"'Ballad' reconstructs the foundation of the novel, but also pushes open the door and window of the novel revolution, and in the whole of the current literary creation, it is like the modern pyramid that I.M. Pei erected in the Louvre, the entrance to tradition and the exit of modernity, and everyone who enters and exits from that entrance and exit, love or dislike, must stop there for a while." Throughout the work, the reader is immersed in the slow tone of "folk songs" and reads the memory, reads the history, reads the times, reads the hometown, reads the nostalgia, reads the relationship between the individual and history, and reads the connection between the past and the times. Recently, Lu Xun Literature Prize winner and Yangtze River scholar Wang Yao's debut novel "Folk Songs" was launched by Yilin Publishing House, which triggered heated discussion.
Wang Yao has prepared "Folk Songs" for more than twenty years, using sadness, warmth and desolation, fictional memories, laying out the spiritual history of a teenager's growth, the history of the change and development of a village, and the history of a nation's self-renewal. As a dual identity as a person in the story and a viewer of the story, he mixed comments and lyrical criticisms, and thus fulfilled his long-cherished wish to reconstruct the connection between the individual and history.
"I sat on the dock, the sun like a thin paper pad under my ass." Wang Yao brewed years of hard thinking into the first sentence at the beginning of the novel.
The time is set back to May 1972. The Jiangnan Brigade, which is born of water, the long rain has finally stopped, the taste of wheat fermentation has covered the village, and the dark tide has surged in daily life. At the dockside, the 14-year-old waited for grandpa to learn about historical issues, and the people of the Gangnam Brigade waited for the big ship of the oil drilling team, but life finally ran out of people's expectations and control. The teenager looked left and right at the dockside, wandering between the mansion and the town, and wandering in and out between the intertwined team history and family history. He grows up in running, looks back in growth, looks back, and his memory ferments and grows. The yellow leaves of the old trees of history, the stories and characters that fall into the "Folk Songs" piece by piece, fluttering, spinning, flying.
In fact, before the advent of the novel "Folk Songs", Wang Yao had already navigated between multiple identities: as a scholar, he was a professor at Soochow University and a special professor of the Ministry of Education, jiang scholar, mainly engaged in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, winning the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Chinese Literature Media Award, etc.; as an essayist, he devoted himself to prose creation for decades, published columns in various newspapers and periodicals, published a variety of prose essay collections such as "A Man's Eighties", "Intellectuals on Paper", and "Intellectuals on Paper", and even published "A Man's Eighties", "Intellectuals on Paper" and " Re-reading Wang Zengqi on Issues Related to Contemporary Literature won the Literary Theory Criticism Award of the Seventh Lu Xun Literature Award, and the study of Wang Zengqi's novel prose is pure and pure, so that its words are filled with a diluted and peaceful literary atmosphere.
Wang Yao, who has been preparing for "Folk Songs" for more than twenty years, confessed: "I wrote novels at this age, and some friends described it as 'the old house is on fire'. In fact, when the 'house' is not new or old, I started to write. It's almost a marathon of writing, and it's not so much that I'm trying to do it, but rather that I've been in a difficult situation of writing novels. After two years of writing a few paragraphs, and then stopping, the pause is so long that I even forget the so-called novel that has been written. It became a stranger to me. One day, I suddenly had a long-lost urge to write, and I felt that I should make up my mind to let go of other writing and complete my own 'rotten tail building'. ”
Gengzi came to come, and Wang Yao experienced a feeling of resurrection from the dead. Like many of my friends, the spiritual history of this time may be an important part of your own re-understanding of the world and your own understanding. Therefore, during the few months of the epidemic, he concentrated on creating and completing the work. "Resurrection of yesterday's words, perhaps for the regeneration of today. The moment the fish flew in the water, I seemed to return to the pier in front of the village. I called that river the Unnamed River, and on the north bank of the Unnamed River, there was a teenager wandering around. ”
