Text/He Liwei
Cai Zhihai smoked a cigarette, he smoked is not inhaled into the lungs, the mouth swirled, squirted out, the lens flashed, almost unquestionably said: Li Wei, I want to publish a novel collection, you write a preface with me! Take another puff of smoke, spew it out, and say even more unmistakably: Also, you have to insert a few paintings! Sigh, say it so loudly, choke me.
I said that I am not unwilling to write, I think Mr. so-and-so is more suitable to write, will be more authoritative, more appropriate, higher building. He waved his hand: "Or not, he doesn't have you understand me!"
Choked again, I had to say, well, I'll try.
He said I understood him, half lifting, half truth. In the early 1980s, we made our debut in the literary world at the same time, and it has been forty years since we were able to do it. During this period, we quarreled and quarreled, fought with each other, flicked our sleeves, threw the door, and lifted the table, which was a regular thing, but never hurt our feelings, and after two days, we were together again, eating, playing cards, playing haha, talking about literature, talking about women, talking about women, he stuttered xiangxi dialect like his mentor Mr. Shen Congwen, and even spewed out beads, witty words, provoked laughter in the hall, and a crowd of people were happy. Cai Zhihaiping is not only in words, but when it comes to literature and women, he often jumps out of a sentence or two, has a knife in his hand, and the precision and sharpness of the five-step killing is fierce, at the same time, he is also humorous, humorous and ice-added. At this time, you will understand that his insight into the world, his wisdom of understanding things, and his perspective on life are far above you. Beneath his seemingly clumsy exterior, there is actually a delicate and clear heart. My understanding of him is that I understand that no matter what, he is a friend that you can't shake off in your lifetime. He doesn't give you a reason to hate him at all.
Earlier, I always thought he was long-time and too playful. We rubbed mahjong together, in the middle of the night, the mobile phone in his pants pocket rang, and his twenty-something wife Xiao Nie called: Cai Zhihai, I have woken up, and I have not returned, where are you? He said quietly to the speakerphone: Where? I'm in Taipei! After saying that, I hung up my mobile phone and asked the head, what kind of brand did you just come out? Chicken? Chicken me and I, seven little pairs! His face was swollen red, he looked up and laughed, and the chair had tilted at a forty-five-degree angle.
He seemed to be very busy, and he didn't know what he was busy with, the dragon saw the beginning and the end, holding a huge file bag, and the heavens knew what secrets were contained in it. Usually he calls and says where are you? I had just reported a complete sentence to a third, and he hung up, leaving me in a mess in the wind. Impatient, impatient. We had a meeting in the Writers' Association, and he never sat for less than ten minutes, hey, what about people? I was slightly better than him, and I had to sit for five minutes longer. We are all professionals who have escaped from the church.
Forty years is really fast, Cai Zhihai and I have done a lot of things, and when I look back, I haven't done anything. Time will not flow back, but it will flow in vain. He was older than me, seventy years old this year. Unexpectedly, suddenly, in recent years, his old husband has talked about juvenile madness, desperately writing novels, changing his greedy play without long feelings, and inexplicably busy, strengthening his will, sitting on the bench, long, novella, short story, steaming, one after another, unveiling the drawer, and good to get a satisfactory table, every time people shoot surprisingly, it is really stubborn determination, and the article is older and more successful.
Cai Zhihai's early novels are good, and after forty years of precipitation, life accumulation, reading people and reading the world, reading and thinking, now, his goodness, his depth, his ascending realm, his care for the land, mankind and the world and history, as well as the requirements for his own literary aesthetic standards, have been greatly different from before. The character of his novels, the quality of his words, and the meaning of his works are completely out of the ordinary, another category. You wonder, how does a person do it? What kind of enlightenment and pain did you experience during this period?
A few of our best writers have a WeChat group, and the new drafts written by Cai Zhihai in recent years are often sent to the group first. They are all elderly people, mobile phones to read the text, very difficult, but the literary friends in the group, must read every article, read it, all praised. And in addition to liking, I always have to send a post-reading feeling, and I praise a lot. One is the mutual encouragement between friends, and the other is indeed a sense of truth. His novels deserve praise.
He asked me to write a preface and accompany the pictures, and at night there was a crackling sound in my phone, and he sent a string of word documents of fictional texts, counting twenty-two. My God, I had my driver's license review this year, my eyesight couldn't pass, and hundreds of oceans were equipped with pairs of glasses, so I barely managed to cope with the past. After reading these twenty-two novels with thousands and tens of thousands of words on your mobile phone, don't you have to change your lenses again? So I scolded two sentences loudly, according to Master Lu Xun, one was a national insult, and the other was also a national curse.
But I read these novels slowly and slowly, with great interest, and my eyes were uncomfortable and my heart was happy. This is a group of novels of the same standard, far more than himself in the past, and far more than many writers who are fashionable and fashionable. Some of these novels have been read in the group, some are new chapters, and they have not yet been published in the group, of course, they are all new works in recent years. Not long after, he actually created such a large number of high-quality works, indicating that his state was a state of explosion, and his second spring of literature with flowers and flowers was also delayed. The old Shu'er is good, the old Cai Zhihai and his new works are better than The Er. After reading it, the fragrance remains in the jaw, and the charm is deep.
I was amazed that his recent works, although mostly short and medium-length, are becoming more and more obviously epic. For example, he wrote "Pretend to be a Peach Tree", is to write a mountain village called "Ancient Tree Village", he wrote "Hedong Street Market", is to write an old street called "Hedong Street", whether it is a mountain village, or an old street, it transcends a narrow area, penetrates time, as if to let people see the scene of human survival and change in the long river of history, those who are alive, dead people, in the visible time and space and invisible time and space, those that carry the legends, stories and songs of the past life and the same years, interspersed in the novel, It is also interspersed in the reader's memory or imagination, awakening the reader's vast perception of time, understanding that personnel have metabolism, and the exchanges have become ancient and modern. Cai Zhihai's epic is the epic of Xiangxi and the epic of mankind on the earth. In "Pretending to be a Peach Tree", he writes about the bugs of the land, which form a literary image in the novel, alluding to the fact that human beings are also bugs on the earth. We all crawl slowly towards the far side of life. Cai Zhihai wrote in "Hedong Street Market": "When a person has his own history, he has time. "Yes, in a mountain village or a street market, everyone in it has its own history, and from beginning to end, time is an endless river. Writing short and medium stories into an epic means a butterfly change in Cai Zhihai's concept of novels. He no longer sees the characters in his works as people who exist in specific time and space, but as people who move in an endless historical scene. The temporal nature of the characters allows the novel to break through the physical length of the text, so that the finite extends to the infinite. Because of this, Cai Zhihai's novel has a kind of weather. He made the novels bigger.
Cai's novels are also becoming more and more inclined to prose culture. As a Writer of Xiangxi, he continued the tradition of the Xiangxian Shen Congwen Gong. Shen Gong's novels are very prose culture. Even "Border City", the most storied in his work, reads like reading a long prose that exudes poetry. The prose culture of Cai Zhihai's novels is more imaginative than that of his predecessor Mr. Shen, and more like the so-called Dongpo residents, who do what they should do and stop at what they have to do. It can be said that Cai Zhihai's novels in recent years are a kind of novel that has gained stylistic freedom. The more he writes, the more he writes, the more relaxed he becomes, the more he writes, the more casual he is, he stops everywhere, he lingers everywhere, and spring city is everywhere flying flowers. He has a confidence that he is not afraid that you will not be able to read. As a result, his narrative style has become more and more personal, more unscrupulous, and more distinctive. Freedom requires fearlessness, which means the breaking of the traditional novel's chapters and dams, and also means the exploration of new possibilities for the narrative of the novel. "Wen Wu Fa", you read Cai Zhihai's novel, you will have a new understanding of this ancient precept.
Cai Zhihai's recent works have a unique tone that belongs only to him in the narrative, producing a slow and calm sense of language, which is not only from the spoken language, but also from the written language, and the tone implies the rough vicissitudes of peeling old bark, the vicissitudes of time, and the vicissitudes of the world. This is a kind of tone of the old Zen master's case, the tone of the white cloud dog, calm, full of confidence, and the magnetic field of speech attracts you. In "A Brief History of Father", he uses this tone and sense of language to tell the life of his father, like the long wind in the valley, blowing the forest of life and glory, triggering the echo of the change of years in the cold and summer. A Xiangxi man, experiencing war, soldiers and bandits, more overlapping regimes, the city head changing the banner of the king, encountering the oncoming good people and bad people, men and women, and can not escape the doom, as a bandit, also as a volunteer army, and married and had children, let the literate son help him write a review of the new dynasty, a life like a worm in "Pretend to be a Peach Tree", towards the end of the life of the same individual in the years. And finally: "When the sun sets." Father is gone. I call Daddy. I don't have a dad anymore. ”
When I read Cai Zhihai's novels, I was always fascinated not by the plot, but by his narrative tone. The tone is murmuring, old and affectionate, deep and magnetic. I seem to have suddenly discovered that the charm of the novel can not be the story, not the plot of the peaks and turns, the ups and downs of the fate, but only the tone of the person who speaks, generating reading traction. Cai Zhihai's novels seem to have not been read, but have been listened to. His novels also seem to be not written, they are told. Oh, you see, nagging can also be beautiful.
Cai Zhihai's novels embody the characteristic that literature is the art of language. His narrative language, sometimes life-like, sometimes note-taking novelization, rhythm, rhythm, long sentences and short sentences, ups and downs intertwined, releasing the charm of the Chinese language ontology. He did not speak any dialect, but his language had a distinct locality and was saturated with the regional culture of western Hunan Province.
Time is the flow of water in fiction. Cai Zhihai wrote in the novel of "Red Kite", a juvenile love affair: "The flowing water washes out the childlike face of the stone. They scattered quietly everywhere, listening to the stories of the river. ”
We, on the other hand, were listening to the story told by Cai Zhihai in the moss-like language of stone.
Every time I listen to his story, there is always a cloud of smoke in my heart, lingering for a long time.
The life of Xiangxi's youth is a deep well of literary materials for Cai Zhihai, and the water in the well is inexhaustible. So we kept reading his new works, and we kept looking forward to him.
But such a good novel, perhaps not many people read it, not enough to be lively, and it can't shock a beach of gulls and herons in the literary world. I am a little sad, not for myself, nor for Cai Zhihai, but for Chinese readers, for their reading aesthetic choices. I am reminded of a friend's poem: Birds crying all over the mountain, looking up at the big eagle.
That's true.