Cover news reporter Wang Hui
On October 16, French writer Shen Fuyu brought his new work "Silent Paris" created during the lockdown of France in 2020 to Beijing, and launched a dialogue with Tian Feng, a sociologist and author of "Won't You Return: A Survey of Three And Young People", with the theme of "How the Life Stories of Ordinary People Are Rewritten by the Epidemic". The two talked about what the epidemic has changed us from different perspectives in literature and sociology, and how we can restart our lives.
Shen Fuyu: The opportunity to write a book stemmed from the concern for the fate of ordinary people
In the spring of 2020, the new crown epidemic swept the world, Paris was locked down, and the whole people were grounded. Trapped in his paris apartment, Shen Fuyu decided to record the people and events around him who experienced this special moment. For the past five years, he had been paying attention to and collecting the stories of every ordinary person around him. At the moment, he wanted to record this particular point in time.
Pay attention to the ordinary people around you, this is Shen Fuyu's consistent style. His work "Craftsmen" writes about the countryside that has slowly disappeared in China for a hundred years; "Half Summer River" writes about his childhood neighbors, villagers and friends, and the nostalgia in his memory. In "Silent Paris", Shen Fuyu also focuses his brushstrokes on the ordinary people he knows in Paris, including tramps, janitors, cooks, violinists, painters, farmers, and government officials. They come from different countries and have different professional backgrounds, but they are experiencing lockdowns in Paris together, and they have made different thoughts and choices about life.
In Paris, people from all over the world are condensed. Shen Fuyu wants to stand at this point in time when the epidemic broke out through writing, thinking about what is happening in the world? How will it continue after that?
Tian Feng: Through the life of a small person, the profundity of life is reflected
Sociologist Tian Feng believes that what is told in "Silent Paris" is not a breaking news, but a very profound story. What is remarkable is that this profundity is reflected through the lives of small people, such as the story of Chinese painters in the book.
When the Chinese painter arrived in Paris, he opened a restaurant. But he still has the remaining ideal of being able to paint on the side of the road. But after the outbreak of the epidemic, even this can not be done. This story is empathetic to the helplessness of people when their ideals are shattered.
The author Shen Fuyu also said that when the epidemic struck, everyone's fate had a huge impact on themselves. The story of "I Lived a Beautiful Life" is about the story of a nursing home in France during the epidemic. A grandfather, 99 years old, a pharmacist, lay in a bathtub, played music, took his own medicine, and went to sleep peacefully. He said he had lived a very long life and that the world now had nothing to do with him.
The themes of life and death, beauty and pain, which are directly reflected through individual choices, are enormous and embody the profundity of life.
People have never been so afraid of the same kind, and they are eager for the same kind
"People have never been so afraid of the same kind, and they are eager for the same kind." During the conversation, Shen Fuyu said that when you walk on the street, you must nod and smile at each other when you look at strangers; when you meet people in the elevator, although you don't know, you must say hello. However, during the epidemic period, there is no basic greeting between people, or even avoidance. People hug veneers and shake hands when they meet, and these rituals are blocked by the new crown. Everyone treats others as viruses themselves, and people are starting to fear their kind. But at the same time, because of loneliness and helplessness, people crave the same kind. This forced, sudden loneliness left many people wondering what to do, had a nervous breakdown, and the number of people in French psychiatric hospitals soared.
Tian Feng recalled that once he was riding a bus and inadvertently touched a person next to him, who bounced off like a virus. However, when he returned to the familiar group, he found that there were not many special changes. Our fear of people during the epidemic has a lot to do with our familiarity and unfamiliarity. When we are within an intimate group, what we feel more is mutual help and understanding.
Different writings constitute the history of cultural memory
We need some shared cultural memory, such as this epidemic, and there will be different people writing, and these writings constitute the history of this cultural memory. Shen Fuyu believes that everyone in the world is writing their own story, but in different ways. Writers write with pens, sociologists write with sociological methods, in the form of fieldwork, painters with paintbrushes, and engineers with his programs. A person has a narrative of a story, an imagination, and a yearning for himself, and only then can he be full of strength to live forward. Tell your own story well, and your story will be remembered as history.
Tian Feng was very much in favor of Shen Fuyu's statement. He believes that people's historical logic has undergone a very big shift at the time of this outbreak. Before 2019, we tend to put Western things in front, such as academic research using Western papers as a good benchmark. 2020 is a very important year, after the epidemic, Chinese's memory of history has undergone a benchmark change, and everyone knows that China can do better.
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