Liu Zhenyun's new work is called "One Day and Three Autumns", listening to the title of the book, I can't help but think of his work "A Place of Chicken Feathers" thirty years ago, Xiaolin's classic dream: "Dreaming of sleeping, covered with a pile of chicken feathers on the top, and covered with the dander that many people have dropped, soft and comfortable, living like a day." "Chicken feathers have flown for thirty years, is it the little Liu who is like a day in the year to become an old Liu in a day and three autumns?"
"One Day, Three Autumns", by Liu Zhenyun, Edition: Huacheng Publishing House, July 2021
After reading it in one day, I also sighed three autumns. The novel originates from the painting of the sixth uncle, who painted the physical and human feelings of Yanjin before he died, but unfortunately no one appreciates it, only the "I" who wrote the novel can say. After the death of the sixth uncle, the painting also disappeared, and "I" used words to connect the paintings of the sixth uncle by impression and imagination to form this novel. If Uncle Six's paintings are like "Qingming on the River", then the story of "I" is like the oil painting of the surreal painter Chagall, all of which are real people, without wings, but can soar into the air, especially like a dream.
The story begins with the legend of Hua Erniang. Hua Erniang is a woman who has lived for more than three thousand years without getting old, and has been looking for jokes in the dreams of Yanjin people, and Yanjin people must prepare jokes before going to bed to prevent Hua Erniang from falling asleep. The joke is funny, and you can get the tomatoes that the second lady rewards; it is not funny, and your life is gone in the dream. "I" brought the second lady from three thousand years ago to the present world, and I became invisible in the novel. Cherry, Chen Changjie, Li Yansheng, Lao Dong, Chen Mingliang, Ma Xiaomeng, Sun Erwu... In the middle of half a century, two generations of Yanjin people have all appeared. They sang operas, fortune tellers, drove trains, stewed pig's trotters, and some of them left their hometowns to settle down in Wuhan and Xi'an, and from the moment they left, their hometown has become a place that cannot be returned.
If the story is limited to this, it is another "Ten Thousand Sentences in One Sentence" that is rooted in the earth. "One Day, Three Autumns" opens a stroke, in addition to writing about the past of the world, there are also stories of gods, ghosts and animals. Hua ErNiang is a god, she has been looking forward to reuniting with Hua ErLang for more than three thousand years, from "WangLang" to "Forgetting Lang", drinking jokes every day and living, but also for the mysterious person who has been attached to herself for more than three thousand years. Cherry is a human, because a leek and her husband Chen Changjie stumbled and then hanged into a ghost, the soul was once attached to the white lady she once played in the Yu opera stills, and then borrowed Li Yansheng's body to find the uprooted husband Chen Changjie and son Chen Mingliang, and finally crossed back to the Song Dynasty. The little yellow skin, Sun Ershou, the middle-aged monkey, and the cat who was punished by the grandmother of the mountain god to become a cattle cultivator are all animals, but they are extremely humane, they do not ask for jokes, as if they are specially designed to earn people a bunch of tears. Fortune teller Dong can use "live broadcast" to let people talk to ghosts, he is blind, but he can touch the bones and know people's past lives. Old Dong has touched his bones and touched his heart for decades, and the thousands of Yanjin people he touched were all animals in his previous life, only Guo Baochen was a prime minister in his previous life, but in this life he swept the streets in the human world; his son had settled in Britain, but the prime minister in the previous life could not go to England to visit his relatives in the present life when he was senile and demented...
Outside the painting, outside the play, outside the dream, the ghost world of the gods, the hometown, and the historical present, these six contradictions are torn apart in the big whirlpool of humor, which is more surreal than Chagall's oil painting, and the novel becomes a hexahedral Rubik's cube.
In classic literary works, people and ghosts are separated by yin and yang, and they meet in dreams, and many love affairs have not yet been resolved. For example, "Peony Pavilion" cloud: "The living can die, and the dead can live." Those who are born and cannot be with death, and those who die and cannot be resurrected, are not the most emotional. In "One Day, Three Autumns", the special way for people and ghosts lies in the rise and fall of the idea of "interesting" or "boring". The humor of the Yanjin people is because of the risk of life, the joke is not strong, and the person becomes a ghost. Cherry hanging is really because the marriage of three years of life is not energetic, dream of meeting the second lady naturally can not tell funny jokes, do not wait for the second lady to move, hanged himself first. And to be reincarnated as a human being, it is not difficult, Yan Luo has a new policy, save up fifty one-sentence jokes can be. There is really nothing that a joke cannot solve; if there is, fifty sentences.
Liu Zhenyun. Image source: IC photo
Could it be that in Liu Zhenyun's view, a sentence of 10,000 sentences has changed from a "saying" to a "joke"? Both bright biological fathers and adoptive fathers have said that they have failed to live and have made themselves a joke. It can be seen that this joke is not the meaning of Lao Liu's sentence. In "Ten Thousand Sentences in One Sentence", eighteen-year-old Yang Baishun sighed between killing and not killing: "Things in the world cannot withstand scrutiny, and once they are scrutinized, everything hides grievances." In "I Am Not Pan Jinlian", Pan Jinlian found that there is a better way to punish a person than to kill him--to make a big fuss," not to reverse this matter, but to reverse the principle of being upside down in the matter." In "One Day, Three Autumns", Old Liu seemed to be borrowing a bright mouth of nearly half a hundred years old and said: "Living to this age, I remembered many bad things in the past, when the piles were piled up, I felt that things were quite big and could not survive, and now that I think about it, it is all nonsense." "Age has changed, or rather, the way you see the world has changed. Mencius said, "If you can't do anything, ask for yourself." "Outwardly can not find the person who "said", so look inward at themselves, funny, not humorous; the joke should add grievances, add helplessness, add bad heart, add dead and alive, add poor and fallen yellow springs, and laugh out of it, is the humor with texture. The day when you can really ask for yourself, life will also come to the season of cool autumn.
In the novel Rubik's Cube, the author uses the mouth of a guest to reverse the time magic of "one day and three autumns" into spatial magic: "It is better to live here for one day than to live elsewhere for three years." "By extension, that is, the hometown can reach the hometown of three autumns in one day. However, the homeland in the Rubik's Cube is also untouchable. Twenty years ago, I left my hometown brightly because of the terrible rumors in my hometown; when I returned to my hometown twenty years later, I dreamed of Hua Erniang, and because of the jokes I told, I felt that I was forced to be shameless by my hometown, "What is a joke, this is a joke; what is called a hometown, this is called a hometown; I can't help but sigh in my heart, Yanjin, I can't come later." "The hometown forces people to spend three autumns in other places in one day, and there is shame in humor."
The three times the space in the novel leaves home is because of three deaths: Chen Changjie left Yanjin to go to Wuhan because cherry hanged; Chen Liang left Wuhan to return to Yanjin because his grandmother died; and left Yanjin again for Xi'an because his wife Ma Xiaomeng hanged herself - fortunately, Ma Xiaomeng was saved by Bright, but her death was a large "social death" scene. In the face of the death of relatives and friends, the living are not innocent. Regarding the light life of cherry, Chen Changjie's father and son had a long garden conversation many years later, and Bright Fang knew that his father, like himself, thought that he had indirectly killed Cherry; Ma Xiaomeng's friend Xiangxiu hanged himself, and Bright, like Ma Xiaomeng, thought that his refusal to let her come to the house became the last straw that overwhelmed Xiangxiu. The dead die, the living go into exile, and since then the nostalgia has been covered with original sin, and the humor contains tears.
Schopenhauer said, "Every parting is the pain of death." Chandler said in The Long Farewell: "To say goodbye is to die a little." In the name of jokes, Liu Zhenyun gave new life to the "social death" and those in exile; also in the name of the novel, gave the living the possibility of seeing the dead again. Although Guo Baochen and his son had no chance to say goodbye in this life, in Grandma's "Spray Air", Grandma finally saw the back of her father who had died for many years; Lao Dong told his son before his death that one day in the next life, he would see his son again at a train station; Ma Daoba chose the young Bright to save himself after forty years, who was already a lone ghost... At the end of the three autumns, it becomes the early spring.
These surreal settings make the painting reborn outside the painting, reshape in the play, realize in the dream outside the dream, echo the divine world in the ghost world, fade away in the hometown, and resurrect history in the present. It is impossible to restore the six-fold contradictory Rubik's Cube by the power of humor alone, and behind all this humor is an equal amount of compassion.
The author | Zhang Er's aunt
Editor | Zhang Jin
Proofreading | Chen Diyan