Seeing the catalog advertisement of the 5th issue of "Jiangnan" this year, Huang Dehai's new "long non-fiction" work "Reading, Reading People, Reading materials--- Jin Kemu Chronicle" (hereinafter referred to as the "Chronicle") immediately triggered my strong and eager reading expectations, first of all because of the legendary academic career of the protagonist of the work, Mr. Jin Kemu, and secondly, Dehai also attached a "postscript" text entitled "Trying to become a non-fiction growth novel" at the end of this work, which is also "non-fiction" and "novel". The fact that I was going to mix these two basic elements together in a stylistic way that contradicted each other had to fill me with curiosity and eagerness to see how Dehai had "tried" it.
I'm not familiar with Jin Lao, but I did have a few encounters in the mid-1980s. At the time, I was also in charge of editing the "Theory and Controversy" edition in the media. In addition to publishing some long articles on literary and artistic theory issues, this special edition will also consciously invite some writers and well-known scholars to write literary and artistic essays of more than a thousand words and publish them in italics. At that time, I noticed that each issue of "Reading" magazine had a column called "Swallow Mouth Picking Mud", although the text was not long, but the content was very chic, and the author was Mr. Jin Kemu.
As a "raw melon egg" who has just walked out of the campus, although I don't know the height of the sky, but there is still the stunned "newborn calf" of the stock, after hearing the mailing address of The Elder Jin, I wrote a letter of appointment to the old man, which is nothing more than a brief introduction to myself and the layout to which I belong, and then asked the old man to "not hesitate to give the manuscript" and so on. What I didn't expect was that a few days later the old man replied to the letter and sent a short article with the letter, what the article wrote is now completely unclear, and all I remember is my own joy at that time and my sincere gratitude and respect for the old man. As I grew older and more experienced, I realized that such a "miracle" might only have happened in that era and generation of scholars.
After a while, I happened to be going to Peking University for business, so I felt that I should thank the old man by the way, so I went to a letter in advance, briefly stating my intentions and the time of the visit, and the old man still quickly replied and recognized. I remember that it was a beautiful morning, on a lawn outside the residence of the old man in The Langrun Garden of Peking University, I saw Elder Jin for the first time, not as fairy wind dao bone as imagined, but as an elderly person with kind eyebrows; after a few simple greetings, the old man began to ask me frequent questions, and the questions were probably some hot topics in the literary circles at that time, especially some writers had just appeared in a literary magazine's new works, and these new works could be sure from the old man's words that he must have seen. This really surprised me, completely different from the undisguised "thick ancient and thin modern" style of most old gentlemen at that time. I also heard that the old man not only knows English, French, German, Sanskrit, Hindi and Esperanto, but also is not a foreign language at all, but also erudite, and this short visit of about an hour can also be regarded as a witness to the rumors. How could the old man's not huge head and not huge body accommodate such profound knowledge? Besides, at that time, he was already a rare man.
Dehai's "Chronicle" largely answers the above question that has existed in my mind for many years: self-taught, although the word is a bit tyrannical to use on such a "strange person" as Jin Lao, and Jin Lao "never admits that he is self-taught, always emphasizes that he has a teacher, and the teachers are the best." Regardless of how Jin Lao became a talent, his absorption and understanding of various knowledge is absolutely amazing and impressive. Jin Lao was born in 1912, in the Qing Dynasty Ren Zhi County's father not only flowered the top of the belt landed, and died in the following year, the family road began to fall, and Jin Lao was neither born of his mother nor a single lineage, his family status and status are not difficult to imagine.
The first part of the "Chronicle", "The Age of Learning", strictly and completely records the "study" career of Jin Lao before the age of 35. The reason why I want to put the word "study" in quotation marks is because this period of time is not only interspersed with some of the work experiences of Jin Laojian or Jin, but also the entire "study" career is completely different from the continuity, normativity and systematization of our habits, but presents the fragmentation of time and the content of the content, although not systematic, but also extremely broad two distinctive characteristics. Summarizing the educational situation received in the 19 years before Jin Lao went to Beiping to study in 1930, whether it was the enlightenment stage or the primary and secondary school period, it is not difficult to see this point by stitching together the fragmentary self-statements of the elderly. The so-called formal school education is intermittent and incomplete, but the personal reading has never been interrupted, and the scope is getting wider and wider, more and more complicated, from the vernacular, from Chinese to Western studies, from humanities to natural sciences, including some left-wing progressive books and newspapers, as well as English and Esperanto... It was during this period that he entered the vision and mind of Elder Jin. In 1930, Mr. Jin, who had just turned 19 years old, went to Beiping to study, and although the three brothers told him to "think of an idea to go to college" when he sent him, he was confined to economic embarrassment, "the door of the university could not be entered, but it did not prevent him from going to another type of university": reading newspapers, entering the municipal public library in Fa Fa Hutong, entering the "Private Professor english" office, entering the "private professor Esperanto" office, entering the Zhongshan Library, Songpa Library, the Library of the Political Association of China, visiting used bookstores and book stalls; to the Republic of China University, listening to education, Chinese language, public English and professional English. Repeat lectures on physiological psychology, German, and French; go to Chinese university to listen to Russian, English literature history, and English classes; go to Beijing Normal University, listen to foreigners teach English classes, listen to Qian Xuantong and Li Jinxi outside the window; listen to Xiong Foxi's drama theory class; read Turgenev again; write novels; soak in the peking university library; engage in translation; read the original works of Marx and Leninism in group reading clubs; listen to speeches by Zhang Taiyan, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun... In 1933, he returned to Beiping with a small salary earned in Shandong Dexian Normal School, and became a ticketless passenger in class at Peking University, listening to German, Japanese, and French classes, and becoming fascinated by astronomy; getting acquainted with Xu Chi, Sha Ou, Wu Mi, Zhu Xihou, etc.; in 1935, he worked in the Peking University Library, engaged in amateur creation and translation; got to know Deng Guangming, and became an academic guide... This was the case, including the fact that in 1941, Jin Lao went through Burma to any Chinese newspaper editor to learn both Hindi and Sanskrit, and then to the Indian Buddhist holy land of Luyeyuan to study Buddhism until 1946, before teaching at Wuhan University.
From the above tireless arrangement of chronological order, it is indeed not difficult to see: First, it is not wrong to say that Jin Lao belongs to "self-taught"; second, there are many self-learners and few talents, but Jin Lao's reading ability, memory, comprehension, endurance and practical ability are indeed beyond the reach of ordinary people; third, although he has no access to formal system education, Jin Lao's learning has thus gained greater autonomy and choice, so we see that his field of study is exceptionally wide, and there are many disciplines of reading, which can also be said to be lost.
In the Chronicle, Dehai's language is extremely simple, but occasionally there will be or excerpts of scenes with a certain sense of picture, which is interesting, and it is good to give an example or two.
Scene 1: When Jin Lao was still working as an administrator in the Peking University Library, "One day, a borrower suddenly said to me softly across the counter, 'You are Jin Kemu, right?'" You will write articles. So-and-so loves the article you write'". This soft speaker was Mr. Deng Guangming, who later became famous as the main pioneer and founder of the study of Chinese Song history in the 20th century, and he was completing his graduation thesis "The Biography of Chen Liang" under the guidance of Mr. Hu Shi. Even if he was only a fourth-year student of the History Department of Peking University at that time, he did not have to take the initiative to show his uneducated librarian, and also showed him his graduation thesis; later, he even took the initiative to ask Jin Kemu, who was still basically unknown at that time, to write and publish a long ten-thousand-word essay "Defending the Road" for the Yishi Bao And Reading Weekly, which was already a well-known Zhou Zuoren, and it was this article that became Jin Lao's "'opening pen' for publishing a big article."
Scene 2: Under the Luojia Mountain on the campus of Wuhan University around 1947, there are often four middle-aged people walking along, while "talking without margins, jumping vertically and horizontally, suddenly learning old, suddenly new poetry, ancient Chinese, and foreign languages... Elegant and customary ginseng, both ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign traffic." This is a scene presented by Zhou Xuliang, Tang Changru, Jin Kemu and Cheng Qianfan, who were known as the "Four Friends of Luojia" at Wuhan University.
In fact, for example, publishing your own works does not require the introduction of celebrities, for example, a letter may meet and communicate with a celebrity, such as you can see or hear many books and magazines and lectures by famous artists for free... Looking at these experiences of Elder Jin when he was young, I also understood why I quickly got a reply and masterpiece from Mr. Jin with an ordinary letter, and it was also an ordinary letter that could meet Elder Jin.
Such interpersonal relationships and scenes like this are indeed warm and fascinating. If Elder Jin had not encountered such a person and such an environment, even if he had superior talent and talent, although it was harmless to teach himself, it was not necessary to become a talent. Hu Shi said when he was marrying Elder Jin that year: At that time, "Peking University had a special system, that is, to allow young people to eavesdrop. Mr. Kim listened not only to one door, but also to many doors. He has become a very good language scholar today. ”
Finally, I would like to talk about the writing of this work. The theme of the work is called "Reading, Reading People, And Reading", which should summarize the main content of the work, that is, the main experience of Jin Lao's life is summarized as this "three readings"; the subtitle is called "Jin Kemu Chronicle", which should refer to the specific writing method of the work, that is, as Dehai himself explained, the whole book is "mainly based on Jin Kemu's reminiscence text, interspersed with the texts involved by others, and miscellaneous examinations". It is natural that such a work should be called "long non-fiction", in other words, it can also be called a text version of the chronology of Jin Lao's life. It can be imagined how much hard work and death effort Dehai put in to complete this work, and how much effort was spent. As he himself mentions in the almost "Creative Talk" text appended to the work, "Jin Kemu's self-study has almost become legendary, but what is his method of self-study?" Jin Kemu had been interrupted from academic work for nearly thirty years, and what was the reason for the endless whimsy in his later years? Questions like this can be answered in Dehai's work. I am talking here of "enlightenment" rather than "finding", that is, the answer is formed by the reader's participation in thinking, not ready to appear in the work, which is where the important value of Deheben's work lies.
In this almost "creative talk", Dehai left a sentence that made the reader think a little: "I hope that this chronicle will have the opportunity to become a non-fictional growth novel." "Hope to have the opportunity to become" seems to refer to the future rather than the present Chronicle, and "not fictional coming-of-age fiction" refers to "non-fiction" as the characteristic and limitation of the future "novel", which is very curious. If so, it would really subvert the most fundamental feature of the novel genre— fiction. Of course, this is a bold idea, not a problem to be discussed in this article, but Dehai's "Chronicle" is indeed a relatively strict chronicle writing method in writing, and the words are like gold, and there is no word and no source. When I read this work, my state is indeed more "divided": on the one hand, I follow the work strictly in chronological order, on the other hand, a sentence or several sentences of the work will indeed immediately appear in my mind a picture, a scene or even a plot. The former state is reading history, and the latter state is reading novels. I believe that the latter state will exist in other readers, except that the pictures, scenes, and plots that appear in their imaginations may not be exactly the same as mine. So is it possible to say that reading history is led by Dehai, and reading novels is "complicity" or "isomorphism" between readers and Dehai? If this is indeed the case, the kind of "non-fictional coming-of-age novel" that De hai expects is already an invisible existence.
Author: Pan Kaixiong (well-known literary critic)
Editor: Guo Chaohao