【Chasing Light Literary Giants: Commemorating the 120th Anniversary of Xia Yan's Birth】
Author: Li Daoxin (Vice Dean of School of Arts, Peking University, Distinguished Professor of "Yangtze River Scholar")
From the beginning of the 1930s to the present, when people evaluate and discuss Xia Yan's literary and artistic creations and their personality characteristics, they tend to associate them with keywords such as "realism", "refinement", "dilution" and "eternity". Just as in July 1943, Ye Shengtao wrote a poem for Xia Yan's drama "Fascist Bacteria" in Chengdu after it was well received by all walks of life: "Xia Yan's literary style is simple and clean, and chinese opera is well-known. Happy to hear that today's two difficulties are combined, and see the glorious moving Jincheng. "I have to say that simplicity and qingfen are not only the artistic style of Xia Yan's famous work "Fascist Bacteria", but also the consistent and beautiful experience brought to readers and audiences by a large number of popular chapters left by Xia Yan's various creative practices for more than 60 years.
Xia Yan
Spans media forms such as text expression, stage performance, and screen screening
The historical situation of the modern world and modern China, especially the development trend of "left-wing" culture and revolutionary literature and art since the "May Fourth" new cultural movement, coupled with the integration of Chinese and foreign intellectuals and the literary and artistic endowments of nature and purity and inner vitality, not only prompted Lu Xun, Guo Moruo and other outstanding ideological enlighteners to abandon their "scientific" ambitions to embark on the road of soul salvation, but also laid the foundation for Xia Yan in his young age to "abandon work and follow literature" and become one of the pioneers and organizers of China's "left-wing" cultural movement. Since then, Xia Yan's cross-media writing with diverse genres, rich themes and free transformation has brought great success.
According to incomplete statistics, throughout the twentieth century, in more than sixty years of revolutionary career and writing practice, Xia Yan occasionally dabbled in or meticulously wrote a variety of genres and themes, including investigation reports, translations, reviews of current affairs, film scripts (original or adapted), drama scripts (original or adapted), reportage, short and medium stories, poems, radio short plays, news interviews, feature editorials, newspaper supplements, essays, lecture notes, oral histories, memoirs, and the theory of film, drama, and literature. He has published or published far-reaching works in the field of criticism, freely traveling between creation and theory and criticism, and running between originality, translation and adaptation, and its carrier spans a variety of different media forms such as text expression, stage performance, radio transmission, screen screening and so on. Although in the history of modern culture, there are also many intellectuals who intentionally or unintentionally devote themselves to this rich and diverse cross-media writing, it is rare for Xia Yan to have such a broad, in-depth and significant achievement in writing practice.
It is particularly noteworthy that Xia Yan's cross-media writing always responds to the needs of the times and reality, and is developed and gradually completed in his social activities and revolutionary practice. In this process, Xia Yan always benefits from many teachers, works diligently, and works silently, and integrates his unique social experience, personality characteristics and spiritual temperament into different genres, themes and media, forming a simple and clean personality and style. During the "Zuolian" period, Xia Yan was deeply influenced by Qu Qiubai to change and rewrite the seemingly ordinary news reports in the newspapers into a literary and artistic work with ideological significance and artistic appeal, and in this way freely switched between the news style and the literary language. Tian Han also clearly stated in the "Preface to the Chronicle of Sorrowful City" that Xia Yan's cultivation as a journalist is also very helpful to the playwright; in his opinion, if there is no sensitivity of the times and familiarity and insight into social events, Xia Yan may not be able to write excellent modern dramas such as "One Year", "Heart Defense", and "Sorrowful City Record", and at the same time, Xia Yan's time theories or scripts make people feel "consistently and sincerely worried about the times".
Because of this, Xia Yan will constantly change his professional identity and try to write across media according to the situation and needs, at least in the fields of reportage ("Bonded Worker"), drama script ("Under the Roof of Shanghai", "Fascist Bacteria"),and film script ("Spring Silkworm", "Blessing", "Lin JiaPuzi"), film theory criticism ("Several Problems in Writing Film Scripts"), and has achieved outstanding achievements, which also represents the highest level of Chinese literary and artistic theory creation in Xia Yan's era.
Xia Yan (center) with Ba Jin (left) and Bing Xin. Profile picture
Explore the different characteristics of reportage, stage performances, and screen screenings
Xia Yan's great achievements in the field of cross-media writing not only depend on his extraordinary diligence and talent, but also on his grasp of unique media characteristics.
In fact, although the writing of reportage, drama scripts, film scripts, or even film theory criticism is ostensibly a grasp of words or literary expressions, he understands better than anyone that the real audience of these different genres of writing is not "readers" in the general sense, but readers, listeners and audiences who want to obtain different perceptions and inspirations through various media.
Due to specific historical reasons, as well as his important position in the modern literary and dramatic film movement, when Xia Yan entered the creation of reportage, drama script and film script, he basically had a relatively direct dialogue relationship with the corresponding social groups, stages and theaters. Therefore, the "literary nature" of written writing is always intertwined with the "publicity" of social concern, the "drama" of stage performances and the "cinematography" of screen screening. Because of this, this unique cross-media writing must be based on accurately grasping the media characteristics of reportage, stage performances and screen screenings, that is, "writing for society", "writing for the stage" and "writing for the screen".
Just for "writing for the screen". Film is an imported art form, and when xia Yan's "party film group" was ordered to enter the Shanghai Star Film Company as a screenwriter and write film reviews, he himself should not have experienced the characteristics of film as a medium different from literature. However, the major achievements of China's "left-wing" film movement are also inseparable from xia Yan and others' conceptual identification with the medium characteristics of film as a new audio-visual carrier, and their extraordinary efforts to observe, learn, and analyze frame by frame in the cinema. Because he truly understood the different characteristics of the film's narrative, picture, editing, rhythm, genre, etc. from literature and drama, Xia Yan was able to win the trust of film directors and production companies relatively smoothly, and led the trend of the times and created a classic of film history with a number of excellent plays such as "Wild Current" and "Spring Silkworm". Until 1958, in the theory of "collecting the great achievements" of film drama in "Several Problems in Writing Film Scripts", Xia Yan still regarded film plays as a special "business" and a special "learning" that had its own special laws and was different from drama and literature.
It is precisely because of the special laws and media characteristics of film dramas themselves that Xia Yan's "Blessings" and "Lin JiaPuzi", adapted from the novels of Lu Xun and Mao Dun, will conquer audiences at home and abroad with its highly cinematic viewing experience and screen charm, and become a simple and timeless model work in the history of film.
Profile picture of the film "Lin Jia Puzi" in which Xia Yan wrote the screenplay
Looking forward to the creators and actors "a little more real life in the play, a little less drama in the real life"
From beginning to end, Xia Yan has taken his dual mission of revolution and literature and art in his heart and shouldered it. What is even more precious is that Xia Yan did not easily detract the aesthetic function of literary and artistic creation because of his revolutionary cause, or set aside its spiritual appeal that directly hits the human soul. On the contrary, a kind of revolutionary affinity and intellectual bookish atmosphere always lingered between Xia Yan's words and lines, and in the simple and clean style of writing, showing the clear trajectory and charming charm of more and more profound realism.
Xia Yan's realistic pursuit is not only related to his "engineering" experience in his youth, but also to his social mission as a professional revolutionary; similarly, the pursuit of realism is not only a broad road for the May Fourth Movement to forge ahead for modern literature, but also inseparable from Xia Yan's personal disposition of being good at facing reality, always paying attention to the people, and loving the world.
In an article, Wu Zuguang once pointed out that reading Xia Yan's works, whether it is a script, a prose, or a political sketch, will remind people of the "conciseness" and "timelessness" of the famous Russian writer Chekhov; even in appearance, Xia Yan and Chekhov hold a cane, hold a pipe, and "quietly observe the world", there is also a similarity - "quietly observing the world", which is the realism characteristic of Xia Yan's creation. The silkworm breeding and rural life links in the almost documentary section of the film script "Spring Silkworm", the film script "Pressing The Old Money", the drama script "A Corner of the Metropolis" and "Under the Eaves of Shanghai" in the colorful metropolis and its sentient beings, and even the "character personality depicted as realistically as possible" in the large-scale historical drama "Sai Jinhua" have all made important contributions to the development of Chinese realist films and dramas. The play "One Year" has also been called "calm and promising realism" by literary historians.
Of course, in the "quiet observation" of the world, Xia Yan embodies the calmness of facing reality and the kindness of paying attention to the commoners, but he also emphasizes more "enthusiastic" and "fertile" to go deep into life and explore the "inner outpouring" of the characters and their "spiritual world", requiring the creators and actors to "have more real life in the play, and less drama in the real life". Respect the inevitability and rationality of facts, the environment and the words and deeds of the characters from the inside out, grasp the accurate sense of proportion according to the original state of reality and human nature, and neither do useless shouts nor malicious concealment. This kind of creative practice and literary and artistic concept, which is soaked with the spirit of Marxist humanitarianism, can not only appreciate its style in "Blessings" and "Lin JiaPuzi", but also give endless inspiration and inspiration to those who come after.
Indeed, Xia Yan's simple and clean literary style complements and complements his successful cross-media writing, unique grasp of media characteristics and profound realism pursuit, and has made outstanding contributions to the chinese culture and art of the twentieth century, pioneering and innovating, and has left a valuable cultural and artistic legacy for future generations.
Guangming Daily (2020.09.16. 14th edition)