After my article "<讲话>Under the Illumination of the Spirit, the People Are Awakening, and 'Mo Yan' is Degenerating" was published in the headlines, it resonated with many netizens and also stimulated everyone's enthusiasm for studying Chairman Mao's "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art."
Focusing on the topic of "Speech" and Mo Yan, the author would like to talk about the relationship between literature's "exposing human nature" and "carrying forward the spirit", and "who does literature serve".
First, Mo Yan's "prejudice" and Xiao Jun's speech
Mo Yan has a "famous saying": I have a prejudice that literature has never been a tool for singing praises. Many people think that Mo Yan is telling the truth.
In fact, he was not the first to mention "literary criticism." As far back as May 2, 1942, at the Yan'an Literary and Art Symposium, one person was the first to fire.
He said: "In our revolution, we must be like Mr. Lu Xun, smashing the old world to pieces, and never writing articles that praise merit and virtue." At a meeting like today, I can write 100,000 words. I greatly appreciate The new heroism of Romain Rowland. I want to be the first writer in China, and I want to be the first writer in the world. "The person who fired the cannon was Xiao Jun.
You see that Xiao Jun was much more fierce than the later Mo Yan, who was the first son of Mr. Lu Xun and a literary friend of Chairman Mao's frequent contacts. It can be seen that "literature has never been a tool for singing praises" has never been Mr. Mo Yan's patent, and there was a fierce discussion at the Yan'an Literary and Art Forum that year.
The chairman's "Speech" is the crystallization of the exchange after the writers collectively discussed the ideas of literary creation, and truly recorded the exchange of ideas at that time. The Speech focuses on the question of "who to serve" and "how" literature is served. Literary criticism is just one of them.
In his "Speech," Chairman Mao mentioned the "political standards" and "artistic standards" of literary criticism, which emphasized the motives of criticism, and "whether it is beneficial to the masses of the people and the interests of the state and the nation" is an important criterion for measuring it. Political standards dominate artistic standards.
If you use this standard to measure Mo Yan's works today, will you have new discoveries?
The Yan'an symposium spent a long time discussing issues related to literary and artistic creation, and also clarified the relationship between literary and artistic criticism and praise, unified everyone's thinking, and clarified the direction of creation. Xiao Jun, who was the first to set off his cannon at the literary and art forum, also actively threw himself into the large-scale production movement after the meeting and went in connection with the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers.
After reading "Speech", you can look at the current literary chaos. Some things are really not the "innovations" of writers, but the resurgence of history. It was a recidivism of the problems of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals of that year.
For example, Mo Yan claimed that "literature has never been a tool for singing praises", but in fact he could not persist, and could not help but make the mistake of "criticizing Chinese and praising the Japanese". This shows that he still has not lost the political purpose of "who does literature serve". By the standards of Speech, he did sit his ass on the lap of a foreign politician.
II. "Positive Humanity" and "Negative Humanity"
Recently, I saw on the Guangming Network that an author named "Yu Yin" wrote an article entitled "Literature is the Study of Human Nature by Words". It talks about the hot topic that people are talking about at the moment: literature and human nature?
What is literature? This is the first question in the study of literary theory. Over the centuries, countless literary commentators have made painstaking explorations and given countless answers. Among them, the thesis that "literature is anthropology" has the greatest influence in China and is also the most respected.
Literature is the study of human nature by words. The method of text deduction can be divided into reproduction and representation: reproduction is suitable for documentary literature (also known as non-fiction literature), and performance is suitable for fictional literature.
So, what is human nature? Yu Yin continued
Human nature, including all the qualities and desires in everyone, has good and evil, rationality and greed, and there are exposed and latent... Just like a healthy person will also hide small diseases and disasters, encountering climate, environment, and mood fusion, it will also make hidden small diseases and disasters "surface". Excellent literary works, especially novels, dramas, etc., portray characters that are not facial and simplistic, but are full of distinct and complex human nature, and such examples are not enumerated.
As for human nature, in Chairman Mao's "Speech", there is also such a passage:
"Is there such a thing as human nature?" Absolutely. But there is only concrete humanity, not abstract humanity. In class society, there is only humanity with class nature, and there is no supra-class humanity. We stand for the humanity of the proletariat, the humanity of the masses of the people, while the landlord class bourgeoisie stands for the humanity of the landlord class bourgeoisie, but they do not say so verbally, but say that they have become the only human nature.
The "Speech" did not discuss the issue of "human nature" further. However, under the influence of the spirit of "Speech", the style of the works created by the writers in the Liberated Areas at that time had a new feeling.
