In this world, some writers will become torches, illuminating the way to the narrow gate. Some writers will become messengers about the weight of a soul at night.
A writer and an intellectual is one who wants to soak his soul in the abyss. Instead of standing on a mountain and looking down on all beings, he himself became part of that being, roaming in the darkness of the night and seeing the light in the dust.
The stories of thirty world-class writers, a vast literary world
The first collection of literary essays by the post-95 newcomer writer Zong Cheng
A classic literary guide for the average reader
Xu Zechen, Zhang Li, Wu Qi, Liu Zichao, jointly recommended
Today, why do we still need literature?
Text | Zongcheng
The first book was published.
It is a thing that has been done this year, with a beginning and an end. There will definitely be happiness, but there will also be pressure, afraid of betraying the trust of readers, afraid of not being able to resist their own requirements for creation, so from the first draft to the completion of the book, it has lasted for nearly two years.
This is a collection of literary criticisms and stories about thirty writers. I put my understanding of writing and my careful reading of literary works in it. The book is a collection of his own published works, as well as new works that have not yet been published.
The first draft of the book was completed in the spring of 2020, and after revision, third review, supplementation, and finalization, the time has reached July 2021. But the wait is worth it, because if it is published early, the book is at best a "collection of published articles" and from the perspective of publishing a book, it has not really worked hard. But this year's revision has made the book have changed a lot in terms of layout, text, and selection of articles, it is a brand new book, and when I delivered the final draft, I also asked myself if I could be worthy of myself and worthy of the reader, so that I could finally feel at ease without feeling guilty about the hasty publication of a book.
The book is divided into three series. The first series is entitled "Dialectics of the Mind", and in evaluating the aesthetic characteristics of War and Peace, the Russian critic Chernyshevsky once put forward the idea of "dialectics of the mind". His earliest statement is based on Tolstoy's 1854-1856 Chronicle of Sevastopol, which Chernyshevsky believes is characterized by "dialectics of the mind" and "purity of moral emotions." The article, published in the magazine Modern Man, wrote: "Most poets are primarily concerned with the presentation of inner life, rather than with the secret process itself... The peculiarity of Count Tolstoy's genius is that he is not limited to expressing the results of mental processes, but is most interested in the process itself, in the dialectics of the form, the laws and the mind of the process. ”
The articles included in the previous series mainly explore the writer's excavation of psychological depth. This group of writers has a tendency to "go inward", and their literature focuses on people's psychological activities, people's way of processing memory, and focuses on the new challenges that modern people face at the spiritual level. For example, in the pen of the writer Yuan Zhesheng, the loneliness of modern people is presented in a blue nightmare-like narrative language, some people walk under the sun, and some people are eager to hide in the night and eliminate themselves. Under Liu Yiman's pen, the prosperous and rich Hong Kong lurks a soul that is eager to be loved and afraid to love, and the wet and lonely shadow in the crowd appears in a detached face. The kind and soft Fitzgerald, on the other hand, let his life form an intertextuality with the novel, and he touched the temperature of the green light in the irreparable collapse.
The series is titled "Squeezing Out the Servility of the Self" as a tribute to chekhov, a Russian writer whom I like very much, who insisted on being a sober man in an era of chaos and uncertainty, presenting the real and universal crisis of Russian society. If the first series is written about the writer's efforts to "go inward", then in the middle series, I pay more attention to the courage of the writer to "break through outward", of course, this "inside and outside" is not static, and great writers can often write about the torment of people's hearts and minds, but also feel the great changes that have taken place in society. In this section, I will write about Chekhov's pinpricks of mediocrity, and I will also write about Wang Xiaobo, such an anachronistic freelancer, who occupies a weight in the field of Chinese literature and culture. There is also Kafka, who dedicated himself to literature, Roman Gary, the melancholy humanitarian, and Qian Chung, who turned from meanness to silence, which presents not only the brave, but also the inner wandering of intellectuals.
A writer and an intellectual is one who wants to soak his soul in the abyss. Instead of standing on a mountain and looking down on all beings, he himself became part of that being, roaming in the darkness of the night and seeing the light in the dust. I like Takeuchi's comment about Lu Xun: "What Lu Xun saw was darkness. But he looked at the darkness with enthusiasm and despair. For him, only despair is real. But soon despair is not real either. Despair is also delusion. Despair is the same as hope. If despair is also delusion, then what should one do? Those who despair of despair can only become writers. I don't rely on heaven or earth, I don't support myself with anything, so I have to put everything into my own. "In this world, there are writers who will become torches, illuminating the way to the narrow gate. Some writers will become messengers about the weight of a soul at night.
As for the second edition of the book, it is a relatively pure textual analysis, aimed at literary works that I think are of excellent quality. When I was writing the next series, I was re-reading Lu Xun again, and in addition to the one included in the book, I was also focusing on the study of Lu Xun's ideological changes from 1926 to 1927. In the history of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun is the most complex and contradictory writer in his thoughts, and he is also a writer who has become an abyss of his own. The depth of his creation has surpassed that of enlightenment writers in the general sense, and it must not be summed up only with the words "critical realism" and "reflection on national nature", otherwise it is not enough to explain Lu Xun's double doubts about conservative and progressive narratives, nor can it penetrate the lonely, sneering and even faint shadow behind his passionate battle. The one who reveals the overall collapse of the old Chinese cultural structure in "The True Biography of Ah Q" is Lu Xun, and it is Lu Xun who combines lyricism, loneliness, despair and self-pity in "Weeds". In the history of modern Chinese, Lu Xun is a fascinating and dangerous abyss, but also a self-contained world, many writers are thinner and thinner the reading, and Lu Xun's words belong to the thicker they read.
In the classic perusal section, I focus on literature and the ideological and aesthetic traces behind it. For example, Lu Xun, what I care about is the use and irony of his novels for traditional resources, as well as other ways to interpret Lu Xun's novels in addition to criticizing national nature and enlightening people's hearts; for example, Wang Zengqi can explore not only his language art, but also the political, cultural and human reasons behind the popularity of his works, and the big problem behind this haunts the heads of Chinese writers, that is, the protracted debate between "art for society" and "art for art's sake".
In the part of the classic perusal, including the review of "Daming Dynasty 1566", it is also a risky attempt. In the public impression, it is well known in the form of a historical drama, but it is also a historical novel, a literary work with rich literary and ideological characteristics. Does literature necessarily come in the form of paper, and can film and television dramas, music, operas, and even today's popular talk shows also produce literature? With the help of this article, I hope to lead the way and provoke the reader to think about this issue.
In writing this book, I did not adopt a dogmatic academic analytical discourse, but tried to find a balance between "academic rationality" and "readability" to bring the writers' works and stories to life. Sometimes, training in the pure literary field can lay a solid foundation for the author, but if you immerse yourself for a long time, you will fall into a kind of vision limitation. Literature is the art of empathy, emphasizing the author's ability to perceive others, not a condescending analysis, but a true understanding of those lives, depicting the texture of life that he has not experienced. The work is the unity of the ego and the unselfishness. Only the self can be unique and charming. Only by forgetting oneself can we relax and open up. Relaxation is a gift. A writer is a reconciler of sensitivity and narcissism, plus some compassion.
A friend once asked me, "Is this a collection of literary criticism?" "I think it's more accurately a collection of thought essays, and I'm more interested in the relationship between literature and life than in a step-by-step analysis of a writer's text—how does literature affect life, and how does life feed back into literature?"
In a literary republic, why do writers take a very different path in life? When Lu Xun threw himself into the era by overcoming nothingness, why did he maintain a casual relationship with the main body of the revolution? When Fitzgerald is irretrievably headed for a breakdown, why is his life mirrored by The Great Gatsby? Starting from the death of Yuan Zhesheng, why do genius writers often go to the fate of early death?
At the same time, we may as well see the limitations of literature and break through a self-romanticizing atmosphere. I like a point by Merleau Ponty that the mind is not self-dependent, but thinks on the body. The way a person sees the world depends on the "sensual encounters" of his body. This sentence affected me because it answered why many people, who are full of wisdom and taste, show a surprising indifference to the suffering of others, or that their understanding can only achieve "decent reflection" and cannot participate in the change of harsh reality.
Reading can not replace the "sensual encounters of the body", reading, can help people feel the other, but it is still difficult to "empathize" with the other, a nobleman who is well-established in the imperial city, he can empathize with the disappearance of the dynasty, but he cannot understand the sorrow of the steppe nomads, and cannot understand the pain of death in a language. A bourgeoisie who enjoys urban civilization can reflect on his own superiority through reading, but he can neither live a hard life nor really get close to the bottom, and it is difficult for him to give up his decent conditions.
Therefore, if we want to go to the wider world, literature alone is not enough, because it cannot expand the emotional encounters of the body. How to combine reading and walking, apply knowledge to practice, and realize the "ordinaryness" of the self, rather than "superiority", may be more important.
Reading literature does not mean that literature is a cure for all diseases, and can provide you with a conclusive solution to the problems of the world, that is not the role of literature, but if literature is only a "useless beauty", only emphasizing the role of literature in lyricism and aesthetics, I am afraid it also narrows literature. Literature is not only a refuge in spiritual life, not only a tool for people to escape from reality, what we read from Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Lu Xun, Bolaño, and knowing that life is difficult, we still have to face life, even if the road ahead of justice that I believe in is difficult, and justice is dusted by darkness in a long time, I must bravely face it and pursue the goodness identified in my heart.
Literature is not a dissolution of reality, but a deeper arrival at reality by inserting the wings of imagination. It allows us to feel the concrete people, the concrete life, and see the thrill under the calm lake. It lets people know that in addition to a person's assembly line rush and the pursuit of worldly fame and fortune, there is a more open spiritual world waiting for him to explore. The young people of the town hold "Remembrance of the Watery Years" and ponder the taste of Madeleine's small snacks; the workshop workers see "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and think of the distant afternoon when Colonel Aureliano saw the ice cubes; the women trapped in the countryside read Chekhov, and she feels that life can no longer be like this... For me, this is the most beautiful moment of literature, it opens a window, and the courage of people's dust awakens in an instant.
