On March 29, "DT Finance" released the article "Whether 985 or 211, the most popular books for college students are it", which counted the TOP20 of the 2021 Chinese college student book lending list, and there is no doubt that Shaanxi writer Lu Yao's masterpiece "Ordinary World" once again came out on top, whether it is 985, 211 or ordinary universities, "Ordinary World" is at the top of the loan list. Landing at the top of the major borrowing lists is not news for "Ordinary World", but more than thirty years later, this work is still red and purple, and the reasons for this are worth thinking about.
■ Image source public account "DT Finance"
■ Image source public account "DT Finance"
As one of the troika of the literary Shaanxi Army, Lu Yao and his "Ordinary World" have had a huge impact on the dissemination and reception of Shaanxi literature and even the entire Chinese contemporary literature, and on the world reading day of the thirtieth anniversary of Lu Yao's death, it is necessary for us to "cliché" to review the publication, dissemination and popularity of this book once again.
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"From my teaching experience, when I first entered the school, the students' enthusiasm for reading was the highest, and the reading time was also the most. At this time, when they meet such an easy-to-understand and narrative work as "Ordinary World", they will inevitably be attracted. University teacher Lin Dada has tried to analyze the reasons why "Ordinary World" has been "dominating the list" for many years, and in an art college in the southern region where he works, "Ordinary World" is also a frequent visitor to the list.
"By the time of the sophomore and junior year, the students' homework will gradually become more, the reading will slowly become professional and refined, and the reading of the senior year will almost completely revolve around the graduation thesis." Since graduating from Zhejiang University majoring in Comparative Literature and World Literature, Lin Dada has been teaching for 7 years, and in colleges and universities, he is mainly responsible for teaching foreign literature, introduction to Western culture and writing.
"There is another reason: as a public course, Chinese modern and contemporary literature and university language are opened relatively early, freshman year generally, what majors are learned, teachers recommend "Ordinary World" in class, push the boat along the water. And foreign literature courses are opened late, generally to the sophomore and junior year, non-literature students can not even touch this course, so you can pay attention to this list, the top 20 books, the proportion of European and American classics is very small. Only Maugham and Husseini, the latter of whom is also Afghan-American. ”
From the perspective of text, Lin Dada believes that the more "level-up" reading experience has directly contributed to the popularity of "Ordinary World" among college students. A college student feedback that reading Lu Yao's novel is like listening to a kind uncle in northern Shaanxi telling a story, telling you a story, not in a hurry. "In short, it's easy to read and has a strong sense of story." However, this also shows from another perspective that "Ordinary World" is a book that is very suitable for literary enlightenment, and no one can deny the importance of enlightenment, but it is undoubtedly regrettable to stay only in "enlightenment" and no longer move forward.
The article "How it Came Out" published in the 7th issue of "Appreciation of Masterpieces" in 2022 and Lu Yao's 1992 essay collection "Morning From Noon" both record the entire process of "Ordinary World" from writing to writing a book in more detail. The first part of "Ordinary World" began to be written in 1982, and until the third part was finalized on May 25, 1988, Lu Yao's writing lasted for nearly 6 years.
At that time, in the Chinese literary world, modernist literature was attacking everywhere, and compared with works such as "The Temptation of Ganges" published at the same time, lu Yao's honest realist writing was quite outdated at the time, both in terms of theme and expression, so this work was controversial at the beginning. After the first book was finalized, Lu Yao successively ate the "closed door soup" of the "Contemporary" magazine, the Writers Publishing House, the China Youth Publishing House and other institutions, and after several turns, it was finally published and published by the newly established China Literary Association Publishing Company. In later literary seminars, many literary critics have also considered its methods old and outdated themes, and have expressed different views on the book. This controversy continues to this day: whether it is Hong Zicheng, Chen Sihe or Yan Jiayan, in the modern and contemporary literature courses he has compiled, "Ordinary World" occupies very little space, and many editions are only skimmed over. Not to mention a number of overseas researchers of Chinese literature, such as Wang Dewei, Xia Zhiqing, and Li Oufan, some of whom have not even commented on the book at all.
Lu Yao himself is not aware of the crux of the controversy, and the essay collection "Morning Begins at Noon" records that many modernist works of literature, including Kafka, are actually placed on his desk. However, he deliberately avoided the modernism that was very popular at that time, and in interviews and writings, he revealed his own heart at that time: "To leave a spiritual epic for ordinary people." Modernist readers are small, and we cannot irresponsibly abandon the majority of readers, and excellent realist works can satisfy readers at all levels. ”
■ Lu Yao wrote in the case of | Graph source network
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Different eras and different groups have different aesthetic tendencies, in fact, any writing method can create classics, as the art historian Gombrich said, the most important thing for good artists to create when creating works is to need a "right" (right), not a specific rationale.
However, in order to prevent the discussion of literature and art from slipping into an unspeakable relativism, it is necessary to have a threshold and a criterion for judging excellent works. For realism, while emphasizing "typical scenes and typical characters", it is also necessary to emphasize in terms of methods "faithfully representing reality with detailed descriptions." From this point of view, the subjective realist expression of "Ordinary World" with a large number of discussions and lyricism poses a certain interference with its depiction and artistic expression.
In addition, Lu Yao's motivation to write "for ordinary people" to a certain extent opposes the formal exploration and artistic exploration of literary texts with the text acceptance of ordinary readers, and in this confrontation, he chooses the latter, which seems to be taking the "mass line", but in fact it may imply a more absolute elitist consciousness.
It can be seen from this that Lu Yao is a writer whose "reader (audience) consciousness" surpasses "text consciousness", so the exploration of the formal structure of the text, the exploration of expression and the exploration of language style all give way to content, giving way to Lu Yao's strong emotional sincerity. For Chinese readers in the early days of reform and opening up, which has not yet departed from the traditional agricultural production methods, this reader consciousness is very accurate, and if they can use another wind of mass media, they can be invincible.
■ Middle-aged road remote | Graph source network
Lu Yao finally waited for this gust of wind. According to the article "How it Came Out", in the spring of 1987, Lu Yao accompanied a delegation of Chinese writers on a trip to West Germany and went to Beijing to go through the formalities for going abroad before leaving. During this period, Lu Yao met her old colleague and editor of the Central People's Radio Ye Yongmei on the bus, and during the conversation, Ye Yongmei asked Lu Yao about her recent creations, and Lu Yao gave her the first part of "Ordinary World". Ye Yongmei sighed after carefully reading the whole book, and decided to record the novel as a radio program so that it could meet ordinary people living in the "ordinary world" as soon as possible.
From March 27, 1988, the "Long Series" program of the AM747 channel of the Central People's Radio began to broadcast Lu Yao's "Ordinary World", the first part used published works, the second part used the second proof, and the third part used Lu Yao's manuscript. On August 3, the 126-episode novel "Ordinary World" ended, and according to the Central People's Radio, the domestic audience reached as many as 300 million that year.
At the same time, after the Central People's Radio broadcast "Ordinary World" for more than 130 consecutive days, more than a dozen provinces and cities such as Zhejiang, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Heilongjiang, and Jiangsu have been replayed one after another, receiving sensational social effects. China Literature Association Publishing Company also felt a strong response from the vast number of readers, and the editorial and distribution departments continued to receive calls from readers asking for the purchase of this book. The love of the vast audience and readers for "Ordinary World" has influenced experts and scholars in the critical community. "Ordinary World" finally won the third Mao Dun Literature Award in 1991.
In the "Ordinary World" selection report submitted by China Federation of Literary and Literary Publishing Company to the Organizing Committee of Mao Dun Literature Award, there is such a record: radio, publishing houses and authors have received nearly 10,000 letters from listeners and readers. Among them are graduate students, college students, middle and high school students, teachers and cadres with high cultural levels, as well as ordinary workers, peasants, soldiers of the army and unemployed youth; there are both young people and the elderly. The representative of the first student of Shanxi Normal College wrote to the whole class: "We regard 12:30 noon as the greatest enjoyment of life after studying, and we pay attention to the fate of the protagonist every day, and we are sad and sad for the protagonist, and we are happy and happy." ”
■ Stills from the TV series "Ordinary World"
A high school student in Gansu wrote to say that his family was in the countryside, eight miles away from the school, and since the launch of "Ordinary World", he has been deeply attracted. In order to listen to the book in its entirety, he ran home every day after school, rushed into the door, opened the semiconductor, and then calmed down and ate while listening. Four months later, his long-distance running results actually won the place in the school sports meeting.
