Gefei:
Hello everyone, it is a pleasure to exchange some understanding of literature with you on such an occasion today, I recently met Dr. Huang Jianxin in Beijing, Huang Jianxin and her husband, we have always been very good friends, so I heard that she came to me to host this forum, I personally feel particularly beautiful and relaxed. Today I was going to discuss with you the question "The Relationship between Literature and Experience."
Why we should discuss this topic is also a question that I have personally focused on recently, and it is also our experience in literary creation.
The first question is, do we have experience?
The first question, do we often talk about whether we have experience? It may seem strange to you that everyone, whether it is writing or ordinary people, actually has experience. If we were to say very simply that this experience constitutes a very important source of writing, this is certainly no problem. But I don't think that prevents us from asking, do we really have experience? Just now, Dr. Huang Jianxin mentioned that I wrote "Spring ends in Jiangnan", "Mountains and Rivers into Dreams", or the earlier "Peach Blossoms in the Face". I have more experience of the role that experience plays in me.
For example, in our hometown, our family is in Jiangsu Province, known as Jiangnan, there are many old people in the village, and I played with them when I was young. One of the old men was always talking to me, he was growing vegetables at home, very ordinary, and his beard was already white at that time. The people in the village all thought that this old man was a madman, and felt that this man was incomprehensible. He also often came to me to talk to me, but you couldn't understand what he said, and you didn't know what he was talking about for half a day. When I was a kid, I thought of him as a lunatic. The man was a little farther away from him, very frightened. But he was very kind to people. Exactly what he was talking about, I always had a mystery in my head. Later, when I went to college and came home from Shanghai, the old man was still alive, and when he passed me, he said something to me again, and I understood, and he spoke In English. One of the questions that got me thinking was, if I had never left our house or learned English. This experience will always sleep in my mind. Later I went to find out what the old man had done before. There are many parts of it that I wrote about in "Peach Blossom with a Human Face". He constitutes my experience of writing, but this experience is not automatically acquired. We experience different things every moment, we have a lot of memories, but it's hard to say whether this thing will necessarily be used by you to write. We know that there are two types of writers, and there is one type of writer Dickens, such as Shen Congwen in China. Before Shen Congwen went to Beijing to start writing, he had traveled almost half of China and experienced countless things. At that time, many things in China were facing the test of life and death. When he said one day in Beijing that I was going to write a novel. Everyone knows that Shen Congwen graduated from primary school, may not have graduated, the cultural level is very poor, Yu Dafu they all feel strange, saying that you are such a person of such a cultural level how can you write? Shen Congwen said other things I am not sure, I surpass Shakespeare is certain. He is very arrogant, because he has accumulated too many things, and there are a lot of things pouring into the pen.
But there is another type, Hawthorne, Kafka, whose experience is not more than ours, only less. After a lifetime as a small clerk, what exactly constitutes the writing of these people? This is also a question that has puzzled me for many years. For example, literary works are indeed expressions of experience, for example, I often give lectures to students in Tsinghua, talking about this issue, everyone knows Du Fu's "Jiangnan Feng Li Gui Year" "Qi Wang's house is common, Cui Jiutang smelled several times before; it is the good scenery of Jiangnan, and the flowers fall during the jun". Wen Zuo'an analyzed the incident in his recollection, saying that if the poem had been translated into English, it would have been bad. This means that I often see you in King Qi's house, and I have heard of you in Cui Jiu's house. Now that we have arrived in Jiangnan, we have met again, and it is as simple as changing to English. So American poetry is unknown. This is a very important poem in Tang poetry, this poem was written a year before Du Fu's death, he did not say anything about experience, not to present any experience to everyone. Rather, he wanted to hide his experience. "It is common in the qi king's mansion, and Cui Jiutang smells it several times before; it is a good scenery in Jiangnan, and it is a time when the flowers fall." You don't have much experience in this literal way, but it's especially difficult to understand the poem. You have to understand the anshi chaos at that time, you have to understand that Du Fu could not return home at that time, he missed his hometown very much, and his memory of his hometown was suddenly triggered by the year of the old Man Li Gui. The hidden thing behind the poem only emerged, which was very common in the works at that time. Is he presenting experience? Or do you hide your experience?
