Dialogue with Mao Prize winner stuff: Can you explore yourself?

At the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award announced in mid-August, Guangxi writer's "Echoes" is the most familiar to everyone.

Echo has the meaning of repercussion, echo, and also refers to the swirling and stirring of sound.

"Echo"

In the eyes of the East, the heart is the echo of reality, and good and evil love and hate all echo. "Echoes" is the echo of our hearts colliding with the real daily life.

In order to create an echo effect, in the novel, things deliberately arrange odd-numbered chapters to write cases, even-numbered chapters to write about feelings, the plot of one line is ups and downs, and the plot of the other line is almost static, but the characters on both lines are tumbling inside and intertwining with each other to form "echoes".

Ancestral Xiangxi, surname Tian

The ancestor who first knew something came from Xiangxi, about eight or nine years ago.

Listening to the thing to confirm that the ancestor is from Xiangxi, it is the fifth day after the announcement of the new Mao Dun Literature Award. In a pre-interview chat about his award-winning work "Echoes", when talking about his mutual friend Tian Er, he said that more than ten years ago he went to give a lecture in the Shanghai Writers Graduate School, and after the class, he had dinner together, and he told Tian Er that his ancestors were from Mayang, he was Mayang Tian, and Tian Er said that he was also Mayang Tian. Both happened to remember the characters in their families. As soon as the characters said, they knew that the ancestors of the two were the same family, and the Eastern and Western families had been in Guangxi for nine generations.

stuff

"My grandfather's tombstone also says where we are from in Hunan, and our family still has a deep Hunan culture gene."

We talked about this on the phone. After winning the award, various visits and invitations continued, and although we had met once before and had a brief exchange of pleasantries, I was actually very strange to him, even so, he very simply accepted this interview invitation from Hunan. When I asked him what day it was convenient to do a phone interview, he replied on the 16th.

On the 16th, it was another very busy day. He knew I was waiting for him, and between meetings, he discussed with me about the approximate time of the interview and apologized. Although he sent me a text message, I could sense his sincere apology.

By nearly 8:30 p.m., Stuff texted me that he had just finished eating, and on the way home, his wife was driving, and he was convenient to answer the phone. After the call was connected, in order to narrow the psychological distance between us, I specially mentioned Tian Er first and mentioned his ancestral visit to Hunan. In hindsight, in fact, if you don't deliberately close the distance, things won't show the same.

"Things are used to tracing the source of their own writing path." This is one piece of information I searched for while doing my homework before the interview. When he told me that he had deep genes in Hunan culture, I vaguely understood why he traced his writing path to the origins.

Born in 1966 in a Yao ethnic township in Tian'e County, Hechi, Guangxi, Dongxi Province was often taught to read well, although his parents were illiterate. When I was in high school in Tian'e County, I found my own way of expression - writing. He once told the media that his writing journey began with four movie tickets.

"We were in high school, we wrote a review of a movie, and if the cinema put it in the window, we would award four movie tickets, which was the first writing fee I received."

Of course, getting a reward is not his original intention of writing, and those four movie tickets are just stimuli and pushes, giving him the motivation to put what he wants to say into words.

Many years ago, someone asked him why he took the pen name Dongxi, and he replied: "Running east, looking west, smearing east, and making east into west, so the meaning is very broad." ”

Tiandailin, whose real name is Tian Dailin, he settled on this pen name in the spring of 1991. The following year, he made his official literary debut with his novella "Ancestors", which is considered a model of "zero degree writing".

"Feelings are far more complicated than cases"

In the afterword to "Echoes", Dong Dong confessed that nearly 20 years ago, when he wrote his second novel, "Regret", he consciously dug into the hearts of the characters, and when he started writing "Echoes", he "wanted to do it more thoroughly".

On the bright side of "Echo", it is a mystery novel. At the beginning of the novel, a female corpse directly surfaced on the surface of the river, followed by the female police officer Ran Dongdong doing her best to investigate and solve the murder case. The story unfolds along two threads, one is criminal investigation and the other is "intelligence investigation". The two clues alternate, with odd-numbered chapters mainly written as criminal investigation and even-numbered chapters mainly written as "intelligence investigation". The two lines alternate and intertwine with each other, and by the last chapter, the two lines merge, the criminal case is solved, and the protagonist's emotional questions are answered.

