In the current literary scene, Cheng Yongxin is undoubtedly one of the closest witnesses to Chinese literature in recent decades. In his new book, If We First See, we see a literary dream that emerged from the 1980s and 1990s. This is as Su Tong commented:
"The ship, which was built in the eighties, is now setting sail. We saw the ship speeding across the dark ocean, and also through time, leaving a silver splash of water. We hear some kind of wave-like sound, sometimes surging and sometimes quiet, telling the story of time and the story of adventure. ”
Xiao Yijun brings you today the review of critic Cheng Depei on "If Only the First Sight".
The aesthetics of the close body and the distant time
——Observe the perspective of Cheng Yongxin's novel
Cheng Depei/Wen
Published in the March 2022 issue of Shanghai Culture
In 1983, Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthology called Distant Sights was published, and the title was borrowed from the Japanese Shiami. Strauss argues that Shiami's view that "the real actor must be good at seeing himself in the way the audience sees you—that is, in a distant gaze," aptly reflects the attitude of anthropologists to observe society: to observe their own society in the same way that other observers who are far away from it in time or space observe it, which sums up the general perspective of Strauss's scientific research.
1
At a conference a few years ago, I looked around and calculated the writing age of several writers around me, even a few friends who were not present. "Sixty-year-olds have started writing novels," blurted out a sentence. Of course, such judgmental discourse is neither a theoretical proposition nor meaningful. Serendipity has nothing to do with opening the "black box" of writing, and is not even more important than the convoluted social flows of symbols, the political use of quotations, and the cultural production of concepts. I consoled myself that it was just a boring game.
I continue to find that those who write novels at the age of sixty are largely immersed in the memories of life: highlighting personal experiences and engraving unforgettable people and events in life. In this spontaneous remembrance, memory is like a meridian, and forgetting is like a weft. Memory is always a fear of forgetting, and this tapestry of life seems to be woven for forgetting. However, some actions and even some memories of our daily lives tear apart the forgotten networks and decorations. As Adorno once said, "All materialization is forgetting."
It can be said that memory is the forgotten legacy, while writing is a movement against death itself, to take back "those I love" and unforgettable things from the hands of death, and we talk and record them so that they will not be forgotten. Or proust in "Remembrance of the Watery Years": "Real life, finally under the illumination of the light, is exposed to us - the only life that can be said to be really experienced - this is literature... But if art refers to our own sense of life, then it also refers to the awareness of the lives of others – because the web is to a writer, just color to a painter, not a matter of skill, but a matter of vision. ”
The late Roland Barthes and Proust are connected. For me, many of Barthes's famous quotes, even if translated and revised, are thought-provoking and unforgettable. For example, "Literature is Orpheus returning from hell to earth", such as "Wisdom is not power, but a little knowledge, a little knowledge, and as much interest as possible", or "Isn't the paradox itself a rhetorical means of expressing emotions?" The late Barthes once said uncharacteristically, "A novel is a biography that does not dare to say his name."
The early Bartko was once famous for attacking traditional biographical criticism, and his slogan "Death of the Author" influenced an entire era. Who would have imagined that the young Barthes, once fascinated by Rob Grillet's outright Objectivism, advocating the clarion call of the vanguard to bury the traditional figures of literary works, was now obsessed with the infinite charm of literary expression of life. Dedicated to saving literature in a world that no longer believed in literature, his last book, The Bright Room, was written because of the death of his mother.
Although sixty years old is not an absolute numerical standard, and the differences between people determine that their psychological age and healthy age are not equal, but overall, this age is a transition period. Memory begins to tell stories, the past comes back, helping the current life, "biography" is not only a writing posture, it is also a tangible and intangible way of life.
We are warned that the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, the memories and restorations created in childhood, the plot and the problem is not mirror image and homologous relationship, but a deformation and transformation of each other. Regression and rediscovery are rhetorical metaphors of time, and in time, in the surprising reversal of every life, in the moment when it grows older and time becomes more and more pressing, the "biography" sounds its starting gun. As Proust wrote when he was ill, "The time has finally come." “...... I also began to understand what death meant, the joy of love and spiritual life, and the benefits of suffering, and a destiny."
And Barthes said that old age "can move us like a love story." For people of this age, time is the memory of the years, the past, the people who are widely known but have left us, the society that has changed, and the yesterday that is disappearing. And writing is a kind of retention, full of the charm of reproduction.
2
I went around in such a circle in order to face Cheng Yongxin's new novella collection "If Only the First Sight". It includes five novellas, most of which were written in the past two years, with both an old work and an expanded rewrite. Coincidentally, the author was just over sixty years old in these two years, but the difference is that the author wrote poetry, plays and novels in the early days, and before the age of fifty, he published two novels, "Aunt in a Cheongsam" and "Smell", under the pseudonym of Mileage.
The young man, who aspired to become a writer in the attic at an early age, eventually "changed his career" because of the statute of his work and became a famous editor. At that time, the editor of Harvest reportedly had a rule that he was at ease to do his job well and did not advocate publishing works outside. After graduating from college, the well-behaved Cheng Yongxin worked in "Harvest" for nearly forty years.
