Chen Yingsong, a famous writer and winner of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, described himself as "carrying something called nostalgia and swimming in the vineyards of his hometown", and in this mood, Chen Yingsong's latest novel "Tianlu Bay" was launched by the Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House this year. "Tianlu Bay" is a hometown book by Chen Yingsong, who said: "It is frightening to write about my hometown, I have never written such a long text for the hometown that nurtured me, I am cautious and bold. An era, a land, when she gave birth to myths and legends, magnificent history began. My pen, tied to their fate, resonates with their hearts..."
"Tianlu Bay" was written for the first time in its hometown, which is an outlier of all writing
Chen Yingsong has published more than 100 novels, novel collections, prose collections, poetry collections, etc., and his works have won important awards such as the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Chinese Novel Society Award, the People's Literature Award, the October Literature Award, and the China Good Book Award. Well-known works such as "Forest Silence", "Returning the Soul", "Hunter's Peak", and "Harvesting to the Edge of the Sky" are all from his pen. Writing about his hometown in "Tianlu Bay" is his first time.
In Chen Yingsong's view, farmers are sculptors and magicians of the earth. Every year in June and July, he receives grapes sent from his hometown, sunshine roses, romantic red faces, sweet sapphires, vines, beauty fingers... His hometown of Gong'an County, Jingzhou City, Hubei Province, originally had no history of growing grapes, until the end of the 1980s, when several farmers tried to grow grapes, breaking the assertion that grapes were not suitable for growing grapes south of the Yangtze River and rewriting textbooks. Nowadays, grapes have become a huge agricultural industry in Chen Yingsong's hometown, and Gong'an County is known as the "First Grape County in Jiangnan". "One day, I was sitting at the door of Lao Chen, the first person to plant grapes in the public security, tasting the grapes planted by this 'sweet digger', in front of his large building, looking at the glittering greenhouses on the vast fields, and the turquoise grapes growing in the open air, the green tide was noisy and endless. The aromatic sweetness of ripe grapes pervades this land where I once labored, how great the peasants were in this era, they created happiness and also created a myth about cultivation. Who discovered and discovered the romance and wonders born on this field? What kind of opportunity did they get the sweet password? Jiangnan can not grow grapes, but the farmers in their hometown have planted, planted, planted, and famous all over the country, this myth about the land, has the need to trace and the significance of writing? I want to try. ”
With the forty years of reform and opening up as the background of the times, "Tianluwan" writes the long and arduous entrepreneurial history of the farmers in the Jianghan Plain to achieve poverty alleviation and prosperity through struggle, and the panorama reproduces the great transformation process of China's contemporary countryside.
Chen Yingsong began to conduct fieldwork in 2019 in Gong'an County, "Before this, I was posted as the deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Municipal Party Committee in Jingzhou, and I also interviewed them and accumulated some information in this regard. The real start was in 2020, and I started writing this novel during the pandemic and wrote it for two years. The inspiration for this novel comes from home, but also from life. The purpose of writing this book is to record the history of reform and opening up in the Jianghan Plain of Hubei Province over the past 40 years, and the history of the development of the grape industry from scratch. As for the stories and impressions that impressed me the most in the fieldwork and the preparation of the material, I actually wrote them into the novel. As a writer, fieldwork is his necessary ability, and what kind of material to prepare depends entirely on the depth and breadth of your deep life. I am a person who prefers to walk in the fields and in life. I once said that man is a walking plant. To say that the story that impressed me the most was that these farmers made us look at it with astonishment and awe. ”
In Chen Yingsong's view, "TianluWan" is an alternative and an outlier in all his writing: "First, I wrote the Shennongjia series of novels based on the literary world; second, my past novels were relatively heavy, more or less with the characteristics of critical realism; third, my past novels were familiar to readers with mysterious magic and magic. But the novel "Tianlu Bay" is written by me with reverence and gratitude to the peasants in my hometown, without those mysterious magics, and is created in a pure and non-unusual realist way; fourth, I used to write about the poor life in the alpine mountains, and now I write about the rich plain water town life, and the color and tone of the novel are completely different from the past; fifth, I have never written a novel with such a time span of thirty or forty years in the past, which requires a certain degree of skill; sixth, This is a novel that really writes positively about the image of the peasants and rural reform; seventh, in writing, it is completely colloquial, life-oriented, and regionalized, and strives to avoid intellectuals and novel translation; eighth, it focuses on portraying characters, and there are dozens of characters in this novel, and I strive to make them all have their own personalities and come to life. ”
The writing of the hometown itself is an object and channel for talking
"Tianlu Bay" writes about the struggle of two generations, and also writes a large number of character group portraits. Chen Yingsong said that these many character group portraits in the novel, each character has a prototype. "Fiction is fiction, but I don't like fiction. Of course, through writing, putting all the archetypes and their characteristics into a protagonist or two protagonists is a writer's comprehensive ability, expressive ability and shaping ability. ”
As for which protagonist in the book he likes, Chen Yingsong said: "If you say one, it is Jin Tiantian, and if you say the second, it is Hong Dajiang." Jin Tiantian is a wayward, simple, cute, kind, and beautiful girl, but her fate is uncertain. Her fate may represent the fate of the only child of that generation of rural people. Because her father broke his leg and needed to change his joints, she gave up the college entrance examination, went outside alone to work to earn money to treat her father's illness, she met a good boss, but as a result, she suffered a shipwreck in the Yangtze River and almost lost her life. She couldn't do without the benefactor who saved him, that is, the company's boss Qiao Hanqiao, and then got married. But the infertile boss found that he did not want to delay her and hoped that she would leave him, but Jin Tiantian could not leave him. In the end, he was forcibly taken away by her husband and boss, left Wuhan, was homeless, and returned to his hometown. She finally came together with her childhood friend and classmates of Aome Bamboo Horse, started a business, planted grapes, and achieved great success. Especially in the end, she took her former mother-in-law to her vineyard to retire, and she completed the shaping of this girl and this protagonist, which I myself thought was successful, and I also shed a lot of tears for her in writing. In addition, the fate of her later husband and classmate Hong Dajiang is also touching. ”
Chen Yingsong considers himself a vernacular writer, "I have been writing about the countryside and nature for decades, and my novels are definitely vernacular novels. However, in the past, I mainly wrote about Shennongjia, about mountains and forests. Now I go back and write about the water town and the plain where I was born, which is actually a kind of regurgitation, re-evoking my past memories, returning to my hometown, writing about the land that I am more familiar with, the more familiar villagers. It's a conscious action and a responsibility to write. I love farmers and the land. Through the writing of this novel, I have an object and channel to talk to, so writing is really a thing full of joy. ”
Grapes and hometown are just a backdrop to write about the fate of two generations of farmers
Chen Yingsong remembered that the countryside was once a kind of farming life that worked at sunrise and rested at sunset, with adobe houses, mud roads, faces facing the loess and back to the sky, and endless labor, picking dung, digging ditches, hoeing grass, planting seedlings... There is nothing that is not a heavy coolie. But in "Tianlu Bay", the image of backward farmers no longer exists, and readers can see the image of new farmers who dare to explore and innovate. He summed up the mood of creating "Tianlu Bay" in eight words: praising the land and praising the peasants. Therefore, in "Tianlu Bay", grapes and hometown are just a background, Chen Yingsong wants to write about a group of farmers, write about two generations of farmers, write about their feelings for the land, their hard work, get rid of poverty and get rich, and their fate of singing and crying.
Chen Yingsong said that during his suspension in 2009, he found that almost overnight the countryside had been mechanized, and farmers no longer needed hoes, sickles and cattle, no weeding, no need to plant seedlings and cut grains, and everything was handed over to machinery. The clever, shrewd, and knowledgeable peasants have emerged, and modern, advanced, and fashionable new rural areas have blossomed everywhere. "In the past, it was said that farmers were backward, but in my hometown, grapes have become a huge agricultural industry, which shows that today's farmers are not only not backward in this era, but also smarter and more advanced than we think." The times are like this, progressing at a speed we didn't expect at all. ”
In Chen Yingsong's view, the spiritual changes of the peasants are enormous, "This is not something to be said casually. That kind of so-called backward A-Q-style peasant image will not exist, at least in our Jianghan Plain. The best qualities of Chinese farmers in this era are the courage to explore, the ability to learn, the courage to innovate, and the strong desire to learn. After the basic realization of agricultural mechanization in the Jianghan Plain, the peasants have completely bid farewell to agricultural life, and learning new knowledge and mastering modern agricultural science and technology are the most important tasks before them. When peasants cultivate land, they must have all-round scientific knowledge. In particular, the cultivation and cultivation of new cash crops, these crop varieties are themselves the most advanced agricultural scientific and technological achievements. Without using them, learning from them, mastering them, the peasants will not be able to survive and grow a single grain of food. ”
Chen Yingsong took grapes as an example, "Grapes and other fruits, including the world's most advanced agricultural scientific and technological achievements, water and fertilizer integration, computer and mobile phone monitoring, it makes greenhouse technology into industrial management, farmers are no longer farmers in the traditional sense, agriculture is not agriculture in the traditional sense, and the countryside is not the countryside in the pastoral era." I've interviewed so many people, each with their own unique story, and I've put them into my characters. For example, some Portuguese farmers treat grapes as a kind of field art, and the branches of grapes are very beautiful, like works of art. The tree type, the spike type, and the fruit type are almost exactly the same, like coming out of a mold, which is amazing. They shouted that agriculture is the art of the earth, and that farming can be planted in such a situation shows how admirable the farmers in the Jianghan Plain of Hubei Province are. Some Portuguese farmers are closely focused on the most advanced grape growing technology abroad, and some farmers have made the grape industry very large and very rich, which is to have courage and imagination. Some sell grapes for 120 yuan a pound, and some cut the grapes one by one to sell, and also sell at high prices. There is also a young man who returned to his hometown to grow grapes, returned home after graduating from China Agricultural University, and the ecological grapes he planted were different and had considerable land feelings, which were very surprising and touching. ”
By writing "Tianlu Bay", Chen Yingsong wanted to tell everyone, "The peasants are indeed the greatest people in our time. Consciously or unconsciously, actively or implicitly, they are all ahead of the times, and we, especially those of us who are so-called writers in the city, have become laggards, people who have really been abandoned by the times. In addition, I think of the peasants' feelings for the land, how much sweat was spilled in the past, how hard work was done, but now the peasants' feelings for the land are how to carefully dress it up, how to illuminate it with the light of science and technology. In the past, it was measured barefoot, and now it is fiddled with in the greenhouse, and the way the peasants cultivate, the way of life, the way of feeding the land to us, has all changed. I hope you can see the story of every legendary farmer in my novel. ”
The writer is always in life in the real touch
Chen Yingsong once said: "The so-called hometown is the place where the heart gets closer and closer and the people are getting farther and farther away", after writing "Tianlu Bay", he has a new understanding and understanding of the hometown, "that is, to rediscover the hometown with words, to rediscover the land, and to rediscover the peasants." Through the writing of the hometown, I rediscovered myself, rediscovered literature, and rediscovered the writer's relationship with the hometown and the land. Writers are born for their homeland. There is no doubt that in my future writing, I will definitely continue to have stories and landscapes of water towns and plains, the trees of life are evergreen, and my hometown will always be young. More legendary stories, greater changes will surely take place in this land, it is the source of the writers' writing, and we cannot resist this temptation, and our words cannot resist this temptation. ”
Talking about future creative plans, Chen Yingsong said that he does not like to set up a writing plan, and always writes what he thinks of suddenly, "but in the future, I will still have works about my hometown, which is beyond doubt, especially works about symbols such as plains or water towns." I now mainly live and write in Shennongjia Mountain, because the air is particularly good, especially fresh and quiet. "Tianlu Bay" is the theme of my first hometown. Shennongjia is my second hometown. I will alternate between the works of the first and second hometowns, and I now feel that my writing state is very good, and another novel about Shennongjia has also begun to write after I finished "Forest Silence". ”
As for the relationship between theme publishing and literary creation, Chen Yingsong believes that it is still unnecessary for writers to consider it, "This is a problem of the publishing unit, and we cannot consider the concept of theme publishing when writing." Writing is writing, writing life is writing life, and the best relationship is no relationship. For writers, it is still honest to write in accordance with the laws of creation, and do not be limited and bound by the so-called theme publishing. Writing cannot be preconceived, the theme cannot be first, the thought cannot be greater than the image, the slogan cannot be shouted, and the crowd cannot be coaxed. In order to complete the publication of a certain theme, we cannot pander to, fiction, illustrate, fabricate, or exaggerate a certain theme. Publishers have their requirements and tasks, and sometimes they need to highlight the importance and timeliness of a certain kind of writing, a certain subject, but the writer is always in life, in the real touch. If you bump into a certain theme publication, it can only prove that you have collided, not a propositional composition, a work of the scene. The writer's inner motivation to write is the emotion in life. ”
No matter what subject matter is created, Chen Yingsong believes that it is impossible to leave life, "When you really go deep into life, life, people, we can immediately touch its temperature, its breath and its connotation." Of course, we cannot stand on the moral commanding heights of literary writing just because we are deeply involved in life and the people, so as to ignore and deny the complexity and richness of art in writing, and no longer have reverence for the exploration of art. It is thought that standing on the moral high ground can overcome everything overriding everything, so that life, the people, realism, and the main theme are conceptualized, symbolized, flattened, and maximized. If this is the case, our works will appear monotonous, single, homogeneous, illustrated and even pandering expressions, so my experience is that we must write such works with great care and reverence, and must not forget the fundamental meaning and aesthetic quality of literature. I hope that in the future writing, I will work harder to overcome the biased understanding formed in the past, and strive for excellence in art, and in writing, standing on the commanding heights of morality is far less than standing on the commanding heights of art for a long time. Text/Reporter Zhang Jia Courtesy photo/Jenny Cat