Essayist and poet Zhao Lihong's latest long fairy tale "Moonlight Cricket" beats with a beautiful heartbeat. This heart sound is the sad chant of pure life, free from the invisible fetters of modern life, and it is also the free exploration of the depths of the soul, soothing the wounds in the heart of modern people. This heart sound makes this fairy tale enter an extraordinary journey of exploration: it not only has a new style of long-form fairy tale that is interacted with by philosophical fairy tales, growth fairy tales, insect fairy tales, ecological fairy tales, etc., but also contains the spirit of oriental fairy tales.
"Spirit" in 21st century Chinese fairy tales refers to the inheritance and transformation of their own traditions, the protection of children's sexual spirits, and the awakening of adult spirit through the creation of fairy tales, and then to distinguish with 20th century Chinese fairy tales in the way of inheritance, and to dialogue with Western fairy tales in the way of absorption. "Moonlight Cricket" mobilizes the writer's childhood experience, so that the fairy tale is rooted in the ideas of heaven, earth and man in traditional Chinese culture, adopts the creative methods other than the two main trends of classicism and romanticism, advocates beauty as the truth, and achieves the truth of the fairy tale by writing classical beauty or romantic beauty.
The name of this fairy tale embodies the spirit of "the truth of beauty". "Moonlight Cricket", as the name of this fairy tale, is not very novel in terms of a single image, but when these two images converge, it is full of novelty and deep meaning. The overture of this fairy tale is a wonderful symphonic music under the moonlight, which is not only the origin of the story of the beginning of this fairy tale, but also the plot direction and meaning of the main part of this fairy tale, and the roundabout back and forth of the end of this fairy tale. In this magical concert, all kinds of creatures of nature that modern people have lost for a long time came on the stage one after another, and finally "the stars hold the moon" like two young and handsome crickets - "natural singer" jade top and "invincible cricket" iron head. Jade Ding and Tietou, as the "conjoined" protagonists of this fairy tale, repeatedly sing two lyrics: "I sing in the moonlight, I am the spirit of freedom." According to this, we can still get a glimpse of the lost beautiful life of modern people, and we can also get a glimpse of the original memory of the harmonious coexistence of heaven, earth and man in traditional Chinese culture. It can be seen that this beautiful life is not a life of illusion and beauty, but a real life, that is, "the truth of beauty".
However, what will happen to this pair of "free elves" in a human-centered world? How will this pair of "free elves" deal with it? What will be the final outcome? In the main part, the author uses poetic language and a succession of amazing details and scenes to tell the thrilling process of how Yuding and Tietou went on an adventure and how to escape. Through the telling of the above content, the story world in this fairy tale naturally presents itself as a modern wonderland world of classical and romantic "beauty truth", and at the same time, the "free spirits" such as jade top and iron head in this fairy tale have naturally become the ideal life form of contemporary Chinese "beauty truth".
The main part of this fairy tale is written as "The Truth of Beauty", so that the concert of natural life in the overture is magically reproduced at the end: "The moon is raised, and a thin cloud surrounds the moon. The moonlight shone down through the cracks in the white clouds and poured down on the earth, a long ribbon of silvery-white light, like a gigantic harp. In the field where the moonlight flows, another wonderful concert begins. The cycle of the overture and the epilogue connects the three dimensions of human time—past, present, and future—and reveals the deep meaning of this fairy tale as story time flows with human time: all the encounters of protecting natural life are worth it, if you can sing again in the moonlight like a cricket. The song of the cricket in the moonlight is the song of the original "beauty of nature" of natural life. This fairy tale continues the ideal life form of the Oriental people embodied in the modern poetic literary tradition of China, and expresses the life belief that the Oriental people rely on to place their hearts: in real life, only with beauty can there be truth.
So far, the fairy tale spirit of "beauty and truth" in this fairy tale has crossed the mainstream fairy tale concept of China and the West, and entered the life of Chinese in the 21st century, writing the ideal life of contemporary Chinese in the form of fairy tales for children and adults of different countries and different skin colors - freedom and happiness. It is on the basis of "sympathetic freedom" that the author of this fairy tale can hear the heart of the "free spirit" of crickets: to "live freely" on the field, instead of "two strong fights" and "two losers" in the fighting ring.
"Moonlight Cricket" is Zhao Lihong's sixth full-length work of children's literature. Even with 50 years of creative experience and 10 years of experience in children's literature, Zhao Lihong is still as patient as he was when he first created it, devoting himself to it, controlling the narrative, and describing it elegantly, which can be said to bear the unique emblem of Zhao Lihong's literary works as always. Not only that, "Moonlight Cricket" is rooted in the deep source of its own traditional thought, inheriting the vein of classics, feeling the fortune of the times, solving the worries of modernity, and sharing the feelings of mankind, which can be called a masterpiece that writes the soul of oriental fairy tales.
(Xu Yan, Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Ocean University of China)