Everyone also knows Bai Juyi's "Flowers Are Not Flowers" "Flowers are not flowers, fog is not fog, the night comes in the middle of the night, and the day goes at dawn." How long has it been like a spring dream? Go to the clouds and find nowhere. "What is a flower?" What is fog? The relationship between this stuff and our experience is very complex.
I can also give an example of a novel. Everyone knows the classical Chinese novels, "Jin Ping Mei" and "Dream of the Red Chamber". Why cao Xueqin said that all the works written before him were nothing more than imperial generals, nothing more than traditional Chinese works. Even if I have written so many pornographic novels before, they are all exhortatory and full of preaching. Why did a work "Jin Ping Mei" suddenly appear in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, and the notes he wrote had nothing to do with the previous script and the previous novels, but why did he appear with a completely different appearance? In this regard, I think there is a very important issue involved. The role of "Golden Plum Bottle", as we all know, "Golden Plum Bottle" has two types of roles, the first type of role: the role of the word book, the first to write "Golden Plum" during the Wanli years. Another is the author of the re-revision after thirty years, which we call Chongzhen ben's "Golden Plum Bottle". It is very important in the history of Chinese literature, for the first time to propose a completely new, this thing directly affects the traditional Chinese culture, the reorganization of all cultural experiences. How could such a situation have been created? I am doing this research this time, and I want to combine the emergence of "Jin Ping Mei" with the intellectual history of the Ming Dynasty to do a combing. Without such an ideological struggle, "Jin Ping Mei" would not have been possible. Because everyone is born, old, sick and dead, they are all wine-colored wealth. People have written before why there will be an anti-moral work during the Wanli years. All his morality is nullified. He could not have imagined it without the influence in the history of ideas. So it also reminds us that experiencing this thing is definitely not a simple thing. So do we really need experience? My answer is not necessarily true. You may go through many things, but these things may not pose any threat to your mental condition, to your writing, to the phenomena of the world.
Of course, we can also mention one aspect in passing. Nor can we say that I experienced something and could have written it into a novel right away. Experiences are stored in your memory. It will reserve first. Can't say what happened to me today to write today, impossible. The process of storing this experience in memory is also very subtle. For example, when we were young, we went fishing, if we went fishing with my father, if you caught a fish, you would tell your classmates how big I caught this fish. When I was a child, I had a classmate who caught a 22-pound fish, and this person talked about it all his life, and it was the most beautiful thing in his life. He was still telling me about this when I returned home, and of course I thought he was sad, but it was completely understandable. Because it was too big, he only had the weight of this fish left. Such a memory we usually call it a willing memory, and we are willing to remember it. We can't forget it. But there is a great deal of experience behind this memory that actually sleeps in our minds. We never wake it up. It was not until a few years ago that there was a very important writer in France, Proust, whose most important contribution was that he discovered another memory, an involuntary memory. You didn't want to remember it, but it happened. It's been asleep in your brain's memory. When are these memories awakened? When Proust had asthma and was in a state of boredom, others were busy earning money and living, and he spent endless time there pondering, and all these unwilling memories appeared one by one, which constituted all the material for "Remembrance of The Age of Water". My son is now 13 or 14 years old, and he has reached the age of reading "Remembrance of The Age of Water.". I didn't let him read it, but he's been secretly reading it lately. When he was about to finish his first book, he suddenly came to my room and said, Dad, I can't read this, although I have spent a lot of effort, I still can't read it. I explained to him, why did people write this? He said so I wanted to see why he wrote that. My son's judgment was accurate, and when Proust was salvaging and searching for this memory, he looked at something different from all of us. This is also a realistic consideration. That's the first question I said, and it's a very complex one.
