Written by Chang Li, "I Hear the Song of Everything", "Where Are You Going" and "Little Mole and the Stars" are a set of picture books that focus on special children, and they are named "Together • Fusion Picture Books".
Inclusive education refers to the placement of students with special learning needs to mainstream schools for education, providing them with a normal learning environment. This set of books borrows the concept of "integration" to open a window for us to be obscured in daily life, and use the power of literature to take us to feel and understand the world of those special children.
The following is Wang Shuainai's comments for this set. In order to have a deeper understanding of special groups and write this review, she also personally experienced the life of the visually impaired for a day. She places her feelings in the notes below.
Covers of "I Hear Everything Singing," "Where Are You Going," and "The Little Mole and the Stars."
In the preface to Literary Discourses, Nabokov disassembles good literary creators into three components: storytellers, educators, and magicians adept at deception. It is also said that the most important of the three is the identity of the magician, and the great writer is always the great magician. That being the case, it is better to refer directly to the writer as the "three-in-one magician" here.
Nabokov was a writer-turned-critic who was not accustomed to summarizing and refining precisely in an orderly manner, and if he tried to summarize his expectations of literary writers, it was roughly that their words could provide intuitive pleasure; Moral perfection or intellectual enrichment; Provide a new perspective on the imaginary world based on the principles of art. The treatment of the artwork contains rhythm and rhythm, and a wonderful word game itself will bring pleasure to the reader, who sees the artist's creativity in the "formal" composition of literature.
The text writer Chang Li mentioned Nabokov's preface many times on different occasions, which shows his identification and appreciation for the interpretation in it. In a sense, this set of integrated educational picture books focusing on children with visual, auditory and intellectual disabilities is another text experiment for him to practice the "three-in-one magician" theory as a children's literature writer.
How literature changes power relations through its magic
"The Little Mole and the Stars", by Chang Li, Tu You, Shanghai Education Publishing House, November 2021. A small mole (a metaphor for the visually impaired) walks into Animal City for the first time. In its feelings, the gates of Animal City are small, the houses are small, the gardens are large, and there is not a single pit on the road... There was a sudden power outage, and the surrounding area fell into a dark panic, but the perceptual little mole led everyone out of the darkness.
First, we will see a classic proposition about literature: "How literature changes power relations through its magic".
In "The Little Mole and the Stars", the creators use graphic and text complementary techniques to open up a way for the protagonist mole with visual impairments to understand the "city" through a series of beautiful misunderstandings and excellent imagination. The mole thinks the city gate is small, but the picture tells us that it was because he touched the child's toy castle; He thinks the city is safe, but in fact it is because there are staff and well-meaning people in the city to guide him and remove roadblocks; He thought the city was like a garden, fragrant, but in fact he happened to be standing in the flower shop.
Illustration of The Little Mole and the Stars.
This certainly involves humor, but the more important structural function of these plots is to hint at the question to be formally explored below: Is the world understood by urban people and able-bodied people the only possibility of the world? These hints resemble the first variations of the "motive" in the symphony, which may not be obvious, but when you flip back and read it, you will find that they function structurally to the whole work.
On the meaning level, the immediate question they raise is that for children, the toy gate is the gate; For those who are cared for and cared for, the world is safe and warm; Why can't a florist, on the other hand, be seen as a garden or a small jungle worthy of your imagination and adventures? Sally can imagine voyages and fight pirates, Mary can heal Colin with the "Secret Garden", Max can swim in the Beast Country in his bedroom, John Paicromon McKinsey's teacher will be caught on the roof by the gorillas, why not understand the little mole?
So far, though, the little mole is largely the recipient of information, and Animal City is the richer and more powerful giver and protector.
But literature is not content with this.
So there had to be a blackout, and the electrically-dependent behemoth lost its source of energy. From this point on, the little mole became an exporter of opinion and power, and what he was good at perfected the city, and the weak, even unsound individuals began to feed the "giant". The story that the mole shared, or the world he shared, lit up the picture space. In a spread we see a visually impaired person leading able-bodied people out of the darkness and into the light. The most star-studded and golden page in the book, a folk tale color that symbolizes eternal texture, appears in the world given by the blind man.
Illustration of The Little Mole and the Stars.
