Read some books that hurt us and stab us: Fiction Night Talk

As I get older, I feel that the flavor of the Spring Festival is getting weaker and weaker. This morning, eating sausages, suddenly realized: the Spring Festival is still that Spring Festival, the reason why we feel light, is because in the past, especially when there was a shortage of goods, the Spring Festival was a good time to fight the tooth festival, eat Ma Ma xiang, so impressed, long aftertaste. Today, the shortage is a distant memory, and our happiness sinks with it, and it takes considerable force to pry it up. The good thing is that we spend our whole lives more than just for that mouth. Once upon a time, when I read Dong Qiao's book, I was impressed by a passage: Feed your mind as you feed your body, everyday. The effect of brain satisfaction is more lasting than feeding the mouth, and believe me, it must be so. Therefore, on the eve of the festival, I launched a novel feast, hoping that everyone could also play a "spiritual tooth festival" during the Spring Festival. This novel night talk series is not written in a day, but it took more than ten years to accumulate bit by bit, and I am revising, adding and deleting every year.

One of the novel's night talks. A good novel must first have a good story. A good story must have empathetic ups and downs of fate, reasonable novelty, and contradictions and dilemmas that make you feel confused. Among the works I have read, the works that belong to the good story are Dickens's "Great Prospects", Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady", Orwell's "Animal Farm", Sholokhov's "Quiet Don", Frankie O'Connor's "Good Man Is Hard to Find", Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness in Life", Ryunosuke Wasagawa's "Rashomon", D. H. Lawrence's "Fox", Malmaud's "Dude", Stellen's "Sophie's Choice", Coetzee's "Shame", Yeribec's "Piano Teacher" , Yu Hua's "Alive", Ian McEwan's "Amsterdam", Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea", Golding's "Lord of the Flies"...

Novel Night Talk No. 2. Good fiction doesn't require the author to interject too much. A common cliché is that in the process of writing, the author forgets the duty of the writer, and constantly stuffs his views and ideologies into the reader; frequently interjects, pointing out the characters and things, afraid that the reader will not understand... The greatness of "The Quiet Don" is that Sholokhov resisted the urge to show his views, although he was the darling of the Red regime, but as a writer, his Gregory was not labeled with any political label, and he did not obviously give his love and hatred to the characters in his pen. So as to guide and hint at the reader's love and hate. It is precisely because it has jumped out of the ideological trap that this huge production has been affirmed by the opposing camps of the East and the West at the same time, and let literature return to literature, which is what it means. Tolstoy's Resurrection, Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, do not reach that height, and these novels have completely become the author's religious, philosophical treatises, and the problem of concept precedence has plunged the novel into a didactic quagmire; they are not writing religious novels, but religious novels. In short, the writer only needs to ask questions, does not give answers, and really wants to give, and must leave enough openness for the reader to answer.

Novel Night Talk No. 3. A good novel should have a good theme. There are many types of wine, and in the same series of wines, the quality is also high. When you have a drink and don't have a choice, those who like Maotai will also drink the second pot. Even so, Moutai is still Maotai, and the second pot head is always the second pot head. Literature is also: "Golden Plum Bottle" will make you enjoy watching, but you said that the theme of "Golden Plum Bottle" is elegant, and I really can't agree with it. The theme should be interesting first, and liking the three-inch golden lotus is also a kind of fun, but it is obviously inappropriate for you to put it on the same level as collecting antique calligraphy and painting. Secondly, the theme should be representative to a certain extent, and the minority should certainly need it, but when we talk about literature, we hope to have a wider influence, and the theme should pay attention to the general plight of human beings. Third, any theme that lacks confrontation and conflict is like riding a cable car to climb a mountain, completely unable to emotionally impact the reader. Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda" is a profound writing of personal fate and a gambler-like mentality of religious beliefs, which makes people want to stop after reading it, and the same strong emotional involvement includes Isaac Singer's "Wrongdoer, a Love Story" and so on. Fourth, the subject matter can cause controversy, but it cannot break through the bottom line. The Wolf Totem story is interesting, but its themes are problematic. The work not only preaches animal worship, but even praises the cruel, greedy, and ferocious wolf nature, and does not dare to look directly at the light of reason, but instead returns to the original animal nature, which is intolerable and unacceptable to people who have survived the two world wars, a Cold War, the Gulag, Auschwitz and The Jiabiangou for the rest of their lives. Regrettably, this cult of wolf nature has made some organizations relish it, and even requires its members to read and learn it, so that those who understand a little history can easily recall the "war machines" that paid tribute to Hitler under the inspiration of Wagner's music and In Nietzsche's crazy cry of "God is dead". Many of Zhang Chengzhi's novels also have such wolf characteristics, although his writing and narrative are indeed extraordinary. Fifth, the theme should have sufficient draft depth. After reading a novel, you can say its theme with your toes, then the book gives you limited room for thinking, it is of little help to sharpen your observation blade, so what is the use of reading it? If you have read a novel and read it, and there is no "rumination" and "looking back", such a novel is still not read! Sixth, good novels often have more than one theme, and a novel has different interpretation spaces, which is precisely the charm of this novel. It's almost like you like someone, that person is a face, I see how long you can like it.

