Back business
Li Jieren, the editor-in-chief of the Republic of China newspaper and the translator of French naturalist literature, seems to have been forgotten for nearly a hundred years. It is more accurate to say that he was put in the drawer of naturalistic literature and then forgotten. This naturalistic drawer naturally does not exist, and even the whole furniture attached to it has been cleaned out of the room. The truth is much more thrilling and much more puzzling. In the books of the compilers of the history of literature throughout the ages, Li Jieren was either directly ignored or regarded only as a minor figure. Of course, there are some reversals, such as Cao Juren, Liu Zaifu and others, Liu Zaifu even regards "Backwater Weilan" as the most exquisite and perfect long story in the history of modern novels (in the 1930s and 1940s), but in the entire literary evaluation system, Li Jieren's replay is not very successful, and there is no real sense of proof and imagination. In the past forty years of academic research, Li Jieren has naturally obtained a certain fair understanding, he is regarded as an important writer in the Bashu world or the Sichuan world, and the regionality and period have been emphasized, and it can be said that the real imagination about Li Jieren seems to have not yet appeared. Many issues remain to be resolved. First of all, romanticism has traces of existence in China, realism also has it, symbolism also has it, and even classical literature has traces of existence in China, why did naturalism disappear out of thin air? Second, is it sufficient to name the literature of the Li Jie people after naturalism? Finally, why did Li Jieren "disappear" from literary history?
Lee Jieren
Regarding the forgottenness of Li Jieren, Zhao Yiheng has a comment, which may be used as the beginning of restarting Li Jieren's imagination. "The reason why Li Jieren has been forgotten, and the opposition or criticism of him, cannot be conclusive, I think there is a reason, that is, he does not have a consistent proposition and does not work consistently. The dazzling luster of the trilogy is drowned in the torrent of discourse in the great history, and it can only be changed more and more rigidly. Fortunately, the masterpiece "Backwater Breeze" that the clever hand can't be changed to meet the spirit of the times. This is not only a great fortune for Li Jieren, but also a great fortune for the history of Chinese literature. However, the interaction between Li Jieren and literary history in Zhao Yiheng's words is not what I am more concerned about, and what I pay most attention to is that Zhao Yiheng said that Li Jieren has never been able to implement a certain proposition. From the perspective of Chinese literary history, the proposition is almost the proper meaning, Lu Xun has it, Mo Yan has it, and a novelist who is drowned out of the news should also have it, in addition, the proposition is related to the position, the sense of reality, the attitude, the narrative, and so on. It should be noted that the propositions in the history of modern and contemporary literature are often analogous to the irony of classical literature, and there is no doubt that in the writing of literary history, the former almost replaces the latter, but on a practical level, the former only occupies the gap after the disappearance of the latter. Coming back, by implication, we can hardly imagine a writer who has no claims. In the history of Chinese literature, how can a writer not advocate it? Why did the li jie people alone have no claim?
"Backwater Breeze"
With this question in mind, I found new information. In "On the Literature of Li Jieren", Kaitani wrote, "I feel more and more that his (Li Jieren's) thought is not centripetal, but diffuse. In order to support the diffusion thinking, Kaitani also specifically said that the Chinese nation is not very agile in responding to things, and it will take a long time for this nation to achieve its goals. The inner tradition is so great that it cannot be changed if you want to. Regardless of whether the Li Jie people are related to such national subconscious, and whether the Li Jie people have a diffuse thinking. In terms of specific interpretations, Haigu kuan is obviously further than Zhao Yiheng, and when Zhao Yiheng is still discussing the interaction between Li Jie and literary history, Hai gukuan is already thinking about the relationship between Li Jie and the community imagination. In contrast, Zhao Yiheng's statue is li jieren in the teaching books, and Haigukuan's statue is li jieren in life and history. However, Haigu Kuan undoubtedly echoes Zhao Yiheng's statement. The actual situation is not only that Li Jieren did not advocate, he chose the strategy of no claim, the actual situation is that Li Jieren originally had no proposition, and he did not have a "heart" in his thinking. The heart that Kaitani Kuan speaks of is actually an anchor point, which facilitates the writing of literary books, facilitates influence and exchanges, but it is not really convenient, which transitions to another meaning of the heart, which is a created heart. Li Jieren's mindlessness is precisely a kind of mind, and in some cases, it can even be said to be the only mind.