Before the age of fifty, Cheng Yongxin was ambitious and determined to write his wandering trilogy. It is not very clear when the trilogy was conceived and when it was conceived, but in any case, it was common for writers who aspired to write a trilogy in that era, and it was also an era of believing in epics. As for where the pen was moved, was it in the dark attic where part of "The Shape of the Wind" was written, or the one-bedroom independent space in Nanpudong, or the hotel room rented by the film and television company? Not quite sure. The latter two places are mentioned in "If Only the First Sight". The trilogy resulted in the completion of the first two parts, and the third part waited for more than ten years, and is still "wandering".
By the time the first two films came out, Cheng Yongxin had been living in a place called "Gubei" for a long time, and he had changed his residence several times before and after marriage. Forget who said, "People who don't change this work unit are quite diligent when they change their residences." For Shanghai, "Gubei" is a legendary place, a piece of farmland that was once not only lined with high-rise buildings, but also once a bellwether for Shanghai's property market. I am a road blind, I have gone to the "ancient north" no less than a hundred times, but I still can't find the north today. Hanging out in that kind of place, you feel like a "countryman".
Sometimes I guess that the "trilogy" is difficult to complete, not because there is no time problem, but because life changes too quickly. The expectations of the 1990s ushering in the new century did not, as we might imagine, with a phased ending and beginning. "Genesis" and "Revelation" did not come as expected, and everything became more strange, unpredictable, and incredible, and this feeling continues to this day. The farewell of the century draws attention to oblivion, to the melancholy of the missing like the death of a seed, the part buried in the soil and the part that grows out of the earth are completely different things. The former is an annotation of the elderly, while the latter is the fruit of childhood trauma.
Now it seems that the so-called "trilogy" is nothing more than a numbers game. It started with a trend and ended with a trend. Fortunately, the first two parts have been born, and the text in black and white exists, and what ending is wanted. For life, the end is already predestined, and if my life cannot be understood as a unique totality, then my life narrative cannot hope that it will be complete and perfect.
In real life, nothing has the value of a narrative beginning: memories are always lost in the fog of childhood. My birth, this act belongs to others, that is, to the story of my parents, not to myself. As for my death, it will only be the ending narrated in the narratives of people who have lived longer than I have: I have always passed over to my death, a shadow that Freud called death-driven, preventing me from understanding it as the end of the narrative.
Wanting to discuss Cheng Yongxin's novel, "Aunt in a Cheongsam" is a work that cannot be bypassed. For more than ten years, I have re-read this novel several times, and there are always unexpected gains, and each time it will cause me to think about the proposition of "how to narrate Shanghai". The mystery of life and the confusion of growth are undoubtedly the inexhaustible themes of the novel.
The famous contemporary writer Colm Tobin has a book on fiction, "The Runaway Man : Writers and Families", which analyzes the relationship between writers and families inside and outside Ireland, and when he analyzes the image of aunts in many novel families due to the lack of motherhood, he pointed out: "In the 19th century, the family was not tolerated in the novel, or the novel as a vehicle for interpreting the broken family and the new sense of morality or the rise of the individual subject spirit, which was not only reflected in the replacement of the mother with an aunt. As Lionel Trilling points out: 'Of all the fathers in Jane Austen's novels, Sir Thomas [Bertram] is the only one to be admired. The elimination of groups, the substitution of individual opinions, and the use of the novel as an intermediary to convey this view, is at the same time the result, but throughout the 19th century it is presented through the fading of mothers and the arrival of aunts. ”
Like a distant echo, writing about the growth of "I", the title is "Aunt in the Cheongsam". In many Shanghai narratives, it is indeed rare to be able to create such an image at the time of the alternation of different eras, which cannot but be said to be a contribution of this novel. Perhaps, this is also a phenomenon that is not born at the right time. It is worth mentioning that the novel is naturally overwhelmed for a young man who is not yet mentally mature to think about the sins, but it is also a way to look at it.
In the afterword to "Smell", the author opposes calling the "trilogy" an "autobiographical novel", which is actually unnecessary, and "autobiographical" is an important source and glorious history of the novel. In fact, even a true autobiography is not so reliable, Brodsky once said rather doubtfully, "I have always felt that the autobiographical novel is a contradictory concept, and it covers up more than what it is enlightened, even if the reader loves it." In any case, to me, the author seems to be more of a minor character than a protagonist."
3
"The boy sitting in the little green chair is me. How old was I then? Three or four? This is the opening sentence of a long story, and the growth history of a "me" named Camel begins. "I sat in a green chair. A lonely person. The narrator again emphasizes this image, an image made of words.
The child of this age is undoubtedly the mirror stage in the sense of Lacan, and the perspective of "I" leads to the second aunt: the second aunt who is fearless of the surveillance of everyone, the second aunt who wears a satin cheongsam, dressed in a green but strange temperament, and her mysterious and magnificent red building, which is the most gentle and dazzling light in the gray and dark world of "me". "The Aunt in the Cheongsam" opens the long river of narration with images. This is similar to The Chamber, Barthes's last book, the emotional journey of the essay novel with a picture of his mother.
And strictly speaking, the difference in time between the two is not much. This is also why Cheng Yongxin likes to talk about Llosa, and I just cling to Bart.