I have written more than once that good literature always empowers the disadvantaged members of society, not that they will necessarily achieve worldly success in the finale like the protagonists of folk tales, but that they will gain a heavier "voice" in the literary world than the high-ranking ones, which may be guaranteed by more space, or by the narrative perspective and the number of direct quotations. In short, they will win more affection from readers.
Those who are sincere and kind and vulnerable often become the most respectable people in the literary world, the most able to impress readers for a long time, and let readers involuntarily have a close heart.
Antigone rebelled against the laws of human nature by King Creon as a weak woman, and with the power of the ancient Greek tragic writer Sophocles, her image became a symbol of the "natural law" of later generations; During the Renaissance, Rabelais used carnival squares to invert the hierarchical order of "up and down" and subvert power relations, so that commoners could pee on the "king" and kick their noses in the face; The Romantic Hugo praises the ugly bell ringer with extreme contrast, and does not hide his contempt for the selfish and vicious bishop with many excuses, although he has humanitarian pity; The humorous and innocent huck of the modern American writer Mark Twain, the pure good boy who has been educated in society to convince him that saving black partners will be burned at the stake by God, and his heart has made him finally tremble and decide: "Well, yes, I will go to hell." ”
The moment when power is denied and reversed is often the moment when a literary work is most shocking or shocking.
Unfortunately, in many original children's literatures, the naughty boy often loses to the old order and prejudice in the end, and the innocent insistence must finally be stamped with a medal of honor through the "being moved" of the high-ranking person, as if without the recognition and coronation of the superior, all persistence is meaningless. Even the discrimination against children with intellectual disabilities is written nakedly in the work of a famous children's literature writer: "Mom began to take medicine - fortunately in misfortune, mom eats Chinese medicine without side effects." If you take Western medicine, it's bad, maybe there won't be a boy named Pickup in this world, and even if there is, it won't be such a vibrant boy (like a clockwork toy all day), smart (all people say he is 'brilliant'), maybe a fool who only knows to smirk at people or roll his eyes. It is hard to imagine the despair and anger in the hearts of parents with special children reading such words.
However, through the understanding and follow of grammar (as well as natural common sense and logic), "The Little Mole and the Stars" makes people comfortable and sincerely respect those seemingly inconspicuous beings, believing that the simple truth of "the ruler is short, the inch is long" is not just a "morally correct" slogan, so that the reader is sincerely convinced that "we need them".
We can think of the blind protagonist as a medieval bard, and this transforms from a children's story into a "mystery" work that explores the act of literary creation itself. The poet's job is to "defamiliarize" the things in ordinary life with imagination and creativity, and if the ordinary world is petrified by the "conventional" Medusa, the magic of literature is that another perspective or observer, another language to refer to and define, can make the petrified world come back to life. In all the narration and feedback of the little mole, the stars flash — and the attentive reader will find that there are many shapes of stars derived from the shapes of matter that the little poet touched from his travels through the city. This is precisely the working mechanism of artistic creation.
Illustration of The Little Mole and the Stars.
On a formal level, these are the mundane and small details of urban life that are extremely unnoticed, buried in the usual perspectives and names, but the retelling of the mole makes them "strange" and makes them shine; In terms of meaning, these things are an indispensable part of the city's fireworks life, and they are also the love that Animal City gives to minorities. Moles may not know much about the latter, but humans always have something to experience and remember about comfort and beauty, especially for a sensitive child or poet. Therefore, the little mole remembered them one by one, and gave back to the city people with the magic of literature, bringing them out of the depleted wasteland and the black hole of nothingness.
Yes, "stars" are, of course, fireworks of wisdom and love. The eternal law of the literary world is that the beautiful are invincible and the benevolent are invincible (again, "invincible" here does not mean that the character wins victory in the secular sense). The writer shows a high degree of trust in these two laws (which are actually consistent) and in the power of fiction.
Trusting the power of fiction is not easy
Trusting the power of fiction is not an easy task, even for writers who have lost their reputation.
Chang Li once pointed out in a treatise on Yu Hua's novel "The Seventh Day" that although this work has the moral courage to criticize reality, it shows a clear and crucial flaw in the contrast with world classic literature (he takes "Madame Bovary" as an example), that is, the writer does not believe in the power of fiction and the power of literature from the bottom of his heart - "If you trust the fiction of the work enough, It is impossible to understand why Rat Sister and other dead people look forward to leaving the land of eternal life (that is, the place where those who have no money to buy a cemetery live after death) and yearn for a place of rest (that is, the place where those who have money to buy a cemetery will rest after death), unless eternal life is an unbearable cruel punishment. ”
However, the novel's description of the immortal land is a romantic fairy tale, and does not give hints such as heavenly punishment. In contrast to Flaubert's feat of portraying Madame Bovary, a small person who "failed" in ordinary life, into a female version of Don Quixote in the history of literature, Chang Li believed that if the writer himself "did not have faith in literary possibilities, without trust in the power of fiction, he would not be able to create the joy of life in literature, which is why our current literature is still far from 'great'".
We can indeed see among other literary writers their sincere and strong "fan" and "fan language" complexes. Shakespeare wrote in his love poem:
When you have eternal life in this eternal line of poetry;
As long as people can breathe and their eyes can see,
As long as this poem lasts, it will make you eternal.
The seemingly obedient poet Ovid of Octavian, in the last paragraph of the Metamorphosis, makes a thunderous statement in his words, competing with the imperial monarch who ended the Roman Republic for the position of leader of the immortal spiritual kingdom:
My work is done. No matter how angry Jupiter is, no sword, no fire, no time can destroy my work. Time can only destroy my flesh, and if death is willing to come, please come to it, to end my faltering life. But my essence is immortal, and it will live with the sun and the moon; My fame will never fade. Wherever the forces of Rome conquered, my works would be read. If the poet's prophecy is not happy, my reputation will be passed on for eternity.
The Russian poet Mayakovsky, then 19, strongly declared in the "Futurist" manifesto", "A Slap in the Face of Social Interest":
We command respect for the following rights of poets: First, the right to arbitrarily coin and derive words in order to expand the poet's vocabulary (to create new words) ... If, for the time being, there are still the dirty imprints of your "sound reason" and "noble taste" on our words, then on these imprints the light of the new future beauty of its own valuable (free) words has shone for the first time in the world.
This strong confidence in the power of fiction and writers is something that many original literary writers today do not possess.
Once a story is told, the supreme law of literature must be followed
The poet must keep the dream of an immortal hero. Moreover, they will have some common tricks to maintain and practice it, such as irony and the refinement of the element of "beauty".
In the dark underground, Grandma Mole tells the children the story of the stars in order to devalue the day and the city, and she protects the visually impaired children by cutting off. The little mole did not believe it, so he chose to go out, he felt the day, touched the city.
But I would like to draw the reader's attention to the fact that the most interesting point here is that in the beautiful world he has created, the "stars" are still the basic elements, and the poet absorbs the most beautiful and shining parts of the elderly story. A good storyteller needs to be able to "refine" (to be precise, the "art of refinement" consists of two parts, namely the sensitivity to discovering "beauty" and the ability to reorganize new worlds of meaning with elements of beauty).
Illustration of The Little Mole and the Stars.
Literature is indeed super-moral in a way, and the highest morality it follows is beauty. The stories of old-age hatred, the folklore with its many old ideas, are not all useless when viewed with a literary eye—in any case, you and I will admit that the stars are beautiful. So the poet extracted the element of the stars, and when he recreated and perfected the world, he used it as a base model or core.
What is even more regurgitating is that even the grandmother who wants to keep her children, once she chooses the way of storytelling, must follow the laws of literature and use "beauty" as a reason to leave her children and grandchildren behind.
The textual author of the picture book, in the preceding article, can serve as a footnote to this kind of plot by a sentence that the author of the picture book slipped lightly when he talked about why Madame Bovary was remarkable, and he said that all this was ultimately achieved by Flaubert's pursuit of "aestheticism of the supremacy of style". That is to say, the unremitting pursuit of "form" guarantees the successful realization of the meaning of the novel. It is fitting to cite this "novelist among novelists" and the most famous stylist to argue that the writer's emphasis on words and grammar and his self-consciousness of reinventing them is indeed most appropriate.
But what Grandma Mole didn't expect was that once the seeds of beauty were planted, it would be difficult to be completely controlled. Because the beauty of the world may all be curious and looking for each other, they are naturally going to spread. The literary critic Paul Valéry said at an international PEN conference a hundred years ago that in theory writers from all over the world could not come together because they were engaged in the work of distinguishing their respective peoples from others, and they had to explore the uniqueness of their respective languages. Only miracles can bring together authors of all cultures – this is the miracle of "love".
Valery believed that literature of all kinds was loved by each other, that they sought each other out, and that they admired each other strongly. Lovers draw on each other and influence each other, reflecting thousands of new reflections. The same is true in this picture book, relying on the little mole, "Beauty" gave birth to an upgraded and evolved "New Star Story", he used the stars to tell a story that encompassed the beauty and goodness of the city, it ironic but enriched the "Grandmother's Star Story", and the city people happily accepted it. Isn't this a kind of cultural self-preservation and "expansion"? But it conforms to the nature of beauty, which is much more effective than the mole grandmothers who shut themselves and their children in the underworld and make up horror stories to degrade the culture of the city's people.
A parable of "myths"
"Where Are You Going", by Chang Li and illustrated by Zhang Fan, Shanghai Education Publishing House, November 2021. The story describes an intellectually handicapped boy named Little Stone. In his dealings with others, he would only say one sentence: "Where are you going?" "Different characters react differently to his questioning, some think he is rude, someone understands something from his actions, someone just plays with him...
Let's take a look at "Where Are You Going", a story written about children with intellectual disabilities. Here the author focuses on the power of "communication dialogue". This story begins with "the failure of dialogue" and finally "the conclusion of dialogue", which is indeed very "children's literature". Referring to Valery's exclamation above, if this is an adult literature script, it is likely to become the scattered ending of the Tower of Babel. "The Miracle of Golden Paradise" is a common ending in children's literature, and it will not be repeated here.
It is worth mentioning that the story develops from the "misunderstanding of dialogue" - the role of the questioner and the answerer is reversed, and the real reason why the small stone of intellectual disability is used as a "prophet" is that he has become the medium of people's dialogue with themselves, becoming a mirror, reflecting the true desire of the questioner's heart.
Illustration of "Where Are You Going".
Sound interrogators live in language, but they are confused and do not know their way forward, the aphasia of small stones constitutes a silent response force, the pause in dialogue is also a way of speech, and the "unanswered answer" gives people the opportunity, courage and reason to put their true wishes into practice. The whole text fully affirms the dialogue, affirms the power of language, but does not detract from silence and emptiness, and even if we do not look at the blank space as alternative language, at least we can understand that there is something that can transcend language, that is, people's desire to explore their true selves and their desire to give love.
If this were not the case, the princess and prince would not have resolutely marched to a terrifying castle that could turn people into stone, and the magician would not have decided to go back and unravel the "fossil curse"—the magician was somewhat like Wilde's giant who guarded his garden and did not let people come in to play.
There are also some subtle details in the picture of "Where Are You Going" - the coloring of the character's body is sometimes grainy and sometimes smooth. It is not known whether this is due to the artist's intentional design or "intuition", but it can be found that it seems that as long as the characters are in the "dialogue" or when the communication state is smooth, their body coloring is smooth, the flow and breathability of the water-based pigment is very obvious, and once the dialogue is over, the coloring of the faces and limbs of the characters becomes grainy.
That is to say, the painter Zhang Fan really accurately captured the theme of this work and appealed to visual expression. Language makes the image no longer rough, but becomes warm and soft. "Dialogue" makes the world no longer a blue-gray melancholy forest, in the final analysis, it is "love" that restores people from petrification through words and actions.
"I Hear the Singing of All Things", by Chang Li, illustrated by Yang Bo, Shanghai Education Publishing House, November 2021. It tells the story of an introverted, lonely deaf girl who learns sign language, gains friendships, and rediscovers the world.
The emphasis on love and language is the theme that runs through the three special education picture books, which is also reflected in "I Hear the Singing of All Things" - when the other party hears me, I can hear the singing of all things, everything has its own sound, the world becomes colorful, and the bouquet of flowers spreads in the ears. The flowers of love bloom on the branches of language— spiritually seeking the meaning of beauty and goodness, and constantly excavating new ways of using language symbols and praising the power of language and writing, which corresponds to the two ultimate pursuits of excellent literary works. The author's "fandom complex" can be seen here.
In fact, the same is true of interpretation. Literary critics are those who need to capture accurate and appropriate words and sentence patterns in the void and combine them. We may be the kind of people who need to practice the ideas of the stylist Flaubert more than literary creators: "A certain phenomenon can only be expressed in one way, can only be summarized by one noun, can only be characterized by an adjective, can only be vividly animated by one verb, and the responsibility of the writer is to seek this unique noun, adjective and verb with superhuman efforts." ”
Illustration of "I Hear the Song of All Things".
However, from a broad point of view, this is true of all artists who construct the world in terms of symbols, and any good work pursues precision, even if it looks like a rough under the mud, even if it is "blurry" like the Impressionist, or like the Cubist painters who are keen on geometric figures, they all refine the impressions left on us by the world in a vague form—from the perspective of light and shadow, or from the perspective of the structural relationship of the body.
Let me conclude this "mystery" book review by borrowing the words of Maramé and Valeri — that the universe has no purpose other than to eventually produce a complete self-expression, that "the world is born a book of beauty." All the performers, all the people who survive the growth of their language skills, all the people who have performed a little duty for this magnificent book, cheer together for this beautiful book!
P.S
In order to gain a deeper understanding of special groups and thus better access to text commentary, I decided to at least lose myself a day of light and try to experience the world of the visually impaired as much as possible. I know that many unique and subtle feelings can only be felt through physical experience. Just as creators explore various forms of creative expression, critics are exploring the writing path of reviews.
This plan was discounted from the beginning, for example, I needed to meet a friend early in the morning to officially put on the blindfold and she took me to find our destination, a Guizhou restaurant in Chaoyang District, where I suddenly wanted to eat silk dolls; For example, because the silk doll is really not a convenient food, in order not to add too much trouble to my friends, I had to take off the blindfold when eating; For example, she is not skilled at looking at maps and navigating, and insists on not helping me down the escalator, and every time at this moment, I have to take off my blindfold, otherwise it is really difficult to walk.
Still, I hope to record some physical impressions.
For the first time, I relied on the touch of the soles of my feet to judge whether to move forward or turn, and found that the blind road used to "disappear", and the manhole was even more blind road killer. Manhole covers and street trees always "haunt" the blind lane that is not spacious, artificially increasing the difficulty factor for the visually impaired who are already struggling to travel.
The difficult experience of the body really reminds me of the rules of the operation of "power", as the superior of power, when we exclude "trouble", we can overbearingly move them and transfer them to the already narrow living space of minorities, and we allow ourselves to be "evil" in a semi-conscious and unconscious chaotic state (including the act of stopping on the blind road), because the tilted power structure has its own set of laws to measure and explain the world, and the formulation of this set of laws will never be related to the subordinates of power. They, as vulnerable ones, are invisible. The atrocities of appropriation are based on our control over the right to see, and since there is nothingness, there is naturally no encroachment.
When I reached out with my right foot to the left and right point and couldn't find those bumps, I took it back and placed it in a cell a foot square and the other foot was tight, and my friend asked me why I didn't go, and I stood there and began to feel an anger rise from the bottom of my foot. I truly felt like I had been thrown off a cliff by the world, and no one had come to ask, because no one cared that there was a man here who stood awkwardly and undignifiedly upright on a small tile.
I said to my friend: I guess the soles of the visually impaired are thinner than the average person, they may not be related to some beautiful thick-soled boots, otherwise it is really difficult to feel the raised shapes on the ground. But I later realized that if the sole of the shoe is very thin, it will not be long before the foot will be very painful, and the visually impaired will become a real-life version of the little mermaid.
The state of the body of the blind person when exercising may be very different from that of a healthy person. I held her arm that day, and most of the time my stride was very small, almost like a quick small step, even if the other party was someone I trusted, I did not pause when there was no obstacle in front of me, but I still felt that the muscles of my entire calf seemed to be shrinking backwards, which was completely different from the body that I walked without hesitation when I walked.
According to the phenomenologists of the body, the intentional extension of the limb in a certain direction is the act of identifying power and exerting the influence of the subject, such as in the past physical education class, the boys' swinging arms when playing basketball, the action of slamming the basket, not only occupying a considerable individual space, but also conveying a strong subject willpower within this space, and the girl's cowering limbs mark a small space that is not affected by it. The tight and contracted muscles pointing and the total form seem to mean that the influence exerted by the owner of the body on the space is negative, and cruelly speaking, the person at this moment has little subjectivity to speak of in space.
When she tells me that there is a flat land ahead, I will stretch out my right foot to symbolically "visit" her and then take a big stride to pull her forward, occasionally jumping away from her arm; But I didn't dare to rush too much, every flat piece was so precious, I was reluctant to finish them immediately.
It was only a seven-minute walk from the place we met to the destination, according to the navigation, but we walked for a full forty minutes that day. I don't know if that's true for the visually impaired, but I didn't think forty minutes were long in the darkness when there was no rush to do that day—it's likely that able-bodied and visually impaired people perceive time very differently.
That day I found that my sense of touch was indeed sharper than usual, the cup of hot water in the restaurant, touching the palm of my hand I felt hot; Hearing wasn't always better, there wasn't much extra beautiful sound, but in the park's pavilion, the chatter of the people around them became particularly clear—as if more sensitive to noise. It's so bad and really unfair, I think, life has been so difficult, but the pain is more acute. But if you think about it, this is very "scientific", which is likely to be the body's self-protection mechanism, and only by doubling the sensitive danger perception can we better protect the unsound body from disaster. But the contrast still makes people feel bad, and I still feel unfair — the inequality of opportunity between us on the scale of happiness. If man can only obey the definition of nature, what is the value of civilization?
We, as fortunate and able-bodied, have not done enough.
I know that in order to facilitate travel, visually impaired people will quickly build road map in their minds, which seems as cool to able-bodied people as the memory maze in detective movies, and they can judge the distance of the car by the sound of the engine when crossing the road, and it sounds like they really have "superhuman" skills. This seems to confirm a common saying that God closes a door for you and opens a window for you, and that people who have lost their sight always have a sharper sense of hearing than able-bodied people. However, such words cannot be misplaced, and the visually impaired – like able-bodied people – need to find a unique strength in ordinary life, a way of qualifying for poetic dwelling, and they can say this to themselves; But if urban planning policymakers excuse themselves, it becomes a bowl of chicken soup.
All the escalators are terrible, sticking out their long tongues like they're going to roll you in and crush you;
There is no tone on the traffic light;
The sunken subway station in Yong'anli, Beijing, is like a black hole with a huge mouth, there is no guardrail, if there are visually impaired people who travel to "explore" (yes, the visually impaired people travel in our city as if they are exploring in the primitive jungle without equipment) after all kinds of difficulties and dangers, they are likely to fall into this black hole;
When climbing the park rockery, there are only you and your companions on the small downhill trail, and everyone else chooses to go from another path;
Not being able to find the blind lane is only the least embarrassment. When traveling, life safety has not yet been guaranteed, and decency is almost non-existent, and it is possible to step on the animal's defecation at any time.
It was probably the day she talked the most in her life, telling me in advance what she needed to take, what shape and height the barricades were, how mixed and matched the murals in the park were, and the big security brother in the mall looked at me with sad and sympathetic eyes.
Although I installed a mobile phone system that visually impaired people use and trained myself to familiarize myself with it in advance, I still gave up in the actual use of that day. Because my phone was too card, my friend's patience was defeated by my repeated failed groping in the dark.
When I watch the visually impaired girl "Little Star" quickly read various works of literature, play the piano, stand in the sunflower field and smell the flowers, I feel that the soul is healed, the exhaustion is miraculously faded, and the language becomes so pale.
But, as Gilbert put it, the writer "what else is there?" Even if it can only be expressed to this extent? ”
So the authors of the picture book call on all writers to "tenaciously create joy in this unforgiving world."
Only then will the time of completion and rest on the seventh day of creation, as claimed in the myth, truly come.
Note: The caption and illustrations in the text are from "Together And Fusion Picture Book".
Text/Wang Shuai Nai
Editor/Shen Chan Wang Qing Luo Dong
Proofreader/Yang Xuli