The fourth emphasis is on the redemption of humanity under the horns
——Commenting on Ai Wei's "In the Mirror"
Yang Qingxiang
"In the Mirror" begins its story with a tragic car accident: Runsheng's wife Yi Rong drunk driving, the car hit the guardrail of the bridge, two children died on the spot, Yi Rong survived after rescue, but has been seriously disfigured, she chose to commit suicide in her old house a few months later, Runsheng thus faced the darkest moment of life... Ai Wei is obviously a master of narrative, and he pushes people to an extreme situation from the beginning: how should people face this misfortune?
helpless. fear. suffering. despair. remorse. regret. This is a normal emotional reaction of people facing misfortune, and our protagonist Runsheng is the same, he is in pain and cannot extricate himself, he needs to take medicine to be able to sleep, he constantly blames himself, realizing that "he is the root of all misfortune" - because Yi Rong discovered his private affair with Zi Shan and became addicted to alcohol, on the day of the car accident, Yi Rong tracked Runsheng and found that he was dating Zi Shan, and then could not control himself. This is the novel's first narrative perspective, in which the betrayer is punished, Runsheng loses his wife and children, and Zishan loses Runsheng's love.
But this is not the whole "truth", in the second corner, Yi Rong is not an image of a "virtuous wife and mother", but has a repressed and crazy desire, which gives birth to secret feelings between her and Shi Ping, and there are more complex ethical dilemmas behind the tragedy of the car accident. As a patient writer, Ai Wei asked Yi Rong to set up an email that was sent out a year later, and in this "death email", more complex intimate relationships and human nature were presented.
Similar to Ai Wei's previous works, camera-like daily writing is not Ai Wei's pursuit, what he pursues is how to see the spiritual depth of human nature behind this seemingly trivial and mediocre daily life? In those great works, because of the grandeur of the environment of the times, the depth of human spiritual field can therefore be illuminated by historical events, in "Hamlet", "Anna Karenina", "Crime and Punishment", "Notre Dame de Paris", human nature is almost "direct" presented without the need for too many "intermediaries". But the dilemma faced by Ai Wei's generation of writers is that the homogenized, flattened, and fragmented characteristics of contemporary life make the "human nature" of contemporary people have a high degree of "virtual sense" and "performance" - in a sense, the humanity of contemporary people is trained and cultivated, its structure has a certain closedness, and to write deeply about this human nature, it is necessary to use more intense story settings and more "mediated" situational devices.
If tragic car accidents are an extreme story setting, then "architecture" is an effective intermediary device. In "In the Mirror", Runsheng's profession is an architect, and Shiping is his most trusted assistant. Architecture is not only a profession at the beginning of the novel, but also a creative act of the characters expressing their spirituality, at the same time, it also constitutes the third value angle in the novel, in this value angle: "Architecture in the mirror, is not only a plot element and modeling method, but also a novel method, the projected problem consciousness related to the novel ontology and the character's architectural practice and speculation in the work, forming a mirror image relationship" (Xu Chenliang, "Architecture as a method, giving shape to the light of the soul"). Therefore, there is a mutual gaze in this corner of emphasis, on the one hand, the characters, especially Runsheng, who gain a sense of life and wisdom through the gaze of architecture, as the architect Tadao Ando reminded him: "Love and hate are one, just like light and darkness in architecture... The only thing we can do is to express our love for the human world through architecture. On the other hand, architecture— which can also be seen as a work of fiction in a metaphorical sense — is also gazing at the characters, and only through the exquisite structure of architecture, that is, the writing of the novel, can it penetrate the obscuration of contemporary life on human nature, through the thick "cocoon of everyday life", and approach the unpredictable deep sea of human nature.
Both the novel as the original text and the architecture as a situational installation vaguely point to the theme of redemption. Before completing this theme, Ai Wei sets up a "journey" for the characters in the novel— he seems to emphasize that salvation cannot be as rapid as the epiphany of "Zen Buddhism", and even if this "moment of enlightenment" will eventually come, it must also go through the trials of earthly life. As a result, the characters of the novel began to move in different spaces, Runsheng went to Burma and became involved in the local armed struggle; Zishan went to New York to try to start a new life; Shiping went to Japan, but as one of Runsheng's "mirrors", he was always entangled in the "host-guest" relationship with Runsheng. The travels of these people give the novel a spatial vision of the world, meeting and meeting different people in different countries and cultures, in the contemporary "fluidity", China is woven into the world, and the problem of human nature is extended from the specific individual to the universal human being. In this sense, the journey of Runsheng and Zishan is not only a journey of personal self-exile and self-pursuit, but also a pilgrimage and redemption journey of mankind.
"In the Mirror" was first published in Contemporary Magazine, Issue 2, 2022
Dark desires, hidden meanness, brutal killing, hidden betrayal... Technological development and material abundance in contemporary society, far from eliminating these "negativities" of human nature, allow these "negativities" to act on our actions in a more secret way— people always start from scratch and learn a little lesson from life in repeated injuries. Ai Wei understands the logic of this history, but he is also obsessed with the possibility of "redemption" - Ai Wei belongs to the kind of "thirsty people", believing that there is some kind of secret path that can lead to the temple of human perfection, and perhaps, there is a "thief spring" that can cure his "thirst" - is this kind of "thief spring" in the novel?
"In the Mirror" reminds me of the famous poem "In the Mirror" by the late poet Zhang Zao: "As long as I think of the regrets in my life / Plum blossoms fall all over nanshan." "Tadao Ando's architecture, Shusaku Endo's silence, the heavenly truth of the four-faced Buddha, the gentleness and terror of the Four-Faced Buddha, the good and evil of human nature, the terror and reconciliation of the earthly world—all in the mirror of Ai Wei, and also between the opening and falling of plum blossoms."
Special commentary of this journal
About the Author:
Yang Qingxiang, born in 1980. He is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts, Chinese Min University, and a doctoral supervisor. His major works include the criticism collection "After 80, What to Do", "Social Problems and Literary Imagination", the poetry collection "I Choose to Cry and Love You", "The World Equals Zero" and so on. He is the chief editor of the large-scale young writers research series "New Coordinate Book Series", the science fiction series "Green Science Fiction Series", the English edition of the post-80s short story collection The Sound of Salt Forming, and has won the Feng Mu Literature Award and the Mao Dun Literary Newcomer Award.
Editor of this weChat issue: Liu Yujie
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