Memory can be said to be one of the basic behaviors of human beings, without memory it seems that nothing can be talked about. But it is not easy to give different and complicated memories to the order of succession, and to the words that must obey certain rules. I always felt that this kind of narration was a bit of a "plastic surgery" flavor. Life is a series of fragments, each of which is not static and repeatable. How can you observe your past without changing your past? Even if you want to change, you don't know where to start.
From a distant era, from the entangled and parallel history, his failure has been brewing. The novel begins with a difficult situation, with the narrator lamenting that he has no extraordinary memory, "and after decades, he can still clearly recall the situation of living in the womb and every detail of the time he was learning to speak". As a result, childhood memories are always a delayed gaze and a late retelling, and others' bystanders include "my second aunt is still nagging to people."
We know that "fiction" is an adventure that accompanies "writing", which is a triumphant moment for words to float, shift, and fill in the gaps. What we can hardly guard against is that at different stages of life, memory will stir up the illusion of the mirror stage, which is a fictional moment of pleasure, a kind of fanatical tracking and speculation. The mystery of life, the confusion of growth, the youthful excitement and noise of young boys and girls, these constitute different narrative levels in the novel. The unmistakable narrative always obscures what is unclear: the reference analysis and reflection of the "me" when I grow up, the phantom left by the absence of the "father" at this moment, and the after-the-fact narrative of the mother are blurred. “
I cannot use my eyes today to discern the correctness of the behavior of people in the environment at that time, nor can I filter the tendencies of my mother in recounting and recalling the past, so as to judge the authenticity of historical events. For me, it doesn't matter why my father was arrested and died, what matters is that before I could get out of the cradle, my father abandoned me." In short, it is easy to choose the narrative of "me", and how to make different "me", the "me" at that time and the "me" after the fact, the "me" of external action and the "me" of the inner heart, the conscious "me" and the unconscious "me", the "me" in front of the stage and the "me" behind the scenes, this is not easy.
If we understand the first-person perspective, then we have to understand it from a third-person perspective. We must ask for an explanation, not my self-knowledge, but your self-knowledge. We have to explain why you sincerely say "I hurt" and your words are true. Why, as Wittgenstein said, truth and sincerity are consistent, the result is that the various criteria of sincerity confirm the veracity of what is said. The so-called various standards also affect the context, involving different contexts and the distance and proximity of the gaze.
When I was lonely and lonely, I tried to grasp myself, and at the same time found that he was far away from the world, and knew that this world determined his destiny. I became a bystander and felt uncomfortable with that. We should always appreciate what this situation means. Here, the person who is aware of himself sees himself as an "I" who has nothing to do with the object.
He was lonely, he lived in darkness, and the result of this loneliness made him feel particularly clearly the clamor of a tragedy, which he paid attention to, and the tragedy was going on the edge of his knowledge. "The Aunt in the Cheongsam" is not only hellish for us, but also the times. This era is drifting away, and when we look back at it, we need distance, otherwise understanding is just a blank piece of paper. Just as we need to understand Cheng Yongxin's most recent novellas, we also need to pay attention to the distance between them and previous works. Moreover, there is also a unique distinction between long and medium stories.
4
The "I" named the camel grew up in loneliness, meditated in the years when it should not be meditated, lost contact where it was supposed to be intimate, and he kept staring, constantly measuring the distance between him and the object, as if it were wrong near and far. His loneliness is multiple: on the one hand, he is connected to the lack of family, on the other hand, he is responsible for the social added value that cannot be maintained, and there are factors such as personality disposition that is difficult to identify and recognize.
Therefore, "wandering" is an unbearable way out, and his "wandering" is nothing more than an hour of running away from home and relying on independent space after growing up. I have no intention of putting the novel and the real life of the author in pairs, because it is too earthy and lacks common sense today. But some scenes, people and things that are too familiar will lead you into the trap of association, and it is impossible for you to pretend to be completely unaware of the strangeness.
The author rarely talks about his father, rarely talks about the family life that maintains the blood of his parents, he values having his own living space, loves school and work, and attaches importance to the friendship between friends. It is unlikely that all this is not reflected in the novel. Even the genre novel "Qingcheng Mountain", which is a bit unrealistic fireworks, will involve the mystery of family lineage.
Memories that value personal experience are still unfamiliar to unfamiliar readers, and for friends with common experience, it is natural to have traceable associations with the personnel of the prototype. The way the prototype enters the work is different: some screenshots, makeovers, Zhang Guan Li Dai, patchwork, tinkering, and smearing at will, and the ultimate destination is that even if it is copied as it is, once it enters the text, the contract expires and has nothing to do with it. My reading situation is somewhat different, the reason is clear, and the association traces the source and does not listen to the command.
For example, "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" and Ag traveled to Thailand together with Da Fat and Jianguo, and these two people are too familiar with these two people in life. Big fat big voice is famous far and wide, like to calculate the skill and lotte active personality, perhaps in life he is more vivid than in the novel, every party is always the voice of the person first, usually not very good wine, once he is happy to chase after you to drink you can not escape; there is also the founding of the country of a few rooms, the story of his family lineage I have heard countless times, the habits and rules developed in living abroad are never easily violated.
