◎ Yi Yang
1, Road Trail 2.0
Some writers are "frozen". For example, in the eyes of many readers, lu nei, who published a long new work "Everything About Farewell", is still in the youthful stage of flesh and blood. In his early 30s, Lu Nei was amazed by the literary world with "Young Babylon", and the erasing youth and the parting of the novel became the "youth bible" of a generation of readers who died nostalgically and sadly. With the publication of the "Follow trilogy", the novel character "Lu Xiaolu" has also become an indispensable classic image in the spectrum of "pan-youth literature".
Boosted by the popular wave such as film and television adaptations, "Lu Nei" as a writer and "Lu Xiao Lu" as a fictional character have been glued together to a large extent, and even drawn equal signs. It seems that he recognized the "crisis" of a writer being flattened, and after writing the "Follow trilogy", Lu Nei declared that "I have written enough, and the story of Lu Xiaolu ends here", and jumped forward, took out another seventeen martial arts, and wrote "Mercy" that was comparable to "Alive", and "Mist Walker" and other transformation works with the significance of the image of the times.
Many years ago, in a conversation with the writer Zhou Jianning, Lu Nei re-proposed the concept of "mental solution", he believes that "(mental solution) is to talk about a writer's self-illumination, through self-reflection of the world", if interpreted in more popular language, then "mental solution" is personal experience, and literary works are the expression of personal experience. In recent years, although the "factory youth" road has been hidden in the bottom of the box, li Bai, the "county youth" who replaced it, still has a distinct personal color of the writer, such as the protagonist of the novel is still consistently sentimental and gag, and although there is no high-frequency chemical technical school, the protagonist is still a useless vocational college graduate.
On the title page of the novel "The Student Age of Jesus," the writer Coetzee quotes a sentence from Don Quixote and laughs at himself that "no matter which book, the sequel is never good." In "Everything About Farewell", Lu Nei let Li Bai write a famous work that was republished many times and was bought out of the film and television adaptation, and then first commented through the editor's mouth: "Your long story is really not well written, the story is broken, sentimental, vulgar, and often flashbacks"; He also pointed out through the mouth of relatives and friends that "writers like you who look for materials in the streets and alleys are low-level"; Borrowing the protagonist's mental activity shows that "I don't want to hear people talk about the book anymore, and reciting his sentences is like laughing at his first love." In the novel, the "three rounds of attack" encountered by Li Bai is not lu nei's own "three rounds of self-destruction", through the fictional character Li Bai, lu nei and his own real-life famous works came to a "break". By the way, like Coetzee, this new work, which has more characters and flashbacks than "Young Babylon", has also been ridiculed.
Although there are obvious literary youth characteristics and small intellectual dispositions of characters such as Zhou Shao and Duan Muyun in "Mist Walker", Li Bai essentially inherits the image of Lu Xiaolu, and it can even be said that it is the 2.0 version of "Xinlu Xiaolu" that has more color in the road. For the shaping of Li Bai, we may also see it as a "rupture", and what Lu Nei wants to announce is not his own unique writing experience, but the gradually solidified cognition and the characterization of relative procedures. Moreover, before the publication of "Everything About Farewell", Lu Nei also changed his Douban user name to "Li Bai lee bah".
2, South
"South" is a literary motif loved by Writers of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Su Tong's Southern Maple Poplar Village and Toon Tree Street, and the Southern Yongcheng in Ai Wei's novels have become the spatial coordinates of contemporary literature with great metaphorical significance. "Everything About Farewell" also surges with the distinct "southern consciousness" in the road, and "south" is like a mirage that can be touched, pulling the characters of the novel and pulling the plot development.
Unlike Su Tong or Ai Wei, in "Everything About Farewell", Lu Nei's reference to "south" is not fixed. For example, when he came to Beijing, Li Bai said: "All my inexplicable emotional entanglements occur in the humid south"; While in Shanghai, Li Bai "walked on the streets after the rain, and the Huang Meiji in the south had already arrived"; Staying in Wuli, "the south is raining, Li Bai is wet and returning home, lying on the sofa", this series of "south" is undoubtedly The Jiangnan in the geographical category of Suzhou and Shanghai. In more plots, "South" is pointed to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places, the legend says that the south where Li Bai's mother Bai Shuzhen went was the coastal special zone, the south that Zhang Youping and Zhou Anna sisters yearn for was Guangzhou, and the south that Qiandao said was the most suitable for sailing was Shenzhen. Two different meanings of the South alternate in the novel, seemingly complex and ambiguous, but also deliberately done by Lu Nei.
