Wang Furen, a famous scholar and Lu Xun research expert, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Beijing Normal University in 1984, majoring in modern Chinese literature, becoming the first doctor of literature in New China. He is currently a professor and doctoral supervisor of Beijing Normal University, a tenured professor of Shantou University, a member of the Chinese Writers Association, the president of the Chinese Modern Literature Research Association, and a director of the China Lu Xun Research Association. He is mainly engaged in the study of modern Chinese literature and Lu Xun, and is the author of many collections of essays, such as "A Mirror of China's Anti-feudal Ideological Revolution", "The Night Watch of Chinese Culture-Lu Xun", and "Finger Map of Modern Chinese Culture". On May 2, 2017, Wang Furen passed away in Beijing at the age of 76.
He felt the pulse of the academics and writers of the academy
Author | Wang Furen
Statement | The content of the article is derived from the recommended preface of this book
(a)
Yu Cijiang is the most special one among my doctoral students, and it is also the one that touches me the most. After receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the Institute of Finance, Trade and Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he applied for a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature at the School of Literature of Beijing Normal University and continued his studies under my "tutelage". This is probably a unique thing in contemporary China, and it is also very touching to me, a teacher of the Chinese Department.
In modern Chinese history, the study of Chinese literature was a prominent science, but it was the study of ancient Chinese literature, not the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature; after 1949, Marxism naturally became a prominent study in Chinese mainland, and Mao Zedong Thought gradually came to the forefront of Chinese mainland culture under the banner of Marxism. After the end of the "Cultural Revolution," it became inactive, and economics took its place. After the May Fourth Movement, "culture" changed China, and "new culture" changed China; after 1949, "politics" changed China, and Marxist politics changed China; after the end of the "Cultural Revolution," "economy" changed China, and the market economy changed China, and economics naturally became a prominent science. Therefore, it is really amazing that Yu Cijiang came to study modern and contemporary Chinese literature after obtaining a doctorate in economics, and it is also something that touches me very much as a literary nerd.
I initially suggested that Yu Cijiang do the depiction of economic life in modern Chinese literature, but Yu Cijiang did not accept this topic and decided to take Yang Jiang as the research object on his own. To be honest, this is something I didn't expect. But later, driven by Cijiang's research activities, I gradually got a taste of his topic. Therefore, I should be grateful to Yu Cijiang, because it was his research that led me to rethink Yang Jiang and her literary activities, and to have a closer and more concrete understanding of the value and significance of such a scholar-type writer.
(b)
Since the 90s of the 20th century, because of the popularity of Yu Qiuyu's prose, there has been such a title as "scholar's prose". I don't read much of Yu Qiuyu's prose, but in my impression, I don't classify his prose as a "scholar's prose", because although he used to be a scholar and studied drama theory, his prose has no essential connection with his scholarly career, because what we feel in his prose creation is not his temperament as an academic scholar, but the temperament of a literary writer with a bit of a romantic atmosphere. In my opinion, at the end of the last century, there were mainly the following people who could be called scholars and writers: one was Yang Jiang, whose "Bath" should be a veritable "scholar's novel"; the second was Ji Xianlin, and the third was Fu Lei, Ji Xianlin's "Miscellaneous Memories of the Cowshed" and Fu Lei's "Fu Lei's Family Letters" should be standard scholarly prose; and the fourth was Zheng Min, whose poetry creation in this period probably brought more characteristics of scholarly poetry.
The so-called "scholarly novels", "scholarly essays" and "scholarly poems", I think, should not only be that their authors were or are still scholars, but that their works themselves exude a strong scholarly atmosphere. Their authors have lived in the atmosphere of academic culture for a long time, and have formed their own concepts of the world and life as well as a series of human and personality characteristics related to them through their interactions with a large number of elite intellectuals of the academy around them, and have been engaged in academic research and teaching for a long time. This makes them more accustomed to rational thinking, more accustomed to facing the real world and everything related to themselves rationally, and their personalities are more introverted. This filters out a large number of intuitive and intuitive components in the emotion, making its character more stable and peaceful, neither belonging to the enthusiastic category, nor to the sentimental and pessimistic category, even if it is the expression of their own life bumpy experiences and tragic feelings, there are more of their life thinking. As authors, they will not have any "gaffe" descriptions in their works because of their uncontrollable "love".
In fact, this kind of scholarly literature has always been very influential in the history of modern Chinese literature. In the early days of "new literature", people such as Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo, Zhu Ziqing, etc., were not only famous scholars, but also famous writers. It's just that at that time, the boundary between scholars and writers was not as clear as it was later, so we could not distinctly distinguish between the literature of a class of scholars. After 1949, the boundaries between scholars engaged in academic research and literary writers engaged in writing became more and more apparent. Although academic scholars in Chinese mainland had already felt the difficulties of being a person and writing essays at that time, as a class, it was still like a layer of oil floating on the surface of Chinese society, and it could still be maintained on the face, so the gentle and generous personal temperament that had long been cultivated was still retained. It was only during the "Cultural Revolution" that his status plummeted, and he also experienced the various states of life that he could not appreciate in the status of academic scholars, and had the material for literary creation. However, the so-called "the country is easy to change, but the nature is difficult to change", but at this time the character of an academic scholar has been cultivated, although this life is unprecedented in the past, but after the end of the "Cultural Revolution", when returning to the status of an academic scholar to reflect on this experience, the scholar's reserve and dignity are still not lost. At this time, most of the literary writers who entered the literary creation world were intellectual young people who went to the mountains and countryside during the "Cultural Revolution". These scholars stand on a high ground and look down on the sufferings of life, while those new young writers struggle to climb up in the abyss of life's suffering. Therefore, the works of the former tend to be stable and peaceful on the whole, while the works of the latter are generally restless, and the boundary between scholarly literature and non-scholarly literature is extremely clear.
(c)
After the "Cultural Revolution", relying on the restoration and development of the graduate student enrollment system, I barely became one of the scholars of the academy. However, most of our generation of academic intellectuals came from poor backgrounds, and few were children of scholarly families, and they were constantly "re-educated" by workers, peasants and soldiers before and during the "Cultural Revolution", so they felt alienated and alienated from the reserve and arrogance of our academic predecessors of our grandfathers and grandmothers. At that time, I was mainly engaged in Lu Xun research. Although Lu Xun is also a well-known scholar and professor, he does not belong to the steady and peaceful faction in literary creation. What I like is his hot style of laughing and scolding. Therefore, although I have always admired the academic predecessors such as Ji Xianlin, Fu Lei, Yang Jiang, and Zheng Min, I have paid little attention to their literary works. It wasn't until Yu Cijiang took Yang Jiang's research as the topic of his doctoral dissertation, especially after reading the first draft of his dissertation, that Yang Jiang's image as a scholar and writer came back to life in my mind.
I fell in love with literature when I was in junior high school. Since my father was a "state cadre" and he himself liked to buy books, I asked him for money to buy a few books that I wanted to read, and it was not forbidden. In the beginning, a high school literature-loving "big friend" volunteered to take on the task of choosing books for me. The first book he bought me was "Hans Christian Andersen's Selected Fairy Tales", and I was a little unhappy at the time, thinking that I was a little despised by letting me read Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales" even more because I had already become a "middle school student" and asked me to read Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales", and the second time, he bought me Ostrovsky's "How Steel is Made", and I was even more unhappy, because I had already read it once in elementary school and didn't want to reread a book that I had already read, so the third time, I didn't let him choose it for me. And this time, I bought Fielding's "Joseph Antroux" myself.
Although it is not the same title as the same book that Yang Jiang translated in his own dissertation, in my mind, the name of Fielding, an English novelist, is associated with Yang Jiang. At that time, I was also a long-term subscriber to an academic journal, Literary Studies (the predecessor of Literary Review). Because I read Fielding's "The Biography of Joseph Antru" and was quite interested, Yang Jiang's "Fielding's Theory and Practice in the Novel" published in "Literary Studies" naturally attracted my attention. Her essay had a great impact on me, not only because it gave me an overall understanding of Fielding, the "father of the English novel", but also because it was the first theory of fiction that I came into contact with.
In junior high school, I also bought a Spanish picaresque novel "Little Leper". Probably not a full translation, a thin volume, 32 folios, whether it was translated by Yang Jiang, I don't know, but the understanding of the position of the book "Little Leper" in the history of Spanish literature is also obtained through Yang Jiang's article. Don Quixote, another literary masterpiece of the Spanish Renaissance, probably didn't read until I was in college. And Yang Jiang's "Don Quixote and Don Quixote" published in the Literary Review is the only article I have read so far that studies and introduces this masterpiece of Spanish literature.
Yang Jiang's "Preface to Thackeray's Vanity Fair" published in the Literary Review also left a deep impression on me. In China in the 50s of the 20th century, Thackeray and Dickens were considered to be the two most famous British critical realist writers of the 19th century. I read Dickens's David Copperfield, an abbreviated version in junior high school, and a two-volume translation in college. I read his "Old Curio Shop" when I was in high school. I also bought a copy of his "Hard Times", but I haven't had time to read it all. Thackeray's Vanity Fair I always wanted to read, but I never did. Therefore, my understanding of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is completely obtained from Yang Jiang's preface.
Yang Jiang also introduced and translated the French writer Les Socièges's Gilles Blas. This novel, like Fielding's The Biography of the Great Man Jeannesen Wild, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Rabelais's The Legend of the Giants, is a masterpiece of fiction that I have long wanted to read but have not yet read. But I read another of Lesage's novels, The Lame Devil, and I was extremely impressed. In the 80s of the 20th century, a newspaper asked me to recommend a few books to its readers. I think that most of the masterpieces of Western writers are familiar to readers, so I don't need to recommend them. I recommended a few books that people didn't pay much attention to but found interesting, including Le Sage's The Lame Devil, Mark Twain's Wilson the Fool, and Dostoevsky's The Dual Personality.
The reason why I attach importance to foreign literature is to a greater extent influenced by Lu Xun. His "Must-Read Books for Youth" is the direct reason why I poured my passion for extracurricular reading mainly into Western literature (including Russia, Eastern Europe, and Nordic countries). Therefore, I mainly focus on the romantic and realist literature of the 18th and 19th centuries in the West. Russian literature of the 19th century is the object of my admiration. But despite this, now that I think about it, there is still a small piece of the literary sky in my mind that belongs to Yang Jiang, and Yang Jiang opened it for me with his own hand.
(iv)
This reminds me of the role and significance of academic literary scholars in the development of a nation's literature and literary concepts.
Young people of any nation and any era should obtain their own growth and development through reading, and literary reading accounts for an absolute large proportion of their total reading. This kind of reading, in the initial stage, is often blind, coerced by the reading interest of the social environment at that time, and the object of reading is like a layer of glass covered with smoke, it is vague, it is hazy, it seems to understand and it seems to understand nothing. This kind of reading seems to be free, but in fact it is the least free, and it is hijacked by the reading tendencies of the social environment of the time. When I came to my senses, I felt that I had wasted too much of my life in some meaningless reading, and that the good books that should have been read but were not read would never have a chance to read again. It is precisely because of this that the role and significance of literary scholars, literary studies and literary education in the academy are manifested. The reading of literary scholars in the academy is not only based on their personal interests at that time, not to follow the big way, not to read what others read, but after having a general understanding of the history of literature, they choose those works with more ideological value and literary value to read, and when reading, they not only pay attention to their superficial interests, but pay more attention to appreciating their inner meaning, and examine the object with an attitude of appreciation, research and rational vision. At the same time, it is like polishing the layer of smoke-filled glass that separates us from the work, allowing us to see the value and meaning of the work itself more clearly.
In fact, many literary masterpieces in history, such as Cao Xueqin's "Dream of the Red Chamber", Dante's "Divine Comedy", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Shakespeare's "Hamlet", Goethe's "Faust", Leo Tolstoy's "Resurrection", Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", Kafka's "The Trial", Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and Lu Xun's novels, Prose poems and essays, etc., without the research and introduction of previous scholars, it is impossible for us to directly feel their deep value and meaning just by reading them by ourselves. This prevents our aesthetic ability and aesthetic taste from entering a higher realm. Therefore, in any nation and any historical era, the creation of literary creators is indispensable, and the literary research activities of literary scholars in the academy are also indispensable.
Literary creators rely first of all on their own direct feelings and experiences of real life, and academic literary scholars first rely on their extensive literary knowledge and rational thinking ability established on the basis of intuitive feelings and experiences of literary works. Therefore, scholars of academic literature should think about whatever they want. When a writer writes a literary work, he or she is often satisfied with it, and that is the end of it, without necessarily thinking about its deeper value and meaning, and not necessarily paying attention to how the reader will read, feel, understand, and receive it. This is why Goncharov, the author of Oblomov, said that he himself did not think of the ideological value and significance of his work Oblomov as revealed by Dubrolyubov in his essay "The Character of Oblomov". And an academic scholar, even if he has created a literary work himself, often has to think from the standpoint of a scholar, and often hopes that readers will feel and understand his work in the way he thinks is right.
"Yang Jiang, Walking on the Edge of the Novel"
Author: Yu Cijiang
*Yu Cijiang, B.A. and M.A., Department of Chinese, Peking University, MBA from Thunderbird School of International Management, Ph.D. in Literature, School of Liberal Arts, Beijing Normal University, Ph.D. in Economics, Institute of Finance and Trade, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He enjoys collecting books, reading, writing, editing, and translating. He is currently an independent writer.
I think that when we pay attention to this, we will feel that Yu Cijiang's "Yang Jiang, Walking on the Edge of the Novel" is actually a bit ingenious as a research work. He does not analyze and dissect her literary works mainly with Yang Jiang's own literary thoughts, as we do, nor do he mainly use Yang Jiang's literary works to argue her literary thoughts, but examines her novel creation, novel research and novel translation respectively, and examines her understanding and knowledge of novels from her views on her own novel creation, novel research and novel translation. This finds a red thread that can connect all of Yang Jiang's literary activities. And this red line is precisely the difference between a successful academic literary scholar and ordinary literary writers, and the reason why academic literary scholars are less blind than ordinary literary writers, and have more rational thinking and rational judgment. Their ideological construction is synchronized with their literary practice, and their perceptual experience and their rational thinking are also symbiotic and progressive.
The "Cultural Revolution" and the social changes before it gave the new young writers of the 80s of the 20th century a new life experience, making their works more vivid, but history also deprived them of the opportunity to receive more academic cultural education and edification, so their literary creation has the weakness of extremely unstable and unprovoked changes. They always seem to rise and fall with the changes of the times, writers who started to become popular later become obscure, and writers who started out in obscurity later become popular. Even the same writer is often inconsistent and does not have an internal unified line of thought, and sometimes he is caught in the whirlpool of political struggle, and then he falls into the abyss of economic competition, and it seems that he has never been able to find the rudder to control himself.
Of course, the literature of academic scholars also has its own weaknesses, but their literary works were not very hot then, and they are not much cold now, and the reserve and arrogance of academic scholars still leave their own unity in their thinking and art. In this sense, Yu Cijiang's academic work is worthy of attention, and it also has its brilliance - he has touched the pulse of the scholars and writers of the academy.
Congratulations to Yu Cijiang on the publication of "Yang Jiang, Walking on the Edge of the Novel"!
Source: World Book Publishing Company Beijing