Yu Qiuyu: Prose Gaze

Prose gaze

Text/Yu Qiuyu

In my lifetime, the relationship with prose is very strange, almost can be said to be "life and death enemy".

My original major was world theater studies and international humanistic aesthetics. Until I served as the dean of the Shanghai Theater Academy and the "Chair of the Doctoral Defense Committee" of Fudan University and Nanjing University, I had not written a single essay.

The starting point for writing essays is mentioned in the book "Courage for Love". It was the late 1980s, and I was increasingly feeling that Chinese culture had suffered great grievances. There are so many people who call themselves intellectuals who write articles and give speeches everywhere, gushing about the "inferior roots of the nation" and "ugly Chinese." Even in the so-called "root-seeking fever", many hot spots are also based on this purpose. As long as it is done Chinese, everything is wrong, and it is stupid, ridiculous, and absurd. The coordinates of the contrast are all in the West.

On the surface, they did not completely deny Chinese culture, but in fact they have. Because my ultimate understanding of culture is "collective personality." The so-called "inferior roots of the nation" and "ugly Chinese" negate the "collective personality" in the ultimate sense, and thus also negate Chinese culture.

I had looked closely at the Chinese of the cursed Chinese, trying to find a hint of shame in their expressions that included themselves. But no, their tone was always condescending, and they looked at each other as if they had just come down from the sky.

I can't help but get angry about this. Although my childhood in the countryside taught me what poverty was, and the disasters of the Cultural Revolution taught me what pain was, I also witnessed the unremitting perseverance of my parents' country in escaping poverty and suffering. I have long studied the highest philosophies and top arts of the West, and I am also familiar with their expeditions to blood and fire, plundering and committing crimes, how can I tolerate the nonsense of a group of Chinese literati who know neither the West nor the East, and poison a large number of people every day?

It was then that I read the English philosopher Russell's discussion of China. Russell came to China in 1921, when China was bullied and dilapidated, and there was no hope, but the philosopher said:

Progress and efficiency make us rich and strong, but they are ignored by Chinese. But before we harassed them, they were still in the country.

Caucasians have a strong desire to dominate others, but Chinese have virtues that do not want to rule over other countries. It is this virtue that makes China appear weak internationally. In fact, if there is a country in the world that is too proud to bother to fight, that country is China. If China wants to, it can become the most powerful nation in the world.

Whether it is China or the world, culture is the most important. As long as the cultural problem can be solved, no matter what kind of political system and economic system China adopts, I will accept it.

To be honest, I choked up when I read "Before we harassed them, they were still in the country."

Russell didn't know much about Chinese history, but he showed such a fair insight. This fairness has a great allure and urges me to do something for Chinese culture.

So, I resigned twenty-three times and finally succeeded, single to the Gansu Plateau. The declared purpose at the time was to "travel through a hundred years of blood and tears in search of a thousand years of glory", but my inner goal was more academic: to let Chinese find a collective identity.

If possible, I would also like to answer a question with little reason: Why did Russell say, "If China wants to, it can become the most powerful nation in the world"?

Two

To convince myself and others, the reasons must be emotional and concrete, so I do not consult the Han and Tang Dynasties in the library, but walk alone in the desert.

In the past, when we were aggrieved, angry, refuted, and debated, we mostly used big words and conclusions, sounding impassioned and imposing, but in fact we could not calmly explain ourselves to the outside world, so we had no power.

More importantly, most of the signs we hold up are historical logic, international politics, and economic figures, rather than culture. People often put culture on their lips, not on their hearts, and do not believe that culture really has so much power.

But, Russell said, "Culture is the most important thing in China or the world." ”

Therefore, I decided that since I wanted to speak for Chinese culture, I must use the purest cultural way to make all strangers who yearn for culture fall in love.

In this way, my main behavior becomes these two things -

First, field visits to the remains and ruins of ancient cultures must be reached in person;

Second, I write prose while examining, and it is beautiful. Because only American literature can be called a "pure" culture.

This is the beginning of my beginning when I began to write a piece of "Cultural Journey" in the wasteland inn.

Three

Speaking of which, the team of ancient Chinese culture is not small, but this team is basically composed of scholars, and they all do the work of scholars with the eyes of scholars.

I'm also a scholar, but I opened my eyes to prose.

Yes, prose is not just writing, it should be the gaze first.

It's like the drama I used to do, looking at the same thing with a "dramatic eye" and a "non-dramatic eye", and the result is very different.

Looking at Chinese history with the eyes of prose has also introduced the most hungry and moving eyes of the vast number of readers. The characteristics of this gaze are: tired of stale, tired of narrowness, tired of boredom, tired of repetition, tired of concepts; focused on poetry, about humanity, about discovery, about surprise, about details.

I followed this gaze, choosing what I saw and heard along the way, and as a result, everything I chose was very different from my original academic vision. But the academic gaze also has a role, that is, to add a layer of "significant significance" to the prose gaze.

In this way, when I write about Dunhuang, I will imagine myself confronting Stein's convoy in the desert and then crying myself. Then, I systematically explained the culture of ruins, the culture of non-attack, the culture of Wei and Jin, the culture of chaotic times, the culture of dilemma, the culture of worshiping water, the culture of collecting books, the culture of academy, the culture of Jin shang, the culture of Qing Palace, the culture of exile, the culture of imperial examinations, the culture of gentlemen, the culture of villains...