Second question: Discourse has a major impact on writing
Now I turn to the second question, the question of experience, which I think poses an important threat to experience, and literature and experience are closely related. For the local society, there are two main threats to our writing, the first of which I mention a little here, the nature of the experience itself, our experience today, because of the Internet, because of the information superhighway, because of the development of the means of communication, so that each of us uses something similar, which is a very important aspect. You can't go through a lot of hard work to get distance and feelings. For example, in the past, if a person wanted to go to Sichuan, he would die in the middle of the road. A family living in Dongcheng District had a small child, and in the twenties, this child was admitted to Tsinghua University, and he wanted to go to school from home, and his parents would shed tears. Because it's too far away. From Dongcheng in Beijing to Haidian, it may take 70 to 80 yuan to take a taxi now, and if there is a traffic jam, it will take two to three hours, but if there is no traffic jam, it will take 20 minutes to get from Dongcheng to Tsinghua. However, ye Shengtao and Yu Pingbo were about to see Zhu Ziqing's widow, they lived in the Dongcheng area, he was going to Haidian, a few days ago he discussed the course of action, where to eat at noon, and arrived at dusk, hiring a donkey cart. Today, due to changes in space and the convenience of transportation information, it has been smoothed out. I arrived in Hong Kong yesterday and they asked me, how many times have you been to Hong Kong? I've said it many times. But I didn't know anything about Hong Kong, because after I came to Hong Kong, I stayed in a hotel in Hong Kong, and the next day I slept in my home in Beijing. I think the biggest threat to today is culture, discourse. The experience we have ourselves is really just the statement of words today. For example, what kind of society I live in today, what kind of ideological struggle is it now, whether you are left or right, whether you are center-left or center-right, or centrist. Everyone is seated in the right number. There's a lot of cultural information in this society, there's a lot of fashion, we're all following it, and we're too late to think about it. They brought me newspapers this morning, and the Hong Kong newspapers were scary. Three newspapers, one thick. He is shaping you and influencing you all the time, he is influencing your judgment and helping you discover your own experiences. So the discourse of culture, the discourse of reality, the discourse of ideology, he affects us all the time, so that in our writing, when we mobilize our own experience, we will fall into a kind of automated identification that Lev Tolstoy once said. Everybody is talking, everybody is talking, and my opinion is that it's in it for the time being. And such a trend, I think is getting stronger and stronger.
So when I talk to writers in Beijing, there are basically three kinds, one leftist, one rightist, one centrist, and they fight all day long. I find that the left becomes the right at night, and the right becomes the left at night. Therefore, there is a saying in Beijing: every left must be right, and every right must be left. What do you mean? Just because you are leftist, I immediately become rightist, otherwise I have no discourse space, I am like you, so what else can I discuss? This kind of thing has a great influence on writing.
I will give you an example here, when Li Qingzhao, Li Qingzhao's husband was named Zhao Mingcheng, Zhao Mingcheng was a military scientist who liked to collect, and he often went out with Li Qingzhao and two people to collect things. A lot of the sweet things in their love have to do with collecting. After receiving the things, suddenly the times changed drastically. The family moved south in a hurry and fled. Because Zhao Mingcheng was an official, he slipped away alone, and the family's old and small, heavy, and everything was handed over to a woman, Li Qingzhao. This is true of traditional Chinese morality, or the norm of experience. When Lao She fled to Kunming in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, a large number of mothers and children at home had to be handed over to his wife, so when his wife took the child to Kunming to see Lao She in her life, from the perspective of such a woman's thinking, what kind of feelings would she have in her heart? No one asked. I didn't ask Mr. Hu either, because I didn't think it was important for me to ask, and it was important for a man to be an official. He went first, he did big things, and of course other things were left to the insiders. Li Qingzhao was also like this at that time, she escorted things to Xuzhou, xuzhou fell again, fled to Nanjing, and then to Zhejiang. By the time he fled to Nanjing, Zhao Mingcheng had already gone to Huzhou to become a prefect and had already become an official. Presumably the situation in the south has stabilized. Then the two men began to say goodbye, With Li Qingzhao standing on the shore and Zhao Mingcheng on the boat. Li Qingzhao felt that his heart was not solid, and he felt that the breakup between the two of us was the difference between life and death. But the husband was so desperate that he didn't explain anything. Li Qingzhao shouted, saying that if I encountered the enemy again and captured the city, what would I do? My husband said that if the enemy attacked, you would first throw the weight at me. If that doesn't work, you throw your clothes away. If you can't escape after throwing it away, you will throw away these things that I have collected in the scroll calligraphy and paintings. If that doesn't work, you can throw away my collection of antiques as well. But in the end there is something that cannot be thrown, the clock, it really can't work, you and the clock coexist and die. Li Qingzhao understood that my value was the same as this artifact. Hu Jixing didn't ask, and we didn't ask, but Li Qingzhao asked. Li Qingzhao suddenly wrote a very important article in that era that has been circulated to this day, "Follow-up to the Golden Stone Record", Li Qingzhao asked this question, asked a big question. For all women, where can a woman under the constraints of traditional morality, her emotions, her life, all her feelings about this matter be sustenance? Among them, Zhao Mingcheng drew an order for her, throwing something first, throwing something again, and finally you coexist and die with this thing. As everything is accounted for, what should I do? The husband says you are dispensable. This is the traditional experience of China, and no one asks. In this respect, in addition to order, there is hierarchy. In today's society, what we have to do first, what we do later, what is most important, what is secondary and what can be abandoned. We basically live under the control of such a discourse. We also think we are held hostage to this experience, which I think is a very important aspect.
The meaning of literature lies in the relationship between experience and the other
At this point we will introduce again the concept of what is the regularity of reality. We live in such a social reality, there are many things, a lot of truths, there are big truths, there are small truths, big truths can control small truths, if you have small truths, unfortunately, you have to sacrifice. For example, I don't think about this society differently than most people. That's tragic, and in a culture like ours, you're probably isolated. You are likely not to be explained, your life is not to be explained. I think this process is very painful. For example, our friends on the mainland may know that China's four or nine years of revolution, all the way to the Cultural Revolution, there is one of the greatest moralities in this history, that is, collectivism, you have to sacrifice personally, you sacrifice, others can survive, and then we can build a new society. Of course you may ask, I am dead, what does this society have to do with me? He will tell you, for example, that you have a family and your son will live in a very good environment. If you don't have any relatives, can I not sacrifice? You also have to sacrifice because you are one with all people, and he has a whole set of doctrines to ensure that you do something. In this process, if you personally say, I still have some personal hobbies, and the large collective unified action will lead to a lot of inconvenience. For example, as a girl, I need to wear makeup during the war, and I have to wash my face and comb my hair when I get up in the morning. If you look at "Song of Youth", if you look at the many kinds of left-wing people, you will remember that all those who want to make a little reservation about personal privacy, personal feelings, we usually call him petty bourgeoisie. After I return to Hong Kong, I will hold a special meeting to discuss the change of petty bourgeoisie in China. What kind of relationship does he have with Chinese society? For example, the two camps of Stalinism, socialism and capitalism, such as anti-nuclear, such as environmental protection, our society today is full of all kinds of environmental protection. In Chinese mainland there is also anti-corruption, and you can write in any one of your words for a lifetime. But I want to tell you that all these words are realistic, he is under the control of reality, that is to say, all these words belong to a range, which I will call the scope of reason and logic. Our reason can see, and our logic can cover such a range as it can. One of the things he most commonly expresses is what we call morality. The moral imperative