The Paper's reporter Ding Xiongfei
Wang Anyi
Wang Anyi was born in 1954 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. In 1977, he began his literary creation, and wrote novels such as "69th Junior High School Students" (1984), "Yellow River Old Taoists" (1986), "Thirty Chapters of Flowing Water" (1988), "Minnie" (1991), "Documentary and Fiction" (1993), "Long Hate Song" (1995), "Fu Ping" (2000) "The Upper Seed of Red Diamond and the Lower Seed Lotus" (2002), "Peach Death" (2003), "Everywhere Woong" (2005), "Age of Enlightenment" (2007), "Tianxiang" (2011), "Anonymous" (2015) "Examination Workers" (2018), as well as works of millions of words such as short stories, essays, and screenplays.
Recently, Wang Anyi's long new work "A Knife, a Thousand Words" was published by the People's Literature Publishing House. Regarding this novel and his recent creations, Wang Anyi was interviewed by the Shanghai Review of Books.
"A Knife, a Thousand Words", by Wang Anyi, People's Literature Publishing House, published in April 2021, 332 pages, 56.00 yuan
Two years after the publication of "Kao Gong Ji", you have published another novel, and it can be said that you are the contemporary Chinese writer with the most stable high-quality output, the sharpest sense of smell of the times, and the most enthusiastic exploration of the boundaries of literary forms, and you are a well-deserved working master. The upper part of the new work "A Knife, a Thousand Words" is a considerable part of the story of Huaiyang chefs in the United States after the 1990s; the second part is mainly the story of the northeastern intellectual family in the early years of the Republic. Can you talk about the reasons for the writing of this novel?
Wang Anyi: Writing is a secret activity, the occurrence, process and end of the matter, is not so sober, feel the stones to cross the river, a lot of so-called planning is more likely to be carried out after the fact, strictly speaking, the creation of talk is actually another imagination, talk more, the farther away from the facts. When the problem is forced to come to mind, there is a strange feeling, as if he is talking about someone else's novel, not his own, probably because the finished writing has detached from the matrix and becomes an objective existence. In my opinion, the upper and lower parts of the novel are structured in a way that says one thing, the past and present lives of The Huaiyang Chef, not in the order of natural time, but according to another, perhaps closer to the sequence of physical and mental growth, or the local mood at the time of writing, who can say well what to think of first, and then think of what, such a subjective nature should be externalized into objective, more suitable for critics to do, this is their job. As for your praise for my continued writing, it is nothing more than pointing out the ethics of a profession, the person who writes novels, what else can he do without writing novels? But one year in Beijing, chatting with the writer Zhang Chengzhi, he suddenly asked a sentence very seriously: When are you going not to write? "When not to write" means that you have finally reached the limit of the fortune number to give you.
Regarding the title of the novel, you said in the preface that "a knife" is "the first of the three knives in Yangzhou, a kitchen knife", and "a thousand words" is taken from Yuan Ming's "Moon Ying Bamboo into a Thousand Words" written by Yuan Ming. The former is the occupation of the protagonist Chen Cheng in the second half of his life, and the latter is the bamboo shadow he and his childhood playmate have stepped on, but a thousand "one" characters can also be read as "thousand words", so between "knife" and "word", it seems to hint at the relationship between things and names, body and language. Do you have any considerations in this regard? At the end of the novel, silent tears replace the original idea of pouring out "a thousand words", is there something similar to "truth" pouring out of the "knife" and "word" in that scene?
Wang Anyi: I named novels, most of them tend to be simple and catchy, "a knife" and "a thousand words", the former comes from the folk proverb "Yangzhou three knives", the latter is naturally a poem written in a garden with Yuan Ming, both are the characteristics of Yangzhou City, relative and echoable, slightly need to be converted, the "one" of "a thousand words" is a quantifier solution, and the battle is neat. Teacher Zong Pu did not have time to read the novel, and said that this name is interesting, which made me feel very at ease, and I was a little nervous, as if it was out of bounds. I think that the name is a "device", the things inside are installed by others themselves, what is loaded, and how much is loaded, which means that this "device" has a high volume ratio, so I welcome the interpretation, and it does not matter if it is excessive. I have a novella, originally called "Flying to Buenos Aires", published in the journal with this title, when the monograph was published, the American editor considered too many words, and changed it to the protagonist's name "Sister Head", which is a milk name, the treasure of the people in the alley, it is not bad, and then I thought, why not call it "glass wood comb tears", Shanghainese people have another name for "Buenos Aires", very interesting, these two things do not match and have a ride, but it is too late, "sister head" has been called out, I don't know what a new name refers to, the name is just a title, but it is always a bit regrettable that it is not called.
The most obvious form of this novel is the division between the upper and lower parts. Each chapter in the upper part goes back and forth between the son's nineties and sixties, leading to suspense about why the mother was absent, and the lower part answers the mother's life from the beginning, culminating in the sixties. Mother may have historical archetypes, but as a fictional character, she has her own yearning and questioning. The term "Oedipus Complex" appears twice in the first part of the novel, and you have also set up a number of mother substitutes: widows, ZhaoDi, and even the mother's Tianjin classmates, dormitory colleagues, and even sisters and wives and teachers can also be counted as such - can this tangled and divided "mother-son" relationship also be regarded as an allegory of the relationship between our time and the sixties?
Wang Anyi: "Mother" is indeed the core of the character growth story, I am only aimed at the individual's encounter, there is no intention to release so far, the novel is really lacking in ambition, attracted to the bitterness of the world. In particular, I never targeted "epic", even if it was "Homer's epic", at that time it was probably only the work of a bard, similar to the grandmother's night talk by the hearth, which was a fishing gossip, telling stories and listening to stories. History turns its hands into clouds, overturns its hands into rain, and everyone is in their own part, where can they see the whole picture. Today magazine has launched a discussion on the "great novel", and my opinion is that the novel is not a "great" business, it is personal, and if you can be honest with the individual, you can do your duty. Of course, you will say that the individual is in the era, this kind of big and reduced statement is the theoretical design of the grand narrative, but also the political correctness of the "epic", and the aesthetics of the novel may be exactly in the marginal part, the dark river under the torrent, the deep and the quiet, the change in the unchanged. Zhang Wenjiang, a classical scholar, has two bad comments on novels, one is that the threshold is low, and the other is that because he does classical research, the novel is just a repetition of what is already there. I agree with both points he said, the relationship between ancient books and novels can probably be compared to the nobility and the common people, and the rise of novels in modern times actually confirms the rise of the new capitalist class, the popularization of culture to the masses, and in the past two hundred years, it is also approaching the proposition of intellectuals, but it still maintains the original life gene, that is, secularity.
Readers familiar with your previous creations will surely realize that your writing has exhausted the geographical space of Shanghai, almost for Shanghai. The spatial radiation of "A Knife, a Thousand Words" is even more grand: Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Atlantic City, Yangzhou, Harbin, orunchun. If you count the origin of the minor characters in the novel, there are Xinjiang, Yunnan, Shandong, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Texas, Vietnam, Soviet Russia, Estonia, Puerto Rico... In this way, there are obviously higher requirements for novel technology. Can you talk about why you made such an attempt?
Wang Anyi: I don't dare to use the word "geographical space", just like I dare not call it "history", the space in the novel is of a virtual nature, and people and things must always have a stage! Realism has to borrow from real place names, "The Matrix" is borrowed from scientific laws, myths can be forgiven like authenticity, but need to create their own logic, such as the "Dream of the Red Chamber" in the too illusory realm, there is no distinction between true and false, the former and future generations are determined, and the Greek gods still have genealogies. Shanghai is the place where I live and grow, naturally the most available, the second gear of short-term residence, again a stopover, the most unfortunate is to hear. I believe more in the field that life will create shape according to its needs. I went to Chongqing in the 1980s, walked down the Chaotianmen pier in the morning light, countless steps, lights dotted, whistle whimpering, unfortunately there is no good story with it, but it is still used as a background in a novel, called "Shu Dao Difficulty". I have not been to the Northern Wilderness, these three words have been familiar to me since childhood, there are neighbors in the fifties who are classified as rightists, the whole family goes there, the endless sowing and harvest in the movie is there, the intellectual youth go to the mountains and go to the countryside to wear safflowers singing songs and excite the words, sending back the birch bark family letter, the Orunchun people in the novel have no chance to meet, but always think of letting the characters go to a spacious place, otherwise it is too humiliating, as if it does not open. Later, it is said that the editor of "Harvest" liked this paragraph the most and was very proud in his heart. Therefore, the geography of the novel is actually prescribed by the characters, and it is lucky to find the ready-made one, and if you can't find it, you can make one up on the paper, but you have to make up an image.
In this novel, three Chinatowns appear —San Francisco, Manhattan, and Flushing. Why do you value Flushing the most, saying that it is "the real life born of a false mother"? Just like you have overlooked Shanghai again and again, this time you are also standing on New York Metro Line 7, overlooking the city, how does New York compare to Shanghai? Are the judgments expressed in the novel through the mouths of the characters and narrators your own judgments: "New Yorkers are actually barbarians", "New York is a place where dragons and crouching tigers", Flushing's survival principle is to "minimize costs"; Americans are "mostly blind", "some people are crazy", "do not believe in fate, only believe in manpower"; "in this part of the United States, the water and soil are too rich", "a lot of brute force", everything is "fat and strong".
Wang Anyi: This is even a question of meritocracy, Flushing itself has a kind of virtuality, I am not engaged in urban research, I can not look at these spaces from the perspective of historical society, I am thinking about whether it is suitable for the needs of the novel. To a certain extent, immigrant gathering places have the nature of enclaves, not to say that outside the border, in the late 1980s, I went to baimaoling farm under the Shanghai Labor Reform Bureau to interview, located in southern Anhui, but it is a small Shanghai, adults and children speak Shanghainese, relatives are Shanghainese; the third line is also a shanghaineck. The story of enclaves is always a bit legendary. Zhang Ailing loves to write about the expatriates of Shanghai or Hong Kong, although there is no siege of the city, but also gradually formed a small society, near in the distance, far in the near, really like that lyric about the people on the earth and the stars in the sky, crowded and distant. I dare not judge the personality and expression of the ethnic group, which is left to the sociologist to study, or that sentence, the novel starts from the individual, and must not be taken seriously. An immigrant's view of the local area is limited by his own experience, can not be said to be right, can not be wrong, reflects his own situation and experience. To say that the United States is rich in water and soil is mostly because he comes from a place where the soil is exhausted; to say that americans have no eyes, and most of them are out of a well-known human society; fatalists will be surprised by a life with strong mobility, and so on, and so on, the novel progresses in the hypothetical facts, and finally completes the mission, and the mission is also assumed.
Unlike Anonymous, whose speculation is mostly embodied in free indirect quotations, your philosophical expression takes on a new form in One Knife, A Thousand Words— dialogue. The characters of the novel talk about existence and consciousness, phenomena and essence; the dialogue itself is also similar to "Zen-like communication", often "the preface does not match the afterword", "from one thing to another", "questions and answers go in circles", "the public is justified, the wife is reasonable", and the "sophistry" is performed, full of "drama". In addition, "Industrious people are talking to you" is like a secret passage in the novel. Can you talk about the dialogue of this novel?
Wang Anyi: I have always been interested in the dialogue between the characters, usually in the narrative treatment, the dialogue is more full of should be regarded as "The Tyrant everywhere", according to the film genre, it is a road novel, and the overall layout is paved by the characters' small talk. "Anonymous" because it is a person in an isolated environment, no one talks to him, and is an amnesiac, in fact, the challenge to the novel is very large, how to fill in the blank impressions, combined into a new world, the remnants of memory will also interfere, input old factors, and at the same time to promote the plot, internal and external interaction, there are many aspects that need to be taken care of, and it is very hard to write. The narrative of "A Knife, a Thousand Words" is much simpler, philosophy cannot be talked about, and the novel is a micro-end filtered down by social science and humanities, and there is no name for existence. I asked the novel dialogue, strictly speaking, not "dialogue", but the words of the characters, Wang Gu left and right to talk about him. Looking at the mountain is not a mountain, the result is to see the mountain is a mountain. That is to set up a good background for speaking, under this background, no matter what you say, it is a meaning, that is, a purpose. It is said that "Zen" is too mysterious, the surface and bottom of "Zen" are too far apart, to rely on "enlightenment", the reader of the novel generally has no "understanding", the author is also a layman, so it is still necessary to give a range. There is a word in our Shanghainese dialect called "speaking dead words", which is about a bit of this meaning, is it the "big truth" spoken by northerners? In short, what is said is what you and I will say, but saying and not saying are different. What I prefer to avoid is to speak with an explanation of the task, so it is better to describe it directly. Because the novel is originally an indirect transmission, even if the dialogue in the branch still lacks intuitive vividness, it is more interesting to deal with it as a narrative from a bystander perspective. This is also the way of gradual formation, once I also directly presented the dialogue, and then I got tired of it, and the written dialogue was always better than the expression of the real person on the stage.
Since Tianxiang, there have been many classical elements and Confucian imagery in your novels. In this novel, there are many "Confucian Taoist systems", "Taoist spirits" and "lively" and "zen on earth", and in addition, you also constantly appeal to the "Dream of the Red Chamber" and the "I Ching", mentioning "Tiangong Kaiwu", "Liaozhai Zhiyi", "Yanzi Chunqiu", quoting "Mencius", "Analects", "Poetry Classics", and explaining some verses, idioms, fables and stories. How do you see these "ancient meanings" in the novel? Of course, when you write about human sensory and physiological changes, the vocabulary of modern physics and biology appears.
Wang Anyi: Please, don't say anything about "Confucianism" and "imagery", this will expose my weakness. In my opinion, that's not the way of fiction, all I do is name it and find the right word. Now, I'm often overwhelmed by not being able to find the explanation, as if there are not enough words to be exact. "Tianxiang" because of the limited theme, in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, can not say the words of the front dynasty and the back dynasty, had to drop some book bags, in fact, I did not write it as a historical novel, it is a story, which happened at that time and that place, so I followed the rules. To say that those ancient books are all taking doctrines and temporarily clinging to the Buddha's feet. At that time, the ancient scholar Zhao Changping was still there, so he used him as a living dictionary and asked him when he used it. How much he has indulged my laziness, some things can be deepened, so that his spirit can get more nourishment and become plump. But urged by writing, he became utilitarian and missed the opportunity. Writing fiction, like many other professions, requires constant learning. This novel, according to theory, is not too difficult, because it is in daily life, but it is also this point that makes people embarrassed. It is too similar to life, and it is easy to fall into the "shape" of the mortar, although it is a secular novel, there is also a yearning for the metaphysical. This is also the paradox of the novel, one side is "shape", the other side is "metaphysical", both sides are pulling you, or squeezing you, just in this tension to work. In "Anonymous", the naming becomes xianxue, because it is the main body of the plot composition, hard work is hard, but there is great fun, it seems to simulate creation, sacred, and at the same time deeply appreciates its own smallness, thinking that Cangjie must not be a person, but a force similar to the first push of the earth. Physicists often think that Einstein was chosen by God, in the words of Chinese, that is, "the heavens descended on the great task", which is the fatalistic worldview, and modern physics is to go to the ultimate world to find unexplainable existence, the former gives up the pursuit, the latter chases to the end, and the result is a turn. Speaking of going back to dialogue, in fact, it may be very simple, people always have to do something together, talking is the duty of words, then say it!
The relationship between nature and man-made civilization seems to be a thread that runs through your novels over the past decade: "Heavenly Creation" in Tianxiang, "Natural History Is Always the Highest Principle in the History of Civilization" in "Anonymous", and The Distinction Between Instrument Construction and Machine Building in "Kao Gong". "A Knife, a Thousand Words" will write about the chef (especially a chef who grows by walking the kitchen and teaching himself), is it also because the chef is related to creation and skill? Can the "Shanghai is a beach" that appears many times in the novel be understood from this perspective?
Wang Anyi: The relationship between nature and civilization is a bit exaggerated in my words, the novel does not undertake such a grand mission, Zhang Xinxin said after reading "Anonymous", since then he believes that xiao can do anything, on the contrary, he also believes that there are many things that novels cannot be done, even if he admits that xiao can do anything, it is also necessary to interpret and transition the figurative to the abstract. We who write novels spend almost our whole lives waiting for an opportunity to fall from the sky, that is, people and things that are one and what is one. For example, "Dream of the Red Chamber", the front edge of Bao Dai's love and tears, if there is no such source, is it not the appearance of Lang Cai's daughter, and the back garden is privately set for life? "Water Margin" one hundred and eight good men are the stars in the sky, and the stars in the sky have no corresponding relationship in action. The modern "Overlord Farewell" is also innately excellent, the male Dan and the raw horn in the opera hide the inversion of gender, and the drama and reality are a pair of inversions, and when the fake is true, it is also false. There are some good motives that lurk beneath the surface of everyday life and need to be explored, such as Nabokov's "Defense", a concrete game of chess, abstracted into geometric shapes, and finally the chess player smashes the pane as if breaking the captivity to gain freedom. I am a clumsy hand, inspiration rarely patronizes me, only rely on the day after tomorrow to work hard to give a higher meaning to what is already there. There are countless encounters, such as "Heavenly Immortal Match", that hearsay that snow hid for ten years before writing a short story, "The Drinker" is also a bar, limited personal experience is a reason, too strict realism is also a barrier, in the end, talent and nature determine your relationship with the world. I have always grown from small to large, and if I start from a large beginning, I will inevitably lose my direction, and as for how long the radius of radiation in this small place is, how far it can reach, it can only be created.
In the novel, my sister's Texas boyfriend asks, "What's right?" The sister replied, "History." This novel can be seen everywhere with expressions such as "the multiplicity of history", "the law of historical development", "the trend of history", "the stagnation of history", "the monument of history", and "the seam of history". Is Flushing somehow outside of "history"? The image of the "ball" appears many times in the novel, and the protagonist finally returns to shanghai where he lived in his childhood, and the memory emerges, and history is "circulating"? Think of the "No Coming, Only Going, Going!" at the end of Anonymous. And the "return, return, return to have the antidote" at the end of "Red Bean Born in the Southern Kingdom", behind these different statements, your thinking about time is fascinating, can you talk about it?
Wang Anyi: Time is a good question, in 1919 I gave a series of lectures in the department of Chinese of Zhejiang University, the first lecture was to talk about time, with Proust's "Remembrance of Remembrance like Water Years" as the text, did not talk well, extended to the first half of the second lecture, only to complete, but also left a lot of omissions, now when sorting out the lecture manuscript slowly to make up, not completely made up. This is really not easy to say clearly, because it is difficult to separate the subject and the object, the narrative is attached to time, it is it that obeys the order, it is also it that attempts to intervene, is natural time and time in human activity the same thing or two? Which one is more real? There is an American drama called "Twenty-Four Hours", which faithfully follows the natural chronological sequence, hour after hour, but the viewing still follows the plot rather than time. The Russian-American pianist Horowitz said that "fast" in music is not the actual "fast". I was also fascinated by the term "light-year", measuring time in terms of space, and the scales of time in various calendars present the participation of people in time. But such a thing as time is particularly prone to produce a sense of nothingness, reminding people of smallness and shortness, in fact, in a sense, the art of our narrative, somewhat in a race against time, in a vain attempt to change the shape of time, we will lengthen and expand time, and include more content. I remember a famous novel in the sixties, Sunny Days, and noticed that almost one-third of the length was in one day, and how many things happened. The age of the characters in "Dream of the Red Chamber" can never be matched, staggered and wrongly connected, and the great desolate mountain is boundless, and the stone is turning in a flash. In the cave, there are thousands of years in the world, and there are three living stones, all of which compress time. Westerners' view of time is positivist, and there is a movie called "Seventy Years Back in Time", and seventy years is seventy years, without moisture. The Japanese Miyazaki animation "Spirited Away" is an oriental view of time, but unlike the fate of Chinese, there is agency, and people can change nature. "A knife, a thousand words" does not have a special pursuit of this proposition, is to obey the law of time, this novel has no experimental intention, it is very honest, that is, to record the life of a character.
In the words you once said of Hugo, your work "also proves to us what the novel is all about." Reading each of your new works, you can always find the places where there is intertextuality with your previous works, such as "complementarity", "hybridization", "yin and yang science" in this one, which can be intertextual with "The Age of Enlightenment"; "Shanghai has ancient history", you can intertext with "Tianxiang"; you can talk about "nicknames", "foreign names", "nicknames", "breast names", "former names", you can intertext with "Anonymous"; talk about "cultivation is common sense", you can intertext with "Examination Workers"... As if each of your novels is the sum of previous novels, but it is a brand new work, with new breakthroughs in various forms and ideas, is this what "a knife, a thousand words" calls "quantitative change to qualitative change"?
Wang Anyi: Every writer works within his or her own established scope, which can probably not be explained by "intertext", of course, what the critics think is their creative freedom. Choosing a similar meaning probably does not support the idea of "intertextuality", but still requires a more essential element. The more accusatory version of this phenomenon is "repetition", and it is true that a writer is always repeating a question, and what is important is the amount of energy released from this problem. "Brand new works" is the duty of writing, what we do every day is to create, "breakthrough" in my opinion is not necessarily a praise, it makes me feel like a halfway, a writer, a generation of writers, or even generations of writers, may not be able to complete a thing, now people are too anxious. I'm not happy with my novel, not because it's "new" or "breakthrough," but just to see if it accomplishes a preset goal. The goal of "A Knife, a Thousand Words" is very simple, to write a character, around this character, and configure a group of characters, each with its own context. The purpose of the novel is the character, and the contribution of "Dream of the Red Chamber" to literary history is Jia Baoyu, who gave birth to a civilization that almost covers human history, but cannot be copied.
May 7, 2021 Shanghai
Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang