"Fiction is very popular and secular, and it takes talent to write a novel, but an overemphasis on talent can sometimes obscure the importance of writing training." At the Zijingang Campus of Zhejiang University last night, Wang Anyi, a famous writer and chairman of the Shanghai Writers Association, was hired as a "writer-in-residence" and opened a literature class, focusing on "the composition of novels" for the first time.
After throwing out the question mark of "what is a novel", Wang Anyi analyzed: Novels are to use written language to shape another substance and express real life. "Language is actually a very simple text, and mastering language requires a lot of preparation, it is not intuitive. But we have to use it to express life. In fact, art is like this, it has a rhetorical meaning in it, to use one material to make another thing. There is a contrast between these two materials, and the novel is such a job, to use such a monotonous thing as language to express life. Wang Anyi said.
Compared with the richness of film techniques, sound and photoelectric rhetorical means, and vivid pictures, Wang Anyi said bluntly: "Novels only have words, and the workload of using words to express such a complex life is actually very large." The material of the text is abstract and tortuous, and it is not specific; the reader must also be literate, have a certain imagination, and relative life experience, otherwise the text cannot be reduced to the scene, which is the limitation of the text itself. So what are the benefits of fiction? Wang Anyi believes that it can depict some indirect things, such as a person's spiritual feelings.
In her opinion, the novel also has a very interesting language function, that is, it can turn the daily trivialities into another existence after being paraphrased by words, becoming brilliant and gorgeous. "Without fiction, the meaning of life might be difficult to unleash. A novel is a narrative genre that relies on language to describe. Its narrative is not intuitive, but proceeds along time, attached to time. The form of time is fleeting, difficult to stay, and difficult to fix. Novelists often have an attempt that dual narratives go hand in hand, but in fact, they can't do it. Because it's a linear thing, very single, you can only have one order. ”
Speaking of the novel's treatment of time, Wang Anyi took the French writer Proust's novel "Remembrance like water years" as an example, the reason for choosing this book, it is not like other novels with characters, plots, structure, reset the state of time, such as "Anna Karenina" or Mai Jia's novel, the story in it has actually disintegrated time and re-established time. And "Remembrance of Water Years" does not intervene in time, so that it is directly reflected, and a unique style is formed.
Although this set of classic tomes is difficult to read and it is not easy to get pleasure from reading, it is full of research value, and the novel returns time to its original form and turns time into a subject. I'm a realistic writer who needs to deform time, so I'm curious about this way of dealing with time. This novel embodies the most primitive state of time, which follows this time, and also follows one of the essences of time, that is, retrospectiveness. The difficulty of the novel is how to unearth hidden story forms. Every novel hides a form. Wang Anyi said that every art has a natural form, and the first sentence at the beginning of the novel "Remembrance of The Water Age" is "For a long time, I went to bed early", and also wrote a lot of sleep states.
She believes that in fact, when we talk about time today, we are artificially giving it a scale. If there is no artificial scale, no clock, time is a chaotic, headless and tailless state, and everyone gives a different scale of time. Another thing that is closely related to time is walking. For example, there is a character in the novel whose walk starts at the church in Cambrai and goes in two directions. One direction is to the side of Swan's house, and the other is to the landlord's house in Cambrai. There are very rich descriptions in these two routes, such writing is in line with the definition of time, and the arrangement of the two characters is not accidental. ”
Luo Weidong, vice president of Zhejiang University, presented Wang Anyi with a letter of appointment as a chair professor
In the interactive session of readers, in the face of the students who flocked to Hangzhou, Wang Anyi shared that she actually has a deep relationship with Hangzhou, her mother Ru Zhijuan was born in Shanghai, but her ancestral home is in Hangzhou, and she also deliberately returned to Hangzhou to find an old house. "In my mother's heart, she is from Hangzhou, so I also have special feelings for Hangzhou."
Wang Anyi thinks that he was very lucky in growing up, because in an era with standards, "the editing teacher will tell you that it is wrong to write this way, it should be better, which also gives us an aesthetic pursuit." "She said that today's too loose creative environment is actually worthy of the vigilance of young creators, and if they are too relaxed in creation, they will relax their self-requirements." Even if no one comes to criticize you, you need to be self-critical. ”
In the next seven lectures, Wang Anyi will start from famous works such as "The Canterbury Story" and "Pride and Prejudice", as well as American documentary novels, Russian novels, Chinese contemporary novels and other genres, and deconstruct the "four beams and eight pillars" of novels. As she said, classics need to be read carefully, all art is the art of details, and novels are made up of details. "As a writer, the details that really move people must remain in the heart, and the observation is supplemented by the imagination of the creator, like the human torso and skin, which is the most important existence."