In the 19th century, when the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm opened up the mysterious and dangerous "labyrinth", language cracked like the magic mirror in Snow White. No one can refuse fairy tales, because fairy tales are the only genre that allows words to move freely and composite, they burn like flames in the center of the story, words slowly get closer, and from Aladdin's magic lamp they gather into monsters, capturing the soul of the reader. Charles Perrault's "The Tale of Mother Goose" continues our original yearning for fairy tales, and countless bizarre dreams stitch our sleep. Later, Hans Christian Andersen appeared, he took the spirit of fairy tales to the extreme, and fairy tales began to move towards self-realization. Hans Christian Andersen once declared, "Behind every fairy tale, there is an adult reader." It can be said that it was Hans Christian Andersen who saved the original memories of children, and then awakened the mysterious power hidden in the human body and mind: the bud of children's enlightenment. The immersion of "folk literature" accelerates the process of fairy tales, and the linguistic characteristics originating from mythology and history are constantly evolving, gradually collaging the fragments of magic, and fairy tales have vitality.
From "a long, long time ago" to "living a happy life", the fractured zone lurks magical elements such as jungles, mountains and rivers, palaces, castles, etc., all due to the magic box that can be transformed. The disappearance of fairy tales means the disappearance of childhood, and once we stop believing in fairy tales, all magic boxes will be closed to us. In Calvino's On Fairy Tales: "My only belief is to push myself to travel between fairy tales and to be convinced that fairy tales are true." "Reading the blue fairy tales "Underground Dream City", "Crooked Hat Tank and Lina" and "Big Tree Run" trilogy in this situation is like a return to innocence recognition ritual.
Lan Lan, poet and writer. His published works include the poetry collections "Laughter for Life", "Love Songs", "Inner Life", "Sleep and Sleep", "Poems", "From Here, To Here", "Sing, Sadness"; the bilingual poetry collections "Canyon in the Body" and "Nails"; He has published more than 20 collections of fairy tales, children's poems, and prose essays.
Once inside, adults turn into children
If there are no fairy tales, where do our memories come from the bright starry sky? Fairy tale writers are magicians, and every fairy tale tries to prevent children from becoming adults. We long to return to the source of life, to the world of childhood that has disappeared but the halo remains. In this regard, Giorgio Agamben offers us some riddles: "In fairy tales everything is a vague gesture of law and magic, accusation or forgiveness, prohibition or permission, casting a curse or breaking a curse; Or the enigmatic separation of the astrological zodiac and the image, the adult connecting the chain of destiny of all living beings (even if the fairy tale lifts the magical veil). "Fairy tales are like "utopias" buried in the ground, and the mystery formed by the vortex of language makes us experience a "journey to the center of the earth". Time has opened a passage, and we can directly enter the "underground dream city" created by Lanlan through the "dream alley between Jingsan Road and Jingsi Road". Once inside, an adult becomes a child: "I carefully opened the book, and all the words inside shone. The nightmarish revelation begins: "If more than half of our dreams are shattered, then our dream city will have a major earthquake, buildings will collapse, landslides will crack..." That is, the order of human dreams hides some hope and risk. When dreams become the entity of language, the mechanism of their presentation becomes clearly palpable. Interestingly, in fairy tale worlds, it is often difficult to tell whether we are living in a butterfly dream or in reality.
"Underground Dream City" is a story that reveals human greed and redemption. All dreams are intended to tell people the true power of fairy tales, just like the magic book in Dream City, "True Stories". And the two sources of this, the intersection of the "mountain of time" and the "mountain of memory" form the polka point of fairy tales, which I think is also the reason why Lan Lan wrote fairy tales - a redrawing of childhood dreams. At this time, Benjamin's expression in Berlin Childhood sounded in my mind: "The fairy tale invites me into the fascinating world or the elven world, and is also intended to bring me finally safe back to the simple reality that so gladly accepts me as it did when I faced stockings." "The cloister of the fairy tale is thus confirmed that it is a city of dreams, and the four pillars are the skeleton that supports the story, and finally, the foundation is completed.
"Underground Dream City", author: Lan Lan, version: CITIC Publishing Group June 2022
A tree trying to run
Following the three and fourth roads, we delve into the Weisi Road in "Big Tree Run", for the reader, these may just be a location where the story takes place, but the "Weisi Road" is not fiction, but the place where Lan Lan lived in Zhengzhou, Henan Province in his childhood. She wrote of a construction worker in the poem "Latitude Four Junction": "All morning / He was waving a pickaxe in the corner of the construction site." "We seem to see the figure of Lao Chen, a cleaning worker in "Big Tree Run", while rice and millet are more like the images of blue and blue twin daughters, everything is like a real projection wrapped in a fairy tale. A tree that tries to run is poetic in itself, a dream like Andersen's "last dream of an old oak tree." From the beginning when it was a fruit in the cradle, to the eyes of each leaf opened, the great trees tried to escape the persecution of mankind, and they were intertwined and discussed countermeasures. The fairy tale gives the plant the ability to act and enters the interior of the story castle with the help of the mouth of the starling bird.
This is easily reminiscent of Collody's Pinocchio (we will never forget Pinocchio's long wooden nose), where humans are no longer the only animals with language, because in the world of fairy tales, everything has the right to escape silence, human control over language, or the magic of language to choose the carrier of human beings is broken, what is the difference between the language of wood and the language of animals? In this regard, Kolodi said:
How the carpenter cherry master found a piece of wood that was like a child, crying and laughing.
Once upon a time..."There was a king! "My little readers will blurt out right away.
No, kids, you're wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood...
Lan Lan has a similar expression in the essay collection "I Am Another Man": "The wonder of fairy tales - people seem to think that the lamp that lights up at the bedside every night suddenly opens its mouth to tell about a long journey. Lanlan's understanding of fairy tales comes from the thinking of daily life, and even the poetic diffusion, from one person to others, from one object to another, Lanlan tries to present the cognition of the real world through fairy tales.
See, the dream of "Big Tree Run" contemplates reality, and the poetic paradise awakens. Those unknowns touch our reading moments. In addition to revealing the laws of human beings and nature, Lanlan also intends to present the mission of fairy tale spirit: "The decline of fairy tale writing marks the decline of imagination. The degradation of imagination is bound to lead to the death of literature and art, leading to the decline of human quality of life and the quiet decline of human nature. "The personification of all things in children's literature enables children to see that all beings are equal." (Preface to The World in a Fairy Tale)
Here, in order to show the whereabouts of the two stories more clearly, we might as well draw the map of these two fairy tales
In this way, the escape of the tree may be a reproduction of the author's situation after witnessing the felling of the "Weisi Road". Through the "tree hole" we can witness the Tower of Babel of language reaching the center of the earth: "Of course we will walk!" We have roots, and our roots walk underground every day, invisible to people. ("Big Tree Run").
"Big Tree Run", author: Lan Lan, edition: CITIC Publishing Group June 2022
"A fairy tale resembles a dream"
Different from traditional fairy tales, blue fairy tales are more like allegory of modern life, and the world itself is a fairy tale of the change of time, an ideal law of survival. We reach such a turning point, in "Crooked Hat Tank and Lina", "upper country" and "lower lower country" seem to be two parallel lines, and Lina's appearance turns the two "national lines" into "gardens of crossed paths". The story begins to weave into the magic of "longitude and latitude", and if we think back to the axis of time and space, we can discover the essence of the fairy tale hidden in the story - everything can be said. Why are fairy tales so charming? In the words of Sheldon Kashdan in The Witch Must Die, "they provide an unparalleled adventure experience" while also "helping children deal with the inner conflicts they have to face growing up." However, Lan Lan's fairy tale does not want to "kill the evil witch", she just hopes to reduce the "witch" to a magician, so that the characters in the fairy tale can escape the curse of the story and go to a wider path.
"Crooked Hat Tank and Lina", author: Lan Lan, edition: CITIC Publishing Group June 2022
"Crooked Hat Tank and Lina" is a work dedicated to her father, an old tank soldier. Lanlan once said that she often saw tanks in her childhood and got into them to play, which also ensured her accurate description of the story. In other words, this is another fantasy work derived from childhood memories. Here's Lan Lan's thoughts on war: "You look at the stars in the sky, and no one gives them territory, right?" "Those tanks with self-awareness speak, behave and feel no worse than humans. As mentioned earlier, in the world of fairy tales, everything has the right to get rid of silence, and there is the magic of self-talking. Lan Lan knew this well, and she let one tank after another refer to the cruelty of war instead of herself: "At this moment, on the entire hillside and on the river bank, all the colorful wildflowers slowly bent their heads at once, and one after another withered..."
The blue fairy tale trilogy is a unity, a fruit, and the reader is the seed in it. Like bees making honey, we draw fresh experiences from the stories of blue and blue fragrances. We see words crawling, breathing, approaching us, and then moving on. Lan Lan's pursuit of the spirit of fairy tales, the unique blueprint of the mind displayed through the story map, may be like Novalis's words: "A fairy tale resembles a dream - no connection - the sum of magical things and events - such as fantasia - the harmonious continuation of the wind god organ - nature itself." The blue fairy tale is the fairy tale itself, and the heart beats in it. Childhood grows here until countless wings fade before our eyes.
Written by/Yan Chaohua
Editors/Liu Yaguang Zhang Jin
Proofreader/Xue Jingning