Famous artists talk about writing| Liang Hong: The relationship between writing and the world is like the relationship between a magician and truth

Editor's Note

How to read, write, and judge the merits and weaknesses of an essay are different and different. In view of this, the China Writers Network has launched a series of articles on "Famous Artists Talk about Writing", so that famous artists from ancient and modern China and abroad can "face to face" with you to teach their writing experience, and perhaps a sentence can make you suddenly realize and open up in the vast sea of books. Stay tuned.

Liang Hong

The relationship between writing and the world

——Speech at Guanghua Bookstore in London

The relationship of writing to the world is like the relationship between a magician and truth.

There is never one truth: a magician's performance cannot be true. However, people are still fascinated by the magician's performance, because it contains the human imagination, the human desire for itself and the world, and it explores possibility.

The same is true of literature, which is not intended to tell you that the truth is what it is, but to tell you that it has other possibilities. This possibility derives both from the facts that human beings have created—the social formations, the structure of civilization, and the state of human nature—as well as from the possible directions contained within human beings. In this sense, literature and the world manifest themselves in a contradictory, dislocated, and metaphorical way.

These are the three levels I want to share with you today.

01

Contradictory relationships

Writing is not simply explaining the world, but turning its back on the world. The writer has to go into the shadows, to the backs of the fashionable, ornate megastructures, to see the shape of the world and the direction of the road there. And, the more certainty this megastructure is—and arguably a giant discourse—the more it requires the writer to turn around and look at it. The two are interdependent, like sunshine and shadow, affirmation and denial, huge and tiny.

It is a very important task for writers to see the sentient beings of everyday life in the midst of giant discourse, to find the silent, quiet part of the noise, and to try to discover how they grow with each other.

The expansion of the small town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the positive side of history, the social reality that is happening. At the political level, it may even be inevitable, and the urbanization and modernity of Latin America, and the urbanization and modernity of China are all inevitable in the process of the development of modern civilization, but the task of the writer is not to write about the inevitability of Macondo's development, but to write about the centuries of loneliness that grew at the same time in this necessity. Ursuna and Colonel Aureliano, trapped by hurricane-like developments, unable to decide their own destiny, but stubbornly maintaining their existence. This stubbornness has earned them dignity and invisibly becomes a game of strength and "history".

02

Small equals big, or, small is greater than big

Like I just said in "One Hundred Years of Solitude", a village can be the whole world, Macondo from a village of a few families to a prosperous town, and then to decay, in the process, the author describes the sentient beings contain many images of human beings, and the fate of the small town of Macondo is almost the fate of the entire modern Latin America.

One man's love can be the love of all mankind. Take, for example, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. There is a detail in the book that goes like this. After Anna and Vronsky quarreled, Vronsky went alone in a carriage to Petersburg for a banquet. At this time, Anna stood by the upstairs window and watched the handsome, well-dressed Vronsky walk toward the carriage, feeling very jealous, lost, and unwilling. They eloped together, but the high society in Petersburg could accept Vronsky but not her. She could only hide at home, allowing despair to devour herself. I think that in that moment, Anna's pain is not just the pain of an upper-class woman, but the sadness of all love encountering barriers in the face of reality, the sadness that all love can experience.

One man's nightmare can be the nightmare of all mankind. The first sentence of Kafka's Metamorphosis is "Gregor gets up in the morning and turns into a beetle." "We all know that it is impossible for a person to become a beetle, but everyone has experienced such moments, fear, anxiety, worry, very, very depressed, and Kafka expressed this invisible emotion into tangible language.

Returning to our theme, today I came to London and sat in this bookstore to tell you about Liang Zhuang and Liang Zhuang's life.

Liangzhuang is a contemporary Chinese village, my hometown, what does it have to do with Britain, with you who are listening at this time?

Let me tell you a little story. Take the story of The Little Black Daughter at the end of "Out of Liang Zhuang" as an example.

At that time, I was doing a survey of "Out of Liang Zhuang" in my hometown. One morning, the grandmother of the little black daughter took the little black daughter to the clinic to see a doctor, and when she checked it, she found that the condition was very serious, so I quickly drove them to the county hospital. When the doctor treated the little black daughter, I tried to contact some people I knew, the police station, the court, and so on, to see what to do. All people, whether doctors, police officers or judges, say that it is certainly right to report the case, but it is not recommended to report the case, according to past experience, not to call the police is definitely less than to hurt the little black daughter than to call the police.

Those two days were two days of extreme pain and suffering. Things keep coming back to square one. Grandma said that she was going to call the police, and then she pulled her hair and said she was sorry for her son and daughter-in-law, and she banged her head against the wall, so it was better to die, or she lowered her head to her legs and cried silently. Grandma is cowardly in her heart, she actually does not dare to call the police, she is afraid of tearing her face with the neighbors, she is afraid that people will beat a rake, afraid of being known that the granddaughter will not be able to find her in-laws in the future, afraid of losing people in the village and relatives.

Once, when I inadvertently opened the video archive on my computer and turned to the interview with the little black daughter, I once again heard the video of my irrepressible crying. At that time, I was asking my little black daughter why the neighbor old man didn't tell her grandmother the first time she did that to her, it hurt so much. The little black daughter said slowly, because she was afraid that her grandmother would be sad, because her brother was too naughty, her grandmother was already very tired, and she did not want her to worry more about herself.

After so many years, I still can't help but cry. She didn't know what she had suffered, and the reason for her further injury was her distressed grandmother.

Listening to the little black daughter's story and seeing her grandmother's gray hair again, I thought, maybe the reason for the incident and the way it is handled may be Chinese, but at that moment, the pain of the grandmother must be contained in the pain of all mankind, it is the eternal pain of mankind and the dilemma that human beings face forever. At the same time, the injury suffered by the little black daughter due to innocence is also the harm suffered by all human innocence, it is a real personal encounter, but at the same time, it is also like one of the inner images of the human world, which is closely related to you and me.

In this sense, Liangzhuang is the center of the world, which carries the fate of human beings all over the world in contemporary civilization.

It can also be said that the relationship between writing and the world is the relationship between small equals large, and even, larger than the world, is the relationship between small and large.

03

Metaphorical relationships

Writing and the world is not a relationship between reflection and reflection, but a relationship between metaphor and symbolism. When a writer writes about a character or a village, a manor, a story, he does not write according to the model of reality, but rather breaks the model, in this case, the perception of reality in everyday concepts, breaks it into elements, and then re-kneads it. Even if we say that Pride and Prejudice is a genre painting of the Middle Class in 19th-century Britain, we cannot say that it is exactly the same as reality, like Japanese ukiyo-e, highlighting some important characters and making them a kind of metaphor and symbolic existence. That's why stories are valuable.

This is the basic starting point for literary creation. Metaphor is not just a rhetorical or creative technique, but a fundamental starting point for the creation of a literary world, especially for fictional literature.

How to have both human beings, but at the same time can lead to metaphor and universality, this is the artistic direction pursued by all writers.

For example, Bulgakov's "The Master and Margaret" examines the social reality and mental state of Russia at that time by examining the human soul through satan the devil incarnated as a professor, and such a surreal starting point has a strong metaphorical color in itself. Márquez and Kafka's novels are such starting points.

However, there is another way, that is, through a very clear carving of the real world, and finally achieve a strong metaphorical style. The day before yesterday I went to the National Gallery in London to see a portrait of Little Hans Holbein, and I was fascinated by the strong and clear style of his paintings. His paintings are very realistic, and every detail, even the folds on the hands, will be painted, but when you look at the whole portrait, they have a strong surreal style. The figures stand out in space like reliefs, sharp, powerful, and lonely.

Returning to literary works, such as Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary, the novel itself is very realistic, but in the end, it has a strong metaphorical style. I think this has a lot to do with the writer's understanding of the world and his understanding of people.

I myself have just finished a novel, The Four Elephants. The novel is about a schizophrenic college student who returns to his hometown to herd sheep in a cemetery by the river. Here, he chatted, talked, studied with three people, and after a series of events, returned to the city and was revered as a master. In the end, his spirits were basically back to normal, but he could no longer hear the three men speaking. These three people are actually the undead in the cemetery.

On the surface, the story seems a little magical, but my intention was not to write a magic realism novel. When I looked at Holbein's paintings, it occurred to me that what I was after was such a style: a strong, clear authenticity, even crude, so that it could eventually reach some kind of metaphor. So, in my heart, I have been writing about the three people of this cemetery as real people, and they are real in the young man with schizophrenia.

This novel is not long, thirteen or forty thousand words, but I have been writing it for more than two years, and I have changed it to the fourth time, and I am still changing it, and I personally like it very much, and one of the reasons is that it is so deformed but closely related to the real world.

Back to the beginning, the literary world is a world that is different from the real world, but must be born in the real world, and the relationship between it and the real world is that you have me and I have you, which looks like a face, but in fact it is a relationship composed of countless faces.

I think this is also the most basic relationship between writing and the world.

Thank you.

Note: The content of this article is from Liang Hong's speech at Guanghua Bookstore in London on March 14, 2019. Edits have been abridged.

Source: Selected Journal of Chinese Literature, No. 9, 2019

Editor: Liu Ya

Second instance: Wang Yang

Third instance: Chen Tao