Huo Xiangjie was born in Guilin in 1978. Writer, artist. He is the author of the novels "Local Knowledge", "Chronicles of spirits", "The Complete Collection of Bronze Seats", as well as "The Tale of Darkness", "Lantern Niche", "Ming and Qing Seal Engraving Edges, Iron Pen Single Knife And Single-knife True Book Thousand Character Text" and other works, and presided over the compilation of "Wu Libo", the Frontier Library of Novels, the Modern Chinese Epic Series, and the Muduo Library. He is one of the main creators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale of Water Body Texts. Corona is the longest-diving novel.
The literary homeland is the longing of every writer, where there is your full understanding of life and life
Li Xiaoxiao: After reading "The Chronicle of the Spirit", I once half-jokingly said that you should write a linear novel to attract readers. But until Corona is completed, I'm not sure you'll be able to write such a "traditional" novel. After all, there are not many writers who can easily transform and sway in a very different style. Therefore, "Corona" is a dashing head-on battle! Tell me about your book writing process.
Huo Xiangjie: The prototype of "Corona" is a novella of more than 50,000 words 20 years ago, "Nightfall". The most fundamental motivation was the sacrifice of one of my grandfathers on the eve of liberation, which was the fog of family nature in the author's growth process. It begins to touch the core of the soul—the fate of a few people, the fate of a large group of people in this land, or worse, the fate of a nation. It is the seed of the Corona. After a long period of fermentation and the expansion of imagination space, there is today's "Corona". This large-scale epic narrative is bound to be a big showdown. Three years ago, one day, early in the morning, as usual, I was drinking Ginseng pigeon stew soup at the "Shaxian Snack" on the edge of the art museum, and the image of the old heir Mo Daheng came to the front of his eyes, and he walked up to him like a person.
"The river cave at the bottom of the Mountain is as quiet as a silver weapon."
This sentence descends. At this point, I can't cover it. After the manuscript was written, an epidemic swept in. The final draft was completed in the past two years.
Li Xiaoxiao: So this is not a stopgap measure, this is a book you must write, the kind of gaze in the writer's heart on where his roots come from, and the most intimate running under his feet at this moment. It's a journey back to the soul.
Huo Xiangjie: Deliberately. It means the seed. The hometown of literature is the place of every writer's longing, homesickness, and sorrow. There is your full understanding of life and life. It has nourished you and continues to nourish you. The Corona journey completed my re-understanding of the omnipotent narrative and a change in narrative posture.
Li Xiaoxiao: The first sentence of "Corona" is very important.
"When your grandfather, Mo Jiawei's last-generation heir, Mo Yuanliang, was dying, he saw in his mother's memory that when he was a child, his father explained to them the principle of water drifting stone in the science laboratory next to the cow pen and stables of the Shenyuan Shiju when he explained the principle of water drifting stone to the river cave at the bottom of the Mountain of The Valley."
After reading it three times, I felt more and more important. It's like the smell of the moment you pull out the cork of a wine bottle, like the first impression of a human encounter. It stands there like a boundary monument. Perhaps the lingering tone and this minimalist metaphor are appealing enough. This sentence not only encircles the most important characters of the novel, it even contains the structure of the entire novel, and the sci-fi tail that I have repeatedly suppressed and still spews out. Mo Yuanliang's long monologue after the return of Nanyang and the first collision with his heirs are typical of the temperament of this novel, and also a paragraph that positively explains the "corona".
Huo Xiangjie: Keen! "Boundary Monuments" and "Minimalist And Polished Metaphors" lead to the beginning of this beginning. It has the courage to lead everything and the feeling that everything is in the basin. All the germs in the book are in it. A beginning that begins with multiple tenses and begins with a single time form is a completely different narrative posture and a barrier to the old text.
The meaning of "corona" is multiple, and it has a symbolic arc the moment it is achieved.
Li Xiaoxiao: Which woman is his favorite? Gao Furong? Hideyoshi? Mo anne? Maybe the love for Gao Yaoqing is about equal to love?
Huo Xiangjie: The true state of love may also be a lingering and changing emotion.
Li Xiaoxiao: I may be more inclined to Gao Yaoqing. Secretive, restrained affection. The trip to the river seemed to suddenly go to the center of the universe, and they accidentally saw themselves at a glance! Time and space meditate, and their love is instantaneous and eternal. I see you draw a concentric circle in that part? It's like visualizing the reader's feelings.
Huo Xiangjie: The author thinks that this is one of the most intoxicating fragments. Concentric circles are the only figurative symbols, and what you're talking about is one of multiple meanings. The authors are not entirely sure what kind of chemical reaction will eventually occur in the transmission of "elephants." It is encrypted and decoded many times by the magician, the narrator.
Li Xiaoxiao: Having said all this, we seem to be stuck in the first sentence. It permeates everything, and everything is in the basin. Tell me about the main character Mo Yuanliang?
Huo Xiangjie: Mo Yuanliang's life trajectory makes every time he encounters an era and event that causes him to undergo a deep personality fission. I wanted to see what he would become in the end, and it was tragic.
Li Xiaoxiao: We have to face this history and its repeated writing. This history, which has been repeatedly explained, is a huge problem in writing.
Huo Xiangjie: As far as I know, writers of every language or country want to write epic poems cast by their literary homeland and the era in which they lived. However, even such texts, which are excellent worldwide, are still rare. We are constantly expecting that kind of typical text.
We expect the narrative to be completed in the latest novel way, so that the reader can experience the new aesthetic
Li Xiaoxiao: From the specific level of the novel, the way of the novel can still be ever-changing, and you must have a lot of specific tricks, such as the way to write several battles.
Huo Xiangjie: Novels are an art, and the way they are told is inexhaustible. We expect the narrative to be completed in the latest novel way, so that the reader can experience the new aesthetic. However, we have to complete the narration of it in the laws of literature, so Mo Jiawei was born.
Li Xiaoxiao: Of course, we still have many specific tricks and secrets, but in fact, the reason why a novel definitely wins in the end is that the novel needs to get a whole look. A smell. This is also where corona is most valuable. Everything else needs this "ambiguous ambiguity" to contain light. ”
Huo Xiangjie: The smell of Mo Jiawei is an atmosphere that has grown for a long time, that is, an atmosphere. This is probably the most mysterious and difficult thing to secrete in fantasy literature. Of course, this also includes the transmutation of narrative. Corona is a split perspective, not a full God perspective. James Wood has a similar term: indirect free body. That's a fantastic name.
Li Xiaoxiao: According to my observation, "Corona" still has some thoughts about "White Deer Plain". Although it seems to be more "foreign", it is fundamentally based on the direction of the self-growth of the Chinese context and the natural integration into the community of human destiny.
Huo Xiangjie: To the vast and subtle! This is the commonality of classic works.
The core idea of "Corona" has changed, from "secret history" to "old state and new life", and finally back to the road of human destiny. When the draft was finalized, I wrote in the front question" "Although the zhou is an old state, its life is renewed" is also the same reason. The two texts will later be on the same track. Readers will make their own judgments. The ethnic groups in Corona have changed, and I examine the enlightened intellectuals emerging from the landlords and gentry who concentrated their wealth, and the role of the elites who promoted the Chinese revolution in modern times. The pure use of class analysis to view China's rebirth is inconsistent with the facts, which ignores the new ability of the ancient structure of Chinese civilization, that is, the ability of Chinese civilization to renew itself, which is not only a matter of class. China's rebirth is tied to the past. Chinese civilization is a great unified civilization that goes on and on and on. These reflections are brought into the text. The novel spans one hundred and fifty years, and some of the problems are seen more clearly in this large cycle. Of course, as a novel, it is unfolded in an experiential and immersive way.
Li Xiaoxiao: A friend said that you wrote a southern copy of "White Deer Plain"? This South, how do you position it.
Huo Xiangjie: This more precise definition of the South is Lingnan. It is subtropical in climate and borders the Indochina Peninsula. At the same time, the rivers that originate here go north to Dongting Lake, and at the same time to the south to the Pearl River, and finally to the Pacific Ocean. It is also connected with the ancient water Silk Road, such as the word lace, which originally means Mexican silver dollars, and the older generation still calls silver dollars lace. Some of the more old things were some trade and exchange with Persia and Malaya Persia. Its human structure includes the earliest southern aborigines (the ancient characteristics in the literature are 獠, 猺, Miao, Dong, Zhuang, etc.), the migratory Hakka, and what Xue Aihua called the Cleo people, which means those whose ancestors were Han Chinese and were born among the natives of South Vietnam. Barbarians, Southerners, Han Chinese, etc. are all mixed and can be scrutinized in the context.
The dialect itself contains a lot of the atmosphere of the times, migration paths, and ethnic characteristics. It is part of the art of fiction
Li Xiaoxiao: You use a lot of Shengao dialects in the book, and I can see that you are gradually adding the final dense text into a set of quite flavorful language systems, which is a feature and will also be a big reading barrier.