I remember once going to a foreign country together, he had to drive back to Shanghai in the morning because of something, and it took five or six hours on the road. That day in the lobby, only to see that he could not eat all over the world for breakfast to find coffee, not drink a cup of coffee, and fight to death. Every time I read Cheng Yongxin's novel, I will have such and such associations, familiar friends are about to come out, and strange feelings are missing. I could only abandon the posture of a critic and immerse myself in the memory of "as if". The assimilation and absorption effect of such a close "aesthetic" due to imitation is sometimes discarded instead by imagined references. The separation of sensation and imagery thus creates the illusion of being close to existence.
The brother and brother written in "If Only the First Sight" has actually left us for many years, and this reading still arouses my longing, and I can't control myself, I can only interrupt reading and enter another emotional world. I remind myself that comments are risky and that you need to be cautious when you meet someone you know and write about someone close to you.
There are many classifications of symbols, of which there are icon type and index type: icon type includes signifier and the actual equivalent of the sign; and in an index symbol, the relationship between the two is causal. The investigation of semiotics should be limited to the situation where well-defined concepts are firmly attached to signifiers according to the continuum of communication. Deciphering and interpretation here are different, and there is no ambiguity for all recipients who have mastered the code of communication.
But this approach is not well suited to the study of natural language or other complex systems: we don't come up with a thought and then use a digital system to turn it into a code; listening to people is just explaining the sentence, not deciphering it. In the same way, people and things from the human events in the work to the real life can only be interpreted rather than deciphered. Moreover, the situation in which the archetypes of life enter the fictional world is much more complicated than this. There are many intermediary processes, and the relationship between them is not two, but three or even multiple, both what we understand and what we don't understand.
The discussion of symbols often makes it impossible to distinguish between techniques and styles. According to Hegel, the former is the author's continual writing in the same way and has become a repetitive habit, while the latter is constantly innovating, challenging and overcoming his own abilities. Having said that, only textual semiotics can highlight this approach to difference. Of course, repetition is not restoration, and innovation is not a wood without roots. The focus on forgetting is the awakening of memory.
Faced with sleeping stones, dreams surfaced. The ruins are brought back to the coordinate points of time and space. The so-called emphasis on the record of personal experience, in fact, the object of experience no longer exists. Diderot said, "Ruins give rise to grand ideas within us. Everything returns to dust, everything dies without a trace, everything passes away with the wind. Only the world remains, and only time continues." Everything that once existed has been reduced to fictional texts, not to mention my wild thoughts about texts.
5
The narrative perspective of "Aunt in the Cheongsam" is multiple, and how to make the camel's childhood perspective coexist with other perspectives is the difficulty and pain point of the narrative. On the one hand, parents are the meetrs and rejectors of the various needs of an infant's childhood, as well as the earliest listeners and indoctrinators. The trauma caused by the absence of a family also deforms as the camel grows, and this deformation extends to the author's other works.
At the same time, the second aunt who is the replacement of the vacancy is a legacy of the past era, and she is incompatible with this era, which can be described as a traumatic trauma. On the other hand, as a childhood perspective, the camel lets his words tell part of the story that he does not grasp, tells the events that he cannot understand, and as a result, part of the story can only be mentioned by the other, accompanied by many unknown listeners and interpreters who are at a loss for meaning.
There is no way out of mirroring and self-identity. In the end, it can only disintegrate into self-division: the object is constantly unconscious, the subject is mocked by self-referentiality, and the inner words are accidentally engulfed by the noise of the times. Just as self-memory cannot distinguish it from the memory of others, so can individual memory be indistinguishable from collective memory entangled in history.
In this sense, creating a general perspective that integrates knowledge and ignorance, solution and non-solution, unity and division is undoubtedly the most valuable place of "Aunt in The Cheongsam". It tells us that the new methods of manipulating perspectives derived from narrative art in the course of its development can be quickly integrated with the old methods and further refined in this way. With the increasing complexity of narrative art, the artist pursues the continuous transformation of the impossible into the possible, that is, to grasp the empirical "fish" and also to obtain the "bear paw" of fictional narrative.
As time passes and the years go by, the "camels" have grown up and the perspective has been extended. The staged scenes after growing up have achieved the narrative images of several novellas at present: from the scenes inside and outside the campus of "Mahjong World", the fabled picture of "Qingcheng Mountain", the structure of the double ghost shooting door of "The Shape of the Wind", the travel route of "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" all the way to the emotional loss and education of "If Only first sight", they return to the novel world with diverse images.
"The Shape of the Wind" revolves around the library's private garden located in the downtown area, which of course refers to its past and leaves a foreshadowing for the original owner's children abroad to return home to buy back the garden. In the garden, there are old janitors and black dogs, a Greek goddess statue in the center of the lotus-shaped fish pond in the lawn, and little angels with different looks stand in the four corners of the fish pond. This scene is familiar and familiar to those who work here every day.
The novel is written by Milin, a high-caliber student at the School of Architecture, assigned here and living in the unit; another Du Yimin, who lived in the unit, du Yimin, who was once the commander of the corps during the "Cultural Revolution", experienced historical drama proofreading and teasing, was placed in the library as an idle post, lived with his daughter without a father, and wrote a sensational novel, "Wings With Broken Wings".
