Cimborska, Milan Kundera, Llosa, Manea, Trevor, Günte Grass, Roussidi, Rilke, Pamuk, Arandati Loy... They are all writers we are familiar with. As we read them, we can feel the common and very different textual worlds of those expressions.
Today we bring you Husan's review collection "Starting with a Distraction". In his narrative, we can see that these familiar writers begin to show a different aspect than the previous cognition.
Hu Sang's book reviews have both the sensitivity of a poet and the rigor of a scholar, freely shuttling between text and reality, history and imagination, form and value, the text swaying and moving, and leading readers everywhere to contemplate the quiet connection between literature, life and life. This is not just a book review, but also a collection of ideas that explores what literature is.
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"It Started with a Distraction"
By Husan
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
The book involves famous Chinese and foreign contemporary writers such as Cimborska, Milan Kundera, Llosa, Manea, Trevor, Günte Glass, Russidi, Rilke, Pamuk, Arandati Løj and others. In writing, Husan adheres to the method of perusal of Nabokov's "Literary Lectures", goes deep into the texture of the text, reveals the secrets of text writing, and opens up many paths to literary works for readers. Through Husan's interpretation, we can witness in literature a complete spiritual world full of differences and competitions, and ultimately able to reconcile.
Writing begins with a distraction
Text/Husan
So, what is writing, for me? Writing is just writing down the life you've experienced truthfully? Or do you want to reconstruct yourself and change yourself? Or is it another way of living your present life?
Husang is my pen name, pronounced husang, a mulberry variety in my hometown of Huzhou. Behind the family's house grew a vast mulberry forest. I used to roam it all the time.
I started using the pen name in college and wandered away in a foreign land, but I reconciled with my hometown. I don't want to live just in my original name. Pseudonyms are additions and overflows to life. This approach is similar to writing.
Writing begins with a distraction, self-forgetfulness, shifting, and constructing. Unfortunately, this can be misunderstood as a kind of writing that tries to escape, or even misses responsibility.
But the pen name also has another meaning, I want to transform the life of the present, not to escape. Because I have retained my surname, this is my connection with my relatives, my life, my hometown, and my land.
David Grossman once said in an interview: "Writing is a great way for me to understand life." Only by writing can I understand life. Understand the misfortunes you and your family have experienced through writing. Get a proper understanding of the living situation through writing. When writing, many things become clear, and the more I write, the more I feel that writing is indeed the best way to deal with loss, destruction and survival. ”
Through writing, I understand myself and others. Those lucky and unfortunate memories can be dissolved in the writing and glow like a dream, which makes me excited and fascinated. Eventually, though, I received an invitation to bright days.
The writer is to become himself through the other, a more abundant self, about his own self, a meta-self. In my writing, I have always tried to resist stubborn localities, localities, and ethnic groups, and I do not want to make myself a writer with a regional label or ethnic label.
Of course, I don't reject my own regionality or nationality, but the premise is that I need an open regionality or nationality to keep my writing flowing. My collection of essays, "Over the Mengxi Side," is a text that works in this direction. Mengxi is the village where I was born and raised in Si. World literature allows me to discern my own isolation and poverty, and thus to desire openness and fluidity.
It was just that I mistakenly thought that world literature had led me to another external world. Now I suddenly look back and realize that this world is actually a world that has developed from the present life, a more malleable world, it is internal, not external, it is flowing, not solidified. Chinese literature and foreign literature, like a cluster of stars, complement and pull each other, and jointly construct a world literary space. Of course, this is a utopia. In the present situation, Paris, London, New York or Berlin serve as centers of power in world literature.
But this does not in any way prevent us from reading literature from Paris, London, New York, or Berlin; we are enriched by reading the other, and even we must read, otherwise we will only be arrogant and self-contained in the well of frozen language. This does not prevent us from writing in Chinese, and even more necessarily in Chinese. Because, through the Chinese language, we can present the life in this land, and through foreign languages or Chinese in translation, we can make the life in this land have a level of vivid swimming.
The ego is not the shadow of the other, the other is not a mirror image of the self, the other is absolute, always remains strange, and thus can correct the ego's arrogance and open the closed self. The other, because of his strange opposite sex, also allows us to see the cruel laws, powers, and binding forces of life, so that we can reveal, even rebel, to dissolve those behemoths.
Taking the lead in world literature, I began to re-examine my present, present life. What I once longed for was not the external life, but the strange, deformed inner life, beyond the life bound in daily cognition, the life that was constantly being "translated". I would also like to say that this is a kind of "translation" that rebels against the center of nations, countries, and civilizations, not only against the center of the West, but also against the center of China.
Writing, that is, transforming and refining the present life, is not surrendering to the life that tends to the center, but revealing the life that is decentric and shaping. In this kind of writing, I began to fall in love with life in the moment again. Translation, let the impregnable barriers, barbed wire, walls, trenches disintegrate, let the language flow, let everyone's life flow.
Writing allows us to overcome (rather than abandon) the present reality, overcome its closedness and bondage, and gives us the possibility of imagining a different life, to construct another way of living that is more open, infinite, and fluid.
At this time we need the concept of "world literature". "World literature" liberates writing precisely because of its heterogeneity. It arises between peoples, it is formed in translation, it can never transcend translation, it can never be solidified in a center—the translation of the tendency center should also be the attack, penetration, possession and perching of the center, the disintegration of the center, the disturbance and proliferation of the inherent grammar.
Translation means changing and shaping each other. There is no one center that can override and encroach on the rest of the languages, nations, nations, and civilizations. World literature is literature that embraces heterogeneity, not literature that rejects heterogeneity. We need world literature. Possible life is not to exclude the current life, but to better recognize, refine, and transform the real life of the present, and to dismantle its dark and unclear binding laws. We need a possible life. Writing is to go to the center, to the other, to the strange, toward the linguistic action of the possible life.
What is literature? This question should be something a writer needs to answer. If literature can be everything, then there is no need to answer, and the question is meaningless.
Broadly speaking, literature can be all expressions, and further, a creative expression. Literature has a natural attachment to creative expression. What is creative expression? If literature can only use its inherent grammar and vocabulary to write a specific, unchanging, unchangeable life, it loses its meaning. Literature always corrects or even transcends a certain life, a certain writing.
Literature, as an expression, can be political, philosophical, or aesthetic. But in any case, it is not possible to go beyond the creative expression itself. Literature is a constant renewal and transcendence of the language establishment. Once the spirit conveyed by language is dispersed, it cannot be completely eradicated.
However, the Chinese language has a strong ability to deform, which does not mean that our civilization can completely restart in modern times, but it requires continuous transformation of the chinese form of expression and its spiritual content.
Chinese has been an extremely open language since ancient times, constantly deforming in absorption, but it has not been replaced by any kind of foreign language. Metamorphosis and translation are to be done in the relationship between the stars, not in the movement toward the center, lazily, unable to hand themselves over in its entirety.
We should have the courage to deform, not to shy away. In practice, it is possible to absorb the power of the other, but not to replicate the other. If we continue to let literature express only one life, and always express the same life in one way, then the creativity of literature disappears, and the stubborn violence of life becomes ineffectual.
Nor can we directly carry an external life. We cannot ask a writer what kind of life he must write about. The significance of foreign literature is that it provides us with a different expression, expressing different ways of living the same life, or re-examining different ways of living the same life, and at the same time forming an openness and fluidity of cognition, such foreign literature belongs to world literature.
But if foreign literature becomes a template for writing, a fixed form, then it has betrayed world literature. I've never refused to pay attention to life, or rather, never stopped loving life. No matter what kind of life you love, literature, as a means of writing, must have a special form and method, and we cannot ignore this form and method.
To love life, first of all, to feel life and deeply understand the face of life. The methods offered by foreign literature must be transformed and deformed in our own language and life, and must be smelted into our ability to see our own lives and feel our own lives. Any creative literary work reduces, rather than reduces, the complexity of life, and shows an unrestrained imagination of life itself. We need to confront the ethics and politics of life today.
A writer, in addition to being able to write, needs to fulfill the other duties required by life: ethical, political duties. Writers should not be able to write only.
In the era of "world literature", writing seems to have become something that can cross borders, not only across the boundaries of languages, nationalities, and civilizations, but also across the boundaries of classes, ages, and genders. In this way, the writing is vast and open, and it travels arbitrarily on the border.
But, at the end of the day, writing is still a free, natural thing that stems from one's love of language and expression, a love, right, and pleasure of one's own. It is only when everyone wants to explore the scale of writing, it is necessary to adjust to the relationship with language, identify their own language ability and language characteristics, connect literary traditions and current life, establish relationships with others and their communities, cross borders, and absorb potential from strange languages and their civilizations.
On such a scale, writing is a public matter, not only to discuss, but even to judge and argue. But this still does not affect one's own rights and happiness. It is this right and joy that has always inspired me to read and write, to write down what I find in reading, to write down the intricacies of grammar and rules in my daily life, to write down the rhythm of the life that life has given me, and the ups and downs of my thoughts.
(This article is excerpted from "The sea, all water, still bears the rain", with abridgements)
Source: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Editor: Duan Pengcheng