Liu Ting
● Young writers, poets. He has published novels such as "Booker Village Xinzha", essay collections "Floating Life", "Hometown", "Warmth", novel collections "All the Winds Only Blow to Them", "Chinese Qitan", "What is the most anxious thing in life is to eat", and the poetry collection "I broke my heart for this human world".
Castles in the air, mirages, stilt houses
——Huo Xiangjie's Novel Reading Notes
1
Recently, reading Huo Xiangjie's latest novel, "The Corona" (excerpt from October Novel, No. 1, 2022), gave me the opportunity to revisit his two previous works, "The Chronicle of the Spirit" and "The Complete Works of the Bronze Seat". I have a lot of messy reading feelings, but for a moment I was unable to combine them into a whole, and when I thought about it, I used speculative pragmatism to pick out three words related to "building" - mirage, aerial pavilion, and stilt building, as a possibility of understanding. I am equally powerless to give why they are and how they constitute an overview of scattered feelings, but only to provide a sense and impression whose only merit is faithfulness to the real reading experience.
Isn't it fair to say that the real reading experience should precede all theoretical interpretations? Moreover, it seems to me that Huo Xiangjie's novel is essentially a refusal to be interpreted, and to the extreme, it is even refused to be read by the average reader and critic in the current context. The rhythm of his story is current and fast, while his language is transparent and viscous (reminiscent of glue), that is, a kind of stagnation, and the tension forms a barrier that prevents the reader from going too deep into the text. In today's context, which captures the eyes and ears of the people with sound and color, and moves the heart by the twists and turns of the plot, it does not promise to provide any pleasure of reading, whether in terms of rhetoric or story, although it has a lot of wonderful expressions, and the plot of the plot is also everywhere; but you must admit that this rejection itself constitutes a special literary nature in the current literary environment. This is not a paradox, it is a kind of reality.
2
Regarding the Chronicle of the Spirit, I will arbitrarily correspond to a "castle in the air", he has fictionalized a kingdom, a civilization, a history book, that is like a snake connected from end to end, swallowing back and forth--the positive reading and backward reading of the story, but also the positive, this kind of words do not need to be repeated -- itself does not transcend the modern way of writing and understanding of literature that "form is content", but "The Chronicle of spirit" has gone further, and even touched the boundary in some places. Once the form reaches its extreme state, it is not only the content, it also has the possibility of methodology.
The novel is fiction after all, no matter how the author narrates it in a convincing tone, no matter how boring the form is, it is still fiction, and only fiction can give birth to the original meaning of the novel in itself: birth is existence. That is, from the moment it is written, all fictional stories become an entity—words, plots, knowledge, feelings, or experiences. Therefore, the castle in the sky is also a pavilion, and it is as effective as the pavilion that actually exists but we have never reached.
3
Then, the Complete Works of the Copper Seat must be a "mirage". This is a much greater dialectical project, the so-called bronze seat - the umlaut of the author's hometown of Tang - has its own basis in reality, but the entire book of more than 700,000 words still points to a kind of fiction, because what Huo Xiangjie wrote is never a "story" about a piece of the countryside, whether in the sense of Benjamin or in the sense of Genet, what he writes is "things", things and stories, just two sides of the coin of the novel, they coexist together, but never meet.
This is also the true meaning of the mirage, which is false in terms of truth and false as truth.
In the process of reading the Complete Works of the Bronze Seat, I came to mind several times Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus, The Arcade Project, which is said to be a book composed entirely of "quotations", with countless words and ideas, events, and materials juxtaposed in the same text. From this point of view, the "Complete Works of Bronze Seats" is a museum of every detail, collecting fragments left by many disciplines such as history, geography, anthropology, fieldwork and so on in the wrong place, as if the historical surpluses obtained by later generations through archaeological excavations are connected together, but, just like the jigsaw puzzle games created by people, a square piece of wood has countless possibilities for patchwork, but the original picture has only one. Another analogy is that, as in the war that is going on in the distance, what is the most important thing in the small suitcase of those refugees when they leave their homes? Passports, cash, or small objects full of memories and feelings? The Complete Works of the Bronze Seat is this suitcase, filled with the things that Huo Xiangjie is going to take away from the hot mistake, as well as the knowledge, cognition, and emotion attached to these things.
These are all blindfolds, but fortunately people are obsessed with blindfolding methods and dare not be interested in the reality behind the illusion, just as in all narratives, people are addicted to mirages, not the real city.
4
However, "Corona" does not directly correspond to the stilt house, it is only the pillar of the stilt house.
This time, Huo Xiangjie returned to the ground from the sky pavilion and mirage, borrowing the Family History of the Mo Family to sort out and deal with modern Chinese history. What do I see in Corona? I saw the enlightenment reflection of Ba Jin's "Spring and Autumn of Home" in the May Fourth period, I smelled the flesh breath of Mo Yan's "Fat Buttocks", and I felt the cold atmosphere of Chen Zhongzhong's "White Deer Plain" ancestral hall. Even without the "communication of influence," no latecomer can avoid his or her work, and must be somewhere in some chain.
What is important is the part that overflows this chain, the structure, the language, the tone, and the relationship between the texts they constitute and the real world and existing texts. Thus, the significance of corona can only be revealed in the whole system of Huo Xiangjie's writing, as a necessary and inadequate part, the corona sets off the characteristics of the first two works. If the first two works can be compared to the sky pavilion and the mirage because of their specificity, then the "Corona" is a pillar erected to support them - it can also be more vividly used as a metaphor for the similar stilt house of Mo Jiaweizi, but at the same time, Huo Xiangjie puts himself in a dangerous situation, that is, he tries to pull the sky pavilion off the ground, trying to turn the mirage into a real city.
5
In Hochschel's novels, all metaphors are metaphors, all symbols are representations, this is not a game of words, but since we entered the postmodern era (it seems to be so, it can be said), we have finally got rid of the modern way of thinking through reverse operations, which are provided to us by Kafka, Beckett and other great writers, which are the safe and warm prisons that we have always relied on, and at the same time the shackles. Modernist leggings have become increasingly difficult to withstand our increasingly obese flesh. Now, especially in the coming age of intelligence, we can only go in the opposite direction, into the interior of the symbol, we are the metaphor, and survival is the metaphor of the act itself.
What exactly are the irregular ink dots in many modernist paintings expressing? They require an entire history of art to interpret, which is the most obvious way of existence of modern art—relying on interpretation to obtain value. There is also another way of modern life, which is reversed, and interpretation precedes the work. Huo Xiangjie's works may be the interpretation itself, which so intricately points to an extremely simple picture, which is invisible, even non-existent, but not meaningless.
For me as a reader, Huo Xiangjie wrote novels by creating interpretations of novels. It can also be said that in this sense I cannot understand his novel at all, and I can only think of his novel as something (something that is not textual) and then know it through the relationship between this thing and the world in which it exists. I must always maintain a non-objective perspective on the outside, otherwise I will fall into the quagmire of his text, which is sticky, ambiguous, and ambiguous. I carefully read some of his creative talks and interviews, and he was able to show in very succinct terms what he was doing, and in his case there was an inevitable logic of thinking and text, but in the reader this logic was vague and constantly changing, at least ever-changing. Therefore, for Huo Xiangjie's novel, it is best not to explain and understand, but to read.
I have no intention of identifying Huo Xiangjie's novel as a new literary form, although it is indeed heterogeneous and different from the works of its contemporaries. We are in a reality that we cannot yet fully understand on our own, and those literary expressions that follow tradition and everyday life, and those that are maverick and even adventurous, enjoy the same status as those who judge validity, which can only be left to those who come after. Or, in a not-so-distant future, everything mentioned above could become unnecessary, like the ancient stone tools excavated in our time, no matter how shocking, can only be proof of the past, neither changing the present nor facing the future.
directory
2022-2 "October"
novelette
Other people's room/005 bells for truth
Small bean bag of jianghu /027 Gu Yu
Phoenix Dance/067 Cheng Qing
Hunting/128 Meng Xiaoshu
Golden Snowflakes of the Earthly Floating /145 Suranduo
short story
Wedding ceremony/059 Li Chao
Anniversary/163 Tao Liqun
Novel Shinkansen
Go to Haikou (short story)/196 Ding Xiaoning
Moonlight (short story)/206 Ding Xiaoning
Face and Self (Creative Talk)/213 Ding Xiaoning
Debut is Hope (Commentary)/215 Meng Fanhua
Prose
Down from Lü Liang/108 Li Jingze
Notes on the Matter of Extras/173 Leaf Rhymes
Discourse with the Long River/187 Zhang Yang Sheep
The things of the earth
The Introverted Beauty of Desert Life (Part III)/113 Half Summer
Wilderness Apocalypse/121 Liu Dongli
Read and be read
Divine Comedy: Divine Comedy/051 Liu Wenfei
Organ lineage
That lost face/092 Jing Wendong
Poetry
Safari/217 River away
Morning bird with sunflower/220 field grass
Kunlun and others/223 Guo Jianqiang
Ten Shadows on Earth/226 Zhou Qingrong
Spring, now it's your turn to express/230 Zhang Hongbo
Eucalyptus and river/232 Pak Ding An
New Era: Yuantouzhu Series/234 Zong Renfa Pang Yuliang Zhang Hongbo Yubang Sentinel Cheng Xiuhu Lu Wenli Zhonghai Zhang Xiaoxue Gong Xuan Ren Bai Wang Mingfa Wang Xuexin
Arts
Cover burning Qiu Dandan
Feng II Parent-child game Qiu Dandan
Seal three upstairs Qiu Dandan
Cover design Zhao Pingyu
Title inscription Cui Manli
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