The narrator has no intention of dwelling on old accounts, but instead chooses chen Dazhi, the boyfriend whom his daughter Dulan first fell in love with, and they are symmetrical about the love affair between Milin and the moon. But if you think it's a romance novel, it's as wrong as the statue of the goddess that's not on the central axis.
Like "The Shape of the Wind," the novel explores many less precise displacements, such as the missing and the repaired, the inevitable and the accidental, the intentional and the unintentional, the doubtful and the convinced, the dreamy and the real, and a series of secrets, some of which can be solved and some of which can never be solved.
First, because "the legendary life of the villa makes Mirin doubt everything in life, and the villa, the garden, the goddess statue, the janitor old man and the dog all seem to cater to his fantasies and work together to complete a preset trap"; secondly, "it is because of a small negligence of the designer during the villa overhaul", so that Mirin and Chen Dazhi have doubts about the displacement of the statue of the goddess, imagining the non-existent secret of the treasure buried under the statue, resulting in an irreparable tragedy.
The author's narrative is extraordinary in that although Du Yimin's tragedy has the shadow of Dai Houying in real life, it still does not affect the dreamlike atmosphere of the novel. Perhaps, "The Shape of the Wind" wants to tell us that on the verge of sleep, the things that we still seem to be in a state of sleep turn into reality, and what we think is reality is a dream in return.
6
From the perspective of narrative dynamics, the mystery of life is not important in Cheng Yongxin's novel, and the so-called "branding" has been forgotten, but it is not so simple to disappear. Ever since we have overcome the error of the assumption that the forgetting with which we are familiar represents the destruction and disappearance of memory, we have tended to adopt the contrary view that anything, once mentally formed, does not disappear, that everything can survive in one or the other form, and that under certain conditions it manifests itself in a different way.
As a genre novel, "The Tale of Qingcheng Mountain" is far enough away from us, although the novel is covered by the fog of martial arts, talent, spell magic, immortal medicine and so on, but the father's unjust, false and wrong cases, the enmity between the rivers and lakes and the temple and other issues have surfaced in spite of the barrier of time. As Nietzsche said, history is the present, and what comes today is history. It is Nietzsche who leads us to a conceptual revolution in the past, making us think that the "present" is also historical.
We live today. Tomorrow we will have a memory of "this present moment". We cannot ignore: just as we ignore the past as it is true, as we have said in the past, "The source of the past is the present." History is no longer a study of the past, but a perspective on the present. When Fengzi Niang closed her eyes and swallowed her breath, Fengzi, who never shed tears, shed tears in her eyes, and niang's last words: repay the Landscape and people of Qingcheng, and return her father's innocence. It's as far away as it is in front of you.
If "The Shape of the Wind" is haunted by the wind, then "Qingcheng Mountain" originates from the rain, "The rain begins to fall that night, from the beginning of the water and the tuotuo, the more it falls, the bigger it gets..." The wind and rain are transformed from natural phenomena into contexts, and what is achieved is an allegory or symbol, which together with life forms the curtain of destiny, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, sometimes understood and sometimes blurred.
Our true human condition haunts it. The reason why the world is important is that man must project outward the meaning of his own life, his logic, and even his reproach. We create ourselves, yet we are entangled with ourselves. All people are created equal, and the reason why it has become an appeal is because of inequality. Birth becomes a passport, and growth is not done alone.
On the one hand, man merges with the world around him and becomes too much of a part of it, thus losing the demands of his own life. Man, on the other hand, isolates himself from the world around him in order to make his own perfect demands on the world, and thus loses the ability to live and act according to the requirements of the world itself.
When "The Shape of the Wind" ends, with both hands "suddenly blindfolding Mirin from behind", the moon that Mirin calls "the lord of the wind", "the laughter of Gege echoes with the wind on the lawn"; when "Qingcheng Mountain" ends, the two old men are "mistaken by Kun Daoshi for hallucinations, but the two stone statues are really standing, tall and majestic, covering the dark mountains". I think that the mystery of the human life and the confusion of growth have all disappeared.
It's some poetic ending. We should understand that aesthetics has succeeded in blurring the question of moving from nature to reason, and at the same time succeeds in elucidating this problem; it illuminates both the troubles of life and the troubles of human nature.
7
In contrast, my personal favorite novel is Mahjong World, even though it's an older work. The narrative tone of the novel is very close, clearly and clearly conveying the atmosphere of that era, which is a unique campus work. Wan Li finally got rid of the entanglement of a girl's mother he met on the farm, Wen Yibin after two years of hard work, finally realized the dream of becoming an actor in the Colonel's Drama Troupe, timid I finally had the first kiss of my life, plus the clarinet successful Bisen, I don't know when to emerge A clone. A happy and literary circle of friends was born in a light-hearted and humorous tone. Even today, we still feel the special atmosphere of the campus and the happy life of the circle of friends after the resumption of the college entrance examination.
The novel is titled "Mahjong World", and the titles of the stanzas are in order "Whitish in the Southeast, Northwest". As we looked forward to how the author would write about playing mahjong, a rumor broke about the ambiguous relationship between Two Men, Bisen and Acron. "For some reason, after listening to Wan Li, I was very itchy, and my back seemed to crawl like an earthworm with skin allergies."
Rumors were eventually debunked by playing mahjong, and Akron's enlightenment education brought "I" into the mahjong game as well. As a result, the family dance party and mahjong play alternately, and the life outside the school attracts the students. The literary and artistic life on campus and the fashion entertainment outside the school construct the ups and downs of "Mahjong World", which is an inner experience from the outside world, like an illusion, and its location, time and burst process are all well documented, as if it were a private diary.
Memories tell stories, entertainment begins to rejoice, and thinking follows. Dionysus is not a dream but a drunk, not a distance from life and a view of life from the veil, but the life itself in the present moment. The person concerned looks at the flowers in the fog as a person who hates the same, and the evil one watches the fire from the other side, and the talker afterwards can only look at the ocean with excitement and look at it from a distance. Importantly, homosexuality is just a rumor, just an unsolved mystery. The desire to solve the puzzle is conducive to advancing the development of the plot. The mystery of homosexuality and the interpretation of mahjong enter a dual-track system, and the way of mahjong and the road of life alternately run, which is what attracts us to the novel.
The events triggered by the noon scene images make the narrative interesting; and because of the mahjong way that leads to the final appearance of the master Akron, the ultimate interpretation of the Emei Mountain Daoist priest has no intention of telling the author's narrative intentions.
It should be noted that Wu Liang's discussion of mahjong is indeed true, when the literary critic Wu Liang wanted to write an article about mahjong, for a while everyone waited for expectations and discussions, even today I want to come as in front of my eyes. And the metaphysical cultural interpretation of mahjong by the little Taoist can only be a statement, it is neither the origin theory nor can it explain the long-standing and obsessive entertainment of the national masses.
Obsession is the most enduring form of mass entertainment, and an infinitely elevated interpretation after the fact will bring insurmountable barriers and obstacles. Just as Schiller once elevated games to the realm of artistic freedom, it is still impossible to explain the game situation in full swing in the world today. Of course, these are digressions. The novel finally seems to explain the way of mahjong, and Li Qin's mystery has risen again, it is really a wave of uneven waves, two legs walking always have one leg in front and one leg in the back.
8
A writer never knows if his work is finally completed. What the writer has already said in one work is repeated in another or in another way from another point of view. Writing is the connection that unites interrupted discourse with the self. Break this relationship – it allows me to speak to you and to speak with the understanding that comes from you with this word, because this word is calling you, it is the kind of call that begins in me, because it ends in you.
"My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teresa" is an attempt to call each other in dialogue with different words. Ag's secret, the big fat who does not know who the birth parents are, the founding of the five rooms and one son, the basis for their attempt to dialogue and establish contact with Teresa Teresa is that "Teresa Teresa, like us, is a child who is separated from his mother in this world."
However, there is a distance between the two, with the help of distant eyes, the need for media, the need for bridges and ferries. The composition of the two ends is one end is a trip abroad to stay in the Meiping Hotel, the mysterious monk who appeared in the lobby, Teresa Teng lived in the 1502 presidential suite before his death; the other is Ag who recovered his memory due to a car accident due to a sudden change at the age of five, the lily on the hospital ward, the only relative who has been missing for many years, and the similarities and family situations of friends Da Fat and Jianguo.
As for the eye-opening statements, the mysterious family genes, the loss and trauma of childhood, the primitive long-necked village, the sometimes looming wood carvings of the sun god, the occasional nightmare, the dazedness and fear that envelop Ag's mind have become the intermediaries that bind the two ends, they are metaphors, allegories, symbols or symbols.
According to the author's self-defense, "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teresa" is written smoothly. In fact, the bitterness of writing and the difficulty of brewing are difficult to express in terms of sober consciousness. I have a feeling that Cheng Yongxin's reappearance contains an ambition for narrative transformation, that is, to restore the magic of imitating reality, but also to preserve some reasonable heritage of the modern avant-garde.
Realism marks a fictional world characterized by inherent harmony, plausible causality, and psychologically seemingly real states. Traditional realism, based on a unified and coherent narrative, is seen as a vague contradiction that projects an illusory "mythical" unity; in contrast, modernist texts emphasize contradictions and allow the "silenced" to express their views. We are all children of silence, and the moment of silence is precisely the most eloquent expression of the true situation of the contradiction.
Sometimes, some latent consciousness carries the seeds of our innermost emotions, and the language of dreams rather than bodies is the best means of exploring people's secret yearnings, often manifested as chaotic omissions being the most reliable symbol of our exploration of the subconscious. For example, the implicit allusion to Oedipus's triangular relationship in "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teresa" can be seen from the fact that Ag never calls his brother a brother, but vaguely calls the man in the family.
Talking about how to express silence, how the aesthetics of the close body show distant eyes. Human beings are easy to revel in the appearance of things, to get happiness from all kinds of brilliant things in the world, and to abandon tangible things to pursue intangible things, which is an extremely difficult thing for human beings. It is worth noting that the real enemy is not the falsehood itself, but the illusion produced by society, and the real opponent is not the story, but the alienated dream, that is, the false consciousness.