As early as 1990, "Ordinary World" was adapted by director Pan Xinxin into a 14-episode TV series broadcast on CCTV. In 2015, "Ordinary World" was once again put on the screen, and the new version of "Ordinary World" starring Yuan Hong, Tong Liya and other actors lasted for 56 episodes; in 2017, Shaanxi Renyi launched the drama "Ordinary World" and won awards such as "Five One Project" Excellent Works...
To this day, "Ordinary World" still has countless fans on short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, who either introduce book content or plots in cos. Starting from other media forms, reverse influence and promote the dissemination of texts, this phenomenon is particularly evident in the dissemination of the book "Ordinary World". Its book sales have reached 18 million copies by 2020 and are still growing every year.
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In the middle and late twentieth century, Literary theorists such as Yao Si shifted the focus of Western literary criticism from the texts advocated by the new european and American critical schools to the reader, thus opening up a new situation in hermeneutics and aesthetic research. Acceptance aesthetics believes that the reader is not a blank piece of paper when he begins to read, he enters the text with a "problem", and the process of reading is a process in which the text satisfies its own inquiry for the "problem", in this process, the reader interacts with the text, and his previous expectation horizon is either expanded or reshaped.
Being able to meet the common expectations of freshmen and even the entire college student youth group for the text world is actually the fundamental reason why "Ordinary World" can break through the context of the times and flourish for a long time. "When I was reading, I kept flashing my old high school life in my head." Zhao Xuejun, a doctor of modern and contemporary Chinese literature at East China Normal University, felt when he first read Lu Yao, which has a strong commonality for many people.
What exactly can break through the aesthetic and environmental restrictions of the times in "Ordinary World"? In fact, those who have read the text are not difficult to appreciate that the emotional intensity of the book is through the back of the paper, although the agricultural era in the book has long ceased to exist, but the individual spiritual strength of the characters in the novel in the face of adversity and changes in the times can quite touch people's hearts. These two points coincide with the state of mind of many young people who have just been admitted to college and are eager to make a difference in the future, which is a kind of youthful romanticism.
■ Stills from the TV series "Ordinary World"
From the perspective of group image construction, this novel defines the positive peasant image of the 1970s and 1980s as a simple, industrious group of people with firm ideals and beliefs in their chests. In contrast, modern society, especially the current young people as a whole, are in a "confused generation", which can especially reflect the tallness of the characters in the work. From this point of view, the longevity of "Ordinary World" also reflects the confusion and panic, entanglement and reluctance of people in ancient China when the society transitioned to modern times, and this transformation road has not really been completed so far. All of this has led to the "Lu Yao phenomenon" that is snubbed by experts but is popular with readers.
However, following the simulation has always been the ultimate shortcut in literature and art. After the success of "Ordinary World", it attracted a large number of imitators in terms of theme and expression. To some extent, like a hood, it has a certain degree of constraint on the students' creation, group image construction, and even the overall temperament of Shaanxi literature.
Liu Tianyu, a spoken-language poet in northern Shaanxi, once lamented at a literature lecture: "Everyone in northern Shaanxi who digs coal has opened a BMW, how can you still face the loess and turn your back to the sky like Sun Shao'an in your pen, how simple?" "A literary work that is in the modern era, but consciously rejects the expression of modernism, cannot really resonate with the times, and the realism it strives to uphold will be divorced from reality."
In Lin Dada's view, the borrowing list may not fully reflect the reading landscape of contemporary college students in many cases. "Based on the statistics of borrowing frequency alone, does this book have such a high borrowing circulation record, does it mean that its reading completion is not high from the negative side?" That is to say, the students came to visit and returned after reading a few pages, and few people really read the three magnificent masterpieces of "Ordinary World".
"Everyone's definition of classics is different, and by my personal standards, classics must be able to bring me a new aesthetic experience, a new perspective of thinking and observation." Lin Dada expressed his views on literary classics.
■ Lin Dada and Zhao Xuejun are pseudonyms in the text
Author | Ma San | Chastity author