Written by 丨 Wang Yiping
Alai, a famous contemporary writer, is the chairman of the Sichuan Writers Association. His major works include the poetry collection "Lingmo River", the novel collection "Blood stains of the old years", the non-fiction work "Ladder of the Earth", the novel "Dust Settled", "Empty Mountain" and so on. He has won the Mao Dun Literature Award and the Lu Xun Literature Award.
In addition to people, literature should also encompass the wider world
From "The Dust Settles" to "In the Clouds", Ah Lai seems to be experiencing a transformation from "social reality" to "the relationship between man and nature" in terms of creative themes. Faced with this question, Alai responded that his changes were more gradual, and the deeper reason for this transformation came from his thinking on the ancient proposition of "the unity of heaven and man".
He pointed out that beyond man, literature should also encompass the wider world, encompassing the natural world. In classical Chinese poetry, the natural world is often an important part, and the literary traditions of "relying on things to speak zhi" and "supporting things to lyricism" are expressed through natural things, as exemplified by Du Fu's famous sentence "When feeling flowers splash tears, hate birds and frighten hearts". However, after the rise of narrative literature, "nature" disappeared, whether it is "Water Margin" or "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", the focus of writing is on people and people.
Stills from the 2011 Cannes Palme d'Or award-winning film The Tree of Life, which tells the story of the mysteries between man and nature
"Why did the nature in the Book of Poetry and chu ci disappear from the novelist's pen?" Alai raised this question at the lecture site. He believes that, to some extent, this is also the embodiment of the lack of scientific spirit in Chinese literature. Since the New Culture Movement, Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu and others have put forward the slogans of "democracy" and "science", but to this day, science has not entered literature. On the other hand, the deterioration of the current ecological environment also deserves more attention from literature. He also cites works by American natural literature writers such as Rousseau and Leopold to express his concern about this issue.
Culturally, dialectical thinking about the new and the old
At the event site, Alai took the Japanese sinologist 'The Collapse and Expansion of China' book as an example to point out the tolerance and strength of Chinese culture. In his view, the use of literature to carry the Tao and lyrical words is a great tradition of Chinese literature, making people good and beautiful. However, after the Opium War, the quest for novelty became the mainstream. Until now, "what's new is good" has become a consensus to some extent.
Alai believes that in culture, the new is not necessarily better than the old. Citing the popular short video as an example, he pointed out that this is not a complete innovation, because image reading existed before the advent of text. In the same way, online literature is not necessarily all good. He argued more pointedly that "the Internet is just a medium, but directly named after online literature, contains a blind cult of technology." Online literature seems to be very new, but in the bones is a very old thing, the so-called domineering president, pet concubine these themes, and the traditional culture of the best and the most beautiful is the complete opposite.
In the face of this situation, Alai mentioned that during the New Culture Movement, the intellectuals at that time discussed the Chinese's faith, and they believed that the education and beauty of poetics in China and the United States might constitute the faith of Chinese. Alai believes that this is a possibility. At present, Chinese culture is facing a special period of "demolishing old houses and new houses have not yet been built", so we cannot only do the work of demolishing houses and selling tiles.
Lecture site map
In death, is there something beautiful?
In Alai's new work "In the Clouds", he focuses on the village in the clouds after the Wenchuan earthquake. The novel tells the story of the collective migration of Yunzhong Village, which has a thousand-year tradition after the earthquake, to the plains. But the priest Aba crossed the mountain forest field to the ruins of every family in the village, burning incense and dancing, telling the past. Zhang Guangguang believes that in this book, Alai deliberately avoids the mentality and suffering complex of disaster victims that are common in disaster literature.
Faced with this problem, Alai recalled his experience as a volunteer in the disaster area after the Wenchuan earthquake. In the town he visited, an earthquake of more than twenty seconds took half of the population. Most of the survivors wept bitterly in the face of a decomposing corpse. This also made Ah Lai begin to think, in the face of death, Chinese only have an attitude of crying? Is there something beautiful in death?
Alai then thought of Mozart's Requiem in the face of death. In his view, "Requiem" contains a kind of expectation and hope in the face of death. When the body cannot be sustained, man often craves the existence of the soul. It is a kind of self-esteem sadness, a beautiful expectation, which has both self-compassion and compassion for all beings under the world.
In other words, in the face of death and disaster, all beings are equal. However, China's disaster literature and war literature often only stay in personal memory and national memory, and lack a universal humanistic care. What "In the Clouds" does is to inject a broader and universal concern into disaster literature.
Stills from the 1992 Iranian film "Life and Growth Stream", the film tells the story of the villagers who lived the rest of their lives after the 1990 Earthquake in Iran, who did not have the sad look that people imagined, but actively participated in post-disaster reconstruction and cherished life even more, and a young couple even held a wedding the day after the earthquake.
At the end of the lecture, Alai returned to the theme of "the life of literature". Literature, he mentioned, was always an unending process of enlightenment for him. He also uses writers such as Faulkner and Hemingway as examples to tell the powerful humanitarian baptism that literature has brought him. He further pointed out that the literature of the future would be what Goethe called "world literature." Literature will no longer be confined to nations and nations, but will stand on the side of all mankind. In his view, science fiction and natural literature represent this direction.
In addition, he believes that the particularity of literature lies not in stories, but in language. Chinese is a language with strong musicality, so Chinese literature should not only be satisfied with narrative, but also explore the beauty of language. In the face of the disappearance of personal language and the prevalence of clichés, he hopes that the beauty of articles and rhetoric can penetrate into people's spiritual and emotional lives.
Author 丨 Wang Yiping
Editor 丨Li Yang
Proofreading 丨 Xue Jingning