According to Hans Blumenberg, the ancient and medieval worlds recognized only a closed universe in which nothing new or strange could be allowed to become real. In contrast, the modern idea "dispels the suspicion of the new, so that the 'unknown realm' or 'new world' becomes a potential and effective stimulus of human activity; if one regards this process as a paradox, then the unexpected is to be expected." Think about the many new things that Mahjong World takes stock of, and they all end up being old things that have been silent for many years. The so-called "new" is nothing more than the novelty of our vision.
9
"If Only the First Sight" was written a little late, but this love affair may have been buried in the author's mind earlier. Since it is difficult to say exactly what love refers to, I prefer to replace it with love affairs. Just as the novel seems ashamed to describe itself as "what it is," it always loves to describe itself as "what it is not," as some kind of non-fictional way of language.
The novel pretends to be some kind of language, and it claims to have a one-to-one correspondence with psychological or historical reality, so as to reflect its legitimate status. Similarly, all romance novels seem to prove what love is not and that it cannot exist. We cannot salvage the scars it has caused, we cannot correct the rejection it imposes, and what love shows is precisely the charm of finding some possible answer in the endless puzzles, and the possibility is precisely what imagination is good at.
Writing here, I glanced at the catalog of Jiangnan magazine that published this novel, a total of two novels: Cheng Yongxin's "If Only the First Sight" and Xiao Kefan's "Lifetime Warranty", muttering to myself, "First Sight" and "Lifelong" are mutual annotations, but the meaning of love.
The "I" of "If Only the First Sight" is waiting for the Queen, like the novelist, in a surreal anxiety: "My bitter water has fallen nowhere, and this platonic telephone long conversation that cannot be seen has exhausted my passion and reached the limit of my endurance." But in spite of this, I had to admit that the long conversation at night fascinated me and made me dizzy, and at night, after eleven o'clock, I couldn't help but obediently wait at the house, and the afterglow of my eyes squinted at the white telephone from time to time, expecting its sudden sound, which was very similar to the situation of a seemingly rational addict who swore a poisonous oath and could not withstand the temptation. "I am shy at heart, and I am inexperienced in dealing with the master of the emotional field with a good schedule, and the final recognition can only be fantasy." The fantasy world is a transparent shield with which the ego protects itself and avoids reality. At the same time, the world is observed through it.
It should be admitted that the interaction between "I" and the queen is told smoothly and moderately, intermittently and intermittently, the flowers falling deliberately and mercilessly, and the entanglement of the enemy advancing and retreating and retreating from the enemy is destined to be fruitless. The novel also has two side lines: after seven years of marriage, Moriko's wife chooses to convert to Buddhism; David "bore a boy to his family, divorced soon after, left the house, and left the child to his parents to raise himself back to live in Paris, France."
There are also the women who appear around the queen one after another: Xiaoyi as a foil and message, the female teacher surnamed Ye, including the girl who appears in the roadside hotel and writes poetry. They all play different roles in this emotional drama, with different roles and indispensable. The two activities to the south and north build the tension of the novel's geography.
What "If Only the First Sight" is meant to reveal is that disillusionment is often the spoils of tragedy, and even the most ordinary love affairs contain the meaning of life. Action speaks louder than words, for all words of love are borrowed, the words we speak precede our existence, and any text expresses the true meaning of the individual in sentences that have been repeated a thousand times, like taking public transport to a private destination.
I tend to see the final awakening and understanding of "me" as an expression of personal image, while David's "no-no" smiling expression contains more complex attitudes and opinions. The over-interpretation of the queen is nothing more than an expression of "my" compassion for life that is too fleeting and fleeting, what is left?
"If only the first sight" is immersed in the perspective of "I", it should also include another story of opposing perspectives, such as this love affair is told by the queen's perspective, so how should the story be interpreted? It is still a story that should not be told today, a story that may exist. Since there is a story in the eyes of "I", there must also be a story in the eyes of you and him.
Narratives generate a wide variety of assumptions, and the task of the reader and listener is to fill in those assumptions. The nature of narrative is inherently incomplete. Every narrative generates an indeterminate number of assumptions that the viewer must put in the text.
10
Beliefs in literature are actually what Richards calls "pseudo-statements," and they are evaluated not to discern their authenticity, but to discern the practical role they play in organizing our emotions.
What matters is whether this belief fulfills something emotionally. This shows once again that those that appear to be objective concerns are in fact concerns with the subject.
The problem with the novel is that it is the product of a cross-breed of genres, a definition that is both narrow enough to shut out narrative literature and broad enough to apply to all genres that normally fall within the category of the novel. The drive to surrender to the storyline is both a reaction to the reading market and an immutable insistence on human instincts. If the story is desired, it actually closes the open door of the novel and eventually falls into the decline of a single variety.
We need images to awaken all of us that are simplified or missed by language, and we need to use language modeling to fix our parallax vision, or to see the invisible, even if it is out of reach. The past can only be saved in the memory, and people are no longer defending the real places of childhood, but a type of experience that is closely connected to these places. And the fantasy genre is formed in me and in you, relying on childhood memories and the results of growing upbringing.
The empire of childhood, the images and sounds of childhood, the happiness and unhappiness of childhood have all become his mysterious worlds, and the past has always lived in his heart. It is close at hand and far away in the sky, so the memory brings sorrow, it sounds in the distance, and only the image of the close body is returned. Among the many daytime remnants, dreams choose those related to childhood memories.
As Freud said, one foot of the dream stands at the head of the present, and the other foot stands on the side of childhood. Therefore, Cheng Yongxin's novel starts from the metaphor of dreams, follows the memories of childhood, expresses that long, unfinished childhood wish, and repairs the childhood wounds that are difficult to heal. As the inscription in "If Only the First Sight" says: "I wandered around the province, with the moon and the stars, chased by the clouds of the old time again and again, lost in endless dreams." ”
Each of Cheng Yongxin's novels has a secret: the mystery of birth, the mystery of disappearance, the trauma of childhood missing, the confusion of emotions, the mystery of death, and so on. It can be said that there are no secrets and no squares. Secrets always point to those things that are hidden, intentionally or unintentionally hidden, separated and kept separate.
Any narrative can be defined as the process of presenting and revealing the truth. It is precisely because there are things that are reserved for us to hide, and we want to know what these things are, that we have to keep reading. The secrets that the text possesses and the secrets that the text lives with are both intractable mysteries of life and death. There is indeed a real secret, and its real debunking is the declaration of its death.
As Freud pointed out: it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, that we may die at any time, but what we can realize is that we still exist only as objectives. This is also the reason why Cheng Yongxin's novels are always foggy and full of mysteries in the end, rather than the truth.
The double-line structure is another feature of cheng Yongxin's recent novel space-time extension. For example, Mirin and Du Yimin and his daughter in the library garden villa in "The Shape of the Wind"; the temple and rivers and lakes in "The Tale of Mount Qingcheng"; Ag-ge in "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" in which Ag searches for relatives and Teresa's call to his mother; the interpretation of homosexual mysteries and mahjong in "Mahjong World"; the sight of "I" and other hidden sights in "If Only first seen", and so on.
The so-called double line is a dialogue mechanism in the final analysis, and there are questions and answers between each other, friction and even confrontation, which can also be parallel to each other. As in the formulation "Racine is Racine", Barthes notes that although this synonymous repetition is illusory, because there is no real Racine, only different versions of Racine.
The value of personal experience is that people always interact with existing things with subtle feelings of double meaning. Faith began to flicker and sway, and morality peeked out; people always liked to look out from the secret huts into the empty fields, which were unfathomable and dimly lit. Changing habits are in the principles that carry their subversion. Yet change is an urgent need to dominate consumer societies. Symbols are obliterated from symbols, but traces of them can be found where they are suppressed. Traces are so important that writing is impossible to talk about without it.
Well, there should be many more narrative features of Cheng Yongxin's novel, but as my observation of its narrative perspective is almost complete. Just as no perspective can be a single one, this article can only be one of them. Looking forward to more perspectives, more interpretations beyond my horizon are born.
11
Cheng Yongxin and I knew each other very early, and in the 1980s we worked in the Shanghai Writers Association at about the same time, the difference being that I was transferred from a factory company, but he graduated from a regular university and was assigned to the Writers Association. In that sensational period of avant-garde literature, we had little contact. When asked afterwards, I always jokingly said, "Because this man is so pretty".
By the 1990s, we were a little too much involved, not because of literature, but because of our friends. For a while, I often haunted Gubei, for only one reason, looking for Cheng Yongxin's "white phase". There are too many nights when we are what Benjamin calls it, the "wanderer" of the city and the "wanderer" that Baudelaire focuses on. The "wanderer" measures the distance of the city with his footsteps; the "wanderer" looks at the unconscious light and dark changes around him with wandering eyes.
I remember very clearly that in the first year of the new century, Cheng Yongxin paid a thousand yuan to invite a tea performance team to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. Eight years later, it was his turn to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, but it was a seminar on the works of "Aunt in a Cheongsam". It was the first installment of his ambitious "Wandering Trilogy." Two years later, the second "Smell" came out. At that time, I had returned to my old business to write some reviews, and I wanted to write something when the trilogy was completed. Who expected that the first class is more than ten years, and there is still no structural capping. And I'm in my early seventies.
In the past two years, this busy man has a little more time to be trapped at home, only to relive old dreams and write several novellas. The Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House preemptively published it, accompanied by "Aunt Wearing a Cheongsam". I also took the opportunity to pay off the debt I owed. This reminds me of our friend Ding Xiaohe's novel called "Paying Off Debts", and once at a dinner party, everyone argued about this novel, and they forgot what they ate into their stomachs. Thinking about how fast time passes, for me, the only gain is old age. In the years of commenting, I always owe a lot of debt, how to do it, and pay a little bit of it.
"If Only the First Sight"
Cheng Yongxin
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
This book is a collection of novels recently completed by Yongxin, the main programmer of harvest literary magazine. The novel of the same title, "If Only the First Sight", starts from individual experience and shows the soul of the 1980s and 1990s; "The Shape of the Wind" tells the story of a college student's encounter after knocking on the iron door of an old house; "Qingcheng Mountain" explores the relationship between ideas, dreams and human nature; "Mahjong World" tells about friendship, love and life; "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" writes about Teresa Teng's relationship with an era. The five novels have different themes, which is the author's long-term understanding and practice of literary work.
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
Shanghai Story Club Culture Media Co., Ltd
Shanghai Chewing Character Culture Communication Co., Ltd