Written by | Simon Wong
Poetic Language: Prose-like fiction
Most readers of "Ballads" agree that this is a novel that is not "story" (or "dramatic"), which is an intuitive experience. Therefore, even if the novel is "spoiled", it will not affect the reader's reading experience too much, after all, "Ballad" is not a text that uses a gripping plot to promote the rhythm of the narrative. Coupled with the first-person narrative perspective of "Folk Songs", some readers feel that this is more like prose, or a memoir with strong personal memories. This reading experience is actually a relatively common feedback. This is the literary character of "Folk Songs", and if you enter the text from this point, you will find its inherent interest and meaning.
"Folk Songs", by Wang Yao, April 2021 edition of Yilin Publishing House.
If we look at the entire history of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, we will find that it is not uncommon for novels like prose like "Folk Songs" to be found. For example, works such as "The Story of the Bamboo Forest", Xiao Hong's "Biography of Hulan River", and Wang Zengqi's "Chronicles of Da Nao" are actually literary classics that rely on plots to "win", but they all have the characteristics of poetic language, and the style of "Folk Songs" is the same. Reading these works is like a boat between green mountains and clear waters, when the warmth of the afternoon flutters in the sun, the gentle mountain wind blows a transparent splash of water, sweeping our hearts. These inner-touch forces, gentle and enduring, go back to the depths of our memories and relate to our spiritual growth.
This kind of growth belongs not only to the individual, but also to the spiritual symptoms of the times. How to view the relevance of personal growth to the times is a key literary proposition. In particular, the "era" of the past has become the history of the present, and when the melodious and continuous memories emerge, how to write them is a great test of the writer's skill. For the special era described in the book, Wang Yao did not adopt the "frontal assault" style of writing, but used aesthetic interest to replace the "appearance" of the turbulent era, which allowed "Folk Song" to maintain a sufficiently personal narrative style.
On the cover of "Folk Songs", it is written: "Everyone has spent their whole life trying to rediscover the era of folk song acquisition, which is the origin of memory." In fact, it is this narrative that traces back to the origin of memory that gives the narrative of "Folk Song" a strong sense of history and scene. The whole work looks at the era image of the countryside in northern Jiangsu from the perspective of Wang Datou (Wang Houping), and the family members and villagers together constitute a group portrait of the local characters of that special era. But the turbulent side of the times has been largely dissipated by poetic language, and the story of gathering and dispersing has been kneaded into the tender heart. From the perspective of reading experience, the reader may not directly feel some common cruel meaning, but it is like listening to a wise middle-aged man, sitting on a lonely boat, telling those distant memories when the sunset has not yet sunk into the water.
Wang Yao once wrote in "The Necessity and Possibility of a New "Novel Revolution"": "When we say that the technology of the novel is mature or even think that technology is no longer a problem, in fact, we have separated technology from the method of understanding and reflecting the world. This is the bias of using technology only as a means and not as a method for a long time, which is one of the reasons why the novel has stagnated in form." As a researcher, this is the unique thinking that Wang Yao offers from the perspective of literary criticism, and when he practices his literary view in "Folk Songs", these forward-looking views are combined with his personal memories to brew this altar of fine wine. For many writers, literary creation is to find their own spiritual coordinates in the passing years, to redeem the beauty of the past through writing, or to make up for the regrets of the past.
Those memories of the past, although belonging to that special era, seem to have few fierce emotions in "Folk Songs", and even those sentimental stories are written with sufficient restraint. It is an unintentional or deliberate sense of alienation that, while moving the narrative deeper into memory, hides the criticality that critics often have. This narrative technique is actually quite clever, while maintaining the aesthetic meaning of the text, but more importantly, it provides a possibility of writing: no matter what kind of memory, nostalgia itself is a valuable act of dialogue with history, and memory is the most important carrier in this dialogue, how to view memory, directly affects the weather and style of the entire work.
As the American scholar Svetlana Boym once wrote in The Future of Nostalgia: "Nostalgia itself has a certain utopian unread, but it no longer points to the future... The past becomes more unpredictable than the future, and nostalgia depends on such strange unpredictable qualities." In fact, this "strange quality" in nostalgia is also reflected in "Folk Songs", which to a certain extent alienates the fierce sense of the contradictions of the times, and makes the style of the whole work pure and sad.
Wang Yao is a writer and critic. He has published a variety of academic monographs, including essay collections such as "One's Eighties" and "Intellectuals on Paper", and has set up prose columns in many media such as "Harvest" and "Zhong Shan".
Fantastic Structure: A multi-voice narrative of history
Unlike the prose culture novels in the first four volumes of The Ballad, the second half of the work also has two parts, "Miscellaneous" and "Outer Parts": including the composition of "I" a student in that special era, and a short story by "my" language teacher. It is very interesting that Wang Yao also made a very detailed "annotation" to the composition of "my" student days - the objectified self, the past self as a "research" object, this wonderful structure not only enhances the sense of history and scene of the novel, but also makes the reader smile, at least I see here, I feel full of interest.
This interest comes from the strong contrast between the two very different styles of content, which creates a certain sense of absurdity. In fact, in the "Miscellaneous Articles", not only the composition written by "I" at that time, but also the proposal, review book, children's song and so on with great characteristics of the times. These contents seem to be very different from the soft and continuous style of writing before them, but they make it easy for readers to face the characteristics of the times. If you look at these texts with great characteristics of the times in isolation from the aesthetic meaning, I am afraid that the reading value is not high, but as the text of the spiritual symptoms of the times, and the metaphor of the times behind the text, its reading value is quite high.
Here, I even feel a certain inertia of Wang Yao's thinking as a literary historian—even in the individual spiritual growth of the characters in the narrative novel, he will not forget to provide historical coordinates. This strong sense of history is common in the pens of some mature writers, and Wang Yao's ability to show this narrative consciousness in his debut novel is probably related to his long-term experience of studying contemporary literary history and attaching great importance to the sense of historical scene. It is the existence of these seemingly "non-literary" contents in "Miscellaneous" and "Outer Parts" that makes the text structure of "Folk Songs" wonderful, and also shows the value of narrative structure to the unique meaning of the work.
Image source: IC photo
The Russian writer Lermontov adopted the perspective of three narrators in "Contemporary Heroes", arranged in three different texts, which together constitute the image of Bi Qiaolin and the charm of this literary classic. Wang Yao's setting of "I" memories in "Folk Songs" and "Miscellaneous" have two different perspectives, which are similar to the structural characteristics of "Contemporary Heroes", but there is still a lot of innovation.
This is first reflected in the high degree of restoration of the sense of historical scene. Readers who have experienced or are familiar with that particular era will not be unfamiliar with the various texts in the Miscellaneous Passages, which and their style have become some kind of symbol. Putting these very live words in "Folk Songs" is actually a supplement to the growth story of "me", or a calm analysis and rational explanation, just like seeing the cultural relics in the glass cabinet in the museum, there is a row of simple text introductions. Although these explanatory texts do not have a charm in front of historical relics, without these seemingly boring "explanations", many onlookers may not really be able to feel the charm of cultural relics. In the face of hard historical memory, "Folk Songs" actually has a similar "operation" - providing some historical "commentary" may make the reader more substitution and sense of scene.
Moreover, the story of Wang Datou (Wang Houping) in "Folk Songs" does not only exist in the melodious and continuous memory, in fact, the rough and naïve "composition" deliberately presented in "Miscellaneous Pieces" actually echoes the story of spiritual growth in the previous article. This may be a kind of narrative consciousness from literary historians, but it constitutes a kind of historical metaphor. There are many novels with growth narratives in history, and there are also many such texts in the "seventeen years of literature" period in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. If we are familiar with the methodology of studying these texts, it is not difficult to see that the growth narrative is not only the growth of the individual characters in the novel, but also often the record of the silhouette of the times.
Therefore, although the story of "Folk Song" seems to belong to the "local knowledge" of northern Jiangsu, its historical meaning does not only exist in northern Jiangsu, but also the changes of the entire era behind the growth of individuals, but "Folk Song" hides the sharp side of the changing times. Looking back at the depths of memory, it is some gentle and even sad story, in the quiet night, they hang above the stars, sometimes shining, sometimes dim.
Editor| Zhang Jin and Li Yongbo
Proofreading | Xue Jingning