Regardless of whether people sincerely love literature or not, Yu Hua and his works are a spiritual presence that cannot be ignored in the contemporary Chinese literary circles, and his novels "Alive", "Shouting in the Drizzle", "Xu Sanguan Selling Blood", "The Seventh Day" and "Wencheng" are all bestsellers of serious literature, and Yu Hua has also established an important position as a pioneer writer of contemporary literature. Not only is Yu Hua's novels well-written, but his prose essays are also very popular with readers, as exemplified by the book "Literature or Music" (reprinted by Yilin Publishing House in December 2021).
One
To a large extent, a person's reading history is the history of his spiritual development and the history of ideological growth. Yu Hua's essay collection "Literature or Music" calmly narrates the process and unique feelings of reading literary classics and studying heirloom musical works, showing the value and special significance of appreciating literary classics and appreciating musical classics for his novel creation. Yu Hua quoted the American writer Jack London as saying about the role of classics: "I would rather read a line of Byron's poem than read more than a hundred literary magazines today." For Yu Hua, the hunger and thirst for reading in the past 30 years may be due to "congenital malnutrition", and in the past 10 years, he can calmly and confidently taste and appreciate the classics in the history of the development of Chinese and Western literature and art, and reading has evolved from the simple need for survival at that time to the noble spiritual enjoyment of the present.
The first half of "Literature or Music" mainly explains literary works and the style of critics, and the second half focuses on the analysis of Western classical music and Yuedan musicians, from this collection of essays that depicts the melody and rhythm of music from the perspective of a novelist, it is not difficult to find that after the style of Yu Hua's novels began to turn from "Alive" to concise and simple, most of those exquisite and beautiful Huazhang jin sentences were put into essay writing. Writers' comments and dissections of writers have their own unique discourse style and expression paradigm, unlike professional critics who need to take into account logic, structure, style and cumbersome academic norms, in the writer's review of writers' texts, literature and literature directly meet, they do not need to go through careful interpretation, careful examination and rigorous reasoning, but rely on intuition and sensibility to instantly reach the end of the argument, very close to or similar to traditional Chinese poetry. Writers can always radiate seemingly unrelated writers in a large number of readings, and rely on rich reading experience to refine the similarities and differences within different writers. Yu Hua has always regarded reading as a channel that "radiates eternal vitality", as he writes in the preface to his collection of essays: "Every time I read those great works, I will be taken away by them." I was like a timid child, carefully grasping the corners of their clothes, imitating their steps, and walking slowly in the long river of time, a journey of warmth and mixed feelings. It is this kind of uninterrupted submersible reading that accumulates into Yu Hua's thick and solid literary skills, stirring up Yu Hua's irrepressible writing impulse, and reading has become a pulse machine and booster for the growth of Yu Hua's literature.
In "Literature or Music", Yu Hua uses the sophistication and fullness of readers, as well as the sensitivity and delicacy of music enthusiasts, to lead readers closer to Borges, Faulkner, Kafka, Chekhov, Márquez, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and other musical masters and literary giants, analyzing their narrative skills in detail and reaching the soul of their creation. Given that most of the classical literary works have transcendent attributes, reading the classic works has become a proposition of the sociology of knowledge.
George Orwell, a British writer who has created world-famous works such as "Animal Farm", wrote a seemingly absurd and shallow sentence in "Nineteen Eighty-Four": Classic works are to tell you what you already know. When I read Yu Hua's essay collection "Literature or Music", I really understood that George Orwell did not point the function of reading classics to the vanished past, not contrary to the humanistic effect of candlelighting the present and insight into the future, but wanted to remind and warn people that a person who is empty in himself does not have the right and qualifications to read classics at all. "The influence of other writers is precisely to make themselves constantly discover themselves, to make the uniqueness of their own writing more complete, and at the same time to extend literature," the words describing Juan Rulfo's profound influence on García Márquez also made Yu Hua break the cardinal of reading the classics. Books, as the mirror image of the human soul, are the inner path for a person to examine and explore his own spiritual world, and those who insist on reading and transform the knowledge obtained through reading into the desk readings of others will become a labyrinth and a guide to the labyrinth path over time. If you are in it and do not find any entanglement or connection with yourself, then this labyrinth will always be just a cold illusory dispensable existence, and only with the help of the key of reading can you "discover" and open the mysterious door between the tight reality and the vast heart.
In Yu Hua's view, classic texts and personal reading are like the barbarism of only one eye and one wing in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", and only after merging with the same kind can they soar and soar for nine days, "Seemingly quiet reading essence is turbulent, and every reader will read with his own experience and feelings, and awaken the details, plots and stories in his experience while reading." Such reading will superimpose layers of associations on top of the original meaning of the work, resonance or rebuttal, are the advent of colorful moments, "In this sense, each work is a brute, reading is another brute, every reading is along the path of narrative, through the heavy text to reach the truth, this truth is both the truth that the writer wants to convey, but also the truth of the reader's self-experience, so this truth essentially belongs to the reader himself."
For every outstanding writer, including Yu Hua, those literary and artistic classics that have survived the washing of time, such as "Noise and Commotion", "Burning Fields", "The Garden where the Path Splits" and "Metamorphosis" mentioned in the book, are the ivy that absorb nutrients and add energy to their works, and the full fragrance of the fruits of labor is not the author's personal achievement and glory, but the feedback and reward for the ancestors of writers such as Zweig, Dostoevsky, Borges and Kafka. Because the juice of the fruit is infiltrated with the high-quality cultural genes of these masters. For ordinary readers who do not have the ability to pay tribute to the master with words, each journey of life is also fruitful, and the cultivation and nourishment of classic works make their ordinary lives also emit a bright brilliance, in this sense, the deposition and inheritance of human civilization, the continuation and circulation, it is through this simplest and most private way - reading to achieve and complete.
▲Yu Hua
Two
The reason why Yu Hua calls "Literature or Music" a book of personal reading and a book of harmony is because the 28 articles collected in the book carry Yu Hua's more than 30 years of reading and listening experience and experience, and the sinking and sinking of those classic masterpieces again and again are condensed in the words and lines of this collection of reading essays. In the book, Yu Hua, with the acumen and intuition of a "novel writer", repeatedly interrogates Faulkner, Márquez, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and other masters, analyzing their narrative style and narrative skills in detail, reaching the secret of their creation, and the classic works written by these masters are also in Yu Hua's deep reading and in-depth interpretation, radiating a strong vitality through time and space. Reading Yu Hua's "Literature or Music", I actually have a wonderful experience of the narrative, which cannot be said to be enlightened, but it seems to open another pair of eyes for the author. For me, the experience and reading of not long and short make me more and more suspicious of words, words are weakening its function as a communication tool, and strengthening the responsibility as a means of expression, and at the moment it may be necessary to cross many barriers and barriers of expression, in order to properly and accurately capture the intention of the author who uses words to communicate with readers, even so, the use of words is still a relatively reliable way of capture, and in novels, essays and other literary works, Only the narrative can reveal the message that the writer wants to convey, or subconsciously reveal the true voice of the heart. Like the exquisite deconstruction of the narrative of "One Thousand and One Nights" in the book, in this ancient story, Yu Hua connects two seemingly unrelated dreams in the form of large circles and small circles through narration, and calmly completes a narrative about the cycle of cause and effect with exquisite whirling. Yu Hua said that words are people's common experiences and imaginations, while narratives are personal experiences and imaginations. The rhythm of the narrative, the order, and the trade-offs, structures, etc. of the events, they are like a string of codes, hidden in the plot and image of Ichima Hirakawa, they make the plot confusing, make the image become uncertain, but because of this string of codes, the image and the plot are seamless, even if it is absurd, it can make the meaning of the expression logical. Yu Hua is not only immersed in reading classics, but also good at telling the joy and harvest of reading classics with the appearance and appearance of novels, which makes his reading essays like narrative works have ups and downs, strange and changeable suspense, descriptions of still water and deep currents, branches and intricate structures, and a tail that flows straight down. This narrative method undoubtedly enriches the expression strategy, but it also undoubtedly obscures the subject content, so that Yu Hua's unique reading findings are hidden behind the fine and trivial words, or explicit or dark, forcing the reader to read these reading essays with Yu Hua's eyes of discovery, but do not regard this penetrating way of writing as a novelist's show off or even a show off, on the contrary, Yu Hua's reading essays are very plain and very introverted, and his high-density metaphors are not rhetorical. Rather, in order to expand the narrative space and aesthetic tension when interpreting the work, it tries to surpass the language norms of the essay in the uncertainty of metaphor. As a kind of literary system reading essay, its main theme connotation and narrative strategy are like the slides used by children to play games, on one side is the ladder of people who pick up the steps and climb up, and the other side is a steep and straight, thrilling light board, although the physical spacing between the two is close at hand, but the function is vastly different, the fundamental difference lies in the author's grasp and control of accuracy, once the distortion is inaccurate, it will fall into the embarrassing dilemma of self-show. The mentality of excellent writers is mostly sensitive and slender, in addition to upholding a kind of piety and concentration in literary creation, it also maintains prudence and vigilance on scale, because the sense of proportion of writing is like an innate sense of balance, hidden in the writer's body, which is also an important sign of identifying and distinguishing the advantages and disadvantages of reading essays: is the dull content of the big fried cold rice style plus flashy words, or the original discovery from the heart and supplemented by simple and profound expressions, which not only indicates whether the author has found himself in reading. And to show whether his writing is really different from his predecessors and others, Yu Hua's reading essays undoubtedly belong to the latter. Goethe said in Faust: If you are indeed great, I will exchange souls with you, and Yu Hua has a sincere dialogue with some great souls in reading, discovers what Goethe calls "great souls", and reveals it in his essay writing.
(Image source Visual China)
Three
In the ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literary circles, there is no shortage of writers who are passionate about music, such as the Japanese contemporary writer Haruki Murakami Listening to music in large doses, many of the characters in his literary works are rich in musical accomplishment, and the melodious and low music between the lines of his novels is often "transmitted". Yu Hua's attention to music began almost at the same time as his literary training, and his nearly 40 years of personal reading and listening history enabled him to find and summarize the common characteristics of literature and music, and then to structure a "intertext" text that crossed words and musical notes in a different narrative structure. This collection of essays includes 6 musical essays, such as "Music Influences My Writing", and the warmth between those flexible words and the notes not only highlights the author's rich experience in music appreciation, but also allows readers to appreciate the characteristics of art and appreciate the beauty of "synaesthesia" between literature and music: "The strength and weakness in music are like the difference between thickness and lightness in literature; the harmony in music is similar to the multi-layered dialogue and description in literature; the colorful segments in music are like the magnificent comparative sentences in literature". Yu Hua fully mobilizes the novelist's feelings and perspectives, leading the reader into a musical world with beautiful melodies and soothing rhythms. As we all know, from the Baroque era to the late Romantic period, music and literature were inherited and evolved in their respective fields, and when literature and classical music met, there was a strange artistic landscape, Yu Hua elaborated on the commonality and mutual construction of the two in the book, the lyricism of the small section of the symphony can cover the high-pitched melody and bright rhythm, and the literary works appear strong emotional shock after the magnificent narrative. Yu Hua's love and preference for music is reminiscent of Faulkner's "Walsh" in the book, and it seems that writers have a striking similarity in their love of music. Reading Fu Lei's translated works, the reader may re-acquaint himself with Mozart; reading Yu Hua's "Literature or Music", the reader once again understands Shostakovich, perhaps music is another way for writers to enter this world, an indispensable component of their own life, and a spiritual habitat and soul shelter for writers.
In the book about The Shri of Western music, Yu Hua felt the holiness and depth of the souls of the music masters, and had a deep dialogue and invigorating communication with them, because he heard the throbbing of his own soul in the musical works of Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and others, especially in the book, the first movement of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and Hawthorne's "Red Letter" were compared in narrative, where the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of the words were highly consistent, just like the waves on the sea gradually strengthening. Finally, in an exciting and high-pitched climax, the narrative makes music and literature reflect each other. Therefore, this book guides readers to have a deeper experience of literary narrative and a different perception of musical narrative. For literature and novels, Yu Hua actually reads the works of his predecessors as a peer, and his creative experience over the years has enabled him to distinguish the texture and taste of literary works very calmly. For music, especially Western classical music, Yu Hua is just worshiping and looking up. When expressing the feeling of reading musical classics, he can only use literature as a rhetorical way, repeatedly emphasizing that literature and music have narrative character, in order to confirm the correctness and rationality of the above comparisons, and assert that "their narratives exist reasonably because they are flowing", which seems far-fetched and arbitrary. We know that almost all art in the world exists in the form of flow, the flow of lenses is the basic feature of film art, the flow of color is the main means of painting art, and the flow of form is an important form of sculpture art, in other words, flow is an important attribute of all art, literature and music are no exception. Of course, Yu Hua himself shows a hint of trepidation and unconfidence in the book: "Every time I read those great works, I will be taken away by them." I was like a timid child, carefully grasping the corners of their clothes, imitating their steps, and walking slowly in the long river of time, a journey of warmth and mixed feelings. ”
Without a strict comparison between the literature and music in the essay collection, it seems difficult to find that Yu Hua lacks a Fu Lei-style artistic synaesthesia when describing music reading, because he hopes to inspire readers to appreciate music from a literary perspective by expressing musical experience, and then use multi-dimensional dialogue to explore the time and space extension of the musical road. In fact, the shortcomings in Yu Hua's music criticism are common problems that currently exist in the field of music theory in mainland China, that is, the language of expounding musical works is too monotonous, the text is too boring, and the internal relationship between literature and music is not thoroughly explained. Of course, Yu Hua opened the door to musical narrative with his superb literary techniques, and in the combing of the two domains of literature and music, he quietly brought the reader into the aesthetic experience of music, which is quite difficult at the moment when the music review article is dull and boring, not to mention that Yu Hua only positions himself as an ordinary music appreciator, in this sense, Yu Hua already belongs to the master of amphibious warfare.
Author: Liu Jinxiang
Edit: Jin Jiuchao
Editor-in-Charge: Zhu Zifen
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.