The story of "Tiger Descending the Mountain" originated in the spring of 1999, after the steel mill under Zhenhu Mountain was acquired by the coastal special steel mill, a large number of workers on the production line faced restructuring and layoffs. And it just so happened that at this time, there were tigers infested on Zhenhu Mountain, threatening the safety of the factory under the mountain. The furious factory director immediately announced the establishment of a tiger fighting team, and those who dared to sign up to fight tigers in the mountains would not only be paid a lot of wages but also exempted from layoffs. Liu Fengshou, the first furnace worker, led the tiger fighting team he formed to start their adventure with the tiger game in the mountains.
As the plot of the story develops, the tricks of fighting and killing, truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, and human hearts and humanity are visible. The novel as a whole is concise and exquisite, and the superb imagination combined with the fast rhythm of the drum makes the story quite exciting and readable. But these are just the routine operations of fiction. For Li Xiuwen, what is the position of this novel in the writer's creative process, which has been dormant for 20 years, and what intentions and aspirations are hidden from the writer?
Reinventing the pioneer spirit
Although Li Xiuwen is mostly known for his prose in recent years, looking back on the writer's creative process, he first began writing with novels. In the 90s of the last century, Li Xiuwen rewrote classical Chinese stories with a subversive attitude, especially good at excavating the hidden secrets and helplessness in the lives of historical figures from the accidents of secular life, so as to reconstruct the power of historical narrative, which is also quite avant-garde. These works can certainly be seen as echoes of avant-garde literature, but the influence of avant-garde literature on Li Xiuwen is not only in form and technique, but also in the spiritual level, and in particular, the rebellion against the established aesthetic concepts that cannot provide impetus for his writing. At the beginning of the new century, after the launch of the two novels "Tear Mole" and "Bound to Heaven", Li Xiuwen was immersed in the aesthetic imagination of self-creation, but because he could not find a realistic basis to match it, he went to self-doubt, so that he failed to write satisfactory works for a long time, until the successive publication of the essay collections "Mountains and Rivers Robe", "To Jiangdong's Fathers" and "Poems Come to See Me" marked Li Xiuwen's return again. When people marvel at how Li Xiuwen carries such a huge aesthetic energy after his return, they don't know that the "silence" that has lasted for many years is the important moment when he gives birth to his personal aesthetics while walking: placing his own writing in the context of the times and the encounters he encounters, that is, corroborating with our real life, so as to break through the narrow aesthetics of the individual and return to the imagination of the community.
This aesthetic concept has directly influenced Li Xiuwen's literary creation in recent years, especially in the change in his understanding of human beings. If Li Xiuwen's early novels focused on the exploration of the secrets of human nature, then his recent creations obviously have a broader vision. Although most of the protagonists in these works are poor, they are small but not humble, and they are more rejuvenated with the tenacity and dignity of life, which are not accused of abstract human nature, nor are they different from the moral rendering of the bottom, thus abandoning the top-down enlightenment of intellectuals, but seeing them as the general people, as their own Jiangdong fathers, discovering beauty in them, and even absorbing their aesthetic energy. Through the infusion of emotion, the vast swath of the earth truly has beauty in the sense of literature, but in fact it is the beauty of the people themselves. In Li Xiuwen's view, any aesthetic and writing that is detached from context and feelings is unreliable. The strong aesthetic roots of life itself are far more creative and staying than the human imagination.
"The Tiger Descends the Mountain" is certainly Li Xiuwen's return to the writing transfer of the novel, but the focus on people is his constant background: "I can't write about a person with a name and surname that I can meet in my daily life, I am obviously moved by his life, I can clearly feel his ups and downs in that era, but it seems that our aesthetics or our narrative can not always clearly and forcefully present a person we know." Because of this, Li Xiuwen said frankly: "The starting point of "Tiger Descending the Mountain" is to write a person with a name and a surname. Although there are many specific practical factors that contributed to the writer's creation of this novel, the people-centered telling of local Chinese stories still constitutes the original and most powerful source and motivation for "The Tiger Descends the Mountain". Therefore, this novel, which has been accumulated in Li Xiuwen's mind for 20 years, may have been brewing in countless moments when he walked the mountains and rivers, but because he always had suspense and obsession with the writer in his heart, he finally fulfilled this wish.
