Book review 丨 "Shouting Mountain Response": Shake your head to read the book, and watch the world with hot eyes

Essay collection "Shouting Mountain Ying" and Wang Yuewen's "Truth"

Lei Lin

In September 2021, the collection of essays published by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, "Shouting Mountain Ying", is Wang Yuewen's latest work, this collection is divided into three parts: "My Literary Hometown", "My Literary Creation" and "My Literary Review", in which the author's review of his own literary journey and the intertextual relationship between the province and the previously published "Wang Yuewen Literary Memoirs" and "No Violation" constitute facts. The difference is that the latter is basically carried out in dialogue with others, while "Shouting Mountain Ying" presents a monologue, the act of "shouting mountain" itself is the pursuit of the self of the shouting mountain people, and the mountain responds to both the appearance of the mountain and the appearance of the person. Therefore, the author's meticulous combing of literature and creation in the collection of "Shouting Mountains" has made the world more deeply understand the relationship between Wang Yuewen and his text, and the place of a writer's origin, present and whereabouts are clear in the narrative of the wisps, and the glittering light is not extinguished.

I remember watching "No Violation" before, and the author talked about his conversation with the earth bee when he was lonely in his childhood, and this detail is impressive. Because of the psychological and emotional alienation of family origins from other children, even games cannot be cured, because the distribution of roles in games is also part of this alienation. Talking to the earth bee is the way Wang Yuewen, as a child, heals himself, and as an adult, literature replaces the earth bee. In Wang Yuewen's different conversation occasions, and in the latest "Shouting Mountain Response", he returned to this stage of the beginning of his life again and again, salvaging the floating light and dust in the personnel entanglements and life difficulties involved in his parents' encounters. What is the significance of this deliberate repetition? In short, they are the starting point for the generation of distance (or time) aesthetics in Wang Yuewen's creation, and the core of this aesthetic is like the author's evaluation of him when he was a child, "I don't like to talk very much, and I think about things in my heart", that is, I turn myself into a bystander and try to figure out the minds of others, Wang Yuewen knows this very well, he said, "In my own heart, this is a pair of cold eyes, keen insight into everything." The acquisition of these "eyes" is the inevitable result of Wang Yuewen's childhood separation from others as the son of the rightist, so that his sense of self naturally has a sense of distance or time, and integrates it into his stories and characters.

The sense of time here is close to the understanding of the Japanese scholar Maruyama Sheng, who believes that the sense of time is the intermediate term that connects thought and reality, and is the most subjective way of combining the individual and the era. The distance and intermediate term here point to the position of the writer in society, and the acquisition of the writer's position is determined not only by the actual situation of the writer, but also by the conscious choice of the writer's subjective psychology. In Wang Yuewen's case, he strives to find and try to get close to the middle of history, in the middle of good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, sublime and inferior, sincerity and hypocrisy, enthusiasm and indifference, wisdom and cunning, sinking and redemption... Constructing an asymmetrical symmetry and unbalanced balance, thus opening up a broader gray area, allowing the world and human nature to accept the inquiry and test from life in the wind and sand, and finally constituting the unique "truth" of Wang Yuewen's works.

"Truth" appears repeatedly in all of Wang Yuewen's texts on creation, and is more deeply used in "Shouting Mountain Ying", he said: "In a sense, literature is a kind of commitment, and it should present a real thing, or truth, no matter what form it takes. I think that even the most bizarre fantasies must come from reality and present reality." On this basis, Wang Yuewen distinguished between the truth of life and the truth of text. The former refers to the person, the figurative, and the everyday life in which it is placed, and it is composed of a series of rich details. The meaning of the latter tends to be abstract, related to imagination, human nature, the essence of life, and the relationship between the invisible. Both point to the already and the ought and ought to be human beings, to the search for the infinite possibilities of life, and Kundera said in The Art of the Novel that "the novel is the explorer of existence", and the tool of exploration is this "truth".

However, in "Shouting Mountain Response", Wang Yuewen distinguishes "truth" from naturalism and gives it an appropriate fictional nature, he writes: "There is no need to show the truth of life to people, some people in life are terrible, but writing novels does not have to be so frightening, everything is better, we only use the real events as models, and then add some artistic components to make it subtle", in his case, "true" is measured, need to be tempered and tailored. This seems to violate the typical shaping theory of traditional realism, and also parts ways with the transformation of novel forms in modern times in China and the West with the help of absurdity, distortion and other methods to deeply depict life. So why is there such a "truth"? This is naturally related to the distance (time) aesthetic in Wang Yuewen's creation mentioned earlier. Because the limited degree of truth and moderation of the narrative ultimately shows the intermediate state of things, implicit but not revealing, hidden but not prominent, in the middle of history and reality, showing the distance between the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object, so that the writer and the reader can obtain a sense of history or time at the same time. But this is not Wang Yuewen's ultimate goal, what he wants to do is to use this intentional convergence of "truth" to reach the most secret place of human nature and express his understanding of human nature, and this understanding is naturally full of neutrality.

Wang Yuewen said: "There are no absolute black characters in my writing, nor are there absolute red characters, most of the characters are in a gray state. Some of the characters are gray to white, which is already a positive image in the reader's feelings, such as Zhu Huaijing and Guan Yinda. Some characters are gray and gray-black, such as Meng Weizhou and Zhang Zhaolin, they are very real characters in reality, there are many gray-black things in human nature, but they are not given the opportunity and conditions to appear on weekdays", this concept of human nature has gone beyond the simple moral aesthetic meaning. In "Shouting Mountain Ying", the author describes the process of creating "The Great Qing Xiangguo" in great detail, and makes many explanations and historical evidence of the personalities of Kangxi and Chen Tingjing, which is rare in the general writer's creative memoirs. Its good intentions are still to show the writer's own moral attitude and ethical position, that is, he is not willing to easily make value judgments on people and human nature, good or bad people, clean officials, corrupt officials or mediocre officials, in the intricate social relations in which people are placed, they are not only a single role, not to mention the dominant force of selfish desires. For example, Gui Ye in "Gui Ye" has lived a hard life, not troublesome and not greedy, but the elderly have fallen ill in bed to serve, and in the dispute with The Five Guarantees of Sixi, because secretly hoping that Sixi will die before him, he finally committed suicide in shame. However, the neutrality of Wang Yuewen's ethical and moral stance does not mean that he ignores and accepts evil, on the contrary, he looks at the darkness of human nature and the absurdity of the world, "cannot close his eyes and listen, sometimes it is inevitable to point out with disgust" "I absolutely do not agree with the ugliness in Chinese culture", in "Shouting Mountain Ying", he once again expressed his rejection of evil and bad taste. Therefore, Wang Yuewen's moderation in ethical and moral attitude reflects his sympathy and compassion for the tragedy of individual life, so the author repeatedly emphasizes that his work "attitude is criticism, the background color is warmth", and he cannot accept the cold tone in Zhang Ailing's "Small Reunion".

Only by understanding Wang Yuewen's "truth" and the subsequent ethical and moral stance can we truly understand why the protagonist in his works is constantly compromising with reality on the one hand, and on the other hand, he is constantly conducting moral reflection, and finally achieving various forms of reconciliation with himself and others, and moving towards the return of ethical significance, such as "The Story of Mei Ci", "Cang Huang", "Between The Day and the Night", "The Bird of the Dead", "The Beauty of Winter", "The First Year of the Love Calendar" and so on. Although some people may question the possibility and effectiveness of this reconciliation, for Wang Yuewen, "all I want to do in my work is to use my lamp to illuminate this small piece of the place I know, candle this small piece of truth, ask questions and think, and that's all", "ask questions with truth, not give answers with truth", he has no ambition. No ambition is also in line with this world full of relativity, Kundera said: "There is no place for hatred in the relative world of the novel", because "in this great carnival of relativity, no one is reasonable, and no one is completely unreasonable", so Wang Yuewen's "truth" is a small footnote to this turbulent and conflicting world, and it is enough for a writer to shake his head and read the book, to look at the world, to explore the meaning of people's actions and the meaning of the environment in which they live.