Xu Huaizhong of the Mao Award series | the aesthetic call of "Drawing the Wind": "Returning to the Future"

Editor's Note

"Literature Guanlan" is a special issue opened by China Writers Network in "Literature and Art Daily", of which the special edition of "Mao Dun Literature Award Winning Writers Research" aims to summarize the award-winning works and the experience of contemporary novel creation, we invite writers, critics or review and revisit the representative works of the winners, or take the pulse of the overall style of their creation, or analyze their literary creations in recent years, and strive to form a new look of research for the winners of the Mao Dun Literature Award.

Writer Introduction

Xu Huaizhong (1929~), a native of Handan, Hebei Province. He joined the Eighth Route Army in 1945 and began publishing in 1954. In 1956, he joined the China Writers Association. He is a member of the 8th and 9th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a member of the 4th Presidium of the Chinese Writers Association, the 5th Vice Chairman and the 6th and 7th Honorary Vice Chairmen. He is the author of the novel "We Sow Love", the novella "The Long Rainbow on the Ground", the film literary script "The Heartless Lover", and the short story collection "Angel Without Wings". The novel "The Wind" won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award.

"The Journey to the Wind": the aesthetic call of "returning to the future"

Dong Xia Qingqing

All military literature that points its pen at war is bound to die, and the characters in those works either die of a magnificent charge, a breakthrough without a chance, or a shameful rebellion, a ridiculous stray bullet. But for the first time in military literature, I read about such an unusual spiritual death described in "The Wind", which was almost entirely arranged by the heroine and had a symbolic significance far greater than the level of reality.

The novel writes that the heroine Wang Keyue said on her deathbed, "If you look up the 'Wang' character on the "Ci Hai" and taste the short one or two lines of commentary text, it is really quite exquisite." 'Deep and broad.' Wang Ran was calm and silently clear. 'Whoever has the surname Wang, his inner space will be deep and wide, like a pool of water, calm and restless, and when he is silent, he will enter the turbid water to be clear and clear. And when Mr. Xu Huaizhong gave the surname "Wang" a "passable" after it, and let the "over" word of "over", he also let the "over" character dot the character's vigorous action character of always "waiting for an opportunity" and moving forward infinitely under the sexual spiritual background of "if it does not move".

It is astonishing that Wang Keyue left his loving parents and went to Yan'an to participate in the revolution with the Song Dynasty guqin wrapped in a brocade bag. At the beginning of the novel, "a song "Mountain Flowing Water" came from the rumbling artillery fire, which is a rare battlefield situation in military literature. Wang Keyue's first "transgression" lies in the fact that she dares to throw her intellect and sexual spirit on the battlefield, use her good piano skills to help straighten out the upside down, let the strong and simple rhythm that can make the mind and matter blend to remind the world to have a reflection on good and evil, and insist on reconciling the degradation of human nature and spiritual closure caused by killing and the lack of life resources through "doing my own thing".

As she would always "raise her arms high, press the upper edge of the door and push it open, then turn her back on the door, gently step back, and with a bang, the door is closed." "To avoid touching with her hands the parts frequently touched by the most unsanitary people on the door; she will use a small white handkerchief to carry the monthly tour fee to pay, and then wash the handkerchief; when she finds that the two shoes on the ground are not neatly arranged, even if she has gone to bed, she will definitely get up and straighten the shoes; even if she borrows from the old countryman's house and sees the newly posted couplet on the landlord's door upside down, she must correct it.

With the above behaviors, Wang Keyue's resolute obstruction of the carriage that was going to be run over from the bodies of more than a dozen enemy soldiers when crossing the small river crossing was even more emotional, and it was even more emotional that the troupe diverted the water to cross the river upstream, and it turned out that Wang Keyue still insisted on "supreme goodness" in the Shuluo field where you died and died, in order to carry out her second "passover".

Wang Keyue's stubbornness confirms that she has the persistent pursuit of evolving to the highest spirit of man. The extreme war environment burned on her again and again the obsession with the object (qin) that she thought should be withdrawn, and also ignited her inner wisdom, so that an intellectual woman who could advertise and collect the grid at a young age learned to write slogans with a foreign iron leather brush under the condition of extremely scarce material conditions, and to take the chimney and dig the pot smoke obtained from the bottom of the pot to make ink paint. When she was encouraged by Qi Jing's speech, she made her own charcoal, wrote slogans with willow calligraphy of "point painting evenly balanced and thin, smooth and tall, and strong bones", and preached to the fathers and fellow villagers in the neighboring villages in the most popular way. Here, the author writes about the scene of Wang Keyue and the fellow villagers who are watching the slogan wall "connecting with each other", which makes people feel that the intellectuals who are in the revolutionary position have achieved a real "open-eye" view of the country and the people through the continuous opening up and expansion of the battlefield and the marching line.

With the help of his own revolutionary experience, Mr. Xu Huaizhong has written about the battles and customs of Tibet and Yunnan in many novels. For example, in the article "The Woman Who Sold Wine", it is written that a small street market on the border of Yunnan is in the east, and in "Ago Laotian", the perspective of a SOLDIER soldier of the People's Liberation Army is written about the bitter cong people living in the Ailao Mountain and the Wuliang Mountain on the border of Yunnan Province. When writing about how the bitter child in the article met the "Brother Laotian" of the "People's Liberation Army Task Force", Mr. Xu wrote: "That day, I caught a fox in the cave, peeled off the skin, put it on the intersection, hid behind the tree and watched from a distance. People who have passed by, want this skin, and put some food at the intersection. Did you know? This is how our ancestors have done business, bartering for things and hearts for hearts. In just a few words, the customs and character of the bitter cong people are placed in front of the reader. If one side of the "revolution" is "you live and I die", then the other side is "you have me", from looking at each other, mutual understanding to find consensus and balance, so as to learn from each other and integrate. Just as Wang Keyue gave the beauty of phonology and revolutionary theory of knowledge to the masses during the war, the masses poured out the wisdom of preserving life; before she died, she marked the end of her life by having a very speculative discussion with the semi-illiterate Cao Shui'er who accompanied her, and Cao Shui'er took care of her with great respect until the end.

Constantly consciously transcending the cognitive and emotional barriers of identity and class, letting the knowledge that was originally trapped in the mind and paper books be placed between the countryside and the people's hearts, accepting the trial and cultivation of the "Tao", so that Wang Keyue's revolutionary process is closer to her ideal of "Qiwu". She was only 19 years old at the time of her death, but she "experienced several years of fire, as well as the most brutal so-called 'sweeping and sweeping' in the history of war", and with her adherence to the perfection and beauty on the most fierce battlefield, it profoundly affected the fate of those who knew her, especially Qi Jing, who admired and admired her very much.

In the novel, Qi Jing is introduced: "There are four people in the field army who studied in Japan, one is the director of the propaganda department of the headquarters, two are the director of the propaganda department of the column, and the fourth is Qi Jing. ...... The Tokyo branch of China's 'Left-Wing Writers' League founded the literary magazine Dongliu, which launched novels and essays with progressive ideas, and Qi Jing was one of the regular contributors. After the Outbreak of the Lugou Bridge Incident, Qi Jing returned to the front headquarters of the Eighth Route Army in Taihang District and made up his mind to become a military commander. In the novel, in the chapter "The Art of Military Command is the Crystallization of Iron Blood", Qijing's combat command ability is also shown and affirmed. However, it was such a "proud son of heaven" in the army, but many years after the victory in the war, he still remembered Wang Keyue, who had passed away for a long time. After writing the ginkgo inscription of the tribute to Wang Keyue, he passed away by swallowing more than 40 pieces of vitamin C. At the end of the book, in a silent silence, the last "thick and deep guqin empty string sound like a bronze bell" corresponds to the past of the battlefield several years ago, and Wang Keyue's third "passover" echoes beyond time and space.

Mr. Qian Mu said in the "Three Directions of Life" in the "Ten Treatises on Life": "The outward life is a kind of decorated life. And the inward life is a life of washing. For Wang Keyue, in the short course of her life of less than 20 years, her thoughts were unadorned and completely liberated from the beginning, and she never carried on the prejudice or prejudice against people and human nature. When Wang Keyue followed the team to end the forced march in the heavy rain, he naturally took off his clothes to dry and slept naked on the door panel of a door opening. Qi Jing, who was already the chief of staff of the brigade at that time, got up and saw this scene, and was driven by the experience of his previous human photography internship, "just thinking, 'Must grab the film, must rush to shoot it!'" He took his trophy-worn camera ' Rorakod' from his satchel and opened the lens cover. And just when Qi Jing pressed the shutter to leave the "battlefield scene", Wang Keyue woke up. To Qi Jing's surprise, Wang Keyue looked at Qi Jing in front of him and said calmly: "Chief, wash and print it, don't forget to send me the photo." In this matter, Wang Keyue showed her fresh and elegant artistic personality.

Before the photo incident, when Qi Jing arranged for Wang Keyue to sit on his own car "Tan Zao'er", there were already people who were right and wrong to orchestrate this matter, and after Wang Keyue heard the discussion, he immediately found the correspondent Cao Shui'er and asked what the rumor meant? In the face of Wang Keyue's straightforwardness, even Cao Shui'er, who has always been a kung fu master, was very embarrassed and embarrassed. But until she figured out the meaning of the joke, Wang Keyue just laughed heartily, "laughing so much that she leaned forward and backward uncontrollably", and ran back to her residence , "still leaving a string of laughter". This makes Cao Shui'er puzzled by a scene that can just prove that Wang Keyue's life determination of "the eight winds can't blow", profit, decline, suffering, happiness, praise, ridicule, destruction, reputation, or not, the dignity of the individual is like the solemnity of the nature of the universe, why should you defend yourself.