In a certain narrative, the distinction between the mind and the unconscious constitute a set of balances and contradictions, the mind is like a hedgehog, and the mind is like a fox, and this distinction begins with Achilokos. In Hedgehog and The Fox, Isaiah Berlin explains this in detail, "The man on one side attributes everything to a single central vision, a more or less coherent and well-organized system... The people on the other side pursue many ends, and the ends are often unrelated to each other, even often contradictory, and even if they are related, they belong to the factual level of connection made by some psychological or physical cause, not to moral or aesthetic principles..." In this statement, Li Jieren is a solid fox, who stands in the ranks of Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Balzac. The Lee man was a fox, but the coat color, memory, and eating habits of the Lee man were obviously different from the foxes on Berlin's list, he was an oriental fox, he was cunning enough to never reveal his position, and avoided the conflict of positions in the system, which only Shakespeare could match.
As Kaitani has testified, Li Jieren oscillated with the swing of history, and he canceled his subjective consciousness as much as possible, as well as any possible subjective consciousness. He had no intention of writing about revolution or accomplishing a narrative. In the so-called trilogy, "Backwaters", "Before the Storm", "Big Wave", Li Jieren records the history from 1894 to 1911, the most unique thing about which is that Li Jieren has never declared a certain tendency, or dissected a certain consciousness, or immersed himself in a certain spiritual world as the novels that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. This is not a limitation in the sense of writing, on the contrary, he is very close to a specific result, he uses a lot of propaganda materials, such as the upper edict, the government telex, the power of the minister, and even the constitutionalist notice, the Baolu Comrades' Association leaflet, his role includes the brother in the robe, there are liberated women, gathered all the forces No, but he never spoke, and even suppressed all these traditions.
In other words, Li Jieren only writes about one person, about the person who has been eliminated by the times, about the person who is fighting against the times, and he writes silently and tacitly. Purely from the role of the robe brother, in the historical context, the gun brothers before the Xinhai Revolution were more righteous, and the robed brothers after the Xinhai Revolution were mostly mixed. In Brother Robe: Violence and Order in the Countryside of Western Sichuan in the 1940s, Wang Di put Brother Robe into a social system. The leader of the robe brothers could hold the power of life and death, and arbitrarily sentence and execute the death penalty, which intensified in the 1930s and 1940s. Li Jieren chooses to avoid such mesoscopic spaces, either focusing on the characters in the microscopic space, whose actions and thoughts are delicate and vivid, or focusing on the transmutations in the macroscopic space, such as street scenes, markets, notices, and sometimes it disguises itself into the dialogue of the characters. For example, in "Backwater Breeze", The Crooked Mouth of Gun Ge Luo, Li Jieren rarely mentions the identity of his robe brother, and does not regard him as a Cannon Brother in his words, Luo Crooked Mouth unfolds with the plot, sometimes cunning, sometimes romantic, sometimes righteous, sometimes fragile, and not rigid.
Take an example of a clip of "Backwater Breeze". Here it can be seen that Luo Crooked Mouth is wandering, cautious, and fragile, on the contrary, Deng Shuniang (first married Cai Xingshun, then followed Luo Crooked Mouth, and then relied on Gu Tiancheng), that is, Cai Dajie, but had a unique kind of strength and tenacity: "Luo Crooked Mouth often goes out to do his serious things during the day. As soon as he came back, he swung the opium cigarette plate, and Sister-in-law Cai always naturally wanted to accompany him at the side of the cigarette tray. At first, she sat across from him with a golden baby and laughed, but once she asked Luo Crooked Mouth to teach her to burn cigarette bubbles, but she moved to Luo Crooked Mouth without hesitation, half sitting and half lying down, so that he could reach over his shoulder and grab her hand to teach. Just at this moment, Zhang Zhankui and Tian Changzi slammed open the curtain and came in. Luo Crooked Mouth turned over, five or six inches away from Sister-in-law Cai, and she, but she did nothing, still lying like that to burn her cigarette bubbles, and still cocked her head to talk to them. "This heroic and righteous brother, when he tasted love, instead dodged and dodged, and only when everyone forgave him did he get bold. It is said that the prototype of Luo Crooked Mouth was Kwong Blind, when his son Li Yuancen was robbed by ticket bandits, and Kwong Blind Man painstakingly rescued and dotted around, and Li Yuancen returned safely. Afterwards, Li Jieren sent Li Yuancenbai to Kwong Blind, whose real identity was a spy under Brother Robe and Gendarmerie Commander Tian Boshi.
"The times, especially the era of accumulation and change, are bound to leave a lot of scum when they pass. Some of these scum floats in the upper echelons of society, which can be seen at a glance; some sink to the lower strata of society, and if they are not carefully discovered, they will never be noticed; and some will be draped in a beautiful cloak with the stubborn existence of the great waves of the times..." Zhou Taixuan, an alumnus of the Université de Montpellier of Li Jie, wrote in his preface to "The Good Man's Home", "On that, if it is only appreciative, You can make people feel fresh and dull, feminine, ugly, because they are all real, so they can always feel a kind of beauty... No one can escape the dots of the times, but there is a distinction between whether it is old and floating on the whirlpool and the vortex..." Zhou Taixuan's statement links the seemingly slight character portrayal, or character imagination, with the inner spirit of Li Jieren. Whether it is "Backwater Breeze" or "Big Wave" with the Road Preservation Movement as the core, they all give up the initiative of events, death, revolution, love do not have a specific ups and downs and episodic evolution, these themes, and the dynamic world around them, are quite subtle and open, but there is no clarity in the sense of fact and philosophy.
Selected Translations by Li Jieren
Here we can show that Li Jieren's literary conception is by no means naturalistic, and although he has translated a large number of naturalistic works, including Madame Bovary, Sarangpo, and Little Things, Li Jieren's narrative is actually Chinese and Oriental. However, through some kind of referral, it may be appropriate to call Li Jieren a naturalistic person. His writing style is quite simple, more paraphrasing, more appropriation, more changes, almost the embodiment of media writing in the world of fiction, which to some extent reflects the law of naturalism, but Li Jieren obviously abandons the most important aspect of naturalism, that is, the direct writing of social reality, especially the ardent concern for pathology. Li Jieren's understanding of naturalism is very standard, French naturalism, which is different from the Japanese naturalism that most people in the same period agree with, the French style is grander and easier to manipulate than the Japanese, but it is different from the imagination of most literary scholars in the same period on the progressiveness of literature and emotional claims. Thankfully, Li Jieren supported the late naturalist writer Yusman of the "Meitang" writers' group. He quoted Yusman as saying, "As for the novel, if it has any power, it should be made into two separate parts, such as the life of the soul and the life of the body, and made it develop through resistance and quarrel, and even reconcile." In this way, it should be said that in addition to following the deep path dug by Zola, it is still necessary to draw a path in space... In order to create an ethereal naturalism, which is more self-effacing, more complete, more powerful. As a pre-naturalist and a writer who converted to nothingness, Husman undoubtedly illuminated the literary world of the Li Jie people. And Li Jieren's choice of naturalism explains his fox attributes from another aspect.
This oriental fox, at the age of more than forty years old, took more than twenty days to write "Backwater Breeze", which he did not take advantage of, but took another step closer to the road of the literary master. Later, he became more and more aware that while "Backwater Breeze" became a masterpiece, it also left a literary vacuum. Unfortunately, the later world never filled this vacuum. Li Jieren was forgotten, but rather, the vacuum he left behind led him to a different world. There, the system of power is no longer worth mentioning, laughter and scolding become indifferent, and there are only people and stories that have not been easy for generations. At dusk, you will see such a fox on the side of the road not far away. This is the story of Li Jieren:
"I started writing in 1912, when I was a middle school student. At that time, there was a political party in Sichuan called the Republican Party, which was robbing the achievements of the Xinhai Revolution and was very reactionary. This year, in order to solicit votes from the Consultative Bureau, they held a garden party on the Baoyuan (formerly Shaocheng Park), inviting people to go in to visit, not buying tickets, and entertaining. I remember that where I invited you to eat oranges, there was also a big flag with four big characters written on maintaining the overall situation, which was very far-fetched. At that time, shortly after the revolution, the ruling class did not have enough energy to suppress progressive ideas. A group of progressive intellectuals in Chengdu set up a "Morning Bell Newspaper" to comment on the authorities. I have always been very envious of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, have great hopes for the revolution, like to read "Minbao" and "Shenzhou Daily", and I also know the editors of local newspapers, and everyone can talk about it. The newspaper encouraged me to write articles. I usually love to read Lin Qinnan's novels, and when I read more, I arouse my interest in writing, but I can't find the title and content. When I came across this garden party, the newspaper asked me to go to the interview. I went, very disgusted, so I wrote a novel titled "Garden Party", people and stories are fictional. I wrote about a self-made clever little citizen who had just entered the city, and the two of them went to the garden, criticizing all the way and making jokes all the way. Through a dialogue between two people, to satirize the politics of the time. The novel, which is more than 10,000 words long, was published in installments in the Morning Bell. On the first day of publication, I was very excited, and I wanted to collect some reflections, so I showed it to an acquaintance, who praised me and said that this was an unprecedented work. I ran to the place where the newspaper was hanging on the street again, and saw that there were not many people reading the newspaper, and when I saw that there were seven or eight people, some of whom still looked very appreciative, this gave me the courage to think that the masses had approved. Since then, I have aspired to be a writer, but more than forty years have passed and I still have not succeeded. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang