In 1988, I went to Cangzhou Normal School to study, and at that time I began to come into contact with modern poetry and foreign literature, and I felt that the air was filled with the atmosphere of eagerness to acquire knowledge of the outside world, to improve oneself and to "embrace the world...... I admit that I was initially resistant to this, and it was so different from the literature I understood and recognized, such as my encounter with One Hundred Years of Solitude.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" / picture from "Douyin"
It was already so prominent when I heard about the title, but I couldn't find it "overnight", I couldn't find it in the school library, and none of my classmates around me had it. A few years later, I met Li Wendong, who led me to his bookcase and "stuffed" me with three books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, when I got home, I couldn't wait to open it, and it took me about two or three days to read thirty or forty pages, and then another three or five days, and about seventy pages. I couldn't read it, so many threads, so many characters wrapped me in it, I couldn't find the path and even felt a kind of suffocation. Over the course of a month, I opened it again and again, and with the same "early enthusiasm", I read more than 80 pages at a time. However, I have to say that I was kept out, again and again. If it weren't for its illustrious fame and the "early enthusiasm" I was prepared for, it would have been missed out on forever.
Maybe it's some kind of coincidence. In 1995, Zhengzhou's "Hundred Gardens" organized a short novel pen meeting, and I, who had never published a novel, was unexpectedly invited. I hesitated for a long time, and decided to pretend to be idealistic and knowledgeable, and brought "One Hundred Years of Solitude". The pen meeting was not short, everyone was unfamiliar with me, and when I leaned over to talk to the writers of the short novel, I got a polite indifferent, perfunctory answer. In a meeting of more than 100 people, I suddenly felt very lonely. I couldn't help it, so I hid in my room, opened the "One Hundred Years of Solitude" that I brought, and turned down page by page - this time, I read more than a hundred pages, and suddenly I read better, and I felt like I was suddenly enlightened, and suddenly through the bright light, and that kind of beauty was really exciting. I pressed the excitement hard and decided to start again from the first page: "Years later, when Colonel Aureliano Buendia stood in front of the firing squad, he would recall that distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice."
Image from "Beauty"
Some people went in and out, some people looked for Gao Haitao, and at midnight Gao Haitao returned, and then the snoring sounded...... I was not disturbed in any way, I was alone, immersed in the story and atmosphere of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", feeling the shuttle of events in a distant and shadowy land.
In the room of the old man José walked the soul who had forgotten time, Colonel Aureliano Buendia melted the goldfish he had made, and the pretty girl Reme Tess flew into the sky, "What is written in this manuscript has not been, and will never be repeated, because the family, destined to be alone for a hundred years, will never have a second chance to appear in the world". I read the last sentence at five o'clock in the morning, and I was extremely reluctant to finish it, because reading it would mean some kind of end to this wonderful journey...... I had mixed feelings, I was excited, and the passion and happiness surging in my heart needed to be said quickly, so I deliberately made a loud noise, deliberately coughed in Gao Haitao's ear, deliberately—but he slept so deeply that he refused to wake up. I couldn't help it, so I walked into the corridor and walked back and forth in the corridor over and over again: I hope to meet someone who gets up early, someone who is ready for morning exercises, and I must stop him to talk to him about "One Hundred Years of Solitude", no matter who he is.
If it weren't for the reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Zhengzhou, I would probably have been forever (at least for a long time) blocked by the names of people and storytelling methods that are difficult to remember in foreign literature, unable to see the richness, beauty, and profundity in it, and would have continued on the path of self-righteousness. After reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I feel that this reading experience has made me achieve a certain "leap", and I no longer have the "fear" I had before.
For more than 30 years, I have repeatedly mentioned (especially to my students) the word "aesthetic overflow": aesthetic overflow, which means that when our old aesthetic experience and old concept are faced with a new text, especially a text with a certain "catastrophic" characteristic, it cannot accommodate the "new", it is at a loss, that text and the way it represents is overflowing our aesthetics for us, and the container of our old aesthetics can no longer hold it. In the face of a work that is very different from what I have read before, or even contrary to my old ideas, whether it is literary, philosophical, or sociological, my current approach is to accept it first and then doubt it, and to maintain the necessary patience and the necessary pre-enthusiasm to prepare for the ......
I value the challenge of difficulty, the books that challenge my aesthetic and convince me. I hope that it will take me into a new world, and it is the arrival of this new world that will allow my aesthetic container to continue to expand. I hope that we can open up, continue to open and accept those "landscapes that we have missed", and in the process we will also expand our aesthetic "basic disk" and make it bigger and bigger. I'll take the example of what happened to me when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude: if I give up after a few times when I can't read it, maybe I'm missing out not just on the beauty of the work, but on the much, too much beauty, and the wisdom contained in it.
The picture comes from the Internet
For a long time, I have talked about literature, and I have always used One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example: first, I am too familiar with it, and second, its sophistication, richness, and variety are truly amazing, and it is often very effective to use it as an example.
By about 2012, I was reading Dostoevsky, Miłosz, Kadalay, Steinbeck, Borges, and Pamuk, reading Russell, Socrates, Kant, and Lessing, and by chance I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude again, and this time I was able to master its basic techniques. I told the writer Liu Jiandong that the reading of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" now is very different from reading in the past tense, and I feel that when the total strangeness and amazement are gone, it is no longer so good.
In 2015, I gave a lecture at the People's Liberation Army Academy of Arts and exchanged "One Hundred Years of Solitude" with graduate students, but this time, I was surprised to realize that I had actually missed a lot: I thought I knew about it, but when I reread it, I suddenly found that I had missed too many plots and buried details, and it once again amazed me at its vastness and charm.
Italo Calvino has said in his book "Why Read Classics" that he believes that "a classic is a book that brings about discoveries every time it is reread, "a classic is a book that seems to be revisited even when we read it for the first time", "a classic is a book that never exhausts everything it has to say to its readers" - in every sense of the word, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a classic, and it will never "exhaust" what it wants to say to the reader.
Source: "Literature and Art Daily", "Reading Times" Issue 04, 2024
Author: Li Hao
Editor: Pan Xi
[Disclaimer: This number is the official public welfare account of "National Reading Promotion", and this article is reprinted for the purpose of conveying more information. If there is a source label error or other inaccuracies, please contact us. We will correct it in a timely manner. Thank you]