Cuiliu Street | Deep Sea: The Charm of Yizhou Novels

The charm of Yizhou novelSight

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Yi Zhou's novels have a distinct personal style, and he is also one of the few writers in the current literary world with a high degree of text recognition. The "Waterfall Gatekeeper" selected in this issue also has a distinct boat character.

A daughter travels thousands of miles to Lijiang to "rescue" her mother, who has retired to travel there but is troubled. From the beginning, the mother-daughter relationship was fraught with tension. The "mother's" desperate stubbornness and willfulness in some respects makes us sympathetic to this "daughter", and it is common sense to predict that an inevitable conflict is about to take place in that beautiful city. If that's the case, it's not the text of Yi Zhou. Yi Zhou's pen travels in a different direction, always taking us to the other side of the "habitual" - he first takes us into the "waterfall gatekeeper" game of the "daughter" and "son", and then leads us to the eternal "starry sky" through the "mother's" sight - the sincerity and unhindered nature of the children's world, and the "mother's" expectation and waiting for the "Leo meteor shower" together to open a door for the "daughter" to escape from the closed and lonely. Finally, in the face of the "flood" caused by her own mistakes, the "daughter" no longer showed anxiety and confrontation, but conformed and felt, she rushed into the waterfall-like water curtain and fought a water fight with the owner of the homestay. The occurrence of reconciliation is so silent, silent, but also shaking people's hearts, which is the charm of Yizhou's novel.

During the Qingming holiday, I concentrated on reading many of Yi Zhou's novels, and another quality of his works, a commonality hidden behind the text, deeply touched me, reminding me of a poem by Paz: "All names are one name / All faces are one face / All centuries are only a moment." And this "instant" is synonymous with eternity. The "starry sky, Leo meteor shower" in "The Gatekeeper of the Falls", the recurring "human bones, snowy mountains" in "Suiyuan", the "time" against "loneliness" represented by the "cigarette" of the released prisoner Lao Kui in "Out of the Police", the "sister" and "family affection" that a large number of people struggle to protect in "Why the Snowman Melts", the woman in "Hidden Disease" who uses madness to compete with the world for her husband to retain "love"... All show Yizhou's fascination with "eternal" things. Almost all of these works begin with disorder, or are quickly introduced into disorder, and in the end, everything magically closes up in a "moment" and returns to a pleasing and convincing order.

How this "moment" comes and how it comes to fruition is not only the writer's ability to structure and narrate, but also what is the spiritual fulcrum chosen by a person and a writer on the road to ideals and independence, and to what extent he expands his life in the process of creation. In Yi Zhou's deep thinking with a slightly melancholy temperament, we can taste the doubt and even pessimism that he has a vague philosophical meaning. But in the end, the classic moral law of the human tradition can always re-give his characters soul and courage at an appropriate moment. Thus, the "I" in "Suiyuan" kissed the dying person and completed her own "black five-eyed and half-victory", the "daughter" in "The Waterfall Gatekeeper" embraced herself again in the room of the waterlogged; the "Lao Kui" in "Out of the Police" who sold her daughter in order to avenge his wife who eloped with someone when he was imprisoned, took the initiative to turn himself in to the police; the "I" in "Why the Snowman Melted", when faced with the bullying of the villains caused by his own "corruption", finally regained his dignity. Summon up the courage to fight to the death... From this, we can clearly see the rules of his own literary world constructed by Yi Zhou, where human nature can be unleashed and taken to the extreme, and in the end, they still have to crawl to the rules he reveres, because the rules, this "moral barrier", are the source of energy that frees people from loneliness from harm, which makes the lost and the broken complete, so that the suppressed life begins to grow again, so that loneliness is no longer a cage... The sufferings and difficulties of the human world can only be solved in the higher eternal things, and the literary map of Yizhou is built on the path that connects people with that realm.

Hayek once said that "those important moral rules are God's commands and laws... To violate these basic morals is to oppose God. Almost all the "moments" in Yizhou's novel come when his protagonists return to the embrace of morality - compassion for death liberates the "I" in "Suiyuan" from the damage of breaking through life; the cruelty and loneliness of Lao Kui in "Killing and Selling Women" in "Out of the Police" are largely caused by "lack of morality", and the fear of loneliness forces him to make the choice of "surrender"; "Why the Snowman Melts" explores the relationship between morality and fear in depth - liberation, redemption, Reconciliation...... Participation without morality cannot be accomplished. The beauty of morality also lies in the fact that it can help human beings get rid of stupidity to the maximum. Yi Zhou's novel not only shows us a rich and complex sample of human nature determined by multiple factors, but also shows us that the standard of measuring whether human behavior is moral is never rigid or single-minded—forgiveness in "Suiyuan" is morality, and resistance in "Why the Snowman Melts" is also morality; reconciliation in "The Gatekeeper of Waterfalls" is morality, and paranoia and madness in "Hidden Disease" are also morality... In his literary world, Yi Zhou explores the most harmonious mode of coexistence between man and self, with soul, and with higher spiritual existence in all directions. This is also the reason why in his narrative unfolding of plant-like tranquility and softness, it can always bring us a deep and powerful impact.

Yi Zhou's novels are quite rich in themes. I think it's not because he has more creative resources than others, but because he can always find a different perspective. In addition to the honesty based on life, in his works, we can also appreciate the artistic enjoyment brought by imagination, like the "horse" at the "end of the line of sight" and its "grass-eating sound" in "Suiyuan", even if the novel is put down for many years, the image and sound are still in my memory, because it is the sound of the protagonist's soul that has nowhere to put it chewing its pain day and night. In many of today's fictional texts, hard wounds caused by lack of imagination are common. The lack of imaginative expression can even make us doubt the meaning of literature. For writers are a group of people who have been given the mission of "understanding and explaining our lives on behalf of the whole of humanity." Behind the profundity of understanding and feeling about people and life is the writer's unusual spiritual experience and the artistic expressiveness that complements it, both of which rely on creativity determined by imagination.

Yi Zhou once said that "writers have the task of re-polishing language", and even compared "loyalty to literature" to "cherishing and respecting life" as sacred. This high degree of self-consciousness makes him a creator with a strong sense of self-control, and also allows him to maintain a proper aesthetic distance from his writing subjects. The elegance, modernity and tension of his novels also derive largely from the contributions of his words. The language of Yi Zhou's novel is implicit and vivid, full of tolerance, full of sincerity and wisdom. The richness of perception is always beyond language, so the rhetoric of wisdom is crucial in compensating for the limitations of language. Yi Zhou also has another identity, graphic designer. We often read synaesthetic rhetoric in his writings, which is a fascinating reading experience. You can feel the organicity of his words, just like living rice can become seeds, and those organic words are like "hidden beacons", which will surely sprout and shine in the reader's heart at a moment of fit. That moment was probably the moment of the "awakening of the stone" that Rilke "waited and waited for."

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"Yangtze River Literature and Art : Good Novel", No. 5, 2022

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