The thickness of the themes of different novels is certainly difficult to compare, but it is not entirely impossible to compare, and if you compare Robert Pan Warren's "King's Bench" with Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", you can still feel that the former is a little thicker than the latter. My favorite novels with good themes include Hawthorne's The Red Letter, Gogol's The Coat, Kafka's Trial, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Conrad's Grandpa Jim, Faulkner's On My Dying Hour, West's Miss Lonely Heart, Camus's The Outsider, and so on.

Novel Night Talk No. 4. The style of the novel can be diverse, but the form cannot be greater than the content. After entering the 20th century, many writers have done a lot of exploration in the diversification of styles, which has greatly enriched the genre of novels. But I'm against form over content, and even if it's a work that's highly praised by a niche, I still don't buy it. For example, Proust's "Remembrance of the Lost Water Years" (taken apart, this book is more like an art appreciation guide, a novelized memoir. Insisting on a novel that embarrasses both readers and literary critics; Cortázar's Hopscotch (which, according to the author, can be read from any chapter, and my opinion is: simply don't read it); Joyce's Ulysses (book of heaven, right?). Don't say you read it, you can't read it, don't be ashamed); Robert Grillet's Eraser (he likes to explain the already complex world in more complex words, and you can guess it); almost all of Paul Auster's works (I believe that human memory is unreliable, I also believe in the virtuality of time, I even believe that all material worlds are unreliable, but if you can't find a foothold to read a book at all, it's like reading a book on a roller coaster).... I believe that novels should first be enjoyed by people, otherwise we might as well nibble on the philosophical books of Hegel, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida. You really want to call the above works novels, but the niche belongs to the minority, and it is easier for us to take the Yangguan Road. In contrast, other works that also tell stories in a different way but do not leave the public away, such as Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", Faulkner's "Hustle and Fury", Calvino's "Baron in the Tree", Gao Xingjian's "Spirit Mountain", Tony Morrison's "Darling", Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", not only allows us to experience the beauty of literature that transcends reality and walks close to the ground, but also smoothly changes the narrative angle, telling the same story from different sides, enriching our reading experience. Hemingway's short stories, such as "The Killer" and "The Last Pure Land", are straightforward but ubiquitous and undercurrent dialogues, so that readers must read with a participatory attitude. Incidentally, there is a tendency at the moment that when fiction is mentioned, some critics think that the traditional meaning of the novel is outdated, that the novel has no meaning, or that the meaning has collapsed, and that the novel has only textual and formal meaning. Therefore, they act as word detectives between the lines, chew words in the text jungle, and interpret a work from the form. In this regard, my opinion is that although these efforts have expanded the space for the interpretation of the novel, it is rather rash to ignore the traditional meaning of the novel.

Novel No. 5 of the Night. Regardless of the genre, a reasonable story is the minimum requirement, and above that is the compelling plot. When we read Shakespeare's works today, it is easy to read too many coincidences, too many dramatic scenes (such as seeing bad people to succeed, miracles falling from the sky, etc.), too obvious contradictions and their rash resolutions, repeated gang scenes... At the time, these may have been a widely accepted and even popular trick, which is a big disappointment for today's readers. In addition to "The Prince's Revenge" and "King Lear", in my opinion, the cheap coincidences, the empty miracles, and the untenable motives in Shakespeare's works are everywhere, which are not the markers of a good work. Also fond of coincidence and ending reversals for lack of rationality is O.Henry. And reading Maupassant's "Necklace", you will find that the coincidences and dramatic endings he created are firmly rooted in the text, and are closely related to the personality of the characters and the obedience of fate. The short stories of Hans Christian Andersen, Borges, France, Kipling, Agatha Christie's detective novels, a considerable number of Japanese detective novels (Seiichi Morimura, Keigo Higashino, and other masterpieces), and Arthur Haley's industry novels have all met the standard of reasonable and interesting stories. To put it more, children's novels, fairy tales, and fables are all within the scope of my investigation, and there is no other standard. The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Kipling reached heights that later generations could not surpass, whether it was C.S. Lewis's "The Legend of Narnia", Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", J.c Rowling's "Harry. No matter how thickly they write, how much money they make, how much they distribute, they can't hide one basic fact: banal, cheesy, completely unimaginative.

Novel Night Talk No. 6. The depth of the writer's emotional experience determines the level of the work. Man has seven passions and six desires, and the novel revolves around these. However, those who have a little life experience know that in fact, the emotions in life are far more than seven emotions and six desires, and many indescribable emotions are often laid out in our hearts, such as not being happy or sad, and being sad and happy... We must write these things out and present ourselves. For example, Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" is a superficial expression of emotion (handsome men and beautiful women have no feelings at first, then have feelings, have feelings and encounter resistance, and finally the resistance dissipates, and there is a lover... Incidentally, duras, who is beloved by the minority, seems to me to have reached only this level of literary status, not much better than that of her compatriot Sagan. The same level includes e.m Foster's "Room with a View"), to Charlotte Bronty's Jane Eyre, we obviously feel that something has increased, the weight and diversity of emotions have been enhanced, and then watch Emily Bronty's Wuthering Heights, you will feel a strong impact and tearing, a long-lasting stimulus, you finally know that bitterness is not simply bitter, bitterness sometimes comes back to sweetness; sour is not pure sour, sometimes astringent... The writer's experience and experience are bound to be reflected in the work. I'm not saying that the work of Austin and others is bad, but that there is a clear gap between their emotional feelings, grasps, and writing abilities compared to Emily. Basically, no matter how hard I try, it shouldn't be difficult to reach Austin's level, but to reach Charlotte's level, it will take decades to practice, and to reach Emily's level, this life is not a thought. Among my top-notch rankings are Hardy's "Unsung Jude," d.h. Lawrence's "Please Buy Tickets," Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," McCullers' Love at the Sad Cafe, Faulkner's "A Rose in Memory of Emily," Yudora Welty's "My Love Without Your Place," Catherine Ann Porter's "Noon Wine," Yan Gelling's "White Sparrow," and Raymond Carver's "Have You Really Gone So Far?" "What We All Say When Talking About Love", George Orwell's "Come Up and Breathe", Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera", Steinbeck's "Between Man and Mouse"...

Novel Night Talk No. 7. The writer's understanding of the changes in the world determines the pattern of the work. Dostoevsky said that all the stories boil down to two categories: strangers come to a calm town and the protagonist embarks on a journey into the unknown. According to this classification, Li Jieren's "Backwater Breeze" and "Big Wave", Mao Dun's "Frost Leaves Red Like February Flowers", Qian Zhongshu's "Siege of the City", and Ah Lai's "Dust Settled" all depict the journey experience between the comings and goings. In addition to the thick smearing and repainting of people and things, Chen Zhongzhong's "White Deer Plain" also leaps forward to the social and historical level, trying to excavate the root system of Chinese. After all, after a person comes out of the mother's body, the tangible umbilical cord is cut off, and everyone is held by an invisible umbilical cord for decades. If the writer forgets the umbilical cord when describing "what", the novel is bound to be lacking and cannot be compared with greatness. Other works of the same height as White Deer Plain include Rushdie's Midnight Child (which was named Booker for the Booker Prize), Sholokhov's The Quiet Don (his excavation of the Cossack national identity far exceeds the depth of Toon's depiction of the Russians in War and Peace), and Günter Glass's Tin Drum (his torture of the historical roots of the Nazis, which no second writer has yet done). As an American who has lived in China for decades, Pearl Buck's "Earth Trilogy" is enough to make many local works ashamed, Shu Ji caught up with Lao She's "Camel Xiangzi", Xiao Hong's "Hulan River Biography", Shen Congwen's "Border City", Liu Zhenyun's "Ten Thousand Sentences in One Sentence", Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum", "Life and Death Fatigue", but she always lacked a deep feeling for the umbilical cord, so that the "Earth Trilogy" was fixed at the level of "not bad".

Novel Night Talk No. 8: Character Shaping Shows Skill. As soon as the character appears, the character is all exposed, and there is no development afterwards, such a creation is a failure, the character must have diversity and contradiction; the development of the character's personality should be natural, and the before and after must be able to echo, without foreshadowing, the mutation behind will appear abrupt. Stendhal's portrayal of Jullien in "The Red and the Black" is generally successful, but when he goes to prison, he suddenly shows a kind of divinity, refusing all rescues, which is abrupt, because from the previous description we can't see that he will change like this--- bitch congliang, at least we have to see her saving money first. Some of the fictional characters I have always admired include Don Quixote and Sancho in Cervantes' Don Quixote, Madame Bovary in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Coppfel in Dickens's David Copperfield, Caster Bridge in Hardy's Mayor of The Caster Bridge, Sue in The Nameless Jude, Finn in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Aq in Lu Xun's Aq, Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea The old man in Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Holden in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Puning in Nabokov's Puning and Lolita in Lolita, the rabbit in Updike's Rabbit Quadrilogy, Kim Taiban in Bai Xianyong's Taipei Man, the Baron in Calvino's The Baron in The Tree, Bisworth in Naipaul's Mr. Bisworth's Mr. Bisworth's House, Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's Long Days、...... Harkin's collection of short stories, Stranger Things in Small Town, is clearly a tribute to Anderson Sherwood's "Small Town Stranger", but the characters written are featureless, but they first establish some kind of typical face, and then throw the characters into the story. I was impressed by Cao Naiqian's proficiency in the local dialect and the refined portrayal of the characters in "To the Night To Think Of You Can't Do It", and when I returned to the normal language to write "The Loneliness of the Buddha", the characters suddenly became dull and familiar, and they were not as interesting as those characters written by Wang Xiaobo.

Novel Night Talk No. 9. The narrative style also obeys the content. Since the beginning of the novel, there have been two basic narrative angles: the omniscient perspective and the subjective perspective. Later, under these two methods, some sub-categories were derived. Some surprising works, such as Faulkner's "Hustle and Fury", tell the changes of a family from the perspective of three people, each of which is first-person, and one of them is a fool, in his eyes, time is frozen, making people unable to distinguish between the past and the present, let alone which are "facts" and which are "illusory". This is not a showmanship, but to force the reader to give up a comfortable reading posture and habit to reorganize the fragments, participate in the construction of meaning, go to the spikes in different parts of the text space, and see how many secrets left by the author can be collected when closing the book. Toni Morrison's "Darling", which tells the tragic life of a black slave from the perspective of a reincarnated dead soul; Atwood's "Blind Assassin", which repeatedly appears in the book as a background, and then supplements and negates it from a private perspective, and then provides evidence from another private eye to provide evidence to construct a questionable but three-dimensional story; Bai Yat's "Hidden Book", which uses reverse order and alternates order, interspersed with dusty letters as clues, thus uncovering a hidden story bit by bit; William Goldin's Pinche Martin tells a story from the perspective of a dead man; Gao Xingjian uses a rare second-person narrative in Spirit Mountain; Pamuk's rare use of more than two dozen first-person narrative angles in My Name is Red, greatly enriching the reading experience.... No matter what the angle, in my opinion, it is to serve the content, if the narrative angle can strengthen the deduction of the story, increase the level and interest of the story, and put forward some small challenges to the reader's reading habits, it is commendable. However, if the difference between the emitter of the perspective is not obvious, and the switching of the perspective is not marked, it is easy to cause reading difficulties. I read Llosa's The City and the Dog, and I read more than 200 pages and couldn't distinguish the characters, and that was the case.

Novel Night Talk Ten. A writer and a work are two different things. Many people can't distinguish their favorite work from the writer. After Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize, he was violently poked by some people (including scholars I admire more, such as Xu Jilin, etc.), because he had copied the "Symposium Classic", which was a fact, and his work was highly literary and a fact. He was not the first to obey orders and obey orders, and Sholokhov, who had also won the Nobel Prize, was also sheltered by the authorities. Having said that, we can turn the work over and over again, but there is no need to turn him over and over again, because in that case, quite a number of writers, whether of character or personality, can make people shake their heads like a drum: Dostoevsky is both an obscene stick and a gambling stick; Flaubert and Maupassant are both obscene sticks, and finally die of syphilis; Hugo often sneaks out of different women's rooms without dawn; Capote, while eyebrow-to-eye with Vanity Fair, writes a novel about the anecdotes of his high-ranking friends in the blink of an eye. Make everyone avoid it like a ghost... Mo Yan's critics have forgotten or deliberately forgotten these people, or they don't know that there are people who came after the ancients, in any case, is it difficult to do some homework before judging? Some of the bad habits of writers are enough if they are blocked out of the work, but if they enter the work, we must be picky. Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris devotes a great deal of space to the interior and exterior structure and decoration of Notre Dame, making himself like an architect and archaeologist; Melville's The White Whale goes out of his way to tell us all the facts about a whale--- is he a fishmonger? ... These are annoying to the reader, have little value in driving the plot, and reduce the pleasure of reading. In the time of Hugo and Dostoevsky, the custom of deliberately writing for a long time was fraudulent, and some contemporary writers did so, and there was some element of showmanship in it.

Novel Night Talk No. 11. The imagination and creativity of a writer are more important than the writing. Among the novels I have read, the best writing is Calvino, Woolf, Hardy, Updike, Michael Cunningham, Nagai Hefeng, Jonathan Franzen, Lao She, Qian Zhongshu... According to Maugham, Balzac, Dickens, etc. were not very good at writing, but they did not affect the greatness of their works. I quite agree with that. Some critics specifically picked up Chen Zhongzhong's works word for word, and found that there was almost no wordless disease. I admit that what he pointed out is true, but the novel is not read in this way, it is a kind of spiritual purity, it is difficult to appreciate the fun of the novel (of course, the text can not be too bad, the words of Duanmu Hongliang, Satin, Philip Ross belong to the type of unbearable reading). In my opinion, more important than words is the imagination and creativity of writers. George. Orwell did not live a single day in a totalitarian state, but wrote such masterpieces as "1984" and "Animal Farm"; Thomas Mann wrote epic masterpieces such as "The Budenborook Family" in his early 20s (although all his subsequent works were racing all the way down); Emily. Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" written without leaving home surprised future generations... It is not unusual for a writer to write about his familiar environment and characters, but it is strange to write about his unfamiliarity, which requires imagination and creativity. In addition, the writer also needs to have a sense of bearing the lotus leaf to beads, a sense of proportion to grasp the fleeting emotions, and a sense of weight of the dragonfly to dot the water without wetting the wings. In this respect, the works of Kafka, Carver, Chever, Ahn Betty, D.H. Lawrence, Ron Rush, Lori Moore, Richard Yates, Vonnegut all set excellent benchmarks.

Novel Night Talk No. 12: There is no grass that nibbles light, only cattle that do not work hard. As mentioned above, one of the hallmarks of a good story is the ability to write something new even in the face of an old subject. It is safe to say that the major subjects that human society has been able to cover so far have been almost covered in literary works since the eighteenth century, that is to say, if you touch any subject today, sorry, some people have already touched it. But isn't there no subject matter to write about? Apparently not. Ha Jin's "Waiting" wrote a love story that listened to thunder in silence: during the Cultural Revolution, a married soldier fell in love with a woman, so he decided to divorce the woman's good, but this marriage is not easy to divorce, because he is a military marriage, according to the policy, you must wait a certain amount of time to divorce. As a result, this "certain time" wait is 18 years! However, they persevered and finally divorced the marriage. Pressing the twists and turns in the middle, after finally becoming a family, the man actually cherished the old wife who had been separated by him and had no feelings for decades! The story ends with him saying "I hope to see you soon" after having a New Year's dinner with his ex-wife and daughter at his ex-wife's house! The interesting point of this story is that it reaches the broad and deep hinterland between love and non-love, showing us the sudden emergence of emotions and the elusiveness of retreating from the grinding in waiting, and letting us understand the indescribable measure and absurdity of love in the thickness and thickness. This kind of subject matter is rarely touched, and the aftertaste is endless, it is no wonder that this Chinese English work can win the "Faulkner Award". That's why I'm always thrilled to read Federman's A Laugh at Washington Square, Ionescu's Rhinoceros, and Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude. According to Kafka, we should read books that hurt us and stab us, and if we follow this path, we will still come across great works. Novels are evolving, and literary criticism and standards are changing. Just a few decades ago, D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Henry W. Lawrence' Miller's Tropic of Cancer is also defined as a banned book because it contains some sexual depictions, and today, if you look for a lawrence Bullock book, you'll find Henry. Miller is a hairy ah, at most Bukowski one level! Even compared to his contemporary Junichiro Tanizaki, Miller was a stall literary grade. However, no matter how the tastes of readers and critics change, literature is still worth looking forward to!