Silver Daily, April 17, 2022
Retrial of Xu Zhaoshou's Journey to the West
Characteristics of "non-fiction" writing
Wen | Ren Zhifeng
Publisher: Writers Press
Written by Xu Xu Jeng-hee August 1st edition 2021
Undoubtedly, Xu Zhaoshou is a poet, and he has published many poetry collections, such as "The Waves of the Ancient Sea", "The Song of the Ears of Wheat", "The Northern Color", etc. At the same time, he is also a novelist, and his novels are based on the spiritual highlands of the west, telling the confusion and pursuit of young people ("The Wasteland Question"), showing the original heart and perseverance of the believers (Kumarosh). Xu Zhaoshou's recent collection of historical and cultural essays, Journey west to the Tao, confirms his identity as a scholar, using the vast land of the Hexi Corridor as a geographical coordinate, shouting for the history and culture of ancient China, and defending the obscured western culture. Since the publication of Xu Zhaoshou's "Journey to the West", it has attracted the attention of the academic community. In "Poems Dedicated to the Western Land", Wu Shiqi emphasized the practical significance of "Journey to the West": the promotion of traditional Chinese culture and the watchful eye of Western Chinese culture. Fan Yingchun's "Return to the Beginning of Hongmeng" focuses on Xu Zhaoshou's writing of the west, integrates the original human thinking about the universe and the world, and aims to show the return to the "return to the beginning of Hongmeng" of the unity of heaven and man. Most of these commentaries capture the "realistic" and rediscovered side of the history and culture of the West, which is the proper meaning of the "non-fiction" writing, but the fact that the book is written in literary imagination and fictional style is not excavated enough. A careful examination of "Journey to the West" shows that the author's imagination with the passion of a poet and the fiction of a novelist is imaginative, and this literary imagination based on historical facts makes the artistic charm of the work more fascinating. Historiography emphasizes rigorous evidence and logical exposition, the fictionality of the novel is sometimes far away from the historical scene, and the artistic method of literary imagination is an interesting form of historical reconstruction.
"Journey to the West" is undoubtedly a "non-fiction" literary work, which can be seen in the connotation dimension of the text, the value orientation and other critics' articles. It is a bit biased to examine its literary significance by only noticing the realistic part of The Journey to the West and ignoring the artistic characteristics of its literary imagination. In essence, on the one hand, "non-fiction" writing reconnects the relationship between literature and reality, and more social reality can enter the field of literature to be recorded, written and disseminated; on the other hand, some people only pay attention to the absolute authenticity of "non-fiction" writing, so that "non-fiction" literary works cannot have fictional components. The author believes that "non-fiction" writing is to emphasize the realist characteristics of literature and the attitude of creating close to reality, which allows the reasonable existence of fictional art. In "Journey to the West", Xu Zhaoshou has a number of articles that combine historical facts and literary imagination. When Xu Zhaoshou writes history, he can see all the historical events in his poetic pen. In "The Xiongnu Are Gone", Xu Zhaoshou portrays two heroic figures: Zhang Qian and Huo Qiyi. Emperor Wu of Han sent an emissary Zhang Qian to the Western Regions, and Zhang Qian, as an emissary shouldering the sacred mission of the Han Empire, was captured several times and escaped several times, and his feat of "hollowing out the Western Regions" was a heroic deed. The life of the young general Huo Fuyi created miracles and established a life of great achievements, and the story of his "sealing the wolf Juxu" was interpreted by Xu Zhaoshou in a similar legendary style. He wrote that after Huo's death, "his soul returned to the Hexi Corridor. That was where he flew and galloped, the mountains and rivers where he descended like the god of war. Such lyrical sentences abound in "The Journey to the West". Kumarosh's life of translating Buddhist scriptures and sermons deeply attracted the author. The third series, "Buddha's Path To Each Other", is not so much a reinterpretation of the historical story as it is a pilgrimage and pilgrimage journey of the author's soul. What Xu Zhaoshou had to do was to whisk away the dust that was hidden above history, and history would no longer be covered in dust, and one day it would see the sky again, just like the Buddha's light emitted from the Three Dangers Mountain in Dunhuang, illuminating the vast night.
In the three articles "In Search of Kunlun", "Dialogue with the God of Science", and "In Front of the Guanghua Building", Xu Zhaoshou fictionalized the scene of the dialogue between "I" and "Science", and in the question-and-answer, criticism, justification and mutual interpretation between the two, the traditional Chinese culture represented by "I" and the Western rationalism embodied in "science" and logocentrism both recognized each other's strengths and weaknesses. In the dialogue between "I" and "Science", readers can better understand the profound essence of Chinese culture, as well as the ideological concept and cosmic consciousness of the unity of nature and man, and also understand that the Western emphasis on logical thinking can promote the iterative renewal of technology. This allows us to find a balance between the two, actively absorbing the strengths of the other without losing the subjectivity of the self.
To examine Xu Zhaoshou's "Journey to the West" from the perspective of "non-fiction" writing is to pay attention to its literary creation on the basis of a large number of fieldwork and historical documents, and also to pay attention to its inevitable use of literary imagination and fictional artistic techniques. This is precisely where Xu Zhaoshou's literary creation is very different from others, shuttling and switching between different genres, the symbolic meaning and metaphorical characteristics of poetic language, the narrative structure and fictional art of the novel and the realism and delicacy of prose, breaking through the inherent barriers between styles and presenting a "meaningful form". This is the characteristic of "non-fiction" writing presented in "Journey to the West", that is, the creative appearance with historical materials as the root, fieldwork as the branch, and literary imagination as the leaf.
——This article was published in Silver Daily on April 17, 2022
Author Profile
Ren Zhifeng
People from Qingyang, Gansu. He is currently a master's student in literature and art at the College of Literature and Literature of Northwest Normal University. His works have been scattered in "Stars poetry original", "Feitian", "Chinese Campus Literature", "Yanhe", etc., and some works have been selected into the "2018 Chinese College Students Poetry Annual Selection". Write poetry and commentary.