In the line of criminal investigation, the victim Xia Bingqing is a young woman with a good family background and education. After graduating from the nursing department of medical university, she worked as a nursing in the department where her mother worked, but neither her profession nor her job was what she liked, and finally, after she threatened to break off the relationship without respecting her choice, she quit. She told her parents that she was going to Beipiao, and made a real appearance in Beipiao, and only went home to her parents every year on major holidays. In the eyes of her parents, she is a successful North Drifter, not only with a monthly salary to send back, but also a variety of gifts. In fact, she did not leave far, she rented in the city, and the owner of a chain hotel chain that paid her monthly rent and "salary" was the one she interviewed. She was originally interviewing the administrator of the Beijing branch of the hotel chain, but after the interview, she was raised by the boss, Xu Shanchuan. They signed a contract that stipulates that Xia Bingqing must not destroy Party A's family.

In the line of "intelligence investigation", when the female police officer Ran Dongdong was investigating the murder of Xia Bingqing, she accidentally found the records of her husband Mu Dafu's two house openings. Mudav, a professor at the university's Faculty of Letters, seems to be close to a woman writer to whom he has written several reviews. Did he open a room with this female writer? Ran wanted to use her professional questioning skills on Mu Dafu, but worried that he would lie because of nervousness. Whether playing cards with a player or simply doing a massage, Mudaf knew that his wife would not believe any answer he said. In order to prove his innocence, he even asked the husband of the female writer to interview Ran Dongdong, and after Ran Dongdong knew that this was a special arrangement by her husband, the doubts in his heart intensified.

Interestingly, at the end of the story, the murderer is captured and voluntarily confesses his guilt, but the vast scenery of the protagonist's inner world is full of new waves.

"Can you decipher yourself?" Before the end of the story, Mudaf's question of Ran Dongdong was extracted into the cover of the book cover of "Echo"; "Don't think that you can solve human nature by solving a few cases, and you can classify and summarize all human feelings." Feelings are far more complicated than cases, just like the mind is far wider than the sky", is taken from another paragraph of Mudaf's question to Ran Dongdong. This is the question and the answer. The editors put them one on the front and one on the back cover, creating an echo-like effect.

"Echoes" records the deep waters of our hearts

Although there have been novels about police officers before, things have not touched reasoning, and psychological knowledge has never been used for novel creation. In 2017, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore hired Dong Dong as the writer-in-residence, who uses his spare time to read and listen to psychology. It is the gradual deepening of the understanding of psychology that strengthens the idea that things write "the abyss of everyday life" with the help of speculative novels.

The abyss of everyday life can come from various aspects: setbacks in the workplace, family problems, broken relationships, and so on. There is an abyss, there is the sound of falling into it, and the reverberations that come from it. The strength of the echo is often related to the depth of the abyss. Obviously, the "Echo" of East and West is an exploration of the abyss of daily life, and this exploration is also an interrogation of the meaning of life and the ethical order.

The psychological and suspenseful reasoning mode adopted by Dong Dong in the novel attracted the special attention of critic Li Jingze. At the book's new book launch, Li Jingze said: "From the narrative shell of suspenseful reasoning, this kind of novel was born in the big cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because with industrialization, cities are getting bigger and bigger, people live in them, surrounded by strange worlds and strange people, so the world has become an object to be reasoned by detectives, and we have become objects that need to be explored." Externally, we seek the truth, and internally, we seek our true selves. ”

Zhang Li, deputy dean of the School of Literature of Beijing Normal University and a professor specializing in contemporary literary criticism, believes that this work writes about the emotional crisis of our time, and records the deep water area of our time and the soul of our society, "There is a lack of security in modern emotional relationships, and we are extremely dependent on emotions and human nature and extremely doubtful, so in this sense, the female policeman Ran Dongdong has special symptoms of the emotions of our times." How to prove self-love? What is true love? If a person needs to constantly affirm oneself through the love of others, is he a strong, free and independent person? This is what the novel inspires us."