Huo Xiangjie: The dialects used are all words in the dictionary. We try to use dialects as moderately as possible, obey the atmosphere, and try to be the dialect of a large area, such as Hakka, Lou Shao, Southwest Mandarin, and so on. The dialect that changes the tone is not actually a dialect, the real dialect is the kind of dialect that renames things, but it is also a kind of Chinese, such as the third person "he" shenyuan says "Yi" (pronounced Ruoqi, a Tang Dynasty pronunciation), the river says "river lip", and so on. There are many more subtle verbs, such as "fly" to say "趐", and it would be a shameful waste to miss them, and they are also members of the Chinese citizens. We try to use dialects that match the geography and identity of the characters. The dialect itself contains a lot of the atmosphere of the times, migration paths, and ethnic characteristics. It is part of the art of fiction. Southern writers often had to undergo multiple translations to reach modern national languages, which was very different from the memory and context that Northern writers faced in the practice of language, which made them feel difficult and rich at the same time. The Chinese language and Chinese characters are the matrix of Chinese civilization, which carries civilization. Dialects are the product of exile and migration and fusion, and it is precisely the dialects that preserve many archaic and medieval sounds. Worldwide, many classics were originally written in dialects and later became the matrix and treasure of a national language. We use Chinese as the matrix and then start writing. It would be a blessing if we could enrich our national language.
Li Xiaoxiao: It is also an important part of the smell. In fact, when I read Corona, the sense of language felt like a translation.
Huo Xiangjie: Except for dialogue, most of them are written in translational style. One is that dialects themselves need to be translated, and the other is that the second tradition we are exposed to, world literature, is actually a layer of filtered translation literature. The translation is preferred. Vernacular is actually a translation of Chinese, and she has a swaying and colorful side. There are also pure words, such as the annotations of the heirs. Therefore, dialects, dialects and translations of modern Chinese are its linguistic characteristics. It is also unlikely that we can write in the language of Ming and Qing novels, and time has passed, and we must acknowledge this development and progress. It's about reconciling the language of the past with the deeper estrangement of the present. This began to evolve from the time of Lu Xun and Shen From the Wen era. Of course, the most fundamental and difficult thing is tragedy and poetic excavation.
Li Xiaoxiao: It takes a lot of space to write about hunger. I can't talk about the most bleak part and the complex body of knowledge in all its forms. They come from childhood experience or reading books.
Huo Xiangjie: Childhood experience occupies the vast majority, and some specific local knowledge is explained in the Complete Works of the Copper Seat. Reading, of course, also fosters something that can be expanded and experiential.
Li Xiaoxiao: Did you encounter a situation in which you could not write in the process of writing "Corona"?
Huo Xiangjie: When the Corona advanced, the famine was "blocked" halfway through the famine. Mo Yuanliang could no longer survive. After lingering for days, I still don't know how to end the ongoing hunger scene. A bird song on the roof reminded me that the plot took a sharp turn. After the "meat of heaven" was finished, hunger was still spreading, and Mo Yuanliang was about to die of hunger. If you can't write anymore, the whole novel will collapse. He cannot die, he must save himself and the people in the enclosure with his own wisdom. If he dies, there will be no way for all the later chapters to flow. At this time, a stranger came to the fence. The moment this Jiang family boy appeared in the enclosure, I stopped writing, and the whole person threw himself on the kang, weeping soundlessly until dark. There is no pain, no joy, it is a kind of vast end, and the human emotion is greater than the existence of the flesh. This emotional experience has never been experienced before, nor has it been experienced in real life. I myself lament how a novel can be so real. Once knocked down, you must fall on the kang to pass through the qi, in order to be sad and happy. This day is September 7 after lying down for a few hours before getting up, and by the time this emotion has passed, the sun has gone down, and all the characters and plots have flowed and surged forward. I experienced this deepest emotion in Corona and it shook me deeply.
To the vast and subtle Huo Xiang knot
Li Xiaoxiao: I was particularly fascinated by the "Dai Sheng Bird's Eye" escape story. Wang Min has a bird's eye escape story, and this person is particularly vivid.
Huo Xiangjie: Bird's Eye escape from prison has undoubtedly made Wang Min's image more profound. He exerted his will to the extreme, amplifying him, so that we can see the complex diversity of path choices under the Enlightenment.
Li Xiaoxiao: You once talked about the problem of text acceleration. "Corona" does have a sense of speed when reading.
Huo Xiangjie: Language has accelerated, changing the language of novels since the 19th century, becoming a prose poetic language, and also an extremely compressed abstract narrative language, extremely fast. The end result is to change the energy of the text in a shorter space. With that comes the acceleration of thinking. If there is no one in modern Chinese, we can let it have. Two conventional castings are still in progress, which is a big cycle.
Huo Xiangjie self-portrait
Li Xiaoxiao: After the "Corona" was written, it is said that there was still a little situation.
Huo Xiangjie: Yes, after leaving the customs, I took a bath, Caught off guard, my hair fell off piece by piece, and the ghost shaved his head.
Li Xiaoxiao: Do you think you will return to The Temple, write a batch of works, and create a huge literary hometown?
Huo Xiangjie: Believe me, never. My sacrifice to the shrine has been completed.