"Concert": An unexpected | has been a long time

"Concert"

Author: Ai Wei

Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House

Publication date: 2022-01

Synopsis

Composed of 7 short stories, "Concert" is Ai Wei's recent work, and the novel shows the depth and breadth that the art of short stories can reach. "Concert" writes about both the trauma of broken lives and the mutual comfort of cold nights; "The Thief" tries to explore who stole our lives and emotions; "In the Horqin Steppe" tells about the unspeakable complexity and ambiguity between men and women; "Xiao Man" talks about the relationship between the female mother's love instinct and the body; "Happiness Hostel" talks about the unbearable guilt; "In Moscow" reflects the mental state of the current intellectuals with an extraterritorial mirror; "The Day After Tomorrow and Another Day" writes about incomprehensible understanding, and therefore unfathomable.

These novels have won the first place in the short story list of the literary list, the Wang Zengqi Literature Award, the "Novel Selection" PopularIty Award, the "Writer" "Golden Short Story" Novel Award, etc., and were selected into the "Urban Literature" list.

An accident

I was a long time ago

One

Ai Wei must have known the secret of controlling the text of the novel. At least when I read the short story collection "Concert", I could intuitively feel that Ai Wei had a certain clear sense of direction and a certain reliable stability when he exerted his strength on writing. He hardly used addition, but subtraction. How to understand the subtractive force used by writers to advance novel writing? For example, a stone carving artist faces a piece of rough, removes the excess, and finally reveals an image, which is the process of subtraction. The exposed image is actually the possession of the artist's mental image, which seems objective, but it is actually subjective. The part that was excluded, said to be superfluous, is actually not accurate. It is the skin of the original world, an objective existence that has not been dealt with by the artist. What is removed and what is left behind constitutes a whole world that the artist needs to face. There is a class of novelists whose methods of force are similar to those of stone carving artists. The original world they faced was life, but the skills they engaged in were not depictions of life, but chiseling out life. Ai Wei belonged to this type of novelist in his body. He was known as the Explorer of Human Nature. It is both exploration, indicating that Ai Wei is concerned about the dark zone of human nature, which is not illuminated by human reason, cannot be defined by concepts, and is difficult to reason with logic. How is Ai Wei going to explore this part of human nature? It adopts a technique similar to that of a stone carving artist, chiseling the skin of life little by little, carefully approaching the flickering shimmer of human nature. "Concert" is such a short story. A man made and sold fake concert tickets, and just one ticket fell into the hands of his son. Holding a fake ticket, the son could not enter the concert site, so he had to sneak into the playground next door and climb the Ferris wheel. Unexpectedly, the Ferris wheel suddenly started, and his son fell from the air to death. Years later, another child bought a fake ticket and met the man who made and sold fake tickets outside the concert. The man took the boy into the playground, guided him to a Ferris wheel, then walked into the control room and pressed the start button. When I recount the story in chronological order, I think the reader has speculated that the man's leading of the boy to the Ferris wheel must be related to the subjective factor of his previous suffering from the loss of his son. But Ai Wei doesn't make this reasoning. He wrote directly from the encounter between the man and the boy outside the concert venue, advancing the actions of the two men in a micro-scale detail until they were discovered by the security guards and finally kicked out of the amusement park. This narrative process takes up two-thirds of the entire work. Reading this, we still don't know what it is, and we don't know why it is so. Just as we watch a stone carving artist slowly remove the stone, but cannot predict what kind of fate this removal action will mean for a stone. However, it is this narrative, which hardly shows any outpouring, that takes us to a high-pressure emotional world in a state of concealment. In the ensuing third of the story, the man takes the boy back to his quarters, and we dimly see the man's inner secret. But it can only be seen vaguely. Ai Wei always closed his hands in time and did not pierce the secret, so as not to hurt the sensitive nerves of the human world. It is not so much that the novelist is adhering to some narrative ethics as it is adhering to some professionalism.

