Editor's note:
If the subject is the "soul" of a literary work, and the plot is the "bone", then the details are undoubtedly the "flesh and blood" of the work. Whether it is writing about people, painting scenes, objects, or narrative, lyricism, and creating the environment, they are all inseparable from dense and plump and meticulous details. The Russian writer Gorky once regarded creation as "the combination of many small things into a perfect whole, large or small".
A great detail is worth a thousand words. In classic literary works, the characters are often full of emotion in a raise of hands, frowns, and gestures, and their personalities are highlighted in a sigh, a monologue, and a close-up.
Guangming Daily has set up a column entitled "Exploring the Charm and Tension of Details", inviting writers and critics to interpret the charm and function of detailed descriptions, and to seek ways and paths to polish the literary world with tight and expressive details. The Light of Humanity Network has successively reprinted column articles, and today we will reprint the thirteenth article "Good Details, Let Novels Grow Wings", welcome to read and pay attention!
Many years ago, when my daughter was about four years old, I led her to buy children's books, and I saw a nun in a gray monk's robe on the street, and she was amazed, "There really are nuns in the world!" When she was two or three years old, she asked similar questions, such as "Are there really bats in the world?" Within the scope of a child's cognition, there are things that must be seen with one's own eyes to be considered true. Later, I wrote these two details into the first paragraph of the novel "Liberation", because these details are interesting, and they also imply a kind of doubt and curiosity about the world.
The details come from life. About 10 years ago, my wife and daughter and I spent the Spring Festival in our hometown in the countryside and took the green train back to Taiyuan, the provincial capital. Thinking of the large passenger flow during the Spring Festival, I rushed to the train station in advance. I happened to meet my childhood friend and his wife. They were carrying a particularly large suitcase and were going to the provincial capital to catch the temple fair. We chatted for about half an hour, and another fellow villager came to Taiyuan. At this time, the partner said to his wife, "Someone helped me get my suitcase on the train, you can go back." I was surprised and said, "I thought your wife was going to accompany you to Taiyuan, and I could help you get the box, why did you have to keep your wife waiting?" I asked him again, "Do you have seats for your ticket?" If not, you can squeeze in with us, we have three tickets. He said, "If I don't go with you, I won't be able to talk together." ”
At that time, sadness came to me, and I immediately thought of Lu Xun's "Hometown". This partner is a good friend of mine who fought for me, and now the gap is so big. I realized it was a good detail of the novel, took it to heart, and then found a suitable opportunity to write it into the novel "Fold Yourself Up".
There are many similar examples. In Wuxiang County, the old area, I interviewed many people engaged in micro-business, and many of them were middle-aged and elderly people in their fifties and sixties, and the oldest of them was over 70 years old. When we started the interview, the farmers turned on their mobile phones and asked for a live broadcast of the interview. I also learned some very vivid details, such as letting children buy themselves smartphones to learn pinyin, selling millet to Africa, and so on. It is simply impossible to understand these things without going deep into life. In Linxian, I interviewed a post-80s first secretary in the village, she said that the villagers praised her every day with the local umbrella Yangge, I asked her if there were any of these songs in her mobile phone, she said to keep a part, open it for me to listen. Listening to these songs, which are not beautiful but very sincere and passionate, I was instantly blown away. I think that's the detail in the novel. Later, I wrote these details into my works "My Father and My Time" and "The Earth".
Most of the details in good works depict familiar life. Like Lu Xun, he wrote mostly about the life of Shaoxing, the water town, Shen Congwen wrote about the life of the border city of Xiangxi, and Zhang Ailing wrote about the life of Shanghai in the ten-mile foreign field. The grasp of details considers the writer's familiarity with life, and also tests the reader.
How does a writer choose and write details? The American poet Pound once said, "There is only one moral criterion for writing, and that is whether its expression is fundamentally accurate." "I read a lot of novels, and over time, I forget the plot and even the name of the protagonist, but I can remember some of the details clearly. I have often been impressed by the accurate grasp and solid expression of the details of daily life by good writers, who are like torches and do not play tricks, like skilled fishermen, who are a fish with water, smelling fishy, struggling, but already caught.
Many people like to use a lot of adjectives and fancy metaphors to describe the details, which look beautiful and make people feel that the author is talented, but they are flashy, the words are not enough, and there is a sense of powerlessness. There are also people who describe the details that can be seen everywhere in daily life, and we can see them at a glance when we open many magazines, such details are accurate but boring and unfocused. Good writers don't write details like this, the details they describe are often real details, they do exist in life, and they can move you. Ordinary writers can't capture them, because they're too ordinary, too ordinary, not beautiful enough to look at, not touching enough. But it is precisely because of these details that the sense of scene in the novel is stronger, making the reader feel as if everything he writes is real. This kind of detail is the foundation of a good novel, and it gives the novel authenticity.
In my reading experience, it was Tolstoy and Joyce who struck me by describing the most ordinary things, and their accuracy is unmatched by other writers. Reading "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", I have this wonderful feeling. War and Peace is a reflection of major historical events from 1805 to 1820, which are quite old and tell stories that take place in foreign lands, but they do not alienate me in the slightest, but rather allow me to find familiar friends in my life, whose many mannerisms and habits, including attitudes towards life choices, are strikingly similar. Many of the depictions of everyday life in Anna Karenina forced me to connect with my own daily experiences.
In his Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov wrote: "Some elderly Russians speak of Tolstoy's characters at the dinner table as if they were real, and compare them with their friends, and they can see them as clearly as if they were dancing with them or having dinner with them." "In fact, not only elderly Russians, but also young Chinese and many people in the world probably feel this way.
Joyce, an Irish writer, also had this ability. His Ulysses always interrupts the narrative and stops to describe. These descriptions are trivial to every detail of life, but because of their precision, these trivialities do not feel boring, but interesting. For example, when Bloom gets up in the morning to prepare breakfast, he describes seven smells such as roasted lamb's kidney, cooked pig's blood, and pot batter, which make the whole morning vivid and vivid. In particular, he describes that when Bloom's wife gets up, "a stream of heat rises from her half-recumbent body, mixing with the smell of her tea." It makes you feel like you're in Bloom's home, seeing and hearing with your own eyes.
Lu Xun "Hometown" by Feng Zikai
In addition to being accurately written, the details must also be meaningful. Lu Xun's "Hometown" begins with a description of the details of the scene: "Since it was the middle of winter, when we approached my hometown, the weather was cloudy again, the cold wind blew into the cabin, whining, looking out from the tent, under the pale yellow sky, there were several deserted villages near and far, and there was no vitality. My heart couldn't help but feel sad. This depiction of the natural environment exaggerates a bleak atmosphere. According to the research of historical materials and the analysis of novels, "I" returned to my hometown this time to sell my property and find a different kind of life. The increasingly dilapidated state of rural areas in old China and the state of mind of "me" can be glimpsed from these few sentences.
In "Kong Yiji", it is written: "Kong Yiji is the only person who wears a long robe while standing and drinking. He was a tall man, with a pale complexion, often scars between wrinkles, and a raged gray beard. Although it was a long shirt, it was dirty and torn, and it seemed that it had not been mended or washed for more than ten years. With a few strokes, the image of a down-and-out scholar with a ruined family, an embarrassing survival, and a humiliated person who couldn't put down the shelf jumped on the paper, laying the groundwork for Kong Yiji to be beaten, walk with his hands, and then disappear, echoing back and forth.
Lu Xun "Hometown" by Feng Zikai
In Zhang Chu's just-published novel "Cloud Falling Map", there is a short-lived character who is "blind". After she found out that Wan Ying was pregnant, she thought that she had the handle on her, and kept blackmailing her and asking her for something. Zhang Chu used dialect to describe the process of opening his eyes and asking Wan Ying for things, and specifically described the details of opening his eyes and looking for things from Wan Ying's house, which was written very vividly, making this character who did not appear a few times in the novel recognizable and remembered by readers:
Blind is a particular person, and he didn't come empty-handed, so he carried a bundle of tender cabbage and two pieces of brine tofu. Wan Ying didn't say anything, and served her the rest of the chicken first. It's embarrassing to open your eyes: "Sister, it's cold, my stomach hurts after eating, if I don't eat it, it seems that I am picky, hey, why is it so difficult to be a man?" When the two fat chicken feet were gnawed to the point that there was no half star of flesh left, Wan Ying dragged her to the buzzing refrigerator, opened the door, and said, "Take whatever you want." He took off his black-framed glasses and wiped the corners of his eyes and said, "Big sister, you are really good to me, how can you repay you as a sister?" Wan Ying said: "I still have some miscellaneous gadgets, which are rare and you can pick them hard." He opened his eyes and said, "Big sister, don't worry, I'll test this refrigerator first, don't leave valuables behind." Well, I remember there was also a plate of South American ice shrimp. ”
In addition to the details described by a good writer from real life, there is also a kind of imagination that is presented on the basis of life. The content of the trilogy "Our Ancestors" by the Italian writer Calvino is all fake, the knight in "The Knight Who Doesn't Exist" has no body, the baron in "The Baron in the Tree" stays in the tree forever and does not come down, and the viscount in "The Viscount Divided in Half" is beaten in half and survives, half representing good and half evil. Calvino depicts the lives of these three special types of people through imagination, giving people a real feeling and making people think more about the profound meaning contained in the novel. This kind of "truth" is not superficial truth, it is out of the mindset of the masses, out of the scope of ordinary common sense, but it conforms to the deep logic, and in a sense it is more real. Imaginary details on the basis of logic allow the novel to grow wings and reach farther places.
(Source: Guangming Daily, March 27, 2024, page 14; author: Yang Yao, vice chairman of the Shanxi Writers Association; photo source: original article with pictures)