The history of wanderers
——Commenting on Yang Xianping's essay collection "Middle Age"
◎ Yu Owl
Writers are inseparable from their personal writing field - or "spiritual hometown", they inspire each other in their writing, run into each other, and constantly broaden its content and boundaries in the physical and spiritual dimensions, and the writing habits and ways of thinking are constantly adapted and corrected in this process. It can be said that the writer and his own writing field are mutually superficial and complete with each other. Guanzhong to Chen Zhongzhong, Shangzhou to Jia Pingwa, Gaomi to Mo Yan, Shanghai to Jin Yucheng, and so on. However, this general style does not seem to make sense in Yang Xianping.
"Middle Age" can be said to be a collection of essays by Yang Xianping "taking the body as a history", in which the author tells the story of "I", explores the secrets of the deep spiritual home of mankind, does not hide or avoid it, and openly and honestly analyzes the complex psychology of a generation halfway through life. When I first read "Middle Age", I felt the deepest feeling of separation in the text, which can be seen everywhere--an extreme disharmony between behavior and thinking. This great sense of separation comes from the dissension between the author's body and spirit, and also from the author's self-loss in the spiritual homeland.
Yang Xianping was born in the mountain village of South Taihang, and after joining the army, he lived in the Badain Jaran Desert for a long time, and in "The Border Cypriot Military Brigade or the Youth of Badain Jarin" and "The Fine Water Shimmer in the Desert", he wrote, "I am convinced that my youth was opened and consumed by the Badain Jaran Desert, including all suffering and happiness, misfortune and insecurity, pain and pleasure", and the author's view of love, world view and even writing concept sprouted there; in "Chengdu Notes", "Mistaken Medicine", "Depression", "Chaos Moment: Depression and Daily Suspense", The author changed careers to work in the local areas, in the process of dealing with family and health problems, thinking about men and women, thinking about life and death, thinking about people's "existence" and "mission", after a series of tribulations, reached a spiritual and physical self-reconciliation; and in "Xingzhou", "The False Journey", "Middle-aged People's Homesickness", the author tried to create a "I" who was "free from the earthy atmosphere and castrated the consciousness of small farmers", but "no matter how far I go, no matter how developed the mind is, it is impossible to get rid of his childhood and even the growth environment." That cultural tradition is not only used as a background, but also deeply rooted in his thinking consciousness and spirit with a powerful posture, and can never be eliminated. ”
It can be said that the Badain Jaran Desert has created the prototype of the author's personality, Chengdu has perfected the author's way of thinking, and the South Taihang countryside has left the background of the author's life, symbolizing his past and present, and even the foreseeable future, respectively. The three regions give Yang Xianping three completely different ways of life and thinking, the three are each other's horns, and they are evenly matched, and they constitute the author's basic writing field at the same time, but also entangled and pulled in his body at all times. In these three specific fields, the signifier and signifier of the cognitive self and the world of cognition are inevitably misaligned, and this dislocation ultimately constitutes the sense of separation in Middle Age. The author's body and mind cannot rest in it, and he becomes a wanderer of self-exile.
The author's characters, such as Zhu Jianjun in "The Path of FalseHood", Zhan Lei in "Middle-Aged Love and Pain", and "I" in "Xingzhou", also "transformed" into the author's shadow in the text, full of unexplained internal contradictions. The wanderer's inner destiny is that they cannot take on any responsibility or make any commitment. They are emotionally creepy but irresponsible, they love to talk but hesitate to delay in action, and they frequently orgasm and cannot extricate themselves in moral self-touching. In "Middle Age", the author uses himself as a history to show the living conditions of the real "wanderers" of contemporary middle-aged men, and questions and worries about the way contemporary people exist and behave and the huge background behind them. In the face of this state of being, O.Henry has made a very accurate description in his short story "Furnished Rooms for Rent": "Say they are homeless, but they have hundreds of places to live." They moved back and forth between countless furnished rooms, both in terms of foothold and mental, as a matter of hurried passers-by. ”
Another topic that has to be mentioned about "Middle Age" is, where is the margin of prose? Among the several existing literary genres at present, the boundaries of the novel can be described as the most distinct, and the interior can also be accurately divided according to the subject matter and length, and the poetry, reportage, etc. are also roughly the same, but the prose is not very clear. From a stylistic point of view, "The Journey of Falsehood" and "Middle-aged Love and Pain" in "Middle Age" are almost like novels, while "Xingzhou Ji" is similar to reportage dressed in the cloak of fiction; from the perspective of length, "Border Cypriot Military Brigade or Youth Badain Jilin", "This is only a matter of time", "Chengdu Notes" and other lengths are amazing, and some fragments of them can almost be independently written into chapters. We often say that prose should be short and concise, but "Middle Age" creates a very large personal and world situation in the long narrative, which can be said to be a betrayal of the spirit of prose, and it can also be said that this is a pioneering of the boundaries of prose. (The author is a young critic, currently working in the Creative Research Department of Hebei Writers Association)
Edited by Li Jie
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