In the melodious afterglow of "water towns and songs and folk songs", everyone has spent their whole lives trying to rediscover the era of folk song acquisition, which is the origin of memory. Talking about the origin of the creation of "Folk Songs", Wang Yao said: "In some fragments written almost twenty years ago, the characters I wrote have grown up, aged, and passed away, and some of them feel that they are not suitable for survival in my world and automatically leave. Even the offspring of my contemporaries I could barely identify their fathers and grandfathers. I've been with my characters for too long, but I've had familiar oddities with each other. They and I have changed. But no matter how it changed, I saw the teenager's me running among them. Hometown is a seed in my writing, and it is also the soil in which this seed originated. Because there is a hometown, there is a hometown. But this boundary is actually blurred, so blurred that I have no distinct nostalgia, no distinction between the countryside and the city, and even the desire to trace my own growth process. ”
As for the naming of the Ballad, Wang Yao explained: "I can't imagine that I would stay in a city for a few months, just like I would go around in that village. At the end of last year, I was attending a conference in a southern city, and when I was wandering around, I heard the sound of erhu coming from the southeast side of the front intersection. When I was a teenager, my closest instrument was the erhu, and almost all the best music I heard was the erhu. Many people were waiting at the intersection for traffic lights, and after a group of pedestrians walked by, I saw a man sitting on the ground about my age. He was not blind, and his breath made me think he was one of my countrymen. I stood by his side and listened to him pull Legends first. Then he pulled "Jasmine", "Jasmine", which was derived from "Flower Tune". In his melody, I remembered my mother saying that she used to sing jasmine at the Mass Assembly, and she also said that she had a long braid at that time. In addition to lullabies, the folk minor tunes and lyrics I am familiar with are "Jasmine", "Uprooting Reeds" and "Husband and Wife Watching the Lights". At the end of the song, the man got up and went in the opposite direction with me. When I crossed the intersection and turned back, he had already disappeared into the crowd. Amid the hustle and bustle of the city, the melody of "Jasmine" is still in your ears. That dusk I was on my empty road from the docks and remembered the scene on the cross street. Perhaps, my so-called novel should be called "Ballads." And the critic walked around and gave her interpretation of the novel's title", "It should be to tell a cold era through the character and fate, opportunity and action, thoughts and feelings of countless people who were born on the land and grew up on the river... At the same time, because the folk song mainly records the ordinary life of the people, it is also spread through the people, and it can be passed down. ”
The award speech of the 2020 Harvest Literature List also talked about the melodic sense of this memory: "The extraordinary "Folk Song" lasted 20 years, but it focused on the growth of a teenager in just a few years. In the long process of writing, the ups and downs of the story have long been turned into smoke clouds of history, leaving only trivial details and irreparable fragments. "Folk Songs" says too many things and at the same time makes us hear what is not said; there are too many secrets in "Folk Songs", some secrets that will be declassified in reading, and some secrets that will always be secrets and attract us. In addition, the critic and editor-in-chief of Novel Review, Wang Chunlin, also keenly captured this feeling: "Wang Yao's "Folk Songs" is a typical and representative southern writing, like Jin Yucheng's "Blossoms", which is a typical model case of southern writing. ”
In terms of stylistic structure, "Folk Songs" is divided into four volumes and miscellaneous and outer parts, drawing on the internal, miscellaneous and external chapters of Zhuangzi, forming a wonderful and meaningful structure, giving the text a higher extended characteristics and interpretation space. In terms of narrative skills, the multiple perspectives from teenager to middle age, the multiple identity conversions from students to intellectuals, the multi-dimensional narrative attempts from constructing texts to deconstructing texts, presenting a grand and fierce fate of the times with a specific and small history of personal growth, re-exploring the complex relationship with history, and embodying the novel's majestic ambition to fight in small ways.
It is worth mentioning that in order to present the poetic and avant-garde literary character of "Folk Songs", Yilin Publishing House invited Zhou Weiwei, a designer who has won the reputation of "China's Most Beautiful Book", to create the visual effect of the book as a whole. As Wang Yao's "northern Jiangsu" hometown, Zhou Weiwei has an innate affinity for the water town atmosphere laid out in the novel "Folk Songs". The cover is dominated by black and gold, which is far away, and the collision of black and gold colors brings a sense of golden age. The sparkling water of the river, the back of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager stands in the distance, leading us to retrace the long river of memory. The title of "Folk Song" is personally inscribed by the writer Mo Yan, with strong ink color, elegant and solemn, which complements the entire cover design. (Readers' Daily All-Media Reporter He Jian)
Editor: Wang Xin Responsible Editor: Dong Xiaoyue Review: Zhou Hua