◎ Lu Min
Compared with the steaming spread of Korean movies and dramas in China, Korean contemporary literature is quite bleak in our reading horizons.
I remember reading a few years ago a book that won the Booker International Prize, "Vegetarian", its author Han Jiang was the winner of the 2005 Lee Box Literature Prize, And Han's father Han Shengyuan was also a writer, who won the Lee Box Prize in 1988 and was the father and daughter of the Korean literary scene. "Vegetarian" is feminist, and the reading experience at that time was more common. The recently popular "Jin Zhiying Born in 82" and "Letter to Xiannan Brother" and so on, because of too many spoilers, coupled with the fierce gender issue, did not read out of a kind of unspeakable and not correct fatigue. But I believe that the progress of Korean cinema is by no means a thriving category, behind which there must be several generations of people in literature, sociology, psychology and of course, including the film industry technology and cultural industry mechanism and other directions of the overall advancement, from this point of view, not only Lee Cangdong, but also Kim Ki-duk, Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-so and a number of Korean directors who have won international reputation, the analysis of the source of literature behind them, or also a noteworthy entry for Chinese filmmakers.
In similar research, we can use a variety of self-descriptions, biographies, or academic books from Japanese directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Yasujiro Ozu, Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Of course, this generation of Korean directors is at the right time, and their cultivation code and literary origins are still in the gushing river of time.
1
Two of Li Cangdong's novels, Burned Paper and Kagawa Have Many Dung, have recently been translated in China, both of which were works he had not yet entered the film industry before the age of 38. Lee Cangdong should be regarded as a diligent but somewhat late writer, he did not publish his debut work "Booty" until the age of 29, and since then he has successively published works in Korean literary journals such as "Deep Spring Water", "Creation and Criticism", "Literature and Art Central", "Novel Literature", "Practical Literature", "Gakuen", etc., published collections, was selected into university textbooks, and won the "Korea Daily" Creative Literature Award in 1992, which is somewhat booming. However, the year after winning the award, he accepted the advice of director Park Kwang-so, began to write a script, and became an assistant director, and has since made great strides in the film industry.
In the 25 years since he directed, he has produced only 6 works prudently and moderately (including 16 months of suspension of creation, invited to serve as the minister of culture of South Korea during the Roh Moo-hyun period), but he has won many international film awards in Cannes, Venice, Asia, Asia Pacific and other international film awards, and fans will even argue over the ranking of their favorite films. The films directed by Li Cangdong undoubtedly have a huge "historical" pursuit and a "poetic" core, and the use of metaphorical intentions such as "rails", "branches" and "mirrors" in films such as "Mints" and "Oasis" can be seen everywhere. The "Poems" directly intervene in the pure poetry of life itself. His "Miyang" is adapted from the novel "The Story of the Worm" created by writer Li Qingjun based on true events, including his new work "Burning", which refreshed the highest score in the Cannes Film Festival, and is also based on Haruki Murakami's short story "Burning Barn", while referring to the setting of class differences in William Faulkner's short story "Burning Horse Shed" - looking at Li Cangdong's entire directing experience, it is obvious that he has a strong blood relationship with literature.
After looking after so many of his excellent film works, I look back and read his novels, and it is not excluded that I have a heart of tracing his literary origins, but soon, Li Cangdong's pure novel writing made me completely forget the original intention. The recommendation on the waist of the "Burning Paper" book reads "Like watching eleven movies", which is a bit dissatisfied with this analogy, and cinematization is not a high-level praise for literature, although this trend is very strong at present. In fact, Li Cangdong's novel is a novel, introverted, profound, nihilistic, its logical units and modes of expression are both beginning with words and ending with words, and it is precisely this pure, almost introverted, exclusive fictional narrative that not only enables Li Cangdong to gain the strength as a novelist, but also consciously or unconsciously, condensed into a powerful literary core that runs through his future artistic career.
2
The 11 novels included in Burning were written and published between 1983 and 1987. "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" is his second collection of novels, published in 1992. Generally speaking, a writer's novel collection is easy to be uneven and uneven, and Li Cangdong's two collections in the past decade are at a high level as a whole, with long-term training traces and strict self-requirements of the "veteran" penmanship, accompanied by strange and familiar "East Asian pictures" of the 1980s, which is addictive and surprising.
What I particularly like is "Snowy Days", "Dance", "For everyone's safety", "Empty House", "Booty", "Sky Lantern" and several articles, which are unbearable to read. First, I can't bear to finish reading, this experience is particularly valuable, it can be said to be the charm of pure technology. Mainly Li Cangdong's details of kung fu have special power, let people cherish, actions, emotions, dialogue, are ordinary sentences, but read but there is a sense of exhaustion, links, tight knots, including his analogy, at first glance are honest and honest, but it is like a fine, like a small hailstone when it is big, accurately smashing into the back of the head, cold to the bone. Writing here, I would also like to pay special tribute to Mr. Jin Ran's translation, which is natural, simple and deep, and I am afraid that it will also add more rich and abundant atmosphere to Li Cangdong's novel.
Another intolerable is for the characters. In fact, readers like us who are more "old fox type" will focus on language, rhythm, and detailed treatment, and the mentality of the character and fate of the characters in most cases is relatively indifferent, and the paradox is that Li Cangdong's narrative is more light and calm than the reader. Often, in the previous description, he meticulously sketches every line of the miserable world, but the next paragraph emits a sneer, without concern, stuttering and really deconstructing and self-deprecating, as if the characters in the story are not worthy of facing the blow and burial of fate.
In "Dance", Li Cangdong vividly and angrily writes about a wife who turns a seaside vacation into a money-saving battle, that kind of childish stubbornness, fatigue and anger, in order to save the "shower money" by the beach, the couple wears wet tight swimsuits through the lively crowd, through the toiling wheat field, to a temporary rent, bargaining broken warehouse as a "homestay". At the end of their frustrated vacation, they return home to find their apartment stolen, and the dispossessed couple dances on a mess of wreckage. This work looks like a funny sketch, but it is painfully aphasia. Born in the 1950s, Li Cangdong should have also experienced the gap between scarcity and urban and rural areas, and the "poor genes" of inferiority, miserliness, sensitivity, and anger have a dermakami sympathy and depiction in Li Cangdong's novels.
Another example is "The Day of Heavy Snow", indeed, the name of the novel is too ordinary, almost like a primary school student essay question, but the heavy snow here is not only the arrival of heavy snow in the sense of time, but also the accidental agreement of a pair of Pingshui men and women, floating lightly and passing by, and after a few months, they rushed to it heavily. How accidental this first snow agreement was at first, how sweet the subsequent rush was, how solemn and important the two ends of the thought were, and it was under this sweet and important confluence of the two ends that the soldier's accidental death seemed too painful, and even how small, the fate of being too frightened was so that people had nothing to say! Most novels are probably written here, and even if they are only written here, they are already highly scored, and this unconscious, innocent cruelty has penetrated all the hearts and livers of the world. But Li Cangdong's astonishing stroke as a novelist appeared at the end - the girl who came to the appointment from a distant place was not only confused by the understated lies of the soldier squad leader, but her personal package was immediately picked up by the soldier commander, and a new "accidental" male-female relationship was already in the same sweet pregnancy. And the soldier who had just died in the first snow and knew nothing was hardly painful for the reader. The snow is about to melt, isn't it like death? Dead are dead, but the living should still hold on.
3
Of course, Li Cangdong not only stops at these "small" and "destructive" traumatic narratives, but behind the subtle technology and the sense of language, it is what he has conveyed as the two cores of the novelist's writing.
The first is the pursuit and sigh of the wave of large-scale industrialization, consumerism and Westernization, which is a writing shackle that Li Cangdong has always carried in his writing, and half of the articles in "Burning Paper" belong to this category: the poor couple who take care of the house for the super boss in "Empty House" and thus live like a suspicious person; in "For Superstars", the old father in the countryside goes to serve his son's American nobles who can only understand English. This is also one of the several major themes of the East Asian narrative field that are coherent and enduring, referring to the concept of north drift that we often see in contemporary Chinese novels, Li Cangdong also uses "Seoul" as a geographical representative of the city and capital in the novel, writing about the survival of the old and the young and the "first drift", the alternation and change of major social nodes, the careful efforts and helpless dispersion of individual characters. This kind of class oppression and poverty and shame in his writings does not have any sense of estrangement from foreign literature, and the intimate commonality seems to exude more broad-spectrum sexual sadness with more oriental colors.
Another theme is closely related to historical events, national nightmares, institutional changes and other hard-core appeals with strong socio-political implications, which can even be said to be the most prominent feature of Li Cangdong's novels, and it is also his writing ambition. His deep concern and concern for social politics, class and ideology, suffering and its values, although not to the point of reaching the depressed narrative of the proletarian struggle like Those of Takuji Kobayashi or the disillusionment of John Steinbeck's capitalist disillusionment, is permeated by internal social criticism and confrontational positions, and is filled with endless and deep sighs about the legacy of war, the advancement of modernization, the fall of a generation of people in the process of Western-centrism and democracy.
In particular, the collection "Kagawa Has a Lot of Dung" basically chooses "specific" historical facts, such as the 1980 Gwangju Incident, the 1987 "June Protests" and the "June 29 Declaration" as the background of the novel and the core of the fate of the characters, especially as the finale of the "Sky Lantern", which has a considerable amount of space to simply restore the "Buchuan Police Sexual Torture Incident" in 1985. In addition, such as anti-communist education, spies, red elements, "White Bone Regiment" (the plainclothes arrest team of the Seoul police), "Gongke" (the South Korean Police Department originally handled the communist department), "Foreign Princess" (a Korean prostitute who provided sexual services to the US military), and other exclusive names with the background and chronological meaning of left-wing activities are also sprinkled like iron nails, including in the novel "Long Chuan Bai", the protagonist's name is ridiculed, because the father who pursues the communist faith is pronounced "Marx" in English and named him "Mo Su"...
But the theme of appeal and protest is often a two-way bondage, as a novelist Li Cangdong in the treatment of this part of the subject, the lightness and sense of playfulness disappeared, his brushstrokes appear to be stagnant, wandering, the plot is slow to push, the character's state of mind and action are with a kind of fog boat confusion, dragging a rootless iron anchor, masked. The political gravity imposed by the outside world and the fantasy of the characters' inner desire to soar, the double pressure of the embers of the times and the fire are extremely vividly reflected in the heroine of "Sky Lantern", and the direction of the novel is the same as that of his characters, bearing the dark clouds of history and the sunshine of this here, half bright and half dark, running and abandoning, looking forward and backward, and it is difficult to complete the end. It is precisely because of this discordant but tenacious advance that Li Cangdong constructed and defended his decisive bravery as a novelist.
4
In the preface to the translation of "Burning Paper", Mr. Kim Ran mentioned the concept of "dividing literature" in the history of Korean literature, that is, it appeared in the 1980s during the writing stage of Lee Cangdong, mainly reflecting on the separation of the people under national division based on the historical and practical pain of the confrontation between the north and the south of the Korean Peninsula. Li Cangdong's novel creation obviously bears the deep imprint of that time and place, of course, his handling is not a frontal assault, but a conceptual relay of two generations, especially the gap, anger and powerlessness in this relay, the flesh-and-blood family affection is forced by the miserable wind and rain of the world, and the descendants who bear the political burden of their ancestors are succumbing to the needs of survival and breaking up, or whether they have achieved "burning" reconciliation by death.
In Li Cangdong's fragmented literary writing, the intention of "death" appears abound, sometimes as an important barrier to isolation, and sometimes as an effective means of relay and reconciliation, skillfully and coldly used. In works such as "Fire and Ashes", "Sacrifice", "Burning Paper", "Booty" and so on, there are repeated pictures of dying, life and death, cremation, burning paper, sacrifice and so on, which are full of memory transmission or fragmentation of rebellion. Interestingly, this part comes from the heavy knots in the depths of time, and it is possible that it is through the repeated writing of the novel that he has been partially relieved and released. More than ten years later, as a director, Li Cangdong has formed a broader care and a more gentle expression in most of his works. On the contrary, in the recent work "Burning", he mixed up poverty and shame, east-west confrontation, consumerism, etc., and lit up a belated, sad and raging fire, as if it was a message and echo from the distant novel of Li Cangdong, a novelist from the past.
Of course, for his own writing, Li Cangdong has a strong sense of introspection, and in the afterword to "Deer River Has a Lot of Dung" written in 1992, with a kind of novelist's sensitivity and introspection, he said to himself, "I hope this book will become an opportunity for me to start again." I can't let go of the belief that strange readers will read my words somewhere and be touched by them. Not being able to be honest with literature can mean being dishonest with my life, and I have to accept that fact. ”
Of course, he has already started again, and thirty years later, Chinese readers (often fans) can still receive his honesty in his novels, and also receive the crystallization of his thinking in the intersection of the times, and the stinging light reflected by these crystals, and we can look back with the eyes of the future, Li Cangdong, as a novelist, paved what he laid for, digested, and terminated what Li Cangdong as a director, in the sense of necessity, made Li Cangdong become Li Cangdong.