is the most ingrained. Many of us have no way to get rid of this moral bottom line. But morality, reason, all the requirements of reality, he belongs to such a rational and logical sphere. In addition to the things in this range, these things all illuminate my experience, and I have experience that I can attest to. We automatically start our own experience to prove this truth right. This, of course, constitutes a part of what I think is tragic in writing. A lot of people are like that. And I think the reason they can't write well is that they can't see something bigger than that. Adorno called this thing "existence", Kant called such a chaotic thing "thing in itself", Schopenhauer called it "the unity of rights", it is a very large object that we do not yet know, it has not yet been illuminated by the light of reason. A good writer has to deal with both of these things at the same time. For example, when Nietzsche began to look at the world as suppression and appearance in the 1840s, when he read Schopenhauer's CriticalIty, he suddenly felt that the world had collapsed, and the most important issue he discussed in his life was a moral problem. Nietzsche said that yesterday's morality is likely to become immoral today. Your morality is likely to become immoral to me. Nietzsche is talking about the universality of morality, of course, he attacks mainly the church and morality. I think that after the mid-nineteenth century, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the world they presented constituted an important aspect of our contemporary knowledge. Why? For in the era of Nietzsche's writing, there were already very good writers who wrote with his contemporaries, and these writers were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. They were concerned with the same problem, and in his later years Nietzsche was very excited to see Dostoevsky's work. As a thinker he and the writer saw the same problem from different angles. This is what Nietzsche thinks, how did his Dionysus come about? It is a Greek choir, and the performance part is rational, there is a story, there is a plot, and we see it very clearly. We can't see what's behind him. What's behind it is represented by the choir. So Nietzsche had a quote that I later used at the very beginning of the book Cloak of Invisibility. Nietzsche said: Without music, our world would be a mistake, a fallacy. He went to listen to the deepest wisdom contained in the music. This is also the question of Odyssey that Adeno has repeatedly discussed. When Odyssey was sailing, he came across a monster named Cylon, and this Cyrence would make a very beautiful song. Sailors are tempted. A kind of sailor will bypass him far away and walk rationally, and such a person will get a safe life. But there is also a category that needs to be used to get a real life. The man went, and after the past the ship hit the reef and died.
Is there a way for me to get the truth of society and listen to wisdom without dying? In fact, Adeno said, in the early days, in the Homeric Epic, there is an answer mentioned, Odyssey let people tie themselves to the mast. Then let the boat drive by, and he could both hear the music and not fall into the sea. This is a very important symbol. Later, Adeno devoted himself to this myth in the Kai Tak dialectic, and we deal with both parts of the experience at the same time. An experience is illuminated by reason, an experience is a deep sleep. This aspect I find particularly important is that writing today is meaningless if we look only at all the experiences that we have in front of us that can be summarized and analyzed. This is what Tolstoy called automated writing, or automated living. He said that each of us is actually living an automated life, never thinking about why we exist. Tolstoy said that such a person may not live a day in his life. Today this society automation is even more pronounced. That's the problem we face, and it's the problem that writing faces today.
The third question is, how can we gain our own experience?
The third question is how we can gain our own experience by experiencing this thing. You may also be concerned, you have said so much, how can we see the experience? I can't do anything about it, I'll tell you a story first. There is a story in One Thousand and One Nights, which was later written as a novel, entitled "The Story of Two Dreamers." There was a man living in Iraq, in Baghdad, a man who slept at night, and a man who was biting a gold coin knocked on the door and said to him, you have a fortune buried in the city of Isfahan. He hired a camel to go to this part of isfahan, and when he went there he found that the place was full of desert, there was nothing, and he had run out of money with him, and he slept in a monastery, and then there were thieves in the city, and the police came in to catch the thief, and the police did not catch him, and as a result the man was arrested. The police interrogated him, where did you come from and what you came here for. This man said that I was from somewhere, and I had a dream in which I said where my wealth was, and I came. After saying that, the leader of the patrol laughed and said that there are really such fools in the world. I had the same dream as you last night about where my wealth lies. The place he was talking about happened to be the city from which the dreamer had set out, and the two men were upside down from each other, and he went on to the back and said, that there was a wall, and after a road into it, there was a large courtyard, and there was a fig tree in the courtyard, and there was a fountain, and under this fountain was buried a large sum of wealth, and this place was his home. After coming out of the monastery, he hurried home and went back to his home to dig under the fountain, and sure enough, he dug out countless riches. This story can be analyzed from different aspects. When I talk about experience today, I think it is also possible to infer from the empirical aspect. You have experiences you don't know, you need to take a big bend, you need to be strongly inspired, you can dig your wealth out of your eyes. All the wealth is by your side, near you, but you don't know it.
