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A person's emotional ability needs to be cultivated, and literary education is one of the important ways to obtain emotional ability.
——Wu Xiaodong, Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Peking University
01 Why am I so hard to give up "Back Shadow"
One day, the music station played the Japanese song "Spring of the Northern Kingdom", which he had heard well in middle school, and heard the third paragraph: "The brother looks like an old father, a pair of taciturn people, but they have been idle to sell wine, and occasionally drink a few cups." "Suddenly I felt something, as if a question that had been bothering me for a long time had been answered in a moment.
At the end of 2003, some media outlets proposed to remove Zhu Ziqing's "Back Shadow" from middle school textbooks because of the low score of "Back Shadow" in the middle school students' polls. It is said that the main reason why middle school students do not like "Back Shadow" is that his father crossed the rails and violated traffic rules, and the second was that his father's image was not dashing. This led to a debate about whether "Back Shadow" should be abolished, and then evolved into a small event in the language industry, touching on topics such as: "Back Shadow" is not a classic, what is a classic, whether the classic will be outdated, whether the choice of classics should keep pace with the times, how the classics should be taught, and a series of major issues.
Illustration of "Back Shadow"
My idea at the time was that to call the author's father "violating traffic rules and not being dashing" in the context of the 21st century was obviously asking the ancients with today's evaluation vision and value scale. The story written in "Back Shadow" takes place in 1917 Pukou Station (also called Nanjing North Railway Station), built in 1914, when it was the end of the Jinpu Railway, and I am afraid that there are few trains passing through in a day, just like the small station in my hometown when I was a child, there is no platform at all, let alone a flyover, probably can not be fully required by today's railway safety rule awareness. The "authenticity" of "Back Shadow" as a specific historical situation lies in the clumsiness and unbridliness of the father, so it really touched Zhu Ziqing at the moment when the author stared at the back of his father. The father in "Back Shadow" reflects the spiritual characteristics of old China, or traditional Chinese fathers, and reflects the hardships and vicissitudes of life left by the years on the father's body. This is not only a true reflection of the original ecology of life, but also the true embodiment of literary history, and the ideological and sense of the times of a literary work is based on the reality of life.
However, I suppressed the urge to participate in the discussion, because I suddenly felt that I still did not explain why Zhu Ziqing's "Back Shadow" is a rare classic in modern literature, nor why I had a touch every time I read "Back Shadow".
In the moment of listening to "Spring in the Northland", I suddenly understood what the appeal of "Back Shadow" was to me.
Compared with the beautiful and carved language in the Beautiful text such as "Lotus Pond Moonlight", "Back Shadow" is almost all vernacular, but there is a deep simplicity, which seems to dilute the emotional capacity but at the same time obtains a deeper and richer foundation. This deep undertones comes first and foremost from the author's memoiristic narrative gesture. The article opens up: "I haven't seen my father for more than two years, and the last thing I can forget is his back." At the beginning, the time distance between the author and the "back shadow event" is opened, and in the memory, this time distance will become an aesthetic and warm distance. In particular, at the end, the writer received a letter from his father, "I am in good health, but my arms are in severe pain, I hold up a pen, many inconveniences, and the period of about the end is not far away", thus remembering that I treat my father", and the thoughts turn into regret, and the time distance of memories makes the thoughts and regrets magnified. "Back Shadow" is actually written about the author's remorse for his father, and the compassion that accompanies regret. This feeling of pity at the beginning of "Back Shadow" is used as "the grandmother died, the father's messenger was also handed over, it is a day of misfortune" as a background for the emotional background, until the clumsy delay of witnessing the father's crawling over the railway pushes Zhu Ziqing's pity and regret to the climax of emotion. The more unsmiling and clumsy the father's actions, the more intolerant and compassionate Zhu Ziqing as a son became.
Zhu Ziqing
At the moment when I listened to "Spring in the Northern Kingdom", I finally realized that the reason why "Back Shadow" may become an immortal classic in modern literature is precisely because Zhu Ziqing wrote the oldest and deepest emotion of mankind, that is, the maintenance of the relationship between father and son. In the prose, this emotion is conveyed by the action and the author's feelings, and the father and son do not have too many words, but they contain the emotional way and way of getting along with men and men. Just like the father and son sung in "Spring in the Northern Kingdom", in the silent and taciturn mood of "idle selling wine, occasionally drinking a few cups", they convey something heartwarming. I am reminded of the contemporary poet Cai Hengping's "Fourteen Lines of father":
The old father no longer had the strength to do what he had done years before
What I used to do as often as I did: beat me up
Laugh out loud. The laughter was so unbridled
The rice wine in the bowl was suddenly frightened and spilled onto the table
I said, Father, you should have a heart like an ancient well
No grudges, and the last few years
My good father, he was like I said
Silent, go to bed early and get up early
To me and yan please, please accompany him to drink
Talk about trivial weather and the pros and cons of wine
I think my father had come to an end
Am I the same way years later?