In contemporary times, literature has been far away from its golden age, compared with high-tech, Internet, film and television entertainment, financial management and other apparent science, literature has a "sunset is infinitely good, just near dusk" twilight color, there are many people who love literature, but they are often ridiculed and ridiculed in real life, when a person engaged in literature but not mixed out of the hall, he is likely to be regarded as an out-of-date person, a non-business, escapist idleness.
In an atmosphere where pragmatism is promoted, people advocate science and adhere to technical and instrumental rationality, but these cannot respond to people's spiritual situation. In Muzier's novel The Man Without Personality, the writer euphemistically points out the "human crisis" caused by the modern order. This is a masterpiece comparable to Kafka's "The Castle", the protagonist of the book Ulrich is a small secretary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Preparatory Committee for the Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Emperor's reign, he is hard-working, eager to get ahead, and the story begins in August 1913, when he was 32 years old and in a confused period of life. He tried to be an officer, engineer, and mathematician, but all failed and did not find the meaning of life. Later, the protagonist reflects that in a whole order, he is just a part of the rules, a person who lacks freedom and autonomy, that is, as the title of the novel reveals- he is a person without personality.
Muzier wrote: "Today ... A world of nobody's personality has been produced, a world of experienceless experience. Eventually, the protagonist Ulrich realizes: "For him, possibility is more important than banal, rigid reality." Unable to find a sense of meaning in the bureaucratic system, he decided to "take a year's leave of absence" in order to understand the "system of causes and secret operations" of the reality that had been broken down into parts. But could Ulrich's choice find meaning for him? We don't know, but the questions Muzier asked in his book still confuse the world.
The thinker Sigismund Baumann once quoted "The Man Without Personality" as hoping that people will have the courage to rebel against mediocrity in their daily lives, regain their own personality, and think about the spirit of practice and humanism outside of technical rationality. Bauman believes that both sociology and literature can give readers the inspiration of life through "delicacy" and "empathy", which is also a response to the current "literary uselessness". The writer is often like a person who plants seeds. Literature is not the one that ultimately realizes the ideal, but literature is often the thing that sows the possibility.
Therefore, those who are enthusiastic about literature today need not be discouraged. As authors, we may not be the last to see spring coming, but if we all give up on ourselves, spring will never come. The ideals of a generation have slowly taken root in the delivery of the previous generation, and we have done a lot of a handover of the baton.
Today, singing down literature is a common tone. Literature is already the least expensive industry in terms of material cost today, and the nutrients it can give to mankind are not lower than the rest of the industry, and even in the ability to open up the boundaries of human language and arouse people's inner emotions, literature is still the most powerful science today.
Literature is not useless, it is a rebellion against instrumental reason, and it helps people to re-realize that there is not only one value choice in life, and that there is a wider world beyond the success or failure of kings and kings.
Finally, thank you to all the people who have helped with this book, my family and girlfriend for their encouragement and help with my writing, and my teachers, editors, and publishers. I hope that I can work hard and write better works.
Thank you to everyone who read this book.
Written in Shanghai in September 2021
Related books
"At least literature"
Author: Zongcheng
Publisher: Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication date: March 1, 2022
"At Least There Is Literature" includes thirty essays on writers' works created by the post-95 newcomer writer Zong Cheng between 2018 and 2021. This book is a collection of literary essays, divided into three series. The first series of "Dialectics of the Mind" mainly explores the writer's excavation of psychological depth, such as Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Zhang Ailing, etc., whose literature pays attention to people's psychological activities, people's way of handling memory, and focuses on the new challenges that modern people face at the spiritual level. The middle series "Squeezing out the servility of the self" focuses on the courage of writers to "break out" and the reflection of society, such as Chekhov, Kafka, Wang Xiaobo, etc. Great writers can often write about the torment of people's hearts and minds, but also feel the great changes that have taken place in society. The next series of "Classic Perusal" is a relatively pure textual perusal and analysis, in this part, the author pays more attention to the literature of Lu Xun, Wang Zengqi and other writers and the ideological and aesthetic traces behind them.
In the process of creation, the author follows the view of "literature as anthropology". On the one hand, he hopes to write the brilliance and flesh of literary characters; on the other hand, he tries to practice a methodology that combines literature and life through this work. "In writing this book, I did not adopt a dogmatic academic analytical discourse, but tried to find a balance between 'academic rationality' and 'readability' to bring the writers' work and stories to life." I am more interested in the relationship between literature and life – how does literature influence life, and how does life feed back into literature? In a literary republic, why do writers take a very different path in life? ”
About the Author
Zongcheng, born in 1997. People from Zhanjiang, Guangdong. Human observer, transcript, has won the Youth Literature Award, the first Book Review Award of Guangxi Normal University Press. His works have been scattered in "Book City", "Single Reading", "West Lake", "Works", "Caixin Weekly", etc., and some articles have been reprinted by Xinhua Digest, Selected Novels, Literature and Art Daily, etc.
Editor: Wang Hao