The story still takes place in Liu Zhenyun's hometown of literary geography - Yanjin, the protagonist still experiences several loops between Yanjin and Yanjin, is still helpless and overcomes the search for loneliness, Liu Zhenyun is still combing through the causes of everything in a slow and rational narrative. Liu Zhenyun's new novel "One Day and Three Autumns" can be regarded as a companion piece to "One Sentence top 10,000 Sentences". However, the ultimate loneliness of "One Sentence top ten thousand sentences" is concretized as a bitter joke about survival in "One Day and Three Autumns".
Reading "Three Autumns in One Day", there are several keywords that cannot be ignored.
Writer Liu Zhenyun Visual China/Courtesy photo
Cause: Logical starting point
The first key word is cause, which is the logical starting point of the story. The word does not always appear in the form of manifestation, but it is ubiquitous throughout the work.
In the preface, the narrator explains that the reason for writing this novel is that he wants to reproduce Uncle Liu's painting in the form of words. In fact, the "preface" is part of the work. Because some of Uncle Liu's paintings are very realistic, some are very postmodern, and the main story of "One Day and Three Autumns" is based on reality, with Hua Erniang, who asks for jokes and may ask for his life in the dreams of the Yanjin people, the ghost of Cherry, the fortune teller's old Dong, and the cursed Ma Daobo, etc., to explain and deal with those surreal parts, so that the cause and effect of personnel are always based on evidence.
The story happens to two generations. Chen Changjie can marry Cherry because he can "talk about drama", from saying a play to move a person; Cherry commits suicide because of a handful of leeks, but also because Hua Erniang did not get a joke from her dream, she must die; Cherry's soul is possessed by Li Yansheng, in order to let Li Yansheng take her to Wuhan to find Chen Changjie to relocate her grave; and she chose Li Yansheng to possess because they are husband and wife in "The Legend of the White Snake". When Bright was six years old, he returned to Yanjin alone from Wuhan for his grandmother's funeral because his grandmother was the closest and most talkative person in his memory; he dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to apprentice at the "Marshal of the Canopy" restaurant because his father cut off the living expenses for the foster family, li Yansheng's family; after he married Ma Xiaomeng, the couple had to leave Yanjin because Ma Xiaomeng's early ugly deeds were well known; twenty years later, the couple flourished in Xi'an, thanks to the craft of stewing pig's trotters that he learned in the "Marshal of the Canopy" when he was young; and later Bright returned to Yanjin to move to the ancestral tomb A few months later, the plaque with the inscription "One Day and Three Autumns" was "found", and it was left bright regardless of whether it was true or false, just because the four words on the plaque "are not seen for a day, such as the meaning of the three autumns, which is a sentence of ten thousand sentences between people and people." ”
Liu Zhenyun, "One Day, Three Autumns"
There is a cause for everything. These clear causal logics clearly present the main story line. And even those branches that were out, Liu Zhenyun did not forget to explain the ins and outs. Some speak from "cause" to "effect", and some from "effect" backwards from "cause". Not a single storyline was ignored by him, and not a single character was abandoned by him. Moreover, Liu Zhenyun's causal logic is never a simple, superficial, and direct cause and effect, but a complex butterfly effect between happiness and misfortune. No matter how far away that "cause" is, it does not prevent the emergence of the "effect." All the past is related to the present and also affects the future. The past, present and future, like a puppy chasing its own tail and biting, go around and around, indissoluble. With the patience of a storyteller, Liu Zhenyun explained the thrilling and blandness of life with beginning and end, and told it with relish.
The Same Thing About All Things: Philosophical Recognition
The second key word in "One Day, Three Autumns" is "the same thing for all things". It is the philosophical realization expressed by the author through stories. It sometimes appears with the word "all things are the same" itself, sometimes replaced by "gone with the wind", sometimes with "yes... Nor is it a biptual expression of ...".
In the specific story situation, don't care about the differences between industries, or the poor old age situation caused by poverty or illness, or the helplessness of life that cannot be the Lord in family life, the problems are very different, because of all kinds, but in the end, similarity and consistency are always waiting for them at the end and dominating them, because everything is the same.
This is true of the actual life level of the story, and it is also true in the mythological narrative. In real life, the grocery store of Ma Xiaomeng's family and the mass grave where cherries are buried are nowhere to be found, the paintings of the sixth uncle pretended by the narrator, the materials collected by Teacher Sima for writing "The Biography of the Second Lady of Flowers", and the tables and chairs and benches made of the century-old jujube trees of Grandma's family are also burned, all of which make the bright have a sense of ashes. In supernatural stories, jokes can make people live or die. Cherry reincarnation is based on a series of jokes that satisfy the King of Yanluo; Hua Erniang waited for HanaJiro in Yanjin for three thousand years as promised, but did not know that HanaJiro died in Yanjin three thousand years ago, died on a joke; the people of Yanjin who knew did not dare to tell Hua Erniang this fact, this matter itself is the biggest joke in Yanjin, and The second lady of Hua Erniang who asks for jokes in the dreams of Yanjin people every day does not know: she is in the biggest joke of Yanjin. It turns out that at the end of the road to the future, everything is indeed the same. True and false, bitter and happy, gain and loss, life and death, are no different for all people. If the inquiry cause is the starting point of the story, the empathy of all things is the end and conclusion of the inquiry.
The supernatural story of "One Day, Three Autumns" is not magical, because it is not magical, but based on the real reality of the supernatural color such as dreams and divination, closely following the reality of life in the story. Or rather, it's part of reality. Peel it off and reality becomes mutilated. With the help of it, Liu Zhenyun once again confirmed the philosophical realization of the empathy of all things that transcends the real logic of the surface.
Anyway: Life is normal
The third key word is "whatever it takes". It shows a normal state of life that cannot be done. In the work, it is the part where the three people share the same sigh in the song of Fahai, Xu Xian and White Snake, and this helplessness constitutes the main tone of "One Day and Three Autumns".
"One Day, Three Autumns" is the sentient beings of small people. Sugar-wrapped paper, sweeping the street, scrubbing, selling mutton soup, stewing pig's trotters, fortune tellers, driving buses, selling bodies, five elements and eight works, none of them are glamorous. Even if Chen Changjie, Li Yansheng, and Cherry had the aura of "horns" when they appeared, they were quickly beaten to the mortal world due to the dissolution of the troupe. The only slightly developed figure in the work is the middle-aged Chen Mingliang. After more than 20 years of hard work at the bottom, Bright has six "canopy marshals" semicolons in Xi'an, and life is no longer embarrassing, and when it comes to funding, losing money, and buying plaques, it is even magnificent. But he is still a small person, because he not only lives in a small person, but also mentally has never considered himself a big man, so he has never "broken the circle". Moreover, when the author portrays this character, the focus is not on his worldly success, but on his uncontrollable wheel of destiny and the coincidence of life. The daily life of small people is often involuntary. The little people in the work can best appreciate the hardships of life, do more patience and compromise, even if they struggle, they are often in vain. The old Dong of fortune telling is good at "touching bones" and has broken his heart for decades. Most of the people he touched were pig and sheep bones on the people who came to tell fortunes, crawling on the street with his back to the sky. Heaven and earth are not kind or bad luck, everything seems to be predestined, and people have no way to do anything. The sentient beings in the work can only sigh "what is the matter".
Yanjin is Liu Zhenyun's realistic hometown, but also his spiritual hometown. But this hometown is "the hometown that can't go back." "Hometown that can't go back" has been a common theme written by writers since May Fourth. Liu Zhenyun continued the local emotional attitude of the previous generation of writers. All his works, whether it is the "Hometown" series or "Wen Gu 1942", the hometown is a place that people love and hurt. Especially in "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences", "Children of the Eating Melon Era", and then to the recent "One Day and Three Autumns", "Out of Yanjin" and "Back to Yanjin" are the themes that are constantly reproduced. Escape and return are like twin flowers, stretching out alone and mirroring each other. In "One Day and Three Autumns", because of the flower second lady who has been making jokes in the dreams of The Yanjin people for three thousand years, everyone in Yanjin has a risk of life. But it is so difficult for the people of Yanjin to cut off their hometown. Even if he is no longer a Yanjin person on the household registration, Chen Liangming will still return to his hometown occasionally for specific reasons, and even dream of returning to his hometown when he is in another hometown. And once this happens, Hua Erniang will come to his dream, and he will be on the verge of life and death. But where can the dream be from yourself? Why? Helpless. In fact, the Yanjin in Liu Zhenyun's works is not a realistic and concrete Yanjin, but a sample of the roots of traditional Chinese culture and the contemporary state of existence. The protagonist continues to run away and constantly return, this helplessness is the need to break out of the cocoon, but also the attachment to the root of life and the root of culture.
Taking jokes as the form and content, from finding the cause of everything, to drawing the conclusion of the same reason for all things, to sighing what to do, "One Day, Three Autumns" is full of bitterness in the world. However, the wise Liu Zhenyun would not really have no way. At the end of the story, he turned his pen sharply, dissolved the slightly decadent helplessness with "no words", and suddenly turned to translucency and detachment. In the preface to "One Day and Three Autumns", the narrator tells the reader to take the story behind it as a joke. In this joke story, jokes become everyone's way of saving themselves, and everyone lives as a joke. But perhaps only by talking and laughing can we resist loneliness, bitterness and desolation—all the inherent pain and pain, emptiness and emptiness. If you can, even if it is difficult to get the emotional echo of the three autumns of the day, everything is not a problem.
About author:Gu Haihui, literary and art critic, currently lives in Beijing. (Editor-in-charge: Li Jing)