The wind and candles are dead, and the evening scenery is desolate
Oh yes, my father was sloppy all his life, and he didn't go far when he was old
Cai Hengping, born in 1967, was admitted to the department of peking university Chinese in 1983 and is good at writing sonnets.
This is also a heartbreaking form of Oriental father-son affection. This eventual emotional bond between father and son is far deeper and more timeless than words like the generation gap. I myself experienced a period of rebellion against my father when I was about the third year of junior high school, and I did not want my father to ask me about school, and I also resented my father for checking my diary, so I repeatedly confronted my father. Soon after I went to college, in the classroom of modern literary history, the moment I listened to the teacher recite "Back Shadow", I couldn't help but feel that I had unconditionally reconciled with my father in my heart.
At that time, I thought of the so-called Beat generation in the United States in the 60s, represented by rebelling against society and smoking marijuana, and was known for the slogan of "killing my father". But this generation soon became a father on its own, the backbone of American society, and the United States did not really collapse because of this generation. Rebellion is temporary, affection is eternal. Later, it was my turn to take a round of modern literary history classes, and the most impressive one was also about Zhu Ziqing's "Back Shadow". Every time I read "Back Shadow" in class, I was first moved again, and then I tried to convey my feelings to the young students who had just left their parents and were in Beijing. If you are not even touched by yourself, of course, you cannot expect to move the audience under the podium.
"Killing the Father", by John Wayne, translated by Liu Kaifang, Translated by Lin Publishing House
The popularity of the talk about emotional intelligence over the years is as if one's emotional intelligence is an innate endowment. Perhaps emotional intelligence is indeed innate, but a person's emotional ability needs to be cultivated, and literary education is one of the important ways to obtain emotional ability. This ability needs to be cultivated even in writers, and Zhu Ziqing actually wrote in "Back Shadow" that he is the process of obtaining his emotional ability. The appeal of literature is reflected in the deep emotional connotation. And "Back Shadow" finally enlightened me: what literary education should teach is the emotional connotation in literature, and then cultivate students' emotional ability, and its premise is that while you are moved, you must also find the real internal motivation of the literary classics to make you move.
02 Chinese look at time through the cat's eyes
When I was a child, there was a custom of watching time in the eyes of cats in the countryside of northeast China. Looking at the changes in the pupils of the cat's eyes throughout the day, the time can be roughly distinguished, and the elderly can control the error within an hour.
After I went to college, I read a poem by Bian Zhilin titled "Homecoming": "Good boy, pick up your kitten and let me look into his eyes — when is it?" This poem can be called a faithful portrait of the local sense of time. Baudelaire begins with "Clocks" in "The Melancholy of Paris" that "Chinese see time through the eyes of a cat", which also reveals that France does not have this habit.
The Melancholy of Paris, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Guo Hong'an, Shanghai Translation Publishing House
In the 1930s, the "luminous watch", also known as the "luminous watch", was already popular in the metropolis, and the pointer of the watch could also be seen at night. Liu Zhendian has a poetry cloud:
Luminous watches have become the liars of time,
Whispering to the eternal soul.
Every soft click of the luminous second hand appeals to transience, so eternity is just an illusion. In essence, the luminous table shows the relativity of time and the passage of time itself, thus constituting the source of anxiety in modern people. Perhaps because of this, Bian Zhilin issued a piece of advice in the poem "Round Treasure Box": "Don't go to any watch shop / Listen to your youth being eaten away." ”
Bian Zhilin (1910.12.8-2000.12.2), modern and contemporary poet, literary critic, translator, together with He Qifang and Li Guangtian, known as the "Three Poets of Han Garden", graduated from Peking University, was a student of Xu Zhimo and Hu Shi, and his representative works "Broken Chapters" and so on.
Now that college students have no longer the shadow of a watch on their wrists, they have changed their mobile phones, and probably mobile phones can effectively avoid the anxiety brought about by the passage of time. But the sense of form of the mobile phone is much worse than that of the watch. My father's generation of post-40s, in the 1960s, the biggest wish is to save money to buy Shanghai brand watches, wearing a Shanghai brand watch is more worthy of showing off than today's post-80s to buy Apple five generations, and the action of watching watches is also exaggerated and abnormal, intending to attract the eyes of female comrades.
Perhaps because of this sense of form, the image of "table" has also become Bian Zhilin's favorite. Bian Zhilin, who likes Xuansi, "table" is the best carrier of his whimsical ideas. For example, "Sailing":
The steamship sailed straight to the east all night, dragging a tail with a big swing,
Proudly invite passengers to a pair of tables -
"Time is behind, a moment behind."