The deep waters of the mind, that is, the abyss. Camus once said that survival itself is the most powerful resistance to absurdity. In the same way, survival itself is the most powerful resistance to the abyss. In life, every trace of our thoughts, every gesture, there will be undercurrents, will leave traces and reverberate.

In the novel, although Ran Dongdong solved the case, she is not a likable character. At the end of the novel, she actually converts the study into an interrogation room, saying that she likes to think and recognize back and forth between the questioner and the answerer. Her identity determines that she is the questioner, but she sits down in the chair where the suspect is sitting, it is the person being questioned, and her every answer will be suspected - she once grabbed her husband, dug his psychology layer by layer, from the camouflage layer to the real layer and then to the pain layer, making him almost collapse, and she finally understood that few people's psychology could withstand such deep digging, including herself. Her "finally understood" can be seen as a huge echo of the abyss feedback she heard.

dialogue

"Every novel I write is written as if it were my first novel"

Xiaoxiang Morning News: At the end of "Echo", you wrote about a village called Eri in Yunnan, and Ran Dongdong investigated the case and found this village. One of the suspects, Liu Qing, and his girlfriend rented there, and he also turned himself in there. You write: "Just as nature purifies itself, the village of Eri purifies everyone here. "Is Eri your ideal country to look like?

Stuff: The countryside is a narrative life. That is to say, the countryside is transparent, and the progress of the story is visible to all. There is a kind of oral culture inheritance in the countryside, etiquette, righteousness, benevolence, wisdom, faith, kindness, these are not through words, but through oral transmission, giving Chinese traditional culture this gene, this quality. Word of mouth means that Zhang's patriarch and Li's family are transparent. This is a big class - which child in which family has a presence, everyone comes to congratulate and establish this positive image; Which child makes a mistake, not only the parents will educate, but also the neighbors. This narrative life is the life of a large family. It tends to form a code of conduct.

Why does the countryside have a purification function? Everyone is afraid of trouble, bad things, bad people, everyone has to squeeze it (him) out and squeeze it out. If the countryside is like a city, what is the surname and name next door, and several brothers and sisters in his family do not know, it is a society with a high degree of privacy and privacy, and Liu Qing is hiding there, no one knows. He was hiding in a place he thought was remote and safe, and he never expected that this place was not safe. It's too transparent here.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: A noteworthy phenomenon is that the psychological problems of Ran Dongdong and others in the novel are common in cities, but rarely appear in rural areas, as if some psychological and spiritual diseases seem to only appear in cities.

Stuff: Psychological anxiety is related to the stress of work. We cannot praise the countryside and deny the city. Urban life has high levels of stress, while in the countryside, if you just need to eat enough and there is no higher demand, your stress will be light, time will appear slow, and life will appear leisurely.

Ran Dongdong's occupation in the novel, coupled with her discovery that her husband is suspected of cheating, and the pressure she has formed on her makes her feel anxious, even slightly depressed, which affects her thinking. Of course, her thinking is also related to her knowledge structure, if she is not an intellectual, not an expert in solving cases, she would not think so much. A person's psychology is related to the person's occupation, knowledge structure, work pressure, etc. Therefore, sometimes we say that we want to find the kind of hometown written by Shen Congwen, in fact, it is impossible, we have undergone great changes in the mountain and countryside, and now most of the young people in the countryside live in the city, and they will also bring back the anxiety and pressure in the city.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: When you talk about this, you feel that these anxieties and pressures are an "echo" brought to us by work and life.

Something: What's different about this novel is that it not only reflects these problems, but also uses some psychological knowledge to tell the reader how to overcome them.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: From your afterword, we can see that your study of psychology, psychoanalysis, and reasoning related knowledge is like reading a graduate school, and it takes a lot of effort.