Somewhere on the Jiaodong Peninsula, not far from Mo Yan's Gaomi Northeast Township, the famous writer Feng Deying created a once-popular "Bitter Cauliflower", which tells the story of women's anti-Japanese battles in that specific historical period, and reflects the cruelty, complexity and arduousness of the class struggle in the revolutionary historical period. Similar to Mo Yan's "Fat Buttocks", "Bitter Cauliflower" also describes the life history of a Chinese mother with many disasters. However, compared with Mo Yan's mother and eight men who gave birth to nine children, and none of them were her own husband's glamorous history, the mother "Feng Da Niang" in "Bitter Cauliflower" is much stronger, she not only tenaciously engaged in anti-Japanese activities herself, but also sent her children to the anti-Japanese front one by one, shed blood and sacrificed, showing the image of a Chinese mother who is strong and not stubborn.
"Fat Buttocks" describes the humiliation and cowardice of women, and "Bitter Cauliflower" recalls the strength and bravery of the mother, which may be the two different human natures mentioned in "Speech"?
In fact, from the beginning of the "Speech" to a certain period in New China, the works created by writers are obviously different from the descriptions of human nature in the works after the rise of scar literature.
It can be seen that human nature is also divided into "positive human nature" and "negative human nature".
Third, is the role of literature and art "exposing human nature" or "spiritual inspiration"?
Is the role of literature and art "exposing human nature" or "spiritual inspiration"?
To answer this question, we must first answer one of the questions that the "Speech" is concerned with first, the question of who literature and art serve.
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, writers traveled thousands of miles from the big cities of the Kuomintang District to Yan'an, of course, not to travel and relax, but to participate in the war of resistance against Japanese aggression of the whole nation and to exert their own strength in the War of Resistance. Therefore, the combination of literature and art with the War of Resistance, and the combination of literature and art with workers, peasants, and soldiers, was a realistic choice at that time. That's politics.
In fact, at that time, the Communist Party and Chairman Mao attached great importance to the propaganda and drumming of literature and art. In the early days of the establishment of the army, it set up its own literary and artistic task force to propagate its own political propositions to the masses in a literary and artistic way that the masses liked to hear, and to encourage the masses to carry out revolutionary struggles in full swing. The tragic encounter of the "White Haired Girl" aroused the anger of the broad masses of the people against "Huang Shiren", and they joined the army to fight the army of "Huang Shiren".
Now, there are some writers who want to "keep pace with the times", say goodbye to politics, engage in supra-class literature, "expose human nature" and regard this as the only correct choice. Can this work?
Earlier, we said that "human nature" is divided into "positive human nature" and "negative human nature", just like "Fat Buttocks", you blindly show the misery and darkness of "a woman, eight men and nine children", and there can be no light, so what is the whole literature displayed to the reader (audience)? Could it be that the whole society is extremely dark, people are terrible, their own lives are hopeless, and they have no ability to change themselves, and they can only lie down and die? If the whole society is so unbearable, and the people are extremely cowardly, just like the situation encountered by the five heroes of Wolf's Tooth Mountain, when the Japanese attack the top of the mountain, will the five jump off the cliff or surrender? At that time, the Chinese revolution was generally a strong enemy and a weak enemy, and there was a huge disparity in strength; if the masses of the people did not summon up confidence and did not exert a hundred times the effort and courage, would they still have the strength to defeat the ruling class that was pressing on their own heads, overthrow the three mountains, and change their own destiny?
Therefore, during the Yan'an period, literary and artistic creation basically adhered to the revolutionary literary spirit of "lashing out at the ugly and praising the sublime", and attached equal importance to "exposing darkness" and "spiritual inspiration". It was because the literary and art workers at that time knew what their task was.
During the Yan'an period, the reason why revolutionary literature adhered to the principle of attaching equal importance to "criticism and praise" was because the revolutionaries at that time were themselves practitioners of literature, advocates, and even the standard-bearers leading the literary army, and they wanted to use literature as a tool to carry forward the spirit, publicize the revolutionary truth, arouse millions of workers and peasants, and "work with one heart" with them. So naturally they advocate the combination of literature and politics.
By the time of the "Mo Yan" era, writers had moved away from the era of revolution and the masses of the people, nor did they stand at the center of the stage of mass economic activities in society, they only stood in a certain corner of society, using the pen in their hands, holding up the weapon of literary criticism, and acting as a function of "chasing the wood bird", so as to gain the attention of the public and the attention of the rulers. Therefore, they went more and more extreme, and repeated the mistakes that Xiao Jun had made during the Yan'an Literary and Art Forum.
Mo Yan said that literature has never been a tool for singing praises and praises. They constantly criticize society and expose human nature, which results in confusion. Chairman Mao said in his "Speech" that literature serves the masses of the people. The masses of the people need spiritual inspiration to change their own destiny through labor struggle, so the people recognize the spirit of the "Speech" and also support the idea of attaching equal importance to literature "criticism and praise" and "carrying forward the spirit". So the people criticize moo.