In the novel, whether it is Bai Shuzhen, who ran away in middle age, or Zhang Youping and Zhou Anna, who traveled far away in youth, once they went to the south in the true sense, they were like throwing stones into the sea, and there was no reply. From Bai Lan, Yu Xiaoqi and Xiao Ya in the early novels, to Bai Shuzhen, Zhou Anna, and Zhang Youping in "Everything About Farewell", lu nei's desperate and desperate images are all women, and lu nei has given them a more civilized consciousness and determination, and the male protagonists with self-attributes in the novel have been left in Daicheng or Wuli, and in the long-term sadness and loss, they have served as a recorder of their hometown memories and witnesses of the journey of "moving south".
When Li Bai and Zhou Anna met again, Lu Nei used casual pen and ink to recount Wu Li's last bold axe, under the appearance of festive and lively, the small city had long been "no one applauded". Since then, Lu Nei has also described the swimsuit show undertaken by the Workers' Film Theater, the era of layoffs opened in a bathhouse group fight, in addition to promoting the development of the plot, what Lu Nei wants to show is the chaos of spiritual civilization and county order, and Wu Li, which was once remnants of the old glory, has long since declined. The reference to this is another "south" that has penetrated comprehensively: in the concept of the Wuli people, this new south "has changed from a vague statement to a metaphor, to a reality, to a logos"; In the life of the Wuli people, "rough or exquisite Cantonese people" also came to Wuli and raised beautiful girls, which made the locals envious. The "two souths" contrast with each other, and it is precisely under the temptation of the other "south" that the decay of the old "south" is more evident.
Coincidentally, the city where Lu Xiaolu and Bailan meet many years later in "Young Babylon" is Shanghai; Yu Xiaoqi in "Follow Her Journey" first went to Shanghai, and then to Shenzhen. In "Everything About Farewell", the reunion of Li Bai and Zeng Xiaoran after 26 years is also in Shanghai; After bidding farewell to Li Bai, Zhang Youping first transferred from Shanghai and then went to Guangzhou. The road allows different characters in different novels to form a cross-text undertaking and echo in the interlacing of time and space. At the same time, in The road's view, in the face of Wuli's obsolescence and decline, the neighboring Shanghai can serve as a supplement, but if you look further afield, perhaps only the land of South Vietnam can truly represent the southern temperament and satisfy the southern imagination.
3. Look at each other
As early as the publication of "Seventeen-Year-Old Hussars", Lu Nei had "complained": "The story time is almost 30 years from now, and it has become a period drama"; In "Everything About Farewell", Lu Nei teased herself with the help of a female editor: "You love to write stories of the past era, the nineties, small towns, the theme is very outdated." The frequent appearance of works such as "Follow the Trilogy" and "Mercy" in the background of state-owned factories in the 1990s has often been given the title of "factory writer" by critics. In Mistwalker, Lu Nei has tried to get rid of the unpleasant "factory" label and shift the timeline of the novel from the usual early nineties to the period of social transformation around the millennium. In "Everything About Farewell", Lu Nei is like "the 'almanac school' in the field of fiction", which stitches together the years of previous novels vertically and continuously, and extends to the nearest 2019; Horizontally, it also touches on commercial bribery, award insiders, online swearing, elderly fraud and other diversified events that are more characteristic of the times.
In the 1920s, the creative model of left-wing literature "revolution + love" was all the rage, and the passionate revolution and romantic ideal of love were joined and bundled together because of their essential interconnection. In "Everything About Farewell", the love between Li Bai and Zeng Xiaoran, Zhou Anna, Zhong Lan, Zhuo Yixuan and others is all shrouded in sorrow and loss. We can naturally think that Li Bai's unhappiness in love stems from the inheritance of his loyalty to his father Li. But just as "times" and "love" have always coexisted in a similar state, in the face of the dazzling and broken picture of Wuli's small town, how can the people living in it be left alone, and how can the love that occurs on it be completely smooth.
At the end of "Everything About Farewell", Li Bai, who once had a zero-distance look with the zoo beast, once again appeared in front of the beast. Unlike the last time as a third party to witness the male lion bite, this time Li Bai faced "a bear that was waking up" with his bare hands. Both the "male lion" and the "black bear" symbolize the barbaric and brutal trampling power, and seem to be a metaphor for the unlimited expansion of industrial civilization. In the early 1990s, just as the administrator was bitten to death by the male lion and the male lion was shot by the armed police, industrial civilization ruthlessly destroyed the social order of the small town of Wuli, breeding the evil hidden in the depths of human nature, and then encountered a total rout of the self; More than 20 years later, just as Li Bai faced the black bear with the uncertain road ahead, in the melee combat with the post-industrial era, how should human beings live by themselves, and how should society develop, the road is sharp, and there is no answer. In the face of a life-saving bamboo ladder extended by the zoo director, although we were worried, we only hoped that Li Bai would climb up smoothly and safely.