Talking tea room is about to be competitive,
He may remember the disappointment of the child's heart—
Race from the front yard to the backyard and the moon.
This is the time for sleepy-eyed thinkers
I remembered the long distance of a night in my hometown
On the window sill a piece of snail silver traces ——
"But this night is two hundred miles?"
The poet imagines what might happen during a sea voyage: the tea house knows the jet lag that comes with a night's voyage, and therefore proudly asks the traveler to check the watch. The "thinker" on the boat," which can be seen as a portrayal of Bian Zhilin himself, remembers in his sleepy eyes that he has identified the span of a night in his hometown by a trace of crawling from a snail, just as a native looks at time from a cat's eye. And on the same night, the ship traveled two hundred nautical miles. "Navigation" thus expresses a kind of relativity of time and space. The proud and competitive tea house makes the traveler's behavior towards the watch somewhat ridiculous because of its ostentatiousness, but after all, the sailing career has brought him a strict sense of time, and this knowledge of jet lag is unimaginable in the childhood era of the tea house running from the front yard to the backyard and racing against the moon. In the end, the context of "Voyage" reflects the contrast between the two concepts of time, modern and vernacular, and behind the consciousness of time, there is the contrast of two forms of life.
Another poem by Bian Zhilin, "Loneliness", writes about the "Luminous Table":
The children of the countryside are afraid of loneliness,
Keep a grasshopper next to the pillow;
Grow up and work in town
He bought a luminous watch.
As a child, he was often envious
Tombgrasses make home for grasshoppers;
Now he's been dead for three hours,
The luminous watch has not stopped.
The special place of this poem is not the reflection on time, space or urban civilization and local civilization, but in the fact that Bian Zhilin uses the imagery of "grasshopper" and "luminous table" to make the two time and space in the countryside and the city vividly juxtaposed together, reflecting the contrast between the two ways of civilization, and behind it is implied two value judgments and orientations. The rich and complex picture of China's transition from an ancient vernacular civilization to an urban civilization in the new century has obtained a concrete and subtle presentation in the dialectical thinking of time in "Navigation" and "Loneliness".
Voyage and Loneliness also represent the interdependence and interdependence between cities and rural areas in 20th-century China. Even today, the city and the countryside are inseparable. Most of what you eat in the city is produced in the countryside; you work hard in the city, and your children may still be left in the countryside. Every year during the Spring Festival, the great population flow is very spectacular, known as the largest migratory bird migration on the earth, most of which are running back and forth between the city and the countryside. The relationship between the local and the urban has acquired a new complex connotation in the 21st century, which is worth re-examining and studying from the perspective of sociology and even anthropology.
Today, when watches and mobile phones are so popular, cat eyes occasionally play a role in characterizing time. I read a passage from the BBS of the campus network: a crush arrived late in class, and in a hurry, claimed to be looking at the time in the eyes of the stray cat in Yanyuan, resulting in an error of half an hour. After reading the passage, the lame cat of childhood once again appeared in his mind, and the thin pupils were like a line, so clear.
03 The Bund Customs Clock by modern poets
The first time I went to Shanghai, after getting off the train, I went straight to the Bund, and the first thing I saw was the big clock on the Bell Tower of the Bund Customs.
My interest in customs clocks comes from my literary memory. Reading Chinese modernist poems in the 1930s, I found that many poems wrote about the imagery of the "customs clock" in Greater Shanghai. The customs clock became the most vivid symbol of urban modernity in the 1930s, just as the new Chinese literature praised the new capital of the republic and often wrote that the square bell of "Dongfang Hong" was played at the beijing station every hour.
Customs clock
Completed in December 1927, the Shanghai Customs Bell Tower was once the tallest landmark building on the Bund in Shanghai. The customs clock on the bell tower ranks first in Asia and third in the world, after Big Ben, the bell tower in London, England, and the bell tower clock in Moscow, Russia. The Customs Clock on the Bund is from the same factory as Big Ben on top of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Square, London, and is identical in structure. More famous is, of course, this Big Ben in London. The word "Big Ben" all got into the Chinese input method in the computer. Even the Chinese women's volleyball team members who first got the ticket to the 2012 London Olympic Games were excitedly interviewed: We are going to take a picture with Big Ben. Movies set in London are even more inevitable to have Big Ben scenes. The most thrilling aspect of the British film "Thirty-Nine Steps" is that the male protagonist played by Robert Powell hangs on The five-meter-long minute hand of Big Ben to prevent the time bomb from exploding. I still remember watching the 1978 remake in middle school when I was shocked to see such a big clock in the world.