Most of these cultures, before me, have not been written in their entirety in a thematic way. That said, the prose gaze helped me to start these major topics in the contemporary world. From this, it can be seen that the prose gaze can transcend the tired historical popular discourse and poetically think about the world.

Unearthing these cultures is still the first step, and the more important step is to make the vast number of friends who are not familiar with history happy to accept. As a result, the sense of language, rhythm, and words of the prose play a key role. This makes works such as "Cultural Journey" have a large number of readers who are eager to recognize their ancestors culturally, and they have maintained their popularity at home and abroad for decades without decreasing.

Needless to say on the mainland, Mr. Chen Jingtao, the general manager of Shenzhen Book City, once showed me a copy of the top ten best-seller lists in the country for ten years, and I alone accounted for four copies - this is not counting the total number of pirated copies that are dozens of times more than the genuine version.

In Taiwan, "to the green light coffee house to listen to Bach read Yu Qiuyu" became a generation of fashion, and a group of Taiwanese writers also published monographs under the title of the book. To this end, I had to go to Taiwan every once in a while to give a "roundabout speech," which I could not postpone.

Mr. Bai Xianyong said: "Mr. Yu's essays have always been the first bibliography of Chinese community book clubs around the world. ”

But it was all this that brought me scourge.

Four

Extremely best-selling, it was transformed by the media into extreme defamation. According to Professor Yang Changxun's statistics, I have the honor of becoming the most attacked independent cultural person in ancient times. His own collection of defamatory articles has reached more than 1,800. This is the scourge that prose can cause, and the "life and death enemy" mentioned at the beginning of this article is not an exaggeration.

Curiously, all the slander does not involve the article itself, but only a rumor. Based on my report, the Shanghai police conducted an in-depth investigation into the rumor of a so-called "ex-wife" and concluded that most of the slanders against me in the society were aimed at obtaining "anti-slander fees", so it was recommended to prosecute me for the crime of "blackmail". In order to avoid dirty, I did not sue, but I still muttered in my heart: Just for the "anti-defamation fee", can I make such a large scale and last so long? There should be a strong initiator, right?

Later, I finally understood the truth. The article "The "Shi Yige" Incident" in this book has already recorded that a Hong Kong newspaper plus a newspaper in Guangzhou played a key role.

It was during the Wenchuan earthquake that I published an article overseas after rushing to the scene for the first time, saying that "the facts of the national disaster relief have proved that the Chinese nation is one of the few most outstanding ethnic groups in mankind." Unexpectedly, this sentence caused Hong Kong's Apple Daily to launch a systematic attack on me, and the attack article also admitted that the past slander against me was created by them. It turned out that what they could not tolerate the most was that I described the Chinese nation as an excellent ethnic group, and even if it was "one of them", it was not allowed.

In response, I said: "I am willing to seek love in China, and they insist on finding hatred in China." ”

That's the root cause of their massive slander against me.

Therefore, they also awarded me a big cultural medal from the opposite side. Thinking like this, prose has returned me from "death" to "life".

Therefore, I simply focused on interpreting Chinese culture. He delivered a speech at the United Nations Conference on World Civilization on "The Non-Aggressive Nature of Chinese Culture" and "The Reasons for the Longevity of Chinese Culture" at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. At the same time, he began to discuss the way of the gentleman, Lao Tzu, Zhou Yi, Qu Yuan, and Sima Qian at home and abroad.

Five

Between life and death, I cherish my prose even more.

There have always been many people compiling my anthologies, and even Mr. Ji Xianlin, a university scholar, led me in compiling a selection of essays for me, "Nanming Autumn Water". However, the various anthologies did not have time to choose the "Chinese Context", "Door Hole", and "Rainy Night Short Essay" that I have written in recent years, so there is this new prose selection.

There are many optional articles, I closed my eyes and thought, roughly divided into four series:

Back of the first series

The second series of the road

Episode 3: Yi Si

Episode 4 Yourself

"Back shadow" refers to some outstanding cultural people in Chinese history that we look up to. Most of them later became "personality landmarks" of the Chinese, and thus part of the collective personality. After following my gaze, who can believe the so-called "ugly Chinese" frame-up?

"Lutu" measures the thickness and temperature of Chinese culture in a spatial sense. For this measurement, I use my feet first, and then I use a pen. Fortunately, a large number of readers followed me on the road. Mr. Yu Guangzhong once quipped: "Your hard journey has become a popular music brigade in the blink of an eye." "It was my original intention to revive the cultural paths that had been neglected for a long time. But the resurgence of excitement is not a throwback to the past. Relive the past in order to take a new step. Chinese culture, which looks like the old road, is in urgent need of a new road.

Many of the articles in the third series, "Yisi", were most popular among young readers when they appeared elsewhere, and were reprinted most frequently in newspapers and periodicals. Writing casually in short words is the nature of prose. In contrast, the load of both the first and second series is too heavy. I myself like to read this kind of light-hearted article in my leisure time. Therefore, this series brings the prose back and makes the reader feel comfortable.

The fourth series, "Myself", is placed in the finale. Prose is written back and forth, and ultimately it is about writing about yourself. The infiltration of individual life signals is an important feature of prose that distinguishes it from papers. The articles I have chosen in this series are all based on myself, but the beginning of this series, "The Fulcrum of My Life" and "Faded by Enlightenment", has shown that the "self" in my heart is actually not so important. "Self" has long been empty in the mind, just a kind of "hand-holding hand" that is needed when writing.

"Having no self and having a self" is a state of life and a style of prose.