Essay collection "Endowed with Eternal Regret", 1996 edition Information picture
In 1999, the National Research Institute of India awarded Ji Xianlin an honorary academician. Profile picture
Ji Xianlin Profile picture
In his later years, Ji Xianlin liked cats very much, and he expressed his love for cats in many essays. Profile picture
【Chasing Light Literary Giant: Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of Ji Xianlin's Birth】
Born in 1911, Ji Xianlin lived for nearly a hundred years. He began publishing essays at a young age; in his later years, he worked tirelessly, becoming a rare harvest season. It can be said that it is not an exaggeration to use "four seasons of evergreen" to summarize his prose creation and thinking. When reading his prose, my eyes often shake the ancient pines and cypresses that are evergreen in all seasons, which is the clear image left by Ji Xianlin for me.
1. Small love and big love
The world is often inseparable from a "love" word. Prose is particularly emotional, and it is difficult for people to stop in the heartless text, let alone resonate with the heart and produce a sense of acquaintance. Ji Xianlin believes that not only lyrical prose, but also general reasoning prose cannot be ruthless. The prose theorist Lin Fei once described "true feelings" as the "lifeline" of prose. In fact, what runs through Ji Xianlin's prose is true feelings, which is the key and pivot to understanding his prose and life.
Small lyrical and private writing has become an important feature of Ji Xianlin's prose. This includes the deep love of mother and child, the love of husband and wife, the love of friends, the goodness of pets, and the joy of entertainment, from which we can see the author's feelings from himself and from life. Here, emotions, especially true feelings, flow like blood veins, showing the jump of life force in the knowable and perceptible. "Endowed with Eternal Regret" is a masterpiece of Ji Xianlin's prose, which is full of heart-rending motherly feelings, because he has only returned home three times since he went out to study at the age of six, which also includes running for his mother's funeral. Only later did the author understand the feeling of her mother leaning on the door for many years and looking forward to the return of her beloved son. In addition, Ji Xianlin has written a lot of reminiscences, especially about old people and old friends, the most rare of which is a "love" word, which is like an old wine that has become mellow and wonderful after years of brewing, nourishing the reader's heart. Small love and private love, especially deep affection, make Ji Xianlin's prose very grounded, but also the true self-expression and expression.
Broad love is another realm and quality of Ji Xianlin's prose. If you only write about your own selfish feelings, even if you write it really and touchingly, it is difficult to achieve the role of baptism, let alone let people's hearts and spirits enter the sacred realm. Ji Xianlin's prose can enter great love from self-emotion, and suddenly sublimates the work. "Three Little Girls" is written about the attachment of strange little girls to "me" at the age of two, five or six, and twelve, respectively, which the author calls "a great joy in life, a strange thing." Grass, trees, rocks, and small animals can often enter Ji Xianlin's pen and transform into a wisp of fraternal silk thread, thus fishing out the reader's compassion. "Mimi" is written about a kitten, from which we can see the softness and kindness of the author's heart. Therefore, the author said in the text: "I have always advocated that it is a crime to beat the weak people such as children and small animals. In fact, this is not surprising, because of the compassion and love for the weak, so the child and the kitten are not defensive, willing to be close to the author "I", it is two childlike hearts that connect the two generations of the old and the young, people and animals.
Patriotism is another kind of love promotion, so in "The Voice of an Old Intellectual", Ji Xianlin wrote such a sentence: "I have few advantages in my life, but I claim to be patriotic and dare not come back, even if I am burned to ashes, every grain of ash is still patriotic." Of course, he is by no means a narrow patriot, but has human feelings, which is why he wrote in "Happy Rain": "Please divide part of the spring rain that is now raining, and with the deep friendship of all the Chinese people, go to Africa to save the people, birds, beasts, and plants there, so that the whole world can share this ganlin." ”
The small ego's private feelings seem to be the root of a big tree, and the broad love is like the selfless sunshine from the high heavens, Ji Xianlin's prose organically combines the two, so that there is a heaven and earth feeling, and it also injects the prose with vigorous vitality and noble spiritual quality.
2. Bland and magical
In the eyes of ordinary people, Ji Xianlin is too bland, whether it is academic life or prose creation. Therefore, when it comes to Ji Xianlin, people will always talk about his ordinary appearance and praise him for being mistaken for a cleaner. In fact, people overemphasize Ji Xianlin's ordinariness, but it is easy to ignore his magic.
Indeed, through Ji Xianlin's literary life, we can see his image of a bland and elegant gentleman, which is also what he has in common with Zhang Zhongxing, and it is also the spiritual temperament that is most lacking at present. This can be seen in both human and prose. This also coincides with the plain and natural nature of prose, which is the avenue of hiding of the enlightened. As Lin Yutang said in "Speaking of the Beauty of True Colors": "Literati with a little high opinion look down on the pile of rhetoric, and they are gradually becoming flat, with blandness as the highest state of literature." However, Lin Yutang went on to say: "Plain and whimsical enough to use it, it will become a heaven and earth." The same applies to Ji Xianlin's prose, especially in "whimsical ideas", Ji Xianlin's prose has a unique style.
"The Magic Loofah" is about plants, and the title is titled "Magical", so the author shows us the wonder of ordinary, usually unnoticed loofahs. This is not only manifested in the rapid growth of loofah vines and loofahs, but also in its own adjustment function, and even full of unknown wisdom. He wrote: "I feel as if this loofah has a mind, it can think of problems, and it has action, it can stop the melon that cannot bear the weight; it can find a place for the melon in the favorable terrain to bear the weight, give such melon special treatment, let them grow madly; it can make the hanging melon lie flat." It was a silent miracle. The melon seedlings seem to become a mysterious rope. "Such an article has a pair of eyes that discover magic.
"Red" is also a way to get rid of the black and white bland writing. The main line of the overall article is to write about the mung bean seller who "has a simple face"; however, the peddler's smile at the "me" when he was a child made "me" frightened "me". What's more, this man had been a bandit and was later caught and killed. The author writes that when the peddler was killed, "a red blood light flashed before my eyes." My eyes glazed over. Looking back at the sunset of the western sky, a big red flower is forming on the edge of the sky." Such a story and brushwork, coupled with the sensitivity to "red", suddenly introduce the work into the artistic conception of "red", giving people a magical and unpredictable feeling. This is a magical way of writing in plainness, which shows the magic of Ji Xianlin's prose and his way of thinking.
"Locust Flower" is an essay about the dialectical relationship between the ordinary and the magical. The author said that he had never felt the specialness of acacia in Beijing, especially in the Langrun Garden of Peking University, but a foreign friend was infected by its beauty and aroma; in the same way, he was amazed in India by the big red flowers of the kapok trees that towered into the sky and were as red as the rising sun, but the natives did not feel magical. To this end, Ji Xianlin concluded: "The more you are used to seeing things, the more you are accustomed to it, and the beauty and ugliness are difficult to see." This phenomenon is easy to explain in psychology: it is necessary to keep a certain distance from what exists objectively in order to observe objectively. "It's almost a philosophical question about the mundane versus the magical.
Some people think that Ji Xianlin is a good gentleman, and his prose and his views on prose are also ordinary and gentle. Even because of this, he did not think much of Ji Xianlin's prose. In fact, this understanding is wrong, or at least not comprehensive. Ji Xianlin is also windy and even thorny in the plain, simple, warm nature, and his personality is not inferior to others.
For example, in "Long Talk about Prose", Ji Xianlin bluntly said his own view of prose. He said: "I think among all literary genres, prose is the most handy and flexible. "Chinese literary creation has made great progress. However, in my personal opinion, the development of various genres is extremely uneven. Novels, including long, novella, and short stories, as well as drama, were completely Westernized in form. "My personal opinion is that the current form of the novel is difficult to say that there is any superiority over the classical Chinese novel." The same is true of drama, which need not be specific. As for the new poem, I think it was a failure. So far, people have not been able to find a form of poetry. ”
The author also gave the highest praise to the prose, saying: "I think the most successful thing in the Chinese literary world since the May Fourth Movement is the vernacular prose. He added: "My ideal prose is simple and not boring, fluent but not oily, solemn but not stagnant, elegant and not sculpted." I also thought that prose was the most taboo tablet. "I even want to use the technique of notation to write prose, around a main melody, adding some secondary melodies; the main melody can appear many times, the form is slightly changed, the purpose is only to see unity in complexity, balance in ups and downs, so as to mobilize the reader's interest, get a deeper and higher aesthetic enjoyment." Having such a rhythmic and rhythmic text, and then filling it with a sense of truth, will surely be able to touch people deeply. For a long time, in the four major genres of new literature, people generally overestimated the achievements of poetry, novels, and dramas, and often denigrated or even disdained prose, but Ji Xianlin's view was the opposite, and he could not but say that he had his own opinions.
In this way, it can be understood that Ji Xianlin's prose has transcendence in plain nature, that is, the yearning for magic and change; in turn, whimsical ideas also make his flat balance more stable and introverted. It is a dynamic, balanced, and changing process of development.
3. Rationality and poetry
As an intellectual, expert and scholar, Ji Xianlin's prose belongs to the scholar's prose. But unlike the general sense of overemphasizing knowledge, especially the listing and display of knowledge, he is humble, low-key, and even a little self-deprecating. Most importantly, Ji Xianlin has the ability to dilute the hard blocks of knowledge, so that his prose flashes with a strange beauty. Poetry is the most prominent of these.
Ji Xianlin's prose contains many rational philosophies, which have both rich knowledge, rational judgment, and the light of thought, as well as the flashes of wisdom, especially the thinking of the country, the nation, the times, society, the people, life, and philosophy, which fully reflects the conscience and responsibility of being an excellent intellectual. In articles such as "Oriental Culture Must Regain Its Glory" and "Engaging in Traditional Culture, It is precisely for Modernization", Ji Xianlin bluntly said that the revival of Oriental culture represents the future development direction of mankind. His "thirty years of Hedong, thirty years of Hexi" has been ridiculed and denigrated by many people. In fact, many of Ji Xianlin's thinking is dialectical and advanced, for example, he said: "Engaging in traditional Chinese studies and traditional culture is precisely for the sake of China's modernization." Modernization without traditional culture is a rootless 'transformation' and a 'total Westernization', which is absolutely unworkable in China, which has a cultural history of thousands of years. "This is the view of the 1990s, and it is valuable today.
However, there is always a clear spring in Ji Xianlin's prose, which is clear, pure, romantic, and elegant all the way to your heart. This is something that many scholars cannot reach in their prose, and it should also be learned from. Many cultural essays, especially big cultural essays, are blocked by knowledge, concepts, logic, and ideas, so the more they write, the more dead they die. Ji Xianlin's "Inch Grass Heart", "Zhilan's Room", "Morning Fun", "Qingtang Lotus Rhyme", "Dream Haunting Water Wood Qinghua", "Two Lines of Words Written on the Soil", "My Heart is a Mirror", "Dream Haunting Red Chamber", "Sleepwalking 21st Century", "Foshan Heart Shadow", "A Red Caryophyllum Flower", "The Ocean of Starlight", "Sea World", etc., just by looking at the title, you can feel the poetry and beauty, and its poetic heart, poetic eyes, poetry, and poetry make the prose transparent, clear, moist and smooth. "February Orchid" has a purple purity and an early spring atmosphere, while "Listening to the Rain" integrates itself into the mood of the poem. The author writes: "I sat there quietly, hearing the sound of raindrops overhead, and at this time there was a sound that was better than silence, and I felt immeasurable joy in my heart, as if I had drunk the dew, sucked in the daigo, and had a fluttering and immortal nature." This sound is slow and urgent, sometimes high and low, sometimes loud and heavy, intermittent and intermittent, sometimes like golden sound and jade vibration, sometimes like Huang Zhong Da Lu, sometimes like a large pearl and a small bead falling on a jade plate, sometimes like a red shan bai hu sinking into the sea, sometimes like playing a suqin, sometimes like a break dance, sometimes like a hundred birds arguing, sometimes like a rabbit falling up, I think of it, I can't help myself, my heart is full of flowers, and the wind is full of pen. Dead words seem to come alive, and I seem to be overflowing with youthful vitality again. ”
Ji Xianlin likes to express it in four words, which adds to the poetic rhythm and beauty, and has a kind of elegance in elegance. In "Mimi", the author writes about the beauty of Hong Kong: "Here is the back of the mountains and the sea, the window looks out, the sea and sky are chaotic, the water waves are not happy, the green snails are a few points, the sails are shadowy, the scenery is exceptionally beautiful, there are four flowers in the garden, eight festivals of evergreen grass, and there is also the host's hospitality, I am happy at this time." "The four words are mixed with long sentences, and the long and short sentences complement each other, which sets off the poetic beauty and the charm of traditional Chinese culture."
The poetry is like the brine used to order tofu, which awakens and dissolves Ji Xianlin's scholarly prose, becomes comfortable and natural, and also has the wisdom of thought and artistic inspiration, and obtains a transcendent understanding of the truth of prose.
In short, Ji Xianlin's prose has life, knowledge, vision, affection, personality, thought, inspiration, wisdom, coupled with heaven and earth feelings, profound Chinese cultural heritage and self-confidence, as well as modern consciousness and world vision, which determines that he not only becomes everyone, but also an intellectual and wise man with a conscience. As a result, Ji Xianlin's prose has lasting vitality and becomes a beautiful flower and fruit in the reader's heart.
(Author: Wang Zhaosheng, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of China Social Sciences Magazine)