Tiger metaphor and anthropological propositions
Li Xiuwen's obsession with writing "people with names and surnames" seems to respond to the traditional proposition that "literature is the study of people". In today's context, the meaning of "anthropological propositions" is not to oppose instrumentalism, nor to talk about human nature or class in the abstract, but to be closer to the scholar Qian Gurong's "concrete people and their concrete actions", which are essentially epistemological propositions around human beings themselves. This is just like Ah Q is not only a product of the special period of modern Chinese society, nor can he be regarded as a representative of some backward peasants, but a group born in a specific period but transcending the times and classes, so it also has the common characteristics of ordinary people. However, as pointed out above, unlike Lu Xun's enlightenment stance based on intellectuals, Li Xiuwen's understanding of human beings has its own emotions. This is not only the writer's own literary concept and writing concept, but also inseparable from the dissolution of the enlightenment position in the era of pluralistic values. From this point of view, although Li Xiuwen's "Tiger Descending the Mountain" inherits the tradition of Lu Xun's new literature of criticizing the national character, it no longer has the psychology of "mourning its misfortune and being angry with it", but tries its best to show the result of people rising up and resisting when they encounter difficulties.
In this sense, "Tiger Descending the Mountain" ostensibly tells the story of the game between man and tiger, but it always points to the game of the hearts of the people in the world. Liu Fengshou originally saved himself out of desperation, but after accidentally seeking personal gain, he fell into the quagmire of power and completely lost himself. However, "The Tiger Descends" is not so much about revealing the alienation of power from human nature, but rather about exploring the complexity and contradictions of human nature itself. If it is said that the action of going up the mountain to fight the tiger itself is doomed to be fruitless, then Liu Fengshou's insistence on going up the mountain again and finally becoming a tiger can be regarded as an extreme metaphor for the fake show, but it is not a complete madness, and it still continues the character's own psychology and perspective. "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" is thus divided into two parts: the first half focuses on Liu Fengshou leading the tiger team up the mountain to fight the tiger, and finally returns in vain; the second half writes that Liu Fengshou continued to go up the mountain to look for tigers after being laid off, until the illusion became a tiger, and was in turn pursued by the tiger team. If the first half constitutes the classic proposition of epistemology, then the second half shifts from the epistemological level to a cycle of self-reflection.
This is first reflected in the novel's portrayal of the character of Zhang Hongqi. Unlike Liu Fengshou who was forced to sign up for the Tiger Team, Zhang Hongqi, the deputy team leader, did not need to be laid off, but because of his affair with Liu Fengshou's wife, he was forcibly pulled into the Tiger Team, and even after going up the mountain, he would not give up his desire for power, although he was squeezed out and suppressed by Liu Fengshou and others, but he became more and more frustrated, and after escaping from the cave, he first put on a fake tiger skin to play a tiger and even it was difficult to distinguish between real and false, and then became more and more crazy until he really became a tiger. And it is not so much that Zhang Hongqi has become a tiger without knowing it, but that he has really become a tiger. The setting of the story of Zhang Hongqi turning into a tiger is obviously a satire on the power panderers, and the result of falling into a coma due to the trap of stray, it can be seen as a self-repercussion.
In contrast, Liu Fengshou's process of becoming a tiger is slightly more complicated. In fact, unlike Zhang Hongqi's complete alienation through animal metaphors, Liu Fengshou was forced to go up the mountain again after being laid off, but he no longer had the initial fear of the tiger, but instead hoped that the tiger would appear and kill it, but after looking for the tiger to no avail, his heart changed, first snatching the fake tiger skin, and then becoming a tiger because he failed to take off the tiger skin.
In fact, Liu Fengshou talked to the tiger before he became a tiger, and the first time he went up the mountain, he dreamed of the tiger and said, "We are both poor people." It turned out that the tiger fighting team killed the tiger's mother thirty years ago, and the tiger cub threatened to come back sooner or later to take revenge. After Liu Fengshou enjoyed the privilege of being the captain of the Tiger Fighting Team, the tiger told him that he could only keep his position by removing the trap. After Liu Fengshou became a tiger, he dreamed of himself thirty years ago, "That me is not Liu Fengshou, but the tiger cub who escaped with his life." Although Liu Fengshou and the tiger met in a dream or hallucination, from talking to the tiger to becoming a tiger, it shows that the human and the tiger are not opposites. "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" sets this tiger as a young widow who lost his mother, and establishes a certain relationship with the weak Liu Fengshou and even Wu Song in the opera, and then combines the novel to repeatedly mention the lyrics in "Wu Song Fights the Tiger": "I Wu Song, like a wandering track, has also been made by fish and shrimp." This not only forms a generative relationship between Liu Fengshou and the tiger, but also connects the protagonist with the animal and the narrator in the narrative, suggesting that the "poor man" is not only Liu Fengshou and the tiger, but also the narrator and even the writer himself.
Black Cat Compilation and Painting "Wu Song Fights the Tiger"
A misplaced saga
"The Tiger Descends the Mountain" uses animal metaphors to explore the "proposition of anthropology", which is easily reminiscent of the legendary genre of ancient China. But it is better to say that it inherits the legendary method of exploring the living conditions of people. This makes "The Tiger Descending" legendary not in the story itself, but beyond the spectacle narrative, activating the classical genre and reshaping the way it is written. Li Xiuwen resides the tradition in the modern aesthetic pedigree, actively responds to the new changes of the times and life, gives the characters more aspects, and objectively makes his works have a pioneering spirit. Therefore, "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" continues the stylistic characteristics of classical Chinese legends, and thus gives birth to a more realistic avant-garde.
First of all, the story of "Tiger Descending the Mountain" is set in the wave of layoffs in the 1990s, supplemented by the infestation of tigers under the mountain. Two seemingly unrelated things are related, ostensibly creating conflict through the combination of the two, but in fact the former is the real point. Just like Liu Fengshou said to the tiger: "Going up the mountain is a death, and not going up the mountain is a death, so I'm here." For workers facing layoff, they would rather go up the mountain and be eaten by a tiger than be laid off, which in itself proves that the laid-off "tiger" is far more terrible than the real tiger. However, "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" deals with history with legends, not to trace the origin and secrets of history itself, but to care more about specific people, or to rescue the hostages buried by history. Although "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" is written about history, it goes beyond specific historical events.
Secondly, "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" revolves around how to stimulate the various possibilities of people when Liu Fengshou and other low-level characters encounter difficulties, and presents people's alienation and reflection through the plot of becoming a tiger, but Liu Fengshou has not become as strong as a tiger, and is still weak in nature. The legend of "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" is not to break the relationship between the strength and weakness of humans and animals, but to generate a group configuration from the perspective of people, establish a connection between people, animals and even the narrator, and then re-examine people themselves. Liu Fengshou fought the tiger just for his own survival. However, after Liu Fengshou became a tiger, his wife and son, as well as former members of the tiger fighting team, turned around and suppressed the "tiger" Liu Fengshou. At this time, Liu Fengshou was not only unable to exert the combat effectiveness of the tiger, but was still afraid of the red hard hat that symbolized power as before.
Finally, "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" writes about the resistance of the weak in a legendary way, but it reveals the desolation of the world that is difficult to hide. As Li Xiuwen repeatedly mentioned the influence of opera on himself, he can always find coolness in opera, because "coolness is the background color of the world". But he also pointed out, "If we don't resist and walk away, then we won't find the fun and vitality that we make with our own hands, and if we can't make them with our own hands, we will never be able to see ourselves clearly." "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" affirms the meaning of rebellion, although the result of rebellion may be vain, just like the fate of Liu Fengshou, but the resistance of the weak who are not willing to accept fate itself shows its value. If the first half of "The Tiger Goes Down the Mountain" is still written about Liu Fengshou's struggle to survive in the face of the sudden laid-off crisis, then his actions after becoming a tiger are no longer the initial struggle against the laid-off crisis, or even the rebellion against fate, but in the face of self-maneuvering and resistance, including the protection of his family in danger, and the nostalgia of himself who was also high-spirited.
It may be said that whether it is the treatment of history or characters, the legend of "Tiger Descending the Mountain" has a sense of self-reflection or dislocation: although it has a historical background, it goes beyond specific historical events; "The Tiger Descends the Mountain" is a legendary story similar to Metamorphosis on the surface, but inside it is the maneuvering, rebellion and introspection of the self in the world.
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Pictured: Photo.com
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