A few days ago, Feng Jicai, a famous contemporary Chinese writer, painter and cultural scholar, walked into Peking University and came to the class of the "Novelists' Lecture Hall", with the title of "Literature Varies from Person to People", combined with his own creative experience and perception, and took a wonderful literature class. Here, I will share the essence of Mr. Feng Jicai's lecture with you.
Lecture transcript
Literature varies from person to person
The topic of "literature varies from person to person" is not complicated, to put it bluntly, because people are different, writers are different, literature is different. My works are definitely different from those written by Li Er, Li Er is different from Mo Yan, and Mo Yan is different from Wang Meng. In terms of human nature, everyone is "this one" as Stanislavsky said, and he is absolutely unique. Because you are the only one, you need face recognition, whose faces cannot be the same, the genetic genes are different, and the fingerprints are not the same. At a deeper level, people's temperament, personality, family environment, and education are different. In addition, it is very important that people's experiences are different. No one else can have exactly the same experience as you, only your experience is your own. And literature is everyone's way of mind, the life of our heart, the pursuit of our heart, the creation of our heart, of course, it is different for everyone.
But when it comes to that, I don't think it's enough. What I just said has an innate nature. Everyone's life experience is actually extremely rich, the key is whether you yourself have discovered yourself, realized that you are different from others, what is different. This "different" is the most noble thing in people, and it is also the most valuable thing in people, and it is more important for literature.
Mr. Feng Jicai gave a lecture
Professor Li Er presided
For me, I must be different from everyone else. I was born in 1942, and from the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression to today's 81 years, the giant ship of our nation's history in the past 81 years, our joys, sorrows, and the history of our historical life and life have all rolled over me. How do I know myself? How is my own literature different from others? I think it's a little different, I painted for 15 years before writing, my first writing was on painting, I went from being an artist and a painter to literature.
I perceive the world differently than a pure writer, and I am particularly sensitive to the vision of images. A piece of color, a piece of light and shadow, a special atmosphere, if it is unique and meaningful, it must make me pay special attention, will firmly remember, and become a part of my novel. So I especially appreciate Chekhov's advice to Gorky in a letter, "Literature is to produce images at once."
Because I entered literature from painting, I had too many artist temperament, and I had an idea from the beginning of writing - to write fiction into a work of art. For example, "The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband" I wrote as a work of art. I value my own methods in writing novels, and I don't pay much attention to other people's methods, other people's methods are most suitable for his novels, and my novels need to be found by myself. Novels need to have a support point, because I came from painting to literature, so I determined from my own nature that the support point of my novel must be on the picture. For example, the love between the hero and heroine, I have to have a painting to express.
For a long time I couldn't write the end of this novel, one day it rained I went out with my lover, I was a big block taller than her, so every time it rained and went out, I put an umbrella, drizzle with umbrellas, walking and walking suddenly I thought, I am a tall woman, she is a short husband. What if I die one day? There is no way, only she opens her own umbrella, and there is no space for me under her umbrella, I feel that this is a desolate, irretrievable, disappearing space, and there is a sadness in it. I suddenly pushed the umbrella to my lover and said go out by yourself, I'll go back to writing the novel because I have an end.
Every writer will unconsciously and naturally write about the life he is most familiar with, the most personal feelings, and the details that touch him the most. This is the writer's instinct. Because I come from a painting background, I especially admire those writers who have artistic feelings, artistic accomplishment, and artistic quality. Like Hugo. He wrote in Les Misérables about an ancient city leaning on a rake at the gate, "May flowers blooming romantically between this rusty red rake teeth", which I think reflects Hugo's cultivation and taste, and he turns the concrete environment into a timeless artistic picture. Another example is Chekhov's "Steppe", he writes about an ancient, desolate, and dilapidated wall, there is a door in the middle of the wall, the wall on this side of the door is crooked inward, the wall on the other side of the door is crooked outward, and this door does not seem to choose which side to go, standing there alone. Very beautiful picture, only a painter has such an eye. Later, when I went to Chekhov's hometown, I knew that Levitan was his sister's painting teacher, and I understood why he had such a good eye, so I admired him very much.
I like the artistic literacy of these classic masters, the richness of their hearts, and their sense of nobility in spiritual creation.
All that I just said is the influence of the artist's instinct on me. But I think there is a higher level that influenced me, which is Romain Rolland's "John Christopher". At the end of the sixties, I read this novel three times in one go. What influenced me about Romain Rolland was that he wrote about musicians, but he didn't just write about music, he wrote novels with musical feelings. So I thought, I must write a book, a painter's book with the feeling of a painter. Only I can write such a book, because I am not writing about a painter from the outside.
The idea for writing this book was first laid down in the eighties, and later it was put down as a cultural heritage salvage. Thanks to letting go, I may write about the various shocks and problems encountered by Chinese culture in the nineties. I have written a lot about the impact of Chinese and Western cultures, especially the confusion brought by the impact of contemporary art and modernity to Chinese artists. There is also the suffering borne by these pure, aesthetic, idealistic people who really work and create for the spirit in the consumer commodity market. Our nation should not fail to pay attention to the sufferings of these people, because they are against the spirit of the nation, and they encounter too many spiritual problems.
If I had continued to write as I had just said, I could have written several novels, including The Artists. I talked with the senior editor of the People's Literature Publishing House, Footprints, and wanted to pull these characters out and write a long story, such as writing about the painter Luo Qian, writing a painter with gray colors, who is flattened by life at the bottom and is unable to become the mainstream of life. I wanted to write about Love, and in the tide of commodities I really met a painter like Love, who was very talented, jumped from a 20-story high-rise building in Guangzhou and fell into a meatloaf, just because he failed in the market.
By the mid-nineties, our country was rapidly urbanizing, industrializing, and marketizing, the commodity economy was highly developed, and high technology made great contributions to the country, and at the same time helped the upgrading of commercial application products, and quickly made the rich make a lot of money. In this big era, I ran around the country, and the word I saw the most was the word "demolition". Crazy! The word "demolition" was blatantly written on those valuable historical buildings, and suddenly we became so arrogant. I now reflect that when I first stood up to defend these ancient cities and these buildings, it was not exactly the position of an intellectual, not exactly the position of Liang Sicheng, but the position of a writer. At that time, with the feelings of a writer, I couldn't help but devote myself to cultural protection, without doing more speculation, I only knew that this matter was bigger than my personal matter. So I began to protect the old city and streets of Tianjin in the nineties, and wrote a large number of articles criticizing the absurdity and ignorance of "cultural stage economic singing".
After 2000, I became the chairman of the Chinese Folk Artists Association, and proposed to investigate all the folk culture of the Chinese nation. On the one hand, rescue, on the other hand, organize people to write archives and do oral histories, this is a huge amount of work. In 2003, when the mainland joined the World Convention for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage, I became the director of the expert committee to assess the list of intangible cultural heritage, and now more than 1,500 items have entered the national intangible cultural heritage list, and a total of 100,000 items are on the four-level government list. By 2011, I had discovered that many of the problems behind the heritage were bigger than the heritage itself, and that was the collapse of villages. The State Council accepted my proposal and began to protect traditional Chinese villages, and in the past 12 years, a total of more than 8,500 traditional villages have been identified.
Two days ago, the French ambassador to China visited me in Tianjin. I said that I am very grateful to France, where many of the methods we did to salvage cultural heritage were learned from three French writers, one Hugo, one Mérimée and one Malraux. They are the first three people in France to do cultural heritage protection, and they are precisely the three literary masters with cultural feelings, not pure scholars. There is an article in the Complete Works of Hugo called "Declaring War on the House Demolitionists," and he wrote it so angrily that it was almost like writing it for me. When I went to France, I learned that in the sixties, when Malraux was Minister of Culture, he conducted a census of all the valuable cultural heritage in France, "from churches to spoons". After the registration, the French said, "Militarily the United States is a superpower, culturally we are a superpower", greatly established national cultural self-confidence, and began to have a cultural heritage day. Later, we recommended the idea of Cultural Heritage Day to the country, which adopted it, and June 10 this year will soon mark the 18th Cultural and Natural Heritage Day on the mainland.
Which inheritor has no successor, what is wrong in which village, the phone is ringing non-stop, do you say I have time to write a novel? In those years, I basically gave up writing novels, occasionally thought about a novel addiction, on the way to rescue, I pulled out the novel I wanted to write in my head, thinking about it all the way very interesting, and came up with a lot of plots. Suddenly, the driver said, "Mr. Feng, we have arrived", and the story was put back in his mind.
And so it wasn't until after 2015, when I got older and it was hard to run around, and when I returned to the study, literature came uninvited. It's looking for me, not me. What was originally written or wanted to be written, it will change itself. For example, "The Stranger of the World", I originally wrote a few articles, and now I have changed the writing of them. Because I have been doing cultural heritage rescue for more than 20 years, when I look at intangible cultural heritage in various places, the most important thing I pay attention to is the regionality of intangible cultural heritage. Historically, the customs, habits, and dialects formed by each village in a closed environment are irreplaceable, and they leave a deep memory of nostalgia, which is its unique cultural wealth. Therefore, when we choose the intangible cultural heritage of this place, we first look at whether it is representative of the place and whether it is a local treasure. By the time I wrote the novel "The Stranger in the World", I also wanted to write about the locality of Tianjin.
Historians have a saying that the historical characteristics of a place are particularly clear in a certain period. For example, the period when the characteristics of Beijingers can be seen most clearly is the late Qing Dynasty and early People's Dynasty, when the old and new social, political, and historical conflicts exist. The characteristics of Shanghainese are most clearly expressed in the twenties and thirties, when Westernization was present. The characteristics of Tianjin people are most clearly reflected in the conflict and change between the two cultural spaces of the concession and the old city. So my "Stranger in the World" not only has to write every story well, but also finally has to write out the people of Tianjin. Tianjin people are different from people in other places, so strong, want face, humor, and usually say funny words. During the epidemic, everywhere was bitter, but Tianjin was full of jokes, I often sent jokes to friends, and one day Jiang Kun sent me a sentence saying "Tianjin's fight against the epidemic is not difficult, there are miscellaneous talks everywhere." Because the pressure on the pier is great, people in this place often use humor to resolve the contradictions of life and ease all kinds of stress.
To write about Tianjin, I don't want to write "Tianjin taste", but to write "Tianjin Jin'er". I also study various methods, such as language. Mr. Lao She writes about Beijing, and the characters speak Beijing dialect as soon as they appear, but his narration language is not Beijing dialect, it is the language of text. I think my narrative language is not in Tianjin dialect, but I have to put the energy of Tianjin on hold. For example, "clay man Zhang counts first in Tianjin's craft road, there is no second, and the third is still 108,000 li behind", this is the way Tianjin people speak. Tianjin people are combative and vindictive, and have their own characteristics, just like each of you has its own characteristics. From a cultural point of view, I think of a very important truth: the culture of a place is its songs, dances, crafts and other things on the surface, and its folklore, beliefs, dialects and so on are seen in depth. But the deepest culture of a place is the collective character, and if the collective character is not lost, its locality is not lost. This is my inspiration from decades of cultural heritage rescue.
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So what do I want to say today? What I want to say is that we must not treat writing fiction as a science. Writing a novel is your life, your life. We need to know our lives, our society, and we cannot run away from it. On the other hand, we need to know ourselves, discover ourselves, find ourselves, and create ourselves on this basis. In this way, we can really go to the road of literature and find the pleasure of creation. (End)