of Man", also has a policeman Han Debao in "The Ring of Years" who basically shows a corresponding state. In the year when the novel ended, Han Debao was still a warm-hearted person, and finally died in the line of duty, just like the early Gong Weize, who was also responsive to the residents of the street and enthusiastically helped. It's just that people are constantly changing, and Gong Wei is definitely a good person at the point where "The Ring of Years" ends, that is, in the early nineties, but he is still late and insecure, and he has not landed safely.
Xu Ke and Han Debao in "The Ring of The Year"
Even the names of the characters in "The Ring of The Year" are very similar to the names of people in "The World".
We can compare (the first is the characters in "The Ring of the Year", and the latter is the characters in "The World"):
Hao Mei - Hao Dongmei;
Han Debao - Cao Debao;
Xiao Yue - Zhou Yue (Feng Yue).
The shantytown in The Rings of The Year
Third, the core key plot is similar.
The core key plots in "The World of Man" are focused on Zheng Juan.
Taking Zheng Juan as the starting point, four men were implicated, namely Bingkun, Luo Shibin, Tu Zhiqiang, and Shui Ziliu.
In order to ensure the purity of Zheng Juan, Liang Xiaosheng can be said to have painstakingly designed Luo Shibin and Shui Ziliu as a pair of homosexuals, so that the two people were excluded from the men who had an affair with Zheng Juan.
Luo Shibin, on the other hand, invaded Zheng Juan through forcible means.
Under such a setting, Zheng Juan is still emotionally pure, which can guarantee the high purity of emotions with Bingkun, and the first child Born to Zheng Juan, Nan Nan, is the result of a loveless collision, so that the existence of Nan Nan not only ensures that it does not affect Zheng Juan's pure personality, but also can implicate the story chain of the next generation.
This setting in "The World of Man" can be described as a tightly sewn mortise, worked in the heart, and used to describe it as "increasing one point is too long, subtracting one point is too short".
The complex relationship between Zheng Juan's and the scattered plot of the novel has initially appeared in "The Ring of Years", and the structure is out of the same band as "The World".
This is the tragic first half of Hao Mei's life like Zheng Juan.com.
Hao Mei in "The Ring of the Year" joined the team to the corps, in 1973, escorting supplies out, some of the other Zhiqing on the road were sick, some went home, only one Shanghai Zhiqing accompanied her, took the opportunity to rape Hao Mei, causing Hao Mei to become pregnant, and the male Zhiqing was frightened and jumped into the well to commit suicide.
After returning to the city, Hao Mei returned to the city with the little girl who was born, and unfortunately, the little girl suffered from bone cancer and died of incurable treatment, leaving a bone-deep pain, just like the death of Zhou Nan in "The World of Man".
Later, Hao Mei met a neighbor with a kind heart, and after the two people were combined, they gave birth to a boy.
We can roughly see that Zheng Juan's plot line is extremely similar to Hao Mei's personality in "The Ring of the Year". Zheng Juan and Hao Mei, two women, were both abused and gave birth to children, who later died tragically. After the two women remarried, they both gave birth to another son.
"In the World" on the basis of the more rough character modeling in "Ring of Years", the fate line of Zheng Juan, a girl in the city at the same time, also "walked up" according to the unfortunate fluctuations of Hao Mei, who was raped, gave birth to a boy, the boy died after adulthood, zheng Juan married the kind Bingkun and gave birth to a son.
This core plot setting undoubtedly has many advantages, that is, it can accommodate different people of all colors, etc., and integrate into the network of character relationships intertwined with family and blood relations.
We all know that the reason why Greek mythology has a crisscrossing divine spectrum is because each god has a blood relationship with interlaced canine teeth. And why has the Chinese divine genealogy not been established? It is that there is no blood relationship between the gods.
From this, we can see that why Liang Xiaosheng likes the setting of "invading and having children" is because this mode can install a "perpetual motion machine" for the conflict between a woman and multiple men, and with this core plot engine, the storyline can start on its own and run automatically.
Hao Mei's setting in "The Ring of The Year", the male Zhiqing who violated the subject, was handled as dead, and the plot momentum was cut in half.
In "The World of Man", the main body of the invasion, Luo Shibin, did not die immediately, so that the plot of fighting for his son was naturally born, and with this plot, the first half of "The World of Man" can basically go on its own like the "wooden cow and flowing horse" invented by Zhuge Liang. Later, the violence caused by this conflict of snatching children increased, resulting in The unexpected death of Luo Shibin, Bingkun was imprisoned, and the plot was completed. To tell the truth, looking at the Zhou family's treacherous life situation in "The World of Man", how many people around us can meet?
Liang Xiaosheng's repeated use of technical core plots is only to configure the plot power of the novel that is also needed at the technical level, but in a strict sense, the characters have become victims of this technical operation or creation, and the practical significance of the novel has to be discounted in the face of the fate line of artificial fluctuations.
Once we encounter a period drama, from "The Ring of The Year" to "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng supports the main framework and main vein clues of the novel, which must be completed by relying on the core power that can be briefly summarized as "invading and giving birth to children", then, what gives us to think is whether such a model can become a template that is inseparable from its origin and universal, and is generalized to a scattered material. If so, will the intervention of this technical creative setting break the requirements of the literary reality of reality reflection and revelation?