Big Ben
The modern British writer Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway begins with Big Ben's sound: "Listen! The bell rumbled. The beginning is the forecast, the tone is pleasant; then the time is announced, and the accuracy is absolute; the heavy sound waves fade away in the air. "Listening to the chimes of this bell, built in 1859, in London has become an integral part of everyday life for Londoners. For Chinese modernist poets, the Customs Bell on the Bund is closely linked to the modern temporal and urban experience in literature. For example, Chen Jiangfan's "Customs Bell": "When the sun climbs across the meridian, / The customs clock is tired of all people; / Its long voice spews into the air, / And the small steamboat entering the port beats for it." Today's urban white-collar workers should easily understand the "tiredness" of the customs clock. The customs clock is not only a representative scene of the city, but also plays a certain inner rhythm of the city, which visualizes and rhythmizes the invisible and traceless time into a tangible thing that seems to be able to be caught. In Xu Chi's pen, the customs clock has become a "full moon of the metropolis" that will never be broken:
It's written in Roman characters
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII
Represents the twelve stars;
Circle the gears.
The full moon of the night, the three-dimensional plane of the machine.
The full moon pasted on the tower of the skyscraper.
Another skyscraper looks down on the full moon of the metropolis.
Short needles like people,
Long needle-like shadow,
Occasionally or at a glance at the surface of the full moon.
Knowing the philosophy of the floating of the full moon of the city,
Knowing the moments,
The bright moon and the lamp and the clock are combined.
——Xu Chi, "The Full Moon of the Metropolis"
The poet likens the customs clock to "the full moon pasted on the tower of the skyscraper", and this "full moon of night and night, the three-dimensional flat piece" makes abstract time concrete and perceptible. At the same time, the customs clock has established a connection between time, vision and space, which is a composite urban landscape of "bright moon and lamp and clock". Time and space are unified on the customs clock.
The customs clock is also a miracle of modern civilization in the eyes of some poets, such as Liu Zhendian's "Table", which writes that the customs clock "Iron Hand on the Dumb String of the Universe / Pops Up a Soundless Sound". Time is originally silent, but the hands of the customs clock are like iron hands, making sounds about time for the universe. Liu Zhendian also expressed his surprise at the customs clock, saying that this surprise "thinks that our distant ancestors have never dreamed of it, / The silence time will emit sounds, language, / and it is also possible to distinguish its footprints." But the poets probably did not expect that once human beings created time with sound and dynamic sensation in the empty universe, so that time left a distinguishable "footprint", this mechanical rhythm would automatically tick without relying on human will, and would eventually be alienated into a mechanical order and iron law of human beings.
Watching Chaplin's film "Modern Times" that year, the most impressive thing was the superimposed lens of Chaplin's workers quickly operating hands on the machine tool and the hands of the clock, metaphorically referring to the advent of a large industrial mechanical age. White-collar workers who clock in every day should be more likely to understand this mechanical temporal order. This is called modern time. The Mexican poet Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, believes that it is precisely this modern time that has made us wanderers, endlessly expelled from ourselves. Time means turmoil and drift, it means the root cause of all instability. This sense of instability arises at the same time as the word "modern", or it is "modern" that makes the consciousness of time unprecedentedly strengthened. Therefore, Western philosophers say that "there is time" is the horizon of modern people. And the hands of the customs clock, the iron hand of time, are the figurative representations of modernity and urban experience.
Stills from Modern Times
The sense of instability brought about by the mechanical time of customs clocks has long been fully experienced and conveyed by poets in the 1930s. For example, Xin Di's description of the Bund Customs Clock in the poem "Contrast":
The pointer of the Roman characters has never stood still
Spiral spinning is not a rigid reincarnation
The street that sold the night newspaper last night
The rested motor still has to break the morning coolness
On the springboard of time
The soul trembled
Why does the soul shudder? Of course it was made up of mechanical time. Because the urban time symbolized by the customs clock is "never static", unlike the pre-modern vernacular time that gives people a sense of tranquility like stopping water, but brings people a sense of trembling. The trembling of the soul here is quite revealing, indicating that time and space outside human beings do not exist, and that time and space exist only in human feelings.
The first time I paid homage to the Bund customs bell was in the late 1980s, and every time I went to Shanghai, I could find some new landmark buildings straight into the sky, especially the high-rise buildings rising from the ground in Pudong, every time I looked across the river from the Bund, it was like a mirage. Compared with the 1930s, the customs clock on the Bund seems to be less majestic and eye-catching. But it is true that only this customs bell, which has gone through vicissitudes, engraves the passage of time in Shanghai for more than half a century, reflects a rich and complex urban picture, and seals the anxieties and dreams that modern Chinese have had.
This article is excerpted from
The Fate of Literature
Author: Wu Xiaodong
Publisher: Guangdong People's Publishing House
Publication year: 2014-4
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