Therefore, when reading the chapter of the novel "The Yellow River In July Peach Blossom Flood", and seeing wang Keyue taking off his clothes and wearing only his underwear to fall into the water and be rescued by seeing Wang Keyue taking the command and the women who were preparing to cross the river by boat, he could know how directly effective this vigorous scene was. What is difficult to approach logically is the most tangible atmosphere and atmosphere of life and death that the author Mr. Xu Huaizhong personally brought out of the war.

Compared with the female figures in classic literary works, Wang Keyue has the talent of Lin Daiyu and the love of Du Liniang, and his strong action to control life obviously inherits the spiritual force of Nuwa and Jingwei in ancient mythology. When she fights the cruelty of war with her flesh and blood, the more fragile her naked body is, the more she can show her perseverance and courage to "hold the wood to the middle ages" in the baptism of blood and fire. It was this courage that made Wang Keyue, after being captured and rescued by the local regimental training armed forces, face Qi Jing's question of whether she had been insulted or not: "Qi Jing, I look down on you from the bottom of my heart!" From then on, a pair of Bi people shook hands and said goodbye. Soon, Qi Jing saw Wang Keyue again, and the remains of Wang Keyue's "face as before, natural and peaceful" were transported by junma Tan Jujube to the hole in the ginkgo tree- "Finally he saw clearly, Wang Keyue's head was slightly tilted to one side, his arms were loose and drooping, his whole body was light bronze, and the protruding parts of the bones shone in the sunlight. ”

In "The Wind", the deaths of several characters are impressive. For example, Cao Shui'er, who was falsely accused of rape because of an affair with the landlord's daughter, was about to be executed, Cao Shui'er also laughed with the woman who loved herself, and when the last shot of the gun was fired, she kicked away the woman who pounced on the martyrdom, "The voice drank vaguely: 'What the fuck is in a hurry, look at the fellow!'" After being captured, liu chunhu, a young actor under the age of 13, was pushed into a pit and buried alive, just when his "face began to deform, and his facial features were also distorted and deformed", he was still turning over tricks of scolding and laughing, and died in a similar way; there is also a "villain" character Guo Lao counselor in the novel, when he heard that his superiors were dismissive of his hard-earned intelligence judgment at the decisive moment of the war, he sneered and threw his body into a "US military dagger" used by entertaining guests to cut melons. Rush to death that is not part of his duties.

And even compared with the military horse beach jujube whose flesh was pecked by birds and beasts after death, only Wang Keyue in the hole of the ginkgo tree seemed to take death as the beginning of another long journey: "One leg is slightly bent, taking the posture of wanting to step forward." She was obviously not willing to stop at 250 million years, presumably taking a short break, and would follow her scheduled return route to the zero kilometer and continue to search for her future. "Her death is a return to the common sense of life out of gravity, with a spiritual and tragic beauty that struggles to ascend." Such a death is a surreal legend, a "passover" of her towards the basic fact of rapid decay in the flesh, and an aesthetic breakthrough that the author Mr. Xu Huaizhong is determined to achieve, pushing forward the limit that can be reached by thinking about war, and opening up a higher dimensional threshold for mankind to examine war.

In 2015, I did an interview with Mr. Xu entitled "My future is to return to the starting point of literary creation". Among them, Mr. Xu said: "In my opinion, life should also be viewed in the same way, and it can only be a return to the future. This is not to say that we have to climb back to the tree, but we must have the simple and desireless spirit of the ancients. Science is moving forward and does not look back. Weapons that destroy humanity are getting more and more powerful, and drones can bomb anytime, anywhere. In the end, the future of mankind can only be to return to the original under the guidance of its own enlightenment, that is, to return to the future. ”

From this point of view, although Wang Keyue died at the beginning of her life, she also showed an innate motherhood - she was the breeder of common sense on the battlefield and the holder of a pure soul, and pain and suffering inspired centuries of wisdom accumulated in her genes in women. Among the time-space coordinate systems she refers to when looking at nature, war, and human nature, there are ginkgo trees that exist on the earth for about 250 million years, guqins that are said to have been created in the prehistoric Fuxi and Shennong periods, stalagmites that only grew 1 centimeter tall in 100 years in caves that took at least 300,000 years to form, and "ancient wild horses" that seem to have been rushing from ancient times to the 20th century... Such an infinitely vast and infinitely far-reaching vision enabled Wang Keyue to "jump out of the Three Realms and not in the Five Elements" early on, and to break away from the narrow horizon of simple dualism. In the end, under the "traction" of Wang Keyue's spiritual breath, those who were close to her finally crossed the blockade of "limitedness" and found dignity in active death. In the place of belonging where there is no reunion, reunite with the original heart of man.

Source: China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily jointly organized the 5th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" on April 20, 2022

Editor: Liu Ya

Second instance: Wang Yang

Third instance: Chen Tao