laitimes

Ni Zhange talks about "Unnecessary Existence", the empirical evidence of the novel, and the fiction of history

author:The Paper
Ni Zhange talks about "Unnecessary Existence", the empirical evidence of the novel, and the fiction of history

Ni Zhanye (Zhang Jingyi)

Zhange Ni, Ph.D. in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago School of Theology, is currently an associate professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and currently researches the interaction between Chinese religion and digital capitalism captured and participated in by online fantasy fiction. In addition, she has published several novels and poetry collections. In the newly published historical novel "Unnecessary", her writing revolves around the unjust case of Yue Fei in the Southern Song Dynasty, entering the same period of history from the perspectives of Yue Yun, Zhao Shuo, Qin Ju and Yue Lei, and exploring the various possibilities of character shaping within the established historical framework. In an exclusive interview with the Shanghai Review of Books, she shared with us her creative concept of "de-mythology and ghostly existence", and called on us to pay attention to the existence of "novels" as technical writing before they became fictional narrative texts, and to reflect on the narrative and fictionality that are indispensable for historical writing.

Ni Zhange talks about "Unnecessary Existence", the empirical evidence of the novel, and the fiction of history

"There is no need to have", by Ni Zhange, Shanghai People's Publishing House/ Century Wenjing, May 2022 edition, 296 pages, 49.00 yuan

Because of the popularity of "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue", Yue Fei's unjust case has a fixed narrative mode. And your novel is based on respect for basic historical facts, not on overturning, what is the purpose of retelling this history?

Ni Zhange: The creation of "Nonsense" began more than ten years ago, and I am ashamed to say that I not only wrote very slowly, but also completely gave up non-academic writing at one time, so "Unnecessary" has been with me intermittently for so long. My current research focus is on Chinese religion and online literature, and many people will ask what this novel has to do with online novels, and unfortunately, if I understand online novels as commercial novels with the Internet as the carrier, my writing does not belong to this path. The first thing that sparked my enthusiasm for Yue Fei's story was Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Psalms, one of the many texts I studied in my doctoral dissertation. Recently Rushdie was assassinated in New York, the "Satanic Psalms" storm once again attracted the attention of the world, if we set aside the many forces and twists and turns in the storm, Rushdie's original intention is to do a humanistic treatment of the Qur'anic tradition and restore the myth to history. This is influenced by the "de-mythologization" of modern Christian culture. There are many attempts to rewrite Jesus in European and American literature, and similar phenomena have appeared in the field of Chinese literature in the late Qing Dynasty, and many writers have rewritten Chinese myths and historical stories, the most famous of which is of course Lu Xun's "New Compilation of Stories". Zhu Yuhong, a teacher at Tongji University in Shanghai, has studied the rewriting practice of the late Qing Dynasty, and with her influence and help, I have also written papers analyzing the rewriting of the story of Jesus. At that time, out of curiosity, I had sorted out the research related to Chinese religious figures such as Guan Gong and Nezha, and I paid attention to the flow of Yue Fei's story, feeling that there were not many original materials and fewer papers, so I suddenly thought that since the text was not enough, then I would make it myself.

I remember seeing someone discussing Yue Fei and Yue Yun on the forum, to the effect that the stories that can be organized according to historical materials are very different from the "Biography of Yue Quan", which is just a collection of various bridge sections of song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dramas. If "The Tale of Yue Quan" is a myth — and here I define mythology as "an ideology that appears in the form of a narrative" — then "Nonsense" is an experiment to mythologize. Next, I was faced with two dilemmas: First, any narrative is inevitably an ideological product, so what is the meaning of my rewriting? The indoctrinating function of the "Saying Yue Quan Biography" is obvious, and everyone is more familiar with the loyalty to the king and the country, but in addition to the home country in the human world, there is also the cosmology of the reincarnation of the gods and immortals, which is the reality of the Ming and Qing religions. It is not difficult to reflect, question, and even deconstruct the home state, but the difficulty is that after stripping away the framework of the ming and qing religious cosmology, how to reconstruct the meaning if we do not intend to treat the modern national narrative as a new myth is a new problem arising from the process of secularization, that is, how we should accept and digest the rootless nature of existence itself. The reason why the protagonist of the novel, Yue Yun, is a frustrated young man in the eyes of many readers is precisely because he assumes this proposition of modern philosophy.

Second, if I were to understand mythology as "a story of supernatural elements outside the rational realm of modern Western," I would naturally choose to base it on historical and historical research, but this creates another conundrum: if we really want to have the spirit of positivism, we must admit that in pre-modern China, the so-called supernatural was originally part of nature, and even the concept of nature was only docked with the modern Western nature in the nineteenth century. Of course, we will say that reincarnation fortune telling and divination is feudal superstition; But these ideas and practices exist objectively, and furthermore, ontology and epistemology outside the category of modern Western scientific rationality exist objectively, both past and present. Over the years many historians and anthropologists have studied so-called mystical knowledge and its applications. In his book Beyond Nature and Culture, the French anthropologist Phillippe Descola argues that in addition to modern Western naturalism (i.e., scientific reason), there are models of totemism, animism, and analogy. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazilian anthropologist who studied American Indian culture, has a similar view, representing the "ontological turn" that the world is inherently multiple. The British scholar Nigel Thrift has an interesting article in response to Descora and Vivillo de Castro, whose subject is the cultural industry of contemporary capitalism, which he borrows from the concept of "military-industrial complex" to call it a "safety-entertainment complex", which is tasked with creating the world, and contemporary capitalism has produced not only standardized commodities of the industrial age, but a set of holistic fantasies. This statement can help us analyze the current metaverse fever, and it is also directly related to the online novels I study.

Then, returning to the creation of "Nonsense", I set myself the goal of "de-mythology and ghostly beings", which means to give up rigid ideology, but not to give up all kinds of "superstitious" behaviors that have existed in history. But these actions can no longer provide real guidance and support for the characters in my story, who live in a disenchanted universe, which is one of the roots of tragedy. For example, the high-ranking figure of the Golden Kingdom, Yan Xiyin, is a sorcerer (Shanman, i.e., shaman), but his ability to communicate with ghosts and gods has not been able to protect him in the cruel power struggle. My fictional little character Ding Jie was recruited by Yue Fei as a subordinate of Yang Yuan, and it is said that Zhong Xiang and Yang Mi rebelled by relying on Manichaeism to mobilize, that is, the Manichaean religion that "eats vegetables and things", but whether it is the leader of the God Demon Sect or the low-level, no one can change their fate of being crushed by the times. Historian Wang Zengyu discussed why Yue Fei is keen on fortune telling, and his subtext is that this matter is a bit embarrassing after all, I don't think so, this matter is not fundamentally different from the contemporary use of big data to predict. I often chase Netflix's self-made episodes based on big data, most of which are very ugly, so it is easy to understand and forgive if you think about it, the fortune teller is not accurate.

There are a lot of grass snake gray lines of religious mysterious culture in the book, such as Yue Yun's various illusions, Yue Lei Zhongyuan Festival's invitation to Taoist priests to fight, etc., and we are very curious, zhao zhao chapter in the three corpse gods of blood gu, bai gu, qinggu are the three corpse gods of Taoism? Are these elements of a mysterious culture influenced by your professional research?

Ni Zhange: My master's degree is Catholic systematic theology, ph.D. in university of Chicago divinity and literature, the main direction is modern and contemporary Christian thought and critical theory, after graduation began to turn to secularization and post-secular studies, and now mainly focuses on the mutual shaping of Chinese religion and digital capitalism, with online novels as cases. The whole path can be summed up as de-Christianity, anti-Western-centric, and "degenerate" from high culture to popular culture. I think Chinese religion is an infinitely fascinating pit, and the Chinese religion I care about is not exactly Buddhist Confucianism or hard-to-classify folk worship, nor is it a profound idea or a complex ritual. Religious studies have been emphasizing the particularity of the center of faith and the importance of bodily practice over the years, and I myself am more interested in the technical knowledge covered by the category of religion, which is naturally mysterious compared to modern scientific reason. I would like to thank the questioner in particular, because the word mystery is used very kindly, and the attitude of the Enlightenment to these things is to spare no effort to suppress them, to the effect that it is a liar who jumps the god, and a fool who believes in the god stick. If you are interested, you can compare the "Biography of Yue Quan" and the commentary "Yue Fei Biography" after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and the strange elements in the original book have been deleted. I add a quotation at the beginning of each chapter of the novel—which is the suggestion of the novelist Zhao Song, and I am very grateful for it—to bring back the invisible gods and demons, and my own narrative repeatedly emphasizes various orthodox or unorthodox religious rituals.