There's something special about this, and one of the concepts I'm going to talk about in part three is that the experience is actually related to the other. How do we gain our own experience? There is a very good way to do it. You put your experience in it first, and then you touch and understand something new, and this new thing can help you discover yourself. For example, if you, as a woman, don't know you're a woman, and you meet the first man, you know you're a woman. Because the other appears. A comparison, you know what my characteristics are, what my physiology is, what I have. If you grew up in a pile of women and haven't come into contact with any man in your life, you don't know your wealth.
The rational and realistic influences I received in college. When I got to Shanghai, I was told that you countryman, you don't know where the tap is going. All the cities are unfamiliar to us. So I went through four or five years of torture in Shanghai, a sense of guilt, you into this new environment, your original experience is useless. But to this day, all Shanghainese and Beijingers today, Shanghai writers and Beijing writers, will be very envious when they meet authors like Me and Su Tong. Say you're different from us. You've lived in Shanghai for twenty years, you've lived in Beijing for ten years, but at the same time your most important life, for example, from the age of one to seventeen, is spent in the countryside. And we don't have this memory. I began to understand what my seventeen years of memories really were, not suddenly, but step by step slowly began to understand what that life meant to me, what kind of experience it provided for the whole of modern Chinese history. Parts of "Peach Blossom on the Face of Man" and "Spring in Jiangnan" are related to the re-understanding of this memory. If I hadn't left my hometown, I would have been in a complaining about reality like the men and women in my hometown.
What is Chinese Culture? In the past, there was no such concept, and it was precisely after Western culture came in that we would have the concept of Chinese culture, the concept of Chinese literature, and the concept of Sinology. Young people reading a lot of works will not only not affect your own experience, but will be very effective. You should try to understand what you don't know. I once tweeted, and I posted one a month. Sometimes Sina and Tencent call me and say you haven't sent it in a month, send us one. I wrote on a microblog: In fact, the meaning that literature wants to discover lies not in experience, but in the relationship between experience and others. Just as the truth is not in the facts, but in the interpretation of the facts.
Finally, a little bit. I read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago and saw the last Sereyosha, who is the purest character written in Dostoevsky's novel, like an angel. All the characters are dirty, full of desire, and have problems of one kind or another. Dostoevsky looked at them with great humility, and all the people were full of love. But there's an exception in this novel, it's a child, and every time I read that Seryosha appears, she goes to protect a child, she sheds tears every time. Such a child in this very bad world, you will pinch yourself a handful of sweat. This little boy finally one day worshipped an elder of the monastery, and he felt that I was leaving this world, that I was going to serve God in the convent, that I was going to surrender my life to God. When his family was in a fight, his brothers, his father, of course, had not yet killed anyone, and there had been no major problems. He went to this monastery and said to this elder, I ask to stay by your side and stay by your side to serve God for the rest of my life, and I am ready to give up in the outside world, and it has nothing to do with me. Elder Zosima told him that you can serve God, but not now, you can do whatever you want now, because you can't understand your God yet, you have to go through everything in this world, and then one day you come back. This is Tostoevsky's advice to Seryosha, and I take it as advice to all writers. Thank you.
【2012 Lecture Notes by Ge Fei at the Hong Kong Book Fair】
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