Stuff: Right. Just like I wanted to understand the police solving the case, I also interviewed several criminal police officers, chatted with them, and made friends to avoid reasoning and criminal investigation and do not make common sense mistakes. In the psychological section, I also specially found a few counselors, chatted with them, and asked them to recommend relevant books. If we add knowledge points to the novel, although we cannot reach the professional level of the relevant field, at least do not have hard injuries when writing. Writing is a kind of creation, so in the process of writing, I also coined some nouns, such as "guilty love", "sad moment of morning and dusk line" and the three periods of love, "chewing gum period", "cocktail period" and "airplane mode period". When I absorbed this knowledge, I also proposed some imagination and naming of this field.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: What first inspired you to write a novel like "Echo"?

Stuff: Originally I wanted to write a novel about trust, how we are going to build trust, and now there is so much distrust between us. The most basic cell of trust is the family. Therefore, I want to start with the issue of trust in the family, from the distrust between husband and wife and how to gain trust. But if a long story only writes this, it is still a little thin, and it seems that many people have written about this issue. How to write something new? First, I thought of a case line, this case is also triggered by mistrust, the police were disturbed by the case when solving the case, affecting their own family, and the family's troubles in turn interfered with and even inspired her to solve the case, which has an echo. And in the line of writing about trust between husband and wife, how can it be written differently from other writers? I thought of digging in the psychological direction. So, there is a lot of subconscious in the novel, the dialogue of the characters ends, but their mental activity continues, like WiFi signals, interfering with each other, and this is a little innovation in my writing.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: Because the police officers and victims who solved the case were women, my initial feeling was that you were writing about the survival of urban women.

Stuff: I have a lot of reverence for this policewoman I wrote about. A man - a man faces these problems, and it is difficult to overcome, let alone women. You see that the police who used to write were all about overcoming external difficulties to solve cases, and very few wrote about overcoming internal difficulties. This novel, not only writes about female policemen overcoming external difficulties, but also overcoming internal difficulties, and internal difficulties can be overcome, is a hero who truly deserves our admiration. Sometimes, the person we want to write about, the difficulties he faced, just helped us shape that person.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: I saw that some critics said that they watched "Echo", saw the beginning, and thought "how to write a mystery novel", and after reading it, they understood that reasoning is just a shell. I personally feel that a serious writer, a pioneer writer, he can actually write mystery novels and popular novels.

Stuff: Genre literature can certainly be written. However, I am not satisfied with only writing mystery novels, and I don't want to be tricked by genre novels. Therefore, I want to use its shell to write my pure literary reality, use the shell of speculative fiction to improve the appeal to readers, and at the same time, I do not give up the seriousness, thinking, and innovation of pure literature. So that it will not be tricked in. This is an attempt by me to find a balance between the two novels, and this attempt is like grafting, giving rise to a new breed.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: A true avant-garde writer should not be bound by whether or not it is pure literature.

Stuff: Any kind of slogan and induction and classification is a constraint on the writer. Of course, without denial, they used to be an affirmation of you. What a new generation, avant-garde novels, something like this. I don't like to repeat myself or repeat someone else's writing.

Xiaoxiang Morning News: You said in the afterword, "The writing mentality of the strong will be killed by themselves, and it is easy to make writing simple and rude; The writing mentality of the weak is easy to sink into self, which will make writing hesitant." You say that you have always been the writing mentality of the weak. As a reader, I am curious, you won the first Lu Xun Literature Award more than 20 years ago, why is it still the writing mentality of the weak?

Stuff: I'm also a weak person in my life, and I feel that writing must be done with humility. Writing may give us some strength and self-confidence, but this strength and confidence is also very weak in the face of reality. When writing, we are required to create boldly and bravely, but as writers of writing, we still have to lower our posture, even to the dust. Sometimes we think that upward strength can be gained, but sometimes we root deeper, and we grow taller and more luxuriant. Writing novels is also like this, our mentality is rooted, maybe the work will grow higher and more lush. If we are floating and arrogant, then our work is also not solid. So, I've always written with the mindset of a literature lover. Every novel I write is written as if it were my first novel. I thought that I am a beginner writer, and I submit my manuscripts to be tested and given opinions by editors and readers.