Affectionate and wise, literary style
——Reading Jiang Chunxia's anthology "Moss Marks on the Upper Order Green"
Wen | Pei Zhenxiang
In the preface to "Honeysuckle Poetry Series", the writer Lin Kenji has such requirements for good poetry: one should be honest, the second should be enthusiastic, and the third should be literary. I thought it would be very appropriate to put them on prose. We know that China is a country of poetry, but in fact it is still a country of prose. From ancient times to the present, various styles of prose creation are endless, and famous works can be described as sweaty cattle. With the development of the times, the methods and styles of ancient prose creation are also constantly evolving and changing. At the same time, mainstream writing also oscillates back and forth between retro and innovation, constantly inheriting and correcting deviations. By the first half of the 20th century, lu xun, Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Ziqing, Liang Shiqiu, Shen Congwen, Yu Dafu, Xiao Hong and other writers arrived at the peak of prose creation from different aspects, and their writing directions and postures were different, but they all reflected the characteristics of sincerity, delicacy, purity and life. Its language is also mostly precise and elegant, natural and simple, with strong stylized characteristics, from which the author's thoughts, temperaments and behaviors can be clearly identified.
Now, it is well known that people born in the 1970s and 1980s, when receiving language education, came into contact with some prose works such as "Lychee Honey" and "Camellia Fu", analyzed the exquisite structure of the article, summarized the central idea of the article, and at the same time were forced to copy a large number of good words and good sentences, resulting in our understanding of prose and writing has been greatly limited. However, for decades, there have also been some reflective and excellent writers who have constantly questioned, protested and challenged the previous dogmatic reading and writing modes, and there have been different and diverse writing concepts and author communities such as new realistic prose, presenceist prose, fragmented writing, and zero-degree writing, providing a fresh, solid and broad creative foundation and atmosphere for contemporary prose. I think this is yet another correction of institutionalized, conceptualized, empirical writing, and it's still going on. From the perspective of practical representation, prose is a very low threshold style, but because of this, it is very difficult to really write well. Now it is an era of national writing, and to rush out of the jungle is tantamount to making embroidery needles float out of the sea.
For these reasons, I don't have much hope for most of my contemporary prose work. But when I got Jiang Chunxia's prose collection "Moss Marks on the Green" and flipped through the chapters in it, I still felt sincerely happy. As an amateur author, Jiang Chunxia engaged in a kind of de-utilitarian writing. She is completely driven by interest, and her creation involves the details and feelings of her own life, as well as the areas and themes that she is familiar with and pays attention to, so she avoids the vulgarity and simplicity brought about by unfamiliar themes and deep feelings, and also avoids the flashiness brought about by hypocrisy and deliberate innovation. At the same time, she is a sincere, simple, and enthusiastic person, all of which constitute the comprehensive basis for writing good works. In general, she is indeed following her own heart to create, and her text is also very clear and concentrated to reflect her character, feelings and education. At the seminar on works, I evaluated her works with "rich emotions and enthusiasm, meticulous life observation, true beauty, and reasonableness", which I think is pertinent. Only its enthusiasm can pay close attention to and cherish the people and things in life; only its sincerity can tell the truth and delicacy of what it sees, hears, thinks and feels; only its simplicity can naturally abandon the deliberate pursuit of novelty in form and profound meaning, so that the vices of pretending to be posture and infinite elevation can be done in writing, and stop at its indispensable.
However, art is endless, and the improvement of the level of literary creation is itself a process of continuous cultivation and gradual progress. Jiang Chunxia herself is a doctor, and the education she received and the later reading are naturally rich and complicated. The style of articles she likes and the changes in life she has experienced will have a deep or shallow impact on her creations. The first two series of articles in "Moss Marks on the Upper Order" are mainly works after traveling to various parts of Hanzhong and traveling all over the country, and their strength lies in meticulous observation, delicate description, and lyrical authenticity. But I think its shortcomings also happen in these three areas. As we all know, this kind of travel text is the most difficult to shine, because every day thousands of people go to the places you have traveled, or even write some words, TV movies and the Internet have a large number of attractions and historical records, how can our creations stand out to become the only one, this one, this is a difficult problem. Clever writers choose to escape and don't write travelogue articles at all. If you want to write, you must avoid positive descriptions of attractions and past, and write your own unique discoveries, feelings and insights. To do this, we must have the courage to discard some memories of self-cherishing, grasp the deepest points from the many details, turn them into "my" own, and then present them.
In this collection of essays, everyone's favorite and most valuable articles are the two series of "The Doctor's Benevolence" and "The Code of Love", one is her understanding and perception of the hospital work she has been engaged in all her life, and the other is the deep memory and description of her parents' affection, which is also the most familiar and most emotional area for any person. Jiang Chunxia's passion is like snow, enthusiasm is like fire, and she has some professional qualities such as rigor, concentration and compassion, which are fully reflected in the words and lines, which leave a deep impression on people. One of her outstanding characteristics is that she does not avoid details, passion, and cumbersomeness, and has time to be meticulous to the point of being unscathed, and having time to express her chest to give up who I am! I think that the completeness of its presentation of details is something that many authors are worth learning. Since ancient times, our Chinese literature has paid attention to "artistic conception" and "qi rhyme", and does not advocate realism. For example, when talking about a woman's beauty, it is usually a sentence of "beautiful and incomprehensible", we read it and only know that she is indeed beautiful, but what it looks like, we will not understand it when we die. For example, our ancients wrote about high mountains, that is, "into the clouds" and "Wanling", writing about the Yellow River is directly from "heaven", beauty is beautiful, always let people not see the true face of Lushan. I believe that in this regard, we should properly learn from the Western method of expression while inheriting the tradition. For example, ecological writers such as Burroughs and Muir, who write a flower, must write out complex colors, the number of petals, and how high the mountain is, it must be accurate to a single digit. I think that this kind of writing will bring people unexpected literary feelings, and at the same time, it can also reflect the writer's serious and rigorous creative style.
However, for an essay, not all the content must be comprehensive and meticulously portrayed, but also have a detailed collocation and a combination of thickness and detail, so as to highlight the key points and be targeted. The ancients took a term from calligraphy to talk about this, called "loose can go, tight and airtight." At the same time, the details of life are still only materials, to become the details in the work, but also under the care of your literary thinking, to integrate and refine, the most unique and meaningful part, the most able to express the character, the psychological characteristics of the part, the most able to show the context of a thing, write in detail, write clearly. That is to say, to write a thing or a detail, it is necessary to write it deeply and thoroughly, even if it is less than a few things and a few details. And those things that are not involved, can be imagined, process, common sense, should be written in one stroke or even not written, so that both frugal pen and ink and make the article appear bumpy, rather than generally thick up and down, as thick as inside and out. In addition, direct expression of the chest is one of the ways to express the intention, in the right time, can reflect the intensity of the author's feelings and the sincerity of the character. But most of the time, it is still emphasized that the allegory is in the scene, the allegory is in the situation, and our emotions, attitudes, thoughts, and experiences must be hidden in the rich and perceptible details, so that the reader can chew, understand, and feel, so that the article will have the effect of "lingering sound around the beam, three days without end".
As the title of this article indicates, I think Jiang Chunxia deserves the phrase "affectionate wisdom, literary style". Literature is anthropology, fiction is the study of others, and non-fiction is more about expressing oneself, especially prose and poetry. Jiang Chunxia uses her writing to present us with a three-dimensional and rich complete image of herself as a woman who combines various roles as a daughter, wife, mother, doctor, friend, and social person. This person is tactile and approachable in "Moss On the Green", and it is also a stranger who wants to make friends with her after reading it. In that sense, I think she's served her purpose in writing. At the same time, in terms of creative materials, literature is also written in language. The depth of the language skills and the quality of the text directly determine the level of the article. Jiang Chunxia's language is pure, natural, and lifelike, while being poetic and philosophical. However, only its purity, there are some light sentences in it, and some use or embezzle other people's sentences and lyrics, which are not rigorous and solemn enough. Only naturally, sometimes the distance between words and words, sentences and sentences is canceled, and the sense of space is lost, and literary language must not be a piece of stubborn stone, there are holes and gaps, sandstone or sponges with space barriers, the author's reasonableness, interest, language taste, rhyme, is hidden in these pores and space. Therefore, prose language should be a living, personalized language, but it should also be a language that has been selected and refined; it is a seemingly ordinary statement, but because it is in the right context, it is also a "meaningful statement".
In summary, I think that everyone's writing may achieve their own unique character because of the influence of temperament, life and career. There is no law in the text, and there is no truth in the poem. At some times, weaknesses can also be strengths; in others, strengths can also cause regrets. Therefore, everything in the world has its two sides, and writing based on man himself is no exception. As for how to use the strengths and avoid the weaknesses, write words that have both literary style and feelings and are very sincere, then you must continue to train, improve your ability to deal with themes, details and language, and grasp the degree of their subtleties, the better you grasp, the higher the level of your articles. Just like the overall appearance of our country's prose creation, it is both innovative and muddy, and our reading and writing need to be identified, its thinking, and its abandonment. When we are tired of writing words that are tired of singing praises and praises, words that should be in the right place, words that are in a hurry, and words that are crowded with clouds, we will finally realize that prose creation should also pay attention to reality, pay attention to life, pay attention to nature, and everything in reality, life and nature should be presented and expressed. It is just that as literary authors, we need a unique humanistic perspective to deeply understand the essence of life in this era, and then express what we experience, feel, and think in rich and unique details and concise and personalized language. This is another level of writing, and I think it is worth thinking, exploring, and practicing.
Columnist: Pei Zhenxiang, born in 1982, is a member of the Shaanxi Provincial Writers Association. His works have been scattered in "Poetry Journal", "Yangtze River Poetry Journal", "Feitian", etc., and have been shortlisted for the 8th China Red Sorghum Poetry Award, the 2nd Shaanxi Provincial Youth Literature Award, won the 2nd Shaanxi Youth Literature Star, and published poems "Dance on fingertips" and "Fruit Street". He currently lives in Luoyang County, Shaanxi Province.
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