Take the stories of Yue Yun, Yue Lei, and Zhao Zhuo as an example. Yue Yun in "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue" is Lei Bu Zheng Shen Fan, and his set of hammer techniques was not practiced diligently, but dreamed. This is like having a human-machine interface, what skills are needed to download at will, I saw this envy when I was a child. Later, when I re-read it, I noticed that Yue Yun slept and dreamed in the small temple dedicated to Nan Jiyun and Lei Wanchun, why were these two? It turned out that these two were Tang Dynasty generals during the Anshi Rebellion, and later became gods worshipped in folk religions, of course, they were canonized by the imperial court, so their temples were not obscene temples. The Israeli sinologist Meir Shahar has studied ming and qing popular novels related to Tongji Gong and Nezha, and he has a very reasonable point of view, that is, the gods and demons in these novels are not completely imaginary fictional characters, but are really rooted in the worship and sacrifice that was popular in society at that time. Benjamin Brose's paper on the rheology of the images of Sun Wukong and the Eight Precepts of the Pig in Journey to the West is also along this line of thought, which is very interesting to read. In the future, I would like to think carefully about the relationship between the "Complete Biography of Yue Yue" and the religion of the Qing Dynasty.

Looking at Yue Lei again, "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue" ends with his successful sweep of the north, which is a proper shuangwen, but in history, he died in exile at a very young age, and the gap between myth and reality is most vividly reflected in this character. In "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue", Yue Lei defeated Jin Bing with the help of Taoist divine powers, and in my novel, Yue Lei can only ask the wandering old Dao to secretly sacrifice his father and brother, which is also one of the specific manifestations of "going to mythology and storing ghosts". The "Three Corpses God" in Zhao Shuo's story does borrow the Taoist term of cultivation, and I use blood gu, bai gu, and qing gu to allude to sexual desire, power desire, and desire for beauty. Zhao's "beheading three corpses" is a metaphor for the emperor's self-cultivation, and what he wants to achieve is what the French philosopher Rancière called "the distribution of the senses", which is a shared task between politics and aesthetics. Therefore, the process of "beheading three corpses" is the process of gradual maturity in the dual sense of Zhao Shuo as an emperor and as an artist. In history, the verdict prepared by Qin Ju in the "nonsense" case only arranged exile for Yue Yun, and it was Zhao Shuo's own handwriting to the death penalty, which I understood as the final formation of "sensory distribution", and Zhao Shuo achieved absolute control over all kinds of desires. I myself feel that this re-treatment of "beheading the three corpses" is to de-contextualize and re-contextualize, leaving the original context of the Neidan tradition and entering the new context of novel creation.

You have been studying online novels recently, but in "Nonsense", you don't seem to see the direct impact of the current popular such as Xiu Xian novels, or these influences are actually hidden, can you tell us?

Ni Zhange: One of the questions I have been thinking about recently is: What exactly is a "novel"? The creation of "Unnecessary" is not radical enough, and it is too deeply influenced by the modern Western novel model, and still pursues the psychological depth of the characters and the exquisite craftsmanship of the language; On the contrary, the online novels in popular culture are more interesting, vaguely returning to the original meaning of "novel" in the Chinese tradition. As far as the characteristics of "Shuangwen" are concerned, Ming and Qing popular novels and contemporary online novels are in the same vein, and I must reverse it and emphasize the ethical duty of creators to "be loyal to helpless reality". But Ming and Qing popular novels and contemporary online novels also have a very attractive place for me, and if you think about it, it should be the non-fiction and non-narrative nature of "novels". We are shackled by the scientific and aesthetic views of the modern West, on the one hand failing to see the cognitive function of religion (or superstition), and on the other hand reducing "fiction" to "fictional narratives for the purpose of enlightenment or entertainment."

In the past two days, I have just read an article by the French sinologist Vincent Durand-Dastès on the story of zhou gong and peach blossom women fighting in Ming and Qing novels. He mentioned that the 1848 edition of The Legend of the Yin-Yang Fighting Cult had a strange preface that seemed to have little to do with the story itself and was drawn from a medical anthology. Is this the publisher getting it wrong? Or is there something wrong with our understanding of the concept of "fiction"? Dai Wenchen wants to remind us that even in the relatively recent Ming and Qing dynasties, even if the educational and entertainment functions of fictional texts have been recognized to a considerable extent, "novels" still have the role of disseminating technical knowledge. Andrew Schonebaum gave a similar example in his 2016 book Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China, where someone went to Mirror Flower Edge to find a prescription and actually cured the disease.

The Hanshu Yiwenzhi divides the bibliography into six categories: Six Arts, Zhuzi, Poetry, Bingshu, Numerology, and Fangjie. Novelists belonged to the "sons", and later generations often divided novels into sub-sections of the subset of the history of the classics. The novel also has the identity of "Shi Yu", because it is a collection of "street talk, small words" collected by barnyard officials. There has been a lot of research on the relationship between fiction and history; It should be added that the novel may not even be a narrative, we often regard zhiwei as the early form of the novel, but the zhiwei text is mostly simply description and explanation, and the primary task is not necessarily to tell the story. In this regard, Wang Yao has long discussed the relationship between novels and fangshu. The novel is likely to be a propaganda tool for the alchemists, or more simply, to make a record of strange things and phenomena, as well as a record of the application of various mathematical techniques. From "Search for God" to "Notes on Reading Wei Caotang" and so on, it is better. We would say that there is the germ of a novel in the modern sense, but we might as well look at it in a different way, these texts do not completely coincide with the novel in the modern sense, why can't the novel develop along these different paths?

In recent years, when I study online novels, I am often painfully asked: These novels have rough language and repetitive character flatness, what is there to see? Leaving aside whether the viewpoint is prejudice or not, we may wish to ask: if we don't care about language, plot and character development, what do we see? The answer seems obvious: cool. I have no problem with that. But what exactly is web fiction doing other than the satisfaction of desire? If capitalism has long been committed to exploiting desires, isn't the desire for knowledge and innovation the engine of the current expansion of capital? This is the view of Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist who studies cognitive capitalism. I have an immature idea that it is the commercial network novel that returns to the original meaning of the "novel" to carry technical knowledge, responds to the re-charm of the digital age with strange forces and chaos, and digests and processes the technical knowledge of the postmodern by reimagining the technical knowledge of the pre-modern era. There are two major genres in online fiction that I am particularly concerned about, xiuzhen and tomb robbery. The former reimagines Neidan, the latter relies on feng shui knowledge; Neidan was born out of the fangji culture, feng shui belongs to the category of mathematical techniques, Li Zero translated fangshu into biological techniques, and mathematical techniques are cosmological techniques, so the interesting coincidence came: media research scholar Wendy Chun said that biotechnology and digital technology are the double helix of our time, isn't this Fangshu and numerology? So online novels don't just capture the "dregs of feudal superstition", their real task is to respond to current changes. For example, works such as "Into the Immortals" and "Arcane Divine Seat" all use magical settings to recount the history of science, and their writing and reading have become simulated fields for the production and circulation of knowledge, and the authors and readers are digital laborers in self-cultivation. My own novels are particularly slow and poorly written because most of my time and energy have been robbed of this interesting phenomenon, and I have to hurry up and write a paper.

The novel tells this unjust case from the perspective of Yue Yun, Zhao Shuo, Qin Ju and Yue Lei, but Yue Yun alone occupies three articles, why do you prefer him so much, or his perspective can bring you the greatest writing space?

Ni Zhange: Jokingly, it wasn't me who chose Yue Yun, it was he who chose me. I have several friends who like to show people the eight characters. They said that Yue Fei was a Komu, and he was straight; Qin Juniper is Otogi and is good at climbing; Yue Yun is Gengjin Life, I am also Gengjin, the five elements lack wood, so they will be attracted by their stories, and will involuntarily substitute for Yue Yun's perspective. Yue Yun is a military general, Gengjin is rough and bold, but he also has the temperament of Ruxiu Wenchang, if he abandons martial arts from Wen, he will be a scholar, and the article will be famous. As a result, he had a lot of whimsical ideas, but he didn't like to read, so he caused the disaster of killing himself. My friend said that a weak insect literati like me (actually having a Gengjin life, which is actually a joke) is probably another life that Yue Yun has not tried, and perhaps because of this, he can make up his past struggles and confusions. My friend also said that according to the "Three Lives Society", Yue Yun's life "has the right to enter the phase, and the golden horse and jade hall are precious", which is too cruel compared with reality. This kind of embarrassment is also one of the original driving forces that pushed me towards him, and the so-called tragedy is to destroy beautiful things for people to see.

As for why Yue Yun's perspective accounts for three articles, this is the experimental location of my novel creation? In retrospect, there are two main categories of novels that I read a lot as a child: Ming and Qing popular novels and European and American (post)modernist works, except for the mainstream literature of realism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These two sources determine my style: on the one hand, "Seven Heroes and Five Righteousness", "List of Fengshen Gods", "Mirror Flower Edge", "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue" and "The History of the Immortals" and other unconscionable mundane things, on the other hand are new novels, absurd dramas, "Situationalist International" and "Beat Generation" and other strange and strange things, my brain is broken is the overthrow of the front, it can be seen that primary and secondary school students need to establish a correct world outlook and outlook on life. So I write novels with a hard head, and I will only use postmodern ideas and techniques to treat the subject matter of previous popular novels, and it is impossible to tell heroic stories honestly, I have to play with strange tricks, engage in unreliable narrators, polyphonic polyphony of multiple narrative perspectives, and even multiverse settings. The first half of "Unnecessary" is not only a narrative with three Yue Yun perspectives, but also three kinds of Yue Yun possibilities, corresponding to the triple "possible world". My friend said that I was a lack of wood in gold life, partial and water transport, water and wood drifting, too many whimsical ideas, readers simply can't understand and don't care, so there should be a problem with the output.

You said that Yue Yun's three perspectives correspond to the triple "possible world", which is also where we feel dazzling and curious when reading, can you tell us more?

Ni Zhange: This collection of novels consists of six short stories, and their relationship is not so much complementary to each other as to each other's dismantling, in other words, each short story is a self-contained "possible world", with obvious or subtle differences in language style, character setting, and plot direction. If you read it carefully, you should be able to notice that the six stories that make up "Nonsense" contradict each other in some details, and my favorite character Zhang Beiwan, that is, Zhang Xian's son, went to sea in one version, exiled like Yue Lei in another version, and did not appear at all in other versions. A more obvious example is that the first three stories of "Nonsense" are all Yue Yun's first-person self-narration, but these three narrators constitute three different Yue Yun, whose personality experiences are very different, and the language styles I have tried are also very different. If you count the self-narration of Zhao Shuo, Qin Ju and Yue Lei later, the six stories have six language styles, and in my case, language is also involved in shaping the characters. The language of "Unnecessary" has a strong performance, and different characters have their own language styles, some lively and fluent, some gorgeous and gloomy, and some plain and meticulous. In order to write Qin Ju and Zhao Shuo's self-description, I deliberately perused their existing articles, deliberately imitating their words and style, which is considered to be the realism in writing. But fiction is even more indispensable. "possible worlds" is a term derived from narratology to study the construction of the world within a narrative text. We usually think of realist literature as works without supernatural elements, but many unsympathetic stories still explore the multiple possibilities of historical progress or just plot unfolding, such as the movie "Sliding Doors", "Lola Run", "Butterfly Effect", etc., the more obvious example is of course the famous science fiction novel "The Strange Man of High Castle", author Philip Dick fictionalized the alternative history of the German-Japanese Axis to win World War II and rule the United States. Along this line of thought, let me explain the title of "Nonsense", which is actually a label for metafiction, using "maybe there is, maybe not" to remind us of the delicate relationship between fiction and reality.

To borrow another fashionable phrase, "Nonsense" is a multiverse setting, which does not seem to jump out of the history of positivism, but explores multiple possibilities in the historical framework. I study fiction and like to focus on its non-fiction and non-narrative elements; When I write history, I emphasize narrative and even fiction. The French philosopher Michel de Celto and the American historian Hayden White have discussed the relationship between history and fiction. The latter argues that so-called reality includes our faithful account of what "actually happened" and what "could have happened." The French philosopher Deleuze further subdivides it: "possible" corresponds not to "actual" but to "real", and to "actual existence" to "potential". "Possible" is defined by established conditions, while "potential" comes from the uncertainty of the process of change in the event itself. The fictional direction of "Unnecessary" is "possible": what kind of people Yue Fei and Yue Yun may be, and what kind of thinking and calculation Qin Ju and Zhao Zhuo may have had, the possibility here is curious to me. But I'm not interested in Shuangwen. Both the former "The Complete Biography of Yue Yue" and the current cross-over novel can provide readers with a clear moral framework and compensation or satisfaction that cannot be obtained in reality, that is, the so-called "myth". I can't do it, I don't want to do it, what I want to do is to be considerate and comfort the sentient beings who are trapped in reality/reality, especially ordinary people who are hurt by the abandonment of power. As an author, I can't give anyone superpowers, even in fictional space; But I will try to imagine, try to get as close to their pain and helplessness as possible, because our own lives are nothing more than this, and everyone can still resonate for thousands of years. Someone once asked the question: Why do you make such a thankless effort? This kind of writing will make it difficult for ordinary readers to substitute from their own situation, let alone get the expected satisfaction. I had taken a course on "Literature and Ethics" before, and I had read the english writer/philosopher Iris Murdoch to the effect that literature assumed the ethical responsibility of being faithful to reality, and I would now like to emphasize that this reality cannot be equated with the reality defined by scientific reason, nor can it be reduced to the cause and effect of good and evil in various mythological narratives, which include violence, possible struggles and potential redemptions at the level of reality and reality. This is what "Nonsense" wants to present.

The relationship between Yue Yun and his father Yue Fei in the novel is complex and delicate, how do you imagine the feelings and relationship between them?

Ni Zhange: This question has been raised by many people, so it can be seen that it is very critical. I think I think I think very clearly about this problem, of course, the specific operation is another thing, thinking very complicated and scribbling is my problem at this stage. What I want to show is neither the Confucian filial piety of fatherhood nor the competitive relationship that Freud referred to as the "Oedipus complex", but the intimate relationship that is outside the various rigid patterns. My friend said that from Yue Yun's eight characters, his relationship with his father is close and tense, the father is stubborn, the son is eccentric, but they are dependent on each other, which is very close to my fiction. I heard that Dick, who wrote "The Strange Man of The High Castle", turned out the "I Ching" when he did not conceive a good plot, and I regret that I did not find a friend to see the eight characters of the main characters before conceiving "Nonsense", but the magic is that the interpretation of the eight characters learned afterwards is very different from my hypothesis. One possibility is that my friend was influenced by my novels; Second, after all, my novel is modeled on history, and the actions of specific characters have a certain basis, and speculations about psychology or personality are not completely empty.

This semester I'm teaching "Religion and Literature" to undergraduates. I teach this course basically every year, and the subjects are mostly demons and ghosts. Zombie movies, vampire tales, and American Gods have all been themes. This year I came to catch up with the fashion again, taking students to watch Netflix's animated series "Love Death". Love, death, and robots, each sub-topic would be interesting to add religion to the front. We just read how Freud and Lacan discussed castration complexes, and we also read historical studies of Christian theology and the source of romantic love. The students were acutely aware that both Freud and Lacan psychoanalysis were heterosexual males, and that the theory of the so-called Oedipal father had obvious limitations. I am excited to have the opportunity to introduce them to the transformation of feminism and queer theory into psychoanalysis, which of course places too much emphasis on the role of culture, symbols, and symbolic systems, and has long been buffeted by the materialistic shift. But we still need to pay attention to the construction of the subject of desire, and "Unnecessary" re-imagining of historical figures also has ambitions in this sense. The lack of strong female characters is the weakness of my novel, but self-justifying: if feminism and queer theory are treated as perspectives rather than limited by specific experiences, why can't we transform male-male relationships in various senses?

In the six chapters of the book, except for Qin Juniper, who is particularly rational and has all kinds of super calculations, the rest of the people seem to have been entangled in the problem of death (it seems that Qin Juniper is the weakest chicken in the spiritual field), but their ideas are completely different, how do you envision the death concept of these characters?

Ni Zhange: I just talked about love, now let's care about death, so we are going to ask the robot next? In my novel, Qin Ju and Zhao Shuo are about the same camp of realists, they are very rational, they know how to fight for immediate interests, even if the flood after death. Zhao Zhuo and Qin Ju are symbols of perceptual aesthetics and instrumental rationality, respectively. Zhao Shuo's killing decision has the cruelty of an artist, not to mention that his special status makes him affordable, he is the only seedling of the old Zhao family, everyone wants to engage in ZTE, they have to take him as the core, and his pain lies in the fact that he cannot be willful. This kind of "second generation of the emperor" should be very disgusting to everyone. Qin Juniper is different, he has never been willful, step by step, like walking on thin ice is my positioning for him. This man was a high-ranking social animal, busy with affairs all day, pursuing efficiency and strategy, disapproving of good and evil, and having no patience for ghosts and gods, so he deserved to go to hell in later folklore. But Zhao Zhuo is not a simple Emperor, and Qin Ju is not a flattened traitor, they each have their own involuntariness, and the evil they represent is not a simple matter of personal conduct, but a kind of institutional violence. Zhao Shuo's identity as emperor is where the legitimacy and mobilization of this violence lie, and the reason why Qin Ju has become an agent manipulated by institutional violence has a lot to do with his being the embodiment of instrumental rationality. Zhao Shuo is hesitant to be in the voice, and in his story, immersion in desire is actually a way to break off lust. Qin Juniper seems to be favoritism and short-term, and has a lot of care for his own henchmen, but this person who pays attention to human feelings is particularly ruthless, he only cares about expanding his own power and safeguarding his own interests, for which he can sacrifice principles, but also sacrifice others.

The opposite of Zhao Zhuo and Qin Ju is the father and son of the Yue family. Yue Fei clearly agreed with the Confucian righteousness of sacrificing life, and for him, what was more terrifying than death in the physiological sense was the social sense of breaking the bottom line. Yue Yun is a natural bystander, I fictionalized his attitude of listening to people in the novel, that is actually his attitude towards life: there is hilarity, hurry up, anyway, floating is not a dream, first be happy and then say; No matter how lively he was, he couldn't change the coldness in his heart, and sometimes the wind and clouds were scattered, and when it came to that time, he was very calm. Everyone says that he is lost, but people who are so lost have a kind of perseverance. His father likes to discipline him, he likes to confront his father, but the father and son eventually go to the same place, and together they keep the bottom line of love and righteousness in the chaotic world. The father and son form a yin and yang mirror image of each other, the impulse to survive and the impulse to die, respectively. Going back to the conundrum I have to solve myself, in a world of disenchantment, what exactly does this novel have to grasp? Feng Menglong's affection may be an answer:

"If the heavens and the earth are merciless, they do not give birth to anything. Everything is merciless and cannot be born together. Born without perishing, by love without perishing. The four are illusions, but the feelings are not false. Those who have feelings are close, and those who are heartless are close. Ruthless and sentient, immeasurable. I want to teach sentient beings. The Son has affection for the Father, and the Subject has affection for the King. Pushing all kinds of phases, all of them are viewed as such. Everything is like loose money, and one love is a clue. Loose money is asked to wear, and the end of the world becomes a family. If there is a thief harm, etc., it hurts itself. If you see the spring flowers, you will rejoice. Thieves will not do it, and adultery will not be punished. Buddha is also merciful, holy and benevolent. But the seeds of love are poured, and the heavens and the earth are chaotic. Helpless I have more feelings, helpless people less. May there be a lover, let's perform the Fa together. After all, Feng Menglong failed to jump out of the routine of father and son, I wanted to jump and watch, to engage in the broadest sense of queer writing that is "outside of any fixed norm", the posture is not necessarily good-looking, but at least it has worked hard.

Read on