Two

Yu Jian said that poetry is an action, that is, cutting, cutting the world apart. As a special kind of poetry, the way the short story opens the world does not have to pursue the speed of cutting, but can fully benefit from the subtlety of the engraving and the subtractive effect generated by it. Ai Wei's "Concert", along with several other short stories in the collection of novels, generally presents us with this kind of writing effect. His exploration of the human world begins with the imitation of a series of actions visible to the naked eye, presenting a slow and delicate physical process. However, it seems inaccurate to say that it is imitation. To be precise, it is a kind of erosion - by recording the progress of the character's actions, step by step eroding the material shell of the surface of life, so as to be infinitely close to the inner subjective reality. This is the subtraction effect. The result is not only a peculiar way of constructing texts, but also a unique rhetorical style. Ai Wei minimizes the use of adjectives in his writing, which means that he filters artificial rhetoric to the greatest extent. This brought his language back to a minimalist state, and even made it wonder if he had been influenced by Carver's writing style. Of course, it doesn't matter if this effect exists. Importantly, its rhetorical style matches its writing strategy. Once the writer realizes that it is only possible to approach the dark zone of the depths of human nature carefully and discreetly by eroding the superficial reality of life with unmistakable accuracy, he knows that he must let the degree be gorgeous and let the degree be windy. This is a kind of professional self-consciousness of writers, and it is also a kind of writing realization of cognitive deepening. I have not read Ai Wei's early works, and I dare not judge the overall style of his creation. Based on my personal reading experience alone, I prefer to believe that the rhetorical style shown by Ai Wei in short stories such as "Concert" is not the release of perceptual talent, but the landing of deep diving practice. He became introverted until he let go of all the rhetoric of competence. This is a subtraction of rhetoric, and there is actually a worldview of awe behind it. He knows that human nature is terrible, easy to touch, can not be caught, can not be said. Only by taking the path of the outside world, carefully testing in the hard shell of life, and carefully excavating, can we get close to the three points of human nature. This also means that although kung fu is outside the poem, the direction of Ai Wei's force does not dare to deviate from the central orientation of the poem. Poetry. But we are long gone from the era of words and aspirations. Freud tells us that chi can be accurately spoken only at the dawn of civilization. I speak my heart. However, civilization is growing, and human beings are going farther and farther on the road of duplicity. This is the great logic of the process of civilization. But human beings have never given up on the effort to find the original intention in the form of poetry. So Yu Jian said that poetry is cut. Cut through the world and see the hidden heart. Ai Wei's novel creation, from a teleological point of view, also belongs to the category of poetry. The cognitive goal he is trying to reach is not life, but the unspeakable accidents that are overwhelmed by life. So Ai Wei said that the short story is an accident in the normal world. This is a good statement, but the use of the word accident is easy to cause misunderstanding, so that people understand the accident of the novel only on the material level. If the short story does not have the inherent requirements of poetry, it can easily degenerate into a short story, equating the accident with shaking baggage. This is something that writers whose careers are modern fiction do not want to see.

Three

The modern novel, especially the short story, is one of the most subtle poetic arts developed in our time, and the most reliable psychiatric anatomy of our time, which does not seem to have one. In this regard, "Concert" may not be perfect. It completes a difficult exploration of life, but does not let people see the profound accidents of life. Does a man lead a boy to the Ferris wheel, licking his old wounds, or irrational revenge, or self-redemption for past mistakes? This ambiguous ambiguity from the subconscious is vaguely presented through Ai Wei's subtractive narrative. But that's about it. It is far less significant than exploration itself, just as the proceeds of minerals are much less than the cost of extraction. In order to make up for the dissatisfaction with the inner meaning, the author initiated the meaning processing process, leading the novel writing to the debate between good and evil in human nature. In the end, the man did not take malicious revenge between a thought, but after continuous interaction, he developed an imperceptible compassion. This is the victory of good over evil, and it is also a reconciliation of the inner conflicts of human nature, from which the author's worldview towards light can be seen. I have no objection to writers making such a value presupposition in fiction. When a writer writes to the end, he must only be left with an attitude. But before expressing an attitude, does the writer really have insight into the accidents under life? This is a question of the degree of completion of the novel. At the same time, we will continue to ask, what exactly does this accident mean? Ai Wei already has a unique understanding of this. He said that the novel uses concrete individuals to pierce the vast and strong fortress of ideas, thus returning vitality and possibility to life and freedom to mankind. Ai Wei's statement represents the creative ideal of a type of novelist. If we decode this ideal, in the vernacular – the novel is the search for the individual buried in the reality of life. Life is real, superficial, material, and at the same time endowed with a powerful rational logic. And those buried individuals have become an accident in this world. The plane sailed to the sky, following the rational logic of aerospace science, but just like the recent China Eastern Airlines accident, the plane fell straight to the ground, which was an accident. However, this kind of accident only occurs on the material level, and cannot constitute a novel. The novel does not shy away from all kinds of accidents in life, but what the novel really cares about, or really makes the novel possible, is the accident that occurs on the spiritual level. According to the common saying we are accustomed to, such an accident is an unfortunate thing. The novelist's search for the unfortunate individual buried by life also reconstructs the connection between the individual and life, while also revealing the tension between the individual and the world, and the possibility and impossible of re-reconciliation. If "Concert" still has dissatisfaction, it must start from here. The author's understanding of the accident, based on the accidental accident of the son's death caused by the sale of fake tickets by the man system, necessarily weakens the close connection between the unfortunate individual and the powerful logic of life. In this way, although the exploration technology is superb, the income may not be abundant.

Four

Another of Ai Wei's short stories, "Xiao Man", has a similar theme to "Concert", both involve the pain of losing a son, but in terms of writing effect, it has formed a comparative relationship. In terms of narrative techniques alone, "Concert" may be superior. Whether it is in the relationship between the characters or in the story line, the narrative resources that the writer can mobilize in this novel are very limited, and the work can be written on this, all relying on the extraordinary ability of the text to control. Looking at "Little Man", as far as the story is concerned, it is relatively full. Mr. Bai, an antique dealer, lost his son in middle age, and his wife no longer has fertility, so they find a rural girl named Xiaoman who is surrogate through the nanny Ximei. After rational monetary calculations, the Xiaoman family took over the business. After becoming pregnant, Xiao Man gradually developed non-essential thoughts, and became deeper and deeper into the belly of the child as his son. The child was born less than a month ago, Xiao Man eloped with his son, was found by the Bai family and escorted back to his hometown in the countryside, and finally became a crazy person, standing at the mouth of the village every day, and everyone said that her son would become a county official in the future. The above is only the main story line. There are also two branches, one about the history of the White family and one about the family affairs of the nanny Ximei, which are interwoven with the main line to complete a complete story. When Ai Wei wrote this novel, he benefited from the self-sufficiency of the story, and the technical force of the novel's narrative seemed ordinary. Traditional white drawing, coupled with reasonable needle leads, is enough. If "Concert" and "Xiao Man" are given to a reader with shallow professional experience at the same time, it will be "Xiao Man" that is more popular. Because the narrative technique of "Little Man" is more common, the experiential world described is also more intuitive. But we must not underestimate the depth of the novel of "Little Man". At least it can tell us what an accident is at the level of fiction. When Xiao Man continues to strengthen her identification with having a son, the originally agreed good buying and selling relationship is no longer counted, and she begins to make enemies with the world. This is a real accident on a spiritual level, and it is also a kind of misfortune. Xiao Man eventually goes to schizophrenia, even if he has never seen it in real life, it is credible in the novel. "Xiao Man" won the Wang Zengqi Literature Prize, and the award speech examined it in the literary tradition created by modern writers such as Shen Congwen, Roushi, Cao Yu, wu Zuyi, etc., on the grounds that they involved similar themes such as milk generation and snatching of children. I think that "Xiao Man" and Lu Xun's "Blessing" are more closely related in spirit. "Blessings" writes about the pain of losing a son on Xiang lin's sister-in-law. In this regard, Zhou Zuoren said that Xianglin's sister-in-law was insane because of the sadness of losing her son. But when we put "Blessing" and "Xiao Man" together, we can clearly see that the pain of losing a child is only the final fatal blow, but the deep root is the opposition between the individual and the world. The opposite of Xianglin is feudal etiquette, a kind of moral rationality from the old era. The opposite of Xiao Man is the instrumental rationality of the age of technology worship - since the development of surrogacy technology in the seventies of the last century, human beings have become more and more convinced that fertility is highly controllable, and everyone's reproductive behavior can also be regulated by monetary rationality. Xiao Man's tragedy lies in the fact that she has an irrational accident in the world of instrumental rationality, which is a real spiritual misfortune.

(Zeng Nianchang, Director of Fujian Provincial Literary and Art Criticism Center)

Editor: Deng Jiefeng

Second instance: Liu Ya

Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang