The new scene | Zhu Mingwei: "Quasi-ethnographic" writing of "mobile"

"Fluid" "quasi-ethnographic" writing

——A Brief Introduction to the Light Leopard Novel

□ Zhu Mingwei

Pale Leopard is a new sharp in the literary world. Of course, in addition to the emerging author, she also has several well-known labels: academics with a good anthropological background, new media reporters... These labels show the knowledge structure and problem awareness of the pale leopard. In other words, it is the leopard's vision of social issues, anthropological knowledge and the ambition of "ethnographic/personal" writing (He Ping). The author's consciousness of the light leopard is therefore often eager to burst the text, hating not being able to appear in person and speaking impromptu. However, After all, The Leopard's literary reading is strong enough, especially her reading experience of world literature, and the experimental nature of writing is calibrated all the time. Talking about new authors is always risky, and commentators are often too arrogant to understand the deep anxiety of the writer, why not the accumulation of male-centric discourse? In sorting out the history of British criticism, Eagleton envisions a classic scenario: "A critic sits down and begins to study a subject or a writer, and suddenly he is attracted by a set of questions that are troubling: What is the point of this study?" Who do you intend to study, who will you influence, and who will impress you? For a long time, literary criticism could only flow into the hands of literary historians, and gave up speaking to authors and readers. The author first opened the author's oral description and interview, re-discussed the existing consensus on the writing of the light leopard, and tried to give shape to the creative personality of the light leopard.

One

It was the pale leopard's problem consciousness that invented her novel form. Pale leopard talkative. In a conversation with editor Xu Chenliang, Tan Bao said: "Reality has no shape, there are random, unprovoked, arbitrary, and accidental events in reality, many complicated lines, overflowing structural elements, incoherent feelings, things that should not be there but have always been there." [1] Authors with fairly complete academic training have a distinctly case-by-case mindset and are more concerned with the contingencies of reality. It is also for this reason that the author has no intention of setting up allegorical structures and shaping typical characters, but instead focuses on a more specific and fluid stylistic form. Critically speaking, it takes social issues as the theme, intimate relationships as a series of cases, and novels as social and cultural columns. She is tired of distilling universality from those specific emotions, but cares about the contingency (particularity) of real events. The realistic experience chosen by Pale Leopard is as fluid and open as possible, and her novels are fluid and eclectic.

Talk about the knowledge structure of the leopard in order to understand the source of its problem awareness. In terms of subject matter, Leopard's writing is generally based on the most public social issues. For example, "Daughter" is about intimate relationships, "Health" is about the topic of old-age care, "Mountains and Rivers" is implicated in intergenerational, gender and fertility issues, and "Parents" focuses on the healing of the trauma of the orphaned family. Looking only at the title of the novel, it is naturally abstract and even clumsy, just a set of social relations nouns ("Mountains and Rivers" seems to be slightly better?). ）。 However, if you only think about it, you may not be considerate of the author. I prefer to think that the author has formulated these topics with a desire to express his heart: she attempts to make "social relations/intimate relations" the theme of the series of novels.

Some critics believe that the novel is a narrative of "relationships" (Hong Zhigang). Mr. Hong Zhigang believes that the "relationship" in the novel is not only a superficial narrative technical problem, but also an ethics, and behind the ethics is the idea. How would a writer born out of sociological training understand the "relationships" in fiction?

The leopard is obviously concerned with the most basic intimacy. "Daughter" writes about a middle-aged man's drunken reminiscences of his ex-girlfriend after breaking up for many years, and the relationship between men and women ends up to cohabitation. "Health Maintenance" is a developed country pension institution worker's self-description of the fragments of the tibetan and bystander life, not fixed in a specific relationship, but all about the relationship of personal opinions. From this point of view, the writing of the leopard is not limited to one kind of relationship, but lies in exploring the motivations, emotions, and concepts of the extension of the relationship. Even in the extraordinarily stream-of-consciousness work "Daughter", the most wonderful part is not the plot of the novel itself, but the narrator's dense analysis and discussion. The novel uses free and indirect quotations to write about the hero's heart, and the implicit author's feminist position jumps out of the discussion from time to time, which constitutes the double reflex of the novel's narrative: the protagonist's reflection on the past love and the narrator's reflection on the protagonist's reminiscence behavior. In the middle of the novel's narrative, the author does not hesitate to make a series of perfunctory passages to express the mockery of the mourning narrative (mourning poems, mourning prose). If taken out alone, this is simply not inferior to a cultural essay that makes people shoot at the patriarchal society. You see, the author said, "Mourning is the style of a real man." But you know, why do drunks have such alarming words? From the implicit author's big discussion to the narrator's revisiting of the Mandarin Dream, this text is disjointed and scattered, the ironic effect is slightly hasty, and the wonderful thing is the concept. After all, in a well-known literature classroom, it is rare to see such an insight into a work of mourning, even if it only stems from a feminist stance. You can complain that "Daughter" is not refined enough, but is the narrative without a position more serious mediocrity? The arguments in the novel seem clumsy, but they have other holes.

The author's problem consciousness is intricate and concrete, so the text has no fixed law and is given shape with things. The style of the short story "Health" has changed again, returning to a simple and plain first-person narrative, which is composed of fragments of the narrator's life. In the first section, "I" am still mocking the business status of the pension institution, the second section is a fragment of thoughts in daily work, and the third section suddenly repeats the elderly parents... Living in a foreign country has enabled "me" to gain richer world experience and put on a new filter for reflecting on the domestic past. The narrative moves from the present and the past, and then to Beijing and the United States. If there is any master brain in the work, it should be the narrator's emotional displacement of the family. In the last section of the novel, "I" meet a family at the airport and feel the cuteness of the child. "It's an extraordinary moment." It's a wonderful family scene.

Also a family theme, the author published in the "Flower City Concern" column of "Flower City", "Traveler", chose a "cosmopolitan family" (He Ping) in the travel state. The Traveler consists of a narrative of scenes from everyday life. In the novel, there are both marriage and father-daughter relationships, as well as more comprehensive family relations and intergenerational relationships. Wellness and Traveler share a similar narrative structure, featuring a global citizen as the first-person narrator, showing the life scenes of his global travel, personal experiences under the stream of consciousness and specific groups of people (the elderly, scholars) in the analysis. I think this is the most groundbreaking and recognizable set of short stories of The Leopard, and its narrative fully reveals the author's analytical ability and contributes to the novel role of a world citizen for current Chinese writing. This is the standard ethnographic writing of the mobile experience/world experience, fully worthy of being a literary sample of anthropological investigation.

Two

I can't plunder beauty—Mr. Ho Ping has long observed that the analytical character of leopard novels comes from the influence of ethnography. This is far closer to the personality of the Leopard novel than the author's self-descriptions of Bolaño, Bernhard, Muzier, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen. As Tambao admits, the fictional material is mainly derived from his own "fieldwork" through new media and even social networks:

I often brush Weibo, often look at different age groups, different situations, different regions of people are doing, what are they thinking. I will "quietly follow" some accounts, citizens living in various places, for example, I paid attention to an old man who went to fly a kite every afternoon in the capital of a province in the Central Plains, and he wrote about his kite flying on Weibo, how to take a car, and how to ask his son to help him download a new shared bicycle program. He also remembers his cooking, moving, entertaining, decorating, and remembering the changes in their city. I corresponded to the bus lines in that city, as well as the real estate situation. I also followed a mom in Chengdu who wrote about family life and the upbringing of her son. These are the accounts of ordinary people, and no one watches them. I watched like a voyeuristic for a few years, as if I had been involved in the lives of many people. This is also a self-training that I have wanted to write novels all these years and give myself. I'm not very good at interviewing or going to a place to collect style, so I find some ways to keep in touch with people who are far away from me. The people I write about in the novel are urban office workers, little girls, old people, Taoist monks, and people who try to write about people who are a little far away from their actual lives, but who are gradually becoming familiar with them in various ways. [2]

From this point of view, the so-called "fieldwork" of the pale leopard is just an ordinary observation of life, and it always happens to the contemporary "low-headed people". The "investigation" of the light leopard is only the living conditions and details of ordinary people. I agree with Mr. He Ping's judgment, after all, most of the authors' life experience is really narrow, and it is not surprising to rely on indirect experience. But even with quotation marks, such observations are too far removed from standard fieldwork and, at best, "quasi-fieldwork" and "quasi-ethnographic" training. The most essential feature of ethnography is the depiction of customs and culture, which is almost the characteristic of most realist novels, Balzac once named his novel "Customs Studies", in the ethnographic genre, is not a "19th Century French Ethnography"? Leopard's understanding of media information should have anthropological and ethnographic knowledge and methodological frameworks, but its fictional talents and creative personalities should not be ignored.

The difference between ethnography and the genre of the novel lies in the fact that in addition to the tasks of description and narration, there is another goal of interpretation. That is, according to the anthropologist Geertz, the material produced by "long-term, mainly (though not without exception) qualitative, highly participatory, almost exhaustive fieldwork in the defined scenario" can give social science concepts a perceptible reality and "use them for creative and imaginative thinking." [3] It is true that a considerable part of the writing material of the leopard comes from the collection and digestion of new media information, which belongs to quasi-fieldwork and quasi-ethnographic writing, but the author's poetry has different talents: he is good at summarizing contemporary customs from smaller situations and giving psychological explanations to the behavior of representative groups. This is a personal talent that belongs to the pale leopard.

In the first section of The Traveler, the husband discovers a camera his wife has installed in the living room of his apartment, acquiescing to the surveillance behavior in intimate relationships. At the end of the short story, he analyzes the young man in his eyes like a writer: "I imagine this young man as a construction worker, watching TV at home after work, drinking beer, and having a few friends from middle school days shooting together in the evening. I imagine he doesn't need a family, the house isn't built for families, it has nothing to do with proposing. I imagine his brother or brother or sister's child taking his name, he became the godfather and was comfortably alone for the rest of his life. "The first and last two situations are also typical examples of modern intimate relationships. The novel "Health" ends with the heroine hugging the child: "The child is heartbreakingly soft, curled up in his arms with complete trust and sincere giving, soft and tough and determined, and the honey-brown curly hair on the scalp emits a chaotic fragrance, mixed with a slight smell of sweat." Baby Baby. I held my breath and felt myself floating in the air with her. "I have no doubt about the symbolism of this scene. Even if the promises of pension institutions are hypocritical, the atmosphere of fast food love is free, and it is always less comforting than families and children. This emotional movement of ordinary people towards "happiness" is a human experience that biopolitics cannot reach.

The panther's admiration for Hillary Mantel is also applicable to the introduction of her creative purpose: "What makes her special is that the invisible observer behind her work can always see incoherent and accidental things, not like many writers who are good at historical fiction and social situations, who love to "generalize", and insist that various details and layers be subordinated to a huge worldview." In addition, she writes on a sentence basis. Some writers write on the basis of paragraphs and sections, and some writers write on the basis of scenes or on the basis of stories. [4] The pale leopard is keen to write about the experience of characters in the flow of everyday scenes with stream-of-consciousness techniques, and the bars and scenes are the smallest units of the novel's text. The reading of Hillary Mantel clearly stimulates the intellectual structure of leopard sociology and anthropology, and the way she understands the world is not dominated by a solid worldview, but by the sample meaning of the lesser emotion.

Three

Out of curiosity, I once browsed the short reviews of the pale leopard short story collection "Happy Man" on the Douban website, and the number of short reviews was very large, and the cool reviews were also amazing. Try enumerating a few examples. Some readers criticize the language of the light leopard as a translation cavity, some readers criticize the novel as if it is popular self-media writing, and some readers think that the novel of the light leopard has a poor plot. And so on. Literary activity without readers certainly never existed. But these glaring "shortcomings" seem to be far less abundant than the "contributions" of the leopard's works. If the language of the leopard has a translation cavity, it also means that the language is highly translatable, and it is Esperanto writing with higher circulation value. As for self-media writing, I am afraid that it is because the author does use novels as columns. If the novel lacks a plot, is it not one of the characteristics of the modernist novel since its birth? Leopard is an ideological writer who has a lot to offer in his novels. As far as some of the short stories of the leopard are concerned, the language is perfectly matched by the voices of the characters in the novel, and I don't think the criticism of the language of those authors is valid.

I don't entirely agree with placing the leopard in the genre of female writing. The light leopard debuted in the new female writing trend, "Daughter", "Mountains and Rivers", "Gone with the Wind" has a considerable gender awareness. The leopard writes about public issues, and "Mountains and Rivers" is a rare intervention in the phenomenon of having children out of wedlock and an exploration of fertility issues in the current writing. "Parents" is the first fictional work in my field of vision to try to be considerate of a family that has lost its independence. "Gone with the Wind" and "The Sea and the Sponge" expand the current situation of literature writing for the elderly. Panther is a female writer, but at the same time a writer whose female perspective cannot be bound.

As Eliot argues, it is impossible for a poet not to confront tradition and his own genealogy and historical consciousness. When talking about the leopard, the text and theory can only be a verbal medium, and it is even more necessary to place the novel of the leopard in the genealogy of literary history for reflection. Only in this way can the writer's personal talent not be unattainable, but only the "contemporary body" of the novel as a column. If the creation of the pale leopard is placed in the vein of the ideological trend, its origin is naturally the social problem novel that was indiscriminately coveted in the "May Fourth" period and revived in the 1980s. In addition, there are also considerable academic intellectuals in the leopard novel, and the author also analyzes the realistic sample in a "quasi-ethnographic" way, which is the return of the scholar's novel after "Ru Lin Wai Shi" and "Evil Sea Flower". Since daily life does not flow, the form of the novel can only be arbitrarily assigned. It is the leopard's attempt to use the fluid and invisible style of "quasi-ethnography" to describe the most public social issues. As mentioned above, it needs to be admitted that the writing of the leopard still has a pre-social science thinking and new media awareness, or that the novel has a great density of language but limited plot space.

James Wood once said: "The novel has not yet grasped the whole scope of life. The quasi-ethnographic writing of the pale leopard has added enough samples to the museum of the short story, but it is not exhausted despite the eyesight of the leopard. The question for The Pale Leopard's creation is whether these samples are sufficient to sustain the ambitions of a personal ethnography. Can the emotions, motivations, and perceptions in those nuances, even if carefully compiled, be transformed into collective literary memories after a long review by the reader? The "ethnography" column of the pale leopard has just been opened, and it may as well continue to be serialized.

exegesis:

[1] Ning Ken, Zhang Chu, Tan Bao, Song Aman, Xu Chenliang: "How to Think about Short Stories", Times Literature, No. 3, 2021.

[3] Clifford Geertz: Interpretation of Culture, translated by Han Li, Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 1999, p. 30.

[4] Ning Ken, Zhang Chu, Tan Bao, Song Aman, Xu Chenliang: "How to Think about Short Stories", Times Literature, No. 3, 2021.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 4, 2022

Responsible Editor | Wu Jiayan Xiong Mengrou

▲Zhu Mingwei |

Zhu Mingwei, a native of Hefei, Anhui Province, Bachelor of Arts, is a doctoral student in the School of Literature of Chinese Min University, and is temporarily engaged in the study of literary history in the new era, and his academic papers and literary criticism are scattered in periodicals. Or reprinted in full by Xinhua Digest (online version), Chinese Min University photocopied newspaper materials and other publications.