"The place of Bemba in Jangel is a paradise for happiness on earth. The people there were all twenty-five years old, no aging and no death. ”
This is a beautiful sentence in the Epic Ofe of the Mongol Hero "Jianger". When it blew through the heart of the writer Liu Liangcheng like the wind, the seeds of the novel "Bemba" were planted.
Liu Liangcheng's latest novel "Bemba"
"Bemba" constructs a vast and boundless time, placing stories in the wilderness of time. The epic poem "Jangel" was rewritten, and several children became the protagonists of the new story: they moved, played hide-and-seek, dreamed, and made the cruel war life into a fun game. In this world, time is completely spread out, everywhere, people can run back to childhood in a thought, throw their childhood friends out for seven years, or they can reach out and pull the beauty of the years to come. The time in the dream is also seen, and it is connected with the actual time. In their dreams, they discover that their lives are actually being spoken, and they come from real-world "dreamers."
This is a true "book of time", which has a childlike and innocent epic temperament, but also has the precision and prosperity of adults after they have re-entered their childhood. It takes the reader through time and space, dream and wake, epic and reality, continues the rupture between reality and fiction, and uses "understanding" to let go of suffering and heaviness, and soothes people's hearts with the compound eyes of children and adults. The novel was first published in October Novels, Issue 5, 2020, and has just been launched by Yilin Publishing House. More than 30,000 words of content have also been added to the single line, which is a very important addition to liu liangcheng's view.
Recently, Liu Liangcheng was interviewed by the surging news reporter on this new work, which is also the first literary interview he has received on "Bemba". In the narration, Liu Liangcheng's speed of speech is always very slow. His calm voice floats between heaven and earth, sometimes introducing subtle observations, sometimes rolling up vast imaginations, bringing people into nature, as if all things themselves are speaking, making people out of their souls. Listening to his narration is undoubtedly also a journey through time, in such a time outside of time, the dead are given souls, and the forgotten will be remembered.
Liu Liangcheng
【Dialogue】
A world that always follows behind time
The Paper: In Bemba, your depiction of time is fascinating and naïve. Why is there such a rich perception of time?
Liu Liangcheng: I am in Xinjiang, and I can often feel the time difference. The day here is two hours behind your side, and it's an area that's behind time. What I have spent in Xinjiang is the time after time.
You can imagine from the geography: at dusk, the sky in the coastal areas gradually begins to darken, all the way from the coast, inland, and the west, representing the time of the night slowly approaching Xinjiang, and the sky in Xinjiang is still bright, it follows the darkness of the Chinese land, and finally becomes dark. Such a world, which always follows behind time, is actually very similar to the literary world.
The Paper: The literary world in your eyes always follows behind time?
Liu Liangcheng: In reality, people in any time zone will think that the darkness and dawn of their location are correct. People in each time zone live in their own dawn. In "A Man's Village", I wrote that "the sky begins to light up from our village", and also wrote that "the sky is not bright is a matter of the sky, and everyone has their own morning in their hearts, and when the time comes, people will wake up on their own." This is the dawn of the writer's own pen.
I live in Xinjiang, naturally she wakes up in the dark of dawn. The sky in Xinjiang is always later than other places, two hours late every day, and when the year comes down, it is nearly a month late, hundreds of years and thousands of years later, in fact, it has been many years later than other places. There is a feeling of living in literary time.
There is a time lag between literature and reality. This is also the meaning of literature. The time that has passed in reality can be restarted in literature.
Literature as I understand it is the past. When everyone is moving forward, there are always some people who follow the crowd and pick up their past. Literature is the past of mankind. For writers, the darkness and dawn of the literary world are either slow and long, or instantaneous for thousands of years, and writers are magicians of time, creating time, extinguishing time, and most importantly preserving time. Reading those excellent classical literature, it seems to tell a story, but in fact it is preserved for a period of time, and what we enter through the story is the past time.
Sunset back to the village. Photography by Liu Liangcheng
The Paper: What is it like when the sky darkens in Xinjiang?
Liu Liangcheng: Usually in the summer, there is still a sunset at eleven o'clock in the evening. Because of the vast territory, even if the sun sets on the horizon, the sunset is still in the sky, and you can feel that the dusk is very long. By ten o'clock, eleven o'clock, many people on your side were sleeping, and the circle of friends was quiet, but the people here were still awake.
The Paper: What was it like at that time?
Liu Liangcheng: Alone. Everyone is in a dream, and you are awake alone in the middle of the night at this time. You said that writing in Xinjiang is different from writing elsewhere, there is a time difference. Don't think about problems at a time. Of course, when every writer writes, he may be in a time of solo closure. A solo writer monopolizes a time zone. That time was his.
The Paper: You live in Rapeseed Ditch in Mulei County, Xinjiang, and you also founded Mulei Academy, which is engaged in farming, reading and writing. I think that "Bemba's special perception of time" is also related to your slow-paced local life?
Liu Liangcheng: There should be a relationship. In the countryside, I can feel the big time, and this big time is a day and a night, very complete. The poplar tree in front of my house can show me the whole day: wake up in the morning, its shadow is in the west, and when it wakes up from the nap, its shadow is already in the east, and when its shadow extends infinitely to dusk, the shadow of a tree generates the whole night, which is a complete world.
In the high-rise buildings of the city, the sun rose in mid-air before the sun came out. In the village, I knew that the sun was rising behind the courtyard wall on the east side of my house and falling from behind the mud wall on the west side of my house. The sun, moon, and stars, all happen on the roof of our house. So, the city you live in, though large, is submerged in it. The countryside where I live, though small, is at the center of the whole living world.
Rapeseed furrow sunrise. Photography: Mu Zhen
Between sleep and wake, create another kind of truth that belongs to literature
The Paper: Falling asleep and waking up in such a world also feels satisfied. In fact, "Bemba" also has a very fascinating story about "dreaming" and "waking".
Liu Liangcheng: I have always thought about people's sleep and wake-up, and it is indeed a very important problem. One-third of the time we spend every day sleeping, doing dreams that we wake up or remember or forget, dreams after dreams, are not part of our lives? We also age in our dreams.
Of course, you may not wear your shoes when you run in your dreams, you wear the shoes of your dreams, you cry in your dreams, you laugh in your dreams, you die in your dreams, and you come back to life during the day. But we can't help but take sleep and dreams seriously, it's almost half of our lives, in a state where we can't observe and control it on the scale of reality. We say dreams are fake. When we say that dreams are false, half of our lives are false, and we live half of our lives in a false life, is this true? We need to find meaning for dreams.
The Paper: There are two worlds in "Bemba", one is the fictional epic world, that is, the bemba world, and the other is the real world where the epic narrator Qi is located. In your narrative, the real world is no more advanced than the fictional world, and even the "dreamer" Qi with a wizarding temperament in the real world is smuggled from the epic world. I wonder if there is something behind this kind of writing that hides some of your thoughts about reality and fiction?
Liu Liangcheng: Or about dreams. Dreams are extra time in real life. In the construction of the book "Bemba", the real-world Qi created the epic, then the epic itself is a dream, a dream created by Qi. But Qi created epics and the many heroes in the epics, and he did not know that the characters he created would dream of themselves, and dreams were a kind of life that these epic characters superfluous. So in the end it becomes that the characters in the epic are more capable than Qi, and all these abilities are given to them by dreams. In the end, including the dream game they created, etc., this was unexpected by the creators of the Bemba world. This dream world is unknown to Qi and cannot be controlled.
The practical significance of dreams is that we have the freedom to dream, but we can't preset dreams, not that I want to do what dreams I want to do at night, design it during the day, and do it at night with my eyes closed. We can't control our dreams. Dreams have their own unpredictable growth. This is the dream reality.
Junger's epic hero. Painting by Zhang Yonghe
The Paper: "Bemba" itself is also a direct embodiment of your concept of fiction, right? In the story, people themselves will dream, and gradually have their own skills and personality, which also implies your understanding of fictional characters?
Liu Liangcheng: A writer writes a character in the resurrection of a soul. Novelists all know that when the character is written vividly, the character himself will act, the direction of the novel will be determined by the character of the character, you shape the character like this, he will naturally have such a story, will say such a thing, and naturally will have such a fate. This is a behavioral skill that the living fictional characters themselves acquire in the novel. Sometimes the novelist will follow the characters he has written alive, to the end of the story, it seems that the novelist is writing the story, but it is actually the character who is going down to complete his mission.
After king Hari in "Bemba" knows that he is a story character who has been raped, he has worked harder to create one wonderful and interesting story after another, because he knows that a character without a story is to be thrown away by the rapper.
The Paper: You have an essay called "Literature is the Art of Dreaming", which has a sentence like this: "What writers do is to constantly transform reality into dreams, and then bring dreams back to reality." Between sleep and wake, create another kind of truth that belongs to literature. I think this quote is particularly appropriate for Bemba.
Liu Liangcheng: This sentence should be an interpretation of "Bemba". I also mentioned in that article that writers have to learn from dreams. Writers may be the kind of people who learn literary expression early in their dreams. No school can produce writers, and the only way to cultivate writers may be the dark dream school, all the dreams, all the ways of dreaming, and later we have transformed them into the way of writing. For example, dreams are jumpy, dreams are metaphorical, uncertain, and so on, these are all literary, and they have become literary writing methods.
"We woke up from an endless sleep, all back home." - "Bemba"
The eyes of childhood, hidden behind the eyes of adults, open quietly
The Paper: The unique thinking about time in "Bemba" is the child's thinking, right?
Liu Liangcheng: In the eyes of children, dreams at night and what happens during the day may be the same true. I don't know if your mom and dad would ever tell you that everything in your dreams is fake, and that the world that wakes up during the day is the real thing. But children at a certain age will not easily believe this, he thinks it is all the same. Everything that happens during the day, when he falls asleep, extends into the dream, and the "sleep" and "wake up" of time are connected, which may be the child's concept of time. Reality and dreams in the world of Bemba are also connected. Dreams are also a reality.
The Paper: I think "Bemba" is also a novel with children as the protagonists, and the three most skilled characters in the novel- Honggur, Heran, and King Hari, are all children. Young people who live forever at the age of 25 are less cute than naïve children. It is mentioned in the novel that 25 is the best age, but it is also the easiest age to slip through, is this written related to your views on different age groups?
Liu Liangcheng: When I wrote "Bemba", I was first moved by the poem "Everyone lives at the age of 25" in Jianger's epic poem. How do people live at age 25 without aging? Epics don't need to give a reason. But "Bemba" is a modern novel, and I need to find a reason for everyone to live to the age of 25, which becomes a part of the whole story logic. Jangel called on all Bembas to hide in the narrow gap of time at the age of 25, the best time of people's youth, the time when they were the most powerful and courageous to resist any foreign enemy. But who is the only person in Bemba who is not in this time? Hongur. He did not grow up with them, he stayed nursing, going out and fighting again and again in his own mind.
So you see, time in Bemba is like the wind, like the wilderness, like the jungle, it's everywhere, there's no past, there's no future, the past and the future are in the same patch of time. When we reach the age of 25, our childhood selves are still in childhood, and only those adults have grown up.
Liu Liangcheng was with his granddaughter
The Paper: From your early essays and novels to "Bemba", childhood followed like a shadow.
Liu Liangcheng: From "One Man's Village" to "Virtual Land" and "Bemba", there are many children's images. Childhood memories have actually been influencing writers, and unconsciously, they will return to their childhood to see the world and use their childhood vision to see the world. Sometimes I don't know, I am obviously writing an adult story, but inexplicably slipped into childhood, after watching so many years of life, the eyes of childhood were closed, and the childhood eye hidden behind the eyes was quietly opened.
Like King Hari, he has the worldly eyes of an adult and the eyes of childhood. I like this character very much, and what I have portrayed in him is a whole person, this person includes his own childhood, adulthood and old age. Originally, he could also manage the country well with two adult eyes, but he had to look at the country repeatedly with two eyes, which was a kind of compound vision. I often do this in my writing, in fact, the king of Hari may be myself, I often feel that I have an eye behind my eyes, it is different. When the writing enters a very deep state, that eye opens.
The Paper: Do you feel that as you get older, your feelings about time become richer and richer?
Liu Liangcheng: My view of time, or the formation of this model of time, began with the earliest poems, starting from "One Man's Village", to "Virtual Earth", to "Bemba", which may be a continuation. The area where I live, there are vast fields, endless deserts, long northwest winds, and the boundlessness of this geographical space makes people's understanding of time different from other places.
As a writer, I have been creating time, creating time that allows me to stay in the world for a long time. "Bemba" creates a time wish: all life goes to old age and can go back, even if this life is over, people can still go to the dream to continue their lives. Life is gone, but dreams are still there, people are still alive in dreams, including the games of dreaming, and although those games have become a kind of war, into a struggle for the right to dream, in all dreams people are living in a different way.
In a writer's pen, time does not throw away any life
The Paper: The "Bemba" has one more chapter than the magazine version, telling the story of Benpa Donggui, which is particularly well added. How did you come up with the idea of making such a supplement at that time?
Liu Liangcheng: "Dong Gui" was not written when it was published in October magazine, it was originally another novel. I had planned to write "Donggui" and prepared it for many years. The great migration of the Turks from the Volga River valley through the long winter to return to the motherland, 100,000 people and millions of livestock sacrificed on the road, and finally returned to the motherland, and the epic poem of Jianger was also brought back from this return to the east. This clue is presented in "Bemba". "Bemba" is part of the "Return to the East". Before writing about the clunky reality, I write the lighthearted and playful Bemba.
But when "Bemba" was almost finished, I lost my original interest in the theme of "Donggui", so I condensed "Donggui" into "Bemba", and the twelve heroes you saw to save Hranzi were the main story of Donggui, and I condensed it into a chapter and wrote it here. But "Bemba" still leaves a foreshadowing at the end, and in the last paragraph, Helan is born, and Ceggy says that he was born in a year of disaster, indicating that Helan's return to the east will begin when he is five years old. In fact, it is still possible to write another one, but I don't plan to write it at present, so let's put it aside.
The Paper: Why do you want to put it first?
Liu Liangcheng: The history of Donggui is indeed too heavy, so many deaths, I am still unwilling to face it with my own novel. As I wrote in Bemba, when you write about death, the dead die again, and as a writer, you join in that death, and you die countless times.
The Paper: How do you understand the pain in the world?
Liu Liangcheng: My previous novel, "Carrying Words", was all about pain. A thousand years ago, two nations of different faiths went to war. The battle of faith took place in the area where I lived, and although it happened a thousand years ago, when I read the relevant documents of this history, I can still feel the pain of the people in that war. That kind of pain is about the body, about the heart. That kind of pain, no matter how many years have passed, will always be felt from the depths of history.
After the writing of "The Tale of The Tale", I thought that I should come out of this pain, so when I interpreted the epic in "Bemba", I put forward the idea that the heroes in the epic are painless, and a nation has walked out of its own history, out of the pain in history, these stories can survive in the epic, and it does not bring the pain of reality to the epic.
Liu Liangcheng at the Mulei Donkey Farm
The Paper: "Bemba" actually gives me a feeling of "lightness", like carrying wings, liberating the depth of the earth and the thickness of the epic, and should be in line with your prose - "talk about the things on the earth to the sky". Many things on earth are suffering and heavy, but you will let the words carry those sufferings and heaviness, how do you think about the weight and lightness in novel writing?
Liu Liangcheng: If the heavy, miserable life is finally understood by us, this heavy and bitter life will be safely put down. If we cannot understand, then the suffering on earth is still suffering, and the heaviness is still the heaviness. I think that literature should present the suffering and heaviness of the earth, and at the same time, literature also needs writers to use their own unique understanding to put down the heaviness and suffering on the earth, which is also an attitude towards life.
Of course, there are some things that cannot be avoided, like the passage in Bemba about the twelve heroes who go to save Heranzi, it is heavy, hard as a rock, so heavy that it cannot be hidden. Epic wants to dodge it and make all the wars a game, but the reality that is close at hand cannot be avoided. So the extra chapter in Bemba is actually what I think is very necessary throughout the text, including finally getting the epic characters back to reality, looking at the origin of the story, and looking at it is reassuring, because there is still Qi telling their story. The people in the epic finally know that they were created by Qi, and they return to the real world again and again, on the one hand, the epic itself will create Qi, on the other hand, they also look back at the epic world from the level of reality, and the two sides care for each other, just as our dreams and reality are actually caring for each other. The dreams that we forget are the other eye that opens in life while we are asleep, peering into and caring for the world in our hearts.
The Paper: In The Tales, you also created ghosts at the end of all deaths. It seems that in your novels, you will always think of a way, maybe through dreams, maybe through the ghost world, in short, you will not let life disappear completely.
Liu Liangcheng: In my pen, time is gentle, time will not discard any life, when your own life is over, life will continue to exist in time in another form. At least in my novels, for the time that my words have pioneered, all life has been there. Death exists in the form of death, and even if man reaches the end of time, the life he once had is still there. Because what I open is an endless wilderness of time, in which everyone lives into their own crowd: the childhood self, the youth self, the prime-age self, the old self, densely packed in this time wilderness, going back will encounter their youth and childhood, and going forward will meet their old age.
Yilin Publishing House launched the "Works of Liu Liangcheng" series
【Afterword】
In this dialogue, Liu Liangcheng said the most, that is, "time".
Whether it is talking about the new work "Bemba" or his consistent view of the novel, whether it is talking about illusory dreams or deep epics, whether it is talking about distant childhood or current rural life, all the narration is related to "time". Even at the beginning of the interview, he said that he didn't really want to talk about it after the novel was written, because he wanted to escape the "time field" in the novel as soon as possible. At the time, he said: "I also avoided a lot of interviews, because I was dragged in again to tell the stories that took you years." ”
Fortunately, starting from Xinjiang", "always two hours later than other places", starting from the very long dusk in Xinjiang, Liu Liangcheng took people into the magical time world of "Bemba". In fact, the first time I read Bemba, the most incredible feeling stemmed from the "time" in it: it could pause, fast-forward or reverse, it could be seen and touched like a concrete object, and the so-called "past, present, and future" were all in the same spatial dimension, with time in front of and behind, and time in the sky and on the ground.
So this interview is also largely about figuring out the question: Why can one have such a rich sense of time? Is it because Xinjiang is located "after time"? Because of the rich literary imagination? Or is it because of an innocent childlike heart, or is it a respect for heaven and earth? Each reader, who thinks of his or her own perception of time, may also have his own answers.