Editor's Note
"Literature Guanlan" is a special issue opened by China Writers Network in "Literature and Art Daily", of which the special edition of "Mao Dun Literature Award Winning Writers Research" aims to summarize the award-winning works and the experience of contemporary novel creation, we invite writers, critics or review and revisit the representative works of the winners, or take the pulse of the overall style of their creation, or analyze their literary creations in recent years, and strive to form a new look of research for the winners of the Mao Dun Literature Award.
Writer Introduction
Liang Xiaosheng (1949~) was formerly known as Liang Shaosheng. Originally from Rongcheng, Shandong, he was born in Harbin. He graduated from the Department of Chinese of Fudan University in 1977. He is currently a professor at the School of Humanities at Beijing Language and Culture University. He is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and a librarian of the Central Research Museum of Literature and History. He is a member of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Plenary Committees of the China Writers Association. He is the author of dozens of works such as "There Is a Snowstorm Tonight", "This Is a Magical Land", "Syracuse", "The Age of Returning to the City", "Ring of the Year", "Zhiqing" and many other works, and many works have been translated and introduced overseas. The novel "The World of Man" won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award.
The novel "The World of Man" won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award
The narrative ambition of The World and the revival of epic traditions
Li Linrong
Liang Xiaosheng's three-volume novel "The World of Man" was first published in December 2017, and won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award with the highest vote in August 2019. At the beginning of publication and at the time of the award, this heavy work has received special attention from readers, the literary world and the book market. But its intensity and popularity are far less than the ratings heat wave triggered by the TV series of the same name adapted from it during the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger just past, which premiered in CCTV prime time. This seems to show that in the links of social communication and public acceptance, film and television drama adaptations that directly appeal to audiovisual experience can also continue to empower and add luster to the original works in the form of texts. In this way, from the perspective of summarizing the experience of literary creation and evaluating the gains and losses of literary creation, we can re-examine the original elements of the original work that have undergone changes in form or function through the adaptation of tv dramas, and may be able to have the enlightenment of viewing in the mirror and attacking the wrong mountain. In this regard, it is easy to be ignored in the comments of impression appreciation, but the first element that must be faced first in the actual creation and generation of the meaning of the work is the narrator.
In a TV series, the narrator simply hears his voice and does not see the narration of his person. However, the role of the famous actor Chen Daoming makes the voiceover voiceover have a bit of a special role that does not appear in the camera. The narrator in the original novel is solid and solid throughout the three volumes of text. He is also an outsider and a bystander of the story, but he uses Zhou Xiang's frank telling and description to open and end the whole story, to configure a meticulous mind and expression for the words and deeds of each character in the story, and from time to time to stand at the height of the "third eye" overlooking the overall situation of the story, to express feelings and comments on the encounters of various characters in the story, and finally make his voice and breath fill all the gaps and corners of the work. As is customary, this belongs to the typical all-knowing, all-powerful God-like narrator.
In contrast, the narration in the TV series appears to be restrained, low-key, and restrained. After the opening credits of the first episode, the narrator preemptively presses the scene of the character's appearance, as if to set some kind of tone for the whole show. However, the short duration and the limitations of timbre and tone processing make the increasingly scattered narration in subsequent episodes unable to intervene in the plot more and more naturally in addition to pointing out the background of the era, explaining the details of the picture and supplementing the inner feelings of the characters, and if they are in harmony with the soundtrack, lines and character performances, they complement each other to achieve the combined effect of rendering the atmosphere and deepening the theme. Of course, this may be an overly demanding luxury that extends from the reading experience and reading habits of paper books. As the crystallization of the audiovisual art and entertainment industry, film and television dramas do not originally need to rely on or amplify the simple language performance efficiency like radio dramas or audiobooks.
What is really worth noting and pondering here is that the soul of novel art is embodied in the construction of narrative forms, and novels that pursue a realistic epic style usually focus on the construction of their own style on the setting of the narrator and its narrative mode, but once they are adapted from the novel to the film and television drama, the first thing that is greatly deleted or even completely abandoned is the narrator and the narrative discourse, and the characters and plots that are originally dispatched and manipulated by the narrator in the narrative discourse can often enjoy the treatment of overall preservation.
In order to make up for this loss, many film and television dramas born out of the realist epic style novel have carefully preserved and tried their best to highlight the voice of the narrator who plays a leading role in the original novel. Among the mao dun literature award winners in the 1980s and 1990s, the TV series "Bell and Drum Tower" and "Ordinary World" were also interviewed by senior drama actors and broadcast artists such as Tian Chunkui and Zhang Jiasheng, accompanied by highly expressive narrators. While retaining the narration, the remake of "Ordinary World" in recent years also adds a recording of the writer Lu Yao himself reciting the opening sentence of the novel at the beginning of the film, revealing a deep sense of courtesy to the original novel.
A history of contemporary Chinese literature runs through a main line of realist-style epic narratives that are deeply rooted in Rio Tinto and constantly transformed. A number of novels with highly genred themes emerged during the "Seventeen Years", such as "Defending Yan'an" and "Red Sun", which reflected the Liberation War, "Three Mile Bay", "Great Changes in Mountains and Townships", and "History of Entrepreneurship", which reflected the agricultural cooperative movement, "Red Flag Spectrum" and "Song of Youth", which reflected the awakening of peasants and the growth of young intellectuals, "The Morning of Shanghai", which reflected the socialist transformation of urban capitalist industry and commerce, in order to compose the pre-history of the founding of New China and simultaneously depict the social development process of New China. Established a large platter model of seeing the same in the same and the same in the same.
In the 1980s, Liu Xinwu's "Bell and Drum Tower" and Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" and other painstaking works, while reflecting on the waves of literature, reform literature and root-seeking literature, continued to deepen the "seventeen years" model, and found another way, for the epic novel to break out the plot focus from tense social struggle to soothing daily life, the narrative tone from high-profile "edutainment" to civilian and personalized pouring out of the new road. This kind of long narrative path of lowering the body, narrowing the horizon, and walking through the side of the individual in family ethics and social relations resonates with the grand narrative melody stirred in the trend of reform, reflection and root-seeking in the grasp, expectation and belief of the general trend and goal of social development. But they fill in and act as the whisperer of the marching march of the marching times. In the early years of the new era when legendary stories led by heroes occupy the "foreground" of the literary world, the mortal trivia that swirls in the whirlpool of family ethics can only be used as a small episode and background sound to embellish and set off the main melody.
With the deepening of the reform of the economic system, intensive commercial relations and economic activities have opened up people's horizons of looking at each other and looking at the world horizontally, the idealistic atmosphere of group-based in social and cultural customs and daily life atmosphere has gradually faded, the realism of the individual has become increasingly strong, and the narrative style of civilian language has finally gained momentum, and has spread in a wide range spanning novels, prose, poetry, and even drama and film and television creation, blooming a little brilliance of "literature of a generation". The cold and solemn historical magistrate or the wise old-man narrator who has read the vicissitudes of the past has begun to disappear from the literary world. The avant-garde neohistoric novel breaks down narrative power into self-talk from a subjective perspective that is divergent. Most of the traditional long historical novels no longer use the hindsight style of historians or storytellers to interpret the story of the "heroes of the crowd" with a panoramic perspective and multi-line progress, but instead mostly focus on the biography of the characters with a single-line narrative, and in addition to the self-description of the characters in the story itself and the direct interjection of the author who makes the situational statement, he is unable or unwilling to set up a meta-narrator or meta-narrative layer that envelops and controls the overall situation of the story. The historical novels, which are surrounded by biographies and piled up, are like a barn full of grain, which is not a fruitful harvest.
The new historical narrative, flaunted by the relativist view of history of "public noise", and the old-school approach of dealing with historical themes with single-line biographical writing, are essentially dodging the difficult challenge of grasping and expressing history as a whole. At the same time, the heroic narratives and grand narratives of the anti-writing in the guise of absurdity or magic have been erected in a corner of the literary world, and several long novels have carved out enclaves from the theme camp of traditional realist epic narratives, and more attempts have covered the close-up areas of literary materials that traditional epic narratives seem to have been unable to set foot in.
In the early 1980s, Liang Xiaosheng, who was in his early 30s, began to be famous in the literary world for his debut works infused with youth and blood and heroic sorrow, "This is a Magical Land" and "Tonight There is a Blizzard", which were infused with youthful flesh and heroic sorrow, and successively won the National Excellent Short Story and Excellent Novella Awards. In the following thirty or forty years, he could be described as fiery and non-stop on the road of creation, and in terms of the high output of his works and the breadth of genres, he could be called a first-class athlete among the writers of his generation. In the novel alone, since "Syracuse", Liang Xiaosheng has maintained the diligent and prolific rhythm of producing a new work at least every other year. In addition, he also devotes himself to prose essays and essays that directly attack social reality with a more diligent and active attitude.
Liang Xiaosheng in most literary history textbooks and literary research treatises is still stuck in the light cavalry of Zhiqing literature that swept by the major trends of scarred, reflective, and root-seeking literature in those years, while Liang Xiaosheng, who was actually creating, has already rushed all the way to the fission of literary thinking and literary concepts that have to return to the realist tradition of the literary world in the new period. According to his later review in "The Self-Introduction to the Red Panic": "At a certain time, I felt that I was exhausted on the creative road of realism, and I was cornered, so I had to stumble to the absurd. But while repeatedly experimenting with the new methods of so-called absurd realism, Liang Xiaosheng gradually confirmed a little understanding from the people and things he repeatedly wrote about in ordinary life: "A few great people, or can be called 'fathers of the times'; and our ordinary people are actually only the children of the times forever." Conforming to the times cannot fail to become our law of survival..."
Today, it seems that ordinary people who are children of the times cannot but conform to the times as the law of survival, and this realization is related to Liang Xiaosheng's social outlook and even more related to his literary outlook. As a result, Liang Xiaosheng's novel, which has almost swept through the life patterns of various social classes impacted by the torrent of the market economy at the level of themes, has returned to and firmly anchored in the territory of the realist tradition in terms of creative methods and creative concepts. Completely different from the realistic face of his early creation, which is only out of the trend of following and imitating, Liang Xiaosheng's realistic pursuit in novel creation in the past ten years has a deep sense of self-integration and self-reflection. The high-profile idealism that prevailed thirty or forty years ago, and the mobius circle of contemporary fashion, has changed into a commoner whisper in the context of daily life. Liang Xiaosheng's story of Hou Zhiqing in "The Age of Return to the City" has shed the shell of the specific situation of a specific group of people, and there are signs of confusion with the novels, plays and non-fiction essay reviews he has written since then aimed at other groups of people and other genres. This means that a writer, in the long journey of life and literature, has finally come to a realm where he can reconcile with his past self-state and past choices.
As a result, the former dwelling place called "Dirty Street" in previous works, the dark and distorted state of human morality that is lost in greed and evil deeds, and the beautiful ideals and pure beliefs that have faded into the logic of real life that is only utilitarian, have all changed scenery step by step, gathered together, and spliced together a warm and open. And the energy that sustains and condenses all this comes neither from the high heavens where the gods are located, nor from the dark underground, but from the human world composed of ordinary families. The simple and ordinary kindness that the parents and children of every harmonious family have passed down from generation to generation is the source of all the light and heat in the world. In every family, there must always be at least one person who pays more than others to protect the harmony of the family. In works before "The World of Man", Liang Xiaosheng often naturally assigned this important role to his mother. In "The World of Man", the role changed from singular to plural, in addition to the mother, the father, and their youngest son Zhou Bingkun.
The reason why such a story can be established, the subtle reason for the creative mechanism is that the narrator of the entire work is actually set to an invisible character whose ideological feelings and cognitive level are closest to the eldest brother Zhou Bingyi. Zhou Bingyi's guilty feelings for his younger brother, who has been burdened by the family for many years, projected into the narrative of Zhou Bingkun's bittersweet life course, with a layer of efficiency enhancement function of a warm color filter or halo substrate. The personality of Zhou Bingyi's smooth growth from a top son to a senior cadre is also closest to the narrator in the novel who can tell the historical veins of the light character film, the Gongle District and even the entire A-city, and can also make a precise evaluation of the role positioning of the historical transformation significance of the country's entry into reform and opening up from 1976 to 1986.
In order to focus on strengthening the foundation of the world in the ordinary people themselves, Zhou Bingyi, who had the status of an official, quickly moved away from the main axis of the story, so that Bingkun suffered several disasters and disasters, but he could not get the care of his eldest brother; and his sister Zhou Rong, who was bent on running to the far away and poetry to find true love, and the poet Feng Huacheng, who had deeply attracted Zhou Rong, were only used as flat supporting roles for themselves, setting off the family that Bingkun and his parents painstakingly supported. Compared with Bingkun, whose career resume was only the acting director of the editorial department of a popular literary magazine, the sister who later taught at the university and the well-known poet brother-in-law were all genuine high-level intellectuals, but they were not smart at maintaining and guarding the harmony and happiness of the big family of their parents and brothers and their own small families. Outside the Zhou family, Cai Xiaoguang, a classmate of Bingkun's sister who had sought help with his scalp, and Qu Xiuzhen, a retired old cadre, proved with selfless behavior that the sincere friendship connection between ordinary people and senior cadres was not impossible, which was similar to the cross-class marriage between Zhou Bingyi and Hao Dongmei, which made Bingyi more powerful in his career.
Bingyi was finally given the opportunity to be transferred to the vice mayor of his hometown A City, and Zhou Rong, who had already stayed in Beijing to teach after graduation, was suddenly transferred back to the university in her hometown due to a marriage change. These plot arrangements are obviously to surround the children of the Zhou family around their parents, so that their stories and Bingkun's stories are intertwined, and together they are interpreted into the story of a big family that is not scattered by the long river of time. This echoes the narrative tradition of the Ming and Qing novels that reflect the changes of the times and the social ups and downs by telling the rise and fall of the family and the family. The trick to its conception is to draw clues as hidden and as deep as possible between the seemingly narrow family and the relationship between the relationship within the family and the intricacies of social life.
From the above simple list of several sets of design intentions, the meticulousness and ambition of the narrative structure of "The World of Man" can be seen. I believe that for Liang Xiaosheng, who is immortal, and many young cadres who have lofty ambitions to create novels, "The World of Man", which has won high applause and warm attention, is not the end, but a new starting point that is eye-catching. I sincerely hope that the narrative tradition of the realist epic style will be revived, and the creation of realistic novels with epic style will rise one after another.
(This paper is supported by the Basic Theory Research Project of Beijing Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature)
Source: China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily jointly organized the 5th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" on March 18, 2022
Editor: Deng Jiefeng
Second instance: Liu Ya
Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang