Your shape is the shape of the wind and novelists are wind catchers

In the era of epidemic, who is the most creative person? It turned out to be Cheng Yongxin. No one could have imagined that Cheng Yongxin would choose to spend this time by writing novels. Considering that Cheng Yongxin's career has been completely devoted to the career of novel editing, and that he has profoundly shaped the image of Chinese literature since the mid-1980s, his now claustrophobic manipulations in space and time further illustrate a basic Fact: Novels are not only the medium for Cheng Yongxin to contact the world, but also the most important channel for Cheng Yongxin to express his emotions, and it has even become an organ on his body.

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If life is just as first seen, what is the autumn wind and sad painting fan. Nalan Xingde's famous lines can almost sum up all the themes of the novels about human conditions, such as Lu Xun's words of sadness and joy, and the traces of gathering and dispersing. Generally speaking, what novels describe is the "changeability" of the beauty of "first sight" in "Autumn Wind": classical novels describe the process of "changeability", while modern novels explore the mystery of "changeability". I watched with great interest how Cheng Yongxin approached, touched, weaved, created and presented this mystery of existence, accompanied by my own memories of the past and of Cheng Yongxin himself.

In "If Only For the First Time", between the time when the story is told and the time when the story is told, the "autumn wind" has been blowing for thirty years, but the past events are still deep in my memory, as shown by the heroine's name "Qingqing" Keep it green. A poem can drift near and parallel to a historical moment, but the novelist needs to become a "Viscount in two halves": half down the river and half up the bank. Cheng Yongxin returned to the source of love in the upstream, and regained the meaning of love in the downstream drift.

I was surprised that Cheng Yongxin attributed the three women's names to the same name, but this is just admirable. The unification of names makes them suddenly become symbols: a symbol of youth, a symbol of love, a symbol of time, a symbol of existence. This is the process from particular to universal, from event to being. In the sense of narratology, Cheng Yongxin here provides a method: through the description of the interaction of the two kinds of time, through the way of renaming the characters, the characters' characters and destiny can be changed in the text; this method can simultaneously Describe how our experience is structured and how realistic fiction moves towards abstraction through different methods.

Frankly, I tend to see "reflexivity" as an important feature of modern fiction, that is, modern fiction can be seen as self-referential fiction. In fact, whether in the field of painting, film or novel creation, important changes in modern art often come from the re-understanding of the media itself, involving the transformation of the media itself. In the field of contemporary Chinese novels, Ma Yuan was the first to express the reflexivity of novels with dazzling effects, and Cheng Yongxin was an important discoverer and promoter of Ma Yuan. Today, when we think of Ma Yuan, the first thing that comes to our mind is the concept of "meta-fiction". Although meta-fiction, a technique commonly used in postmodernist fiction, appeared in Europe and the United States as early as the 1960s, in the Chinese context it is Still a novelty, in the context of the 1980s it had a disenchanting effect on a certain ideology and strengthened the subjectivity of the novelist. But what I want to say now is that the reflexivity of fiction cannot be summed up in metafiction alone. The reflexivity of the novel, that is, the self-referentiality of the novel, the most important meaning is not to tell us that the novel is fiction, which is not self-evident, but that it is through this self-referentiality in the form of storytelling. , to explore the way experience is constituted, to examine the relationship between the novel itself as being and the being in which we live, and whether there is enough room for dialogue and reflection. What I want to say more is that the more external form of metafiction is actually unnecessary. However, the reflexivity of novels is still an important reason for the existence of modern novels: novels are originally the way of existence of human experience, and the way to reflect on experience through self-referentiality. Now, in its concrete form, the reflexivity of the novel may become more subtle, like an antelope hanging its horns. Cheng Yongxin's recent works are obviously reflexive.

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Readers may also note that after the completion of "If Only For the First Time", Cheng Yongxin completed "The Shape of the Wind". Cheng Yongxin's "Postscript" and Su Tong's comments confirm that this is a rewritten novel based on the old work "Shadow of the Wind". "The Shape of the Wind" is much more complicated and more difficult to write than "If Only For the First Time". Who has ever seen the shape of the wind? It can only follow the shape of things, but it is beyond the image, and it is in its circle; who can capture the situation of history? It cleans up everything and casts a shadow on everyone's head, and the destiny is on the opposite side, so why should he punish him? I read this novel with the feeling of eating crabs for the first time, and I still feel intimidated when I look back. Cheng Yongxin's creative thinking and mysterious writing style. The statue of Eros erected in the novel is undoubtedly the core image of the novel and the core device of a complex engine.

It was written at the beginning of the story that, in the eyes of architecture graduate Mi Lin, the position of the statue of the goddess was a bit wrong at first glance, as if it had been abandoned, alone, and had nothing to do with the overall pattern of the garden, which was obviously counterintuitive. . As the story goes on, we learn that its displacement is the result of historical action. History has forced it to deviate from its rightful place. Its deviation is the beginning of the tragedy, the continuation of the tragedy, and the result of the tragedy. Thus, the statue of the goddess became a symbol of tragedy. As the novel writes at the end, it will continue to move. In the turbulent years that never cease, deviation is its destiny, and each deviation heralds tragedy for everyone in the garden once again.

This core image actually implies a series of complex relationships: the lightness of the wind and the heaviness of the statue, the intangibility of the wind and the tangibleness of the statue, the whistling of the wind and the silence of the statue, the omnipresence of the wind and the standing of the statue, as if hanging from each other , both comforting and deviating from each other. In a sense, the process of reading this novel is the process of feeling and reorganizing this dialogue relationship. We can see that the winds of different eras blow over and over again from the statue of the goddess, over generations of people, over gardens, howling over China's urban and rural areas, and even across the ocean, allowing more people to feel to the storm, and then the storm struck again, again prompting the Eros statue to continue shifting. In fact, whoever the wind blows on is the shape of the wind; and the shape of each of us is the shape of the wind we feel at a certain moment. So, specific to this mysterious garden, who has witnessed so many shapes of wind and the secrets of many shapes? Only the silent gatekeeper - he is the shadow of the tomb gatekeepers of different dynasties in Chinese history, witnessing and guarding all the secrets.

Here, Cheng Yongxin's setting of the gatekeeper as dumb is really meaningful. He can only transfer the right to speak all secrets to another person, that is, the novelist himself, just as all tomb gatekeepers have to transfer the right to speak to archaeologists. like scientists. I think Cheng Yongxin emphasized the essence of the novelist's work here: the novelist is the wind catcher, the witness and explorer of history, and the archaeologist in another sense.

Su Tong's memory and senses are extraordinary. After many years, Su Tong still remembered the impression that the first draft of this novel had left him unfinished. In fact, I suspect that's how he feels now after rereading it. In other words, he actually felt the "unfinishedness" of the novel, although the degree of completion of this extremely difficult novel was surprising enough.

The "unfinishedness" and "unfinishedness" of novels can be regarded as two slightly overlapping but different concepts. All novels are "unfinished", whether or not it has been completed. "A Dream of Red Mansions" and "The Castle" are the most famous unfinished novels in the East and the West. They are unfinished to show its "unfinishedness"; Jin Shengtan cut "Water Margin" in half to change the completed novel to Unfinished, the "unfinishedness" of the story and characters has been highlighted. The "incompleteness" of the novel is rooted in the profound understanding of human beings: people have always been creatures with incompleteness, and human history has always been a concept of time and space with "incompleteness".

As for the "unfinishedness" of this novel, it is because the story told in the novel is difficult to end, and the complex relationship between characters is difficult to penetrate, just like the shape of "wind" is the most difficult to describe, and the clouds of history The most difficult to catch, the fate of the characters is like the floating grass in the fish pond is the most difficult to salvage clean. The wind is like a god, and the god is unprovoked, living in the form of sense. Only through the description of specific things, and let the truth into the shape, can we approach this wind god. The task of the novelist is to approach in every way infinitely close to its completion, and to reveal the unwritten through the already written.

In "The Shape of the Wind", Cheng Yongxin mobilized almost all the narrative means to make it complete in its "unfinishedness": he partly adopted the form of adventure novels to highlight the mysterious and unpredictable history. ; The claustrophobic space he builds is reminiscent of Cao Yu's "Thunderstorm", where desire screams and groans at the same time; his depiction of objects has the style of French new novels, but because of historical circumstances, it is not indifference The image itself is the incarnation of the spirit, and through the description of the image, the erratic fate of the characters can be fixed; he also partially absorbs non-fictional factors, such as moving Dai Houying's tragedy into the text to increase the novel's sense of reality. After mobilizing so many narrative resources, if the novel still feels unfinished, it highlights the unfinishedness of the novel. After all, this is the most meaningful question that history and reality have left to the art of fiction. I would like to add that this question lingering on the heads of all novelists is actually the mystery of the art of fiction. It is a torment and challenge to the novelist, and it is also a comfort and a call to the novelist.

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From "If Only For the First Time" to "The Shape of the Wind", the theme of the novel maintains continuity. We can assume that love is the endless theme of the novel, or that exploring the law of memory is the essence of the novel; if we admit that the theme of Wang Anyi's "Song of Everlasting Regret" and Jin Yucheng's "Flowers" is Shanghai, then we can also assume that this is actually the case. It is also the theme of "The Shape of the Wind". It is hidden in the dark depths of the library and in the soil under the statue of Eros in the form of an architectural history book, waiting for Cheng Yongxin to carefully unearth; Transformation, as the underlying theme of the novel, is that they are noble gods when we see them as human beings, but failures when we see them as gods. I think escaping or deviating can also be regarded as an important theme of Cheng Yongxin's novels. "I" is escaping from Shanghai to Inner Mongolia, "Qingqing" is escaping from Shanghai to Japan, and Milin's upcoming return home is not only an escape, but also after deviating. deviates again; in My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng, the theme of escape or deviation is played simultaneously.

Reading Cheng Yongxin's novels, I am often accompanied by sadness, like listening to the song of a sad cafe. I think this should first be attributed to Cheng Yongxin's tone of voice, which is lazy, often joking in laziness, but often tender in his joking. Even when dealing with martial arts themes such as "Qingcheng Mountain", he is still affectionate, sees the butterflies deeply, and the dragonflies fly. In the limited space, Cheng Yongxin has the ability to write the thousands of twists and turns of the characters' fate, which brings tears of sympathy. Cheng Yongxin's handling of details is not only easy to be immersed in, but also easy to fall into reverie. He is usually reluctant to describe the actions of the characters directly, but directly cuts into the psychology of the characters, but his technique is tactful.

Du Yimin called her daughter, and when she was waiting for the call to be connected, she would temporarily return to the attic. Cheng Yongxin then wrote: "In the continuous imagination, she has been chatting with her daughter for a long time." What is written here is her loneliness and love for her daughter, but readers can easily enter the story, as if they are also accompanied. Min waited together, and while waiting had already participated in the chat that had not yet taken place. One of "Qingqing" was about to go to Japan, and finally met with "me". With just one sentence, he subtly revealed the character's situation and psychology: "You can not let me go." The lightness and the weight of fate have formed a great tension, which not only makes the "I" in the novel stunned, but also makes the readers extremely nervous. Of course, some readers will immediately look forward to a good show. And when "I" immediately changes the subject, some readers relax for "I", while others will sigh. Similar details abound in the novel, sneaking into the languid tone that keeps the novel's dramatic conflict hidden. These precise details bring us readers into the scene of the story, into the gears of fate with the characters in the novel, and then fall into a long-lasting hatred.

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After reading "My Chiang Mai", I could not help but relax a lot, and I would still laugh in the dark when I put down the book. At the beginning of the novel, it is written that the people who study the "Book of Changes" teach the coup to overcome the fear of heights, which is to "recite Amitabha Buddha in silence until the plane lands". This is a common sight after the change of the past and the present and the dispute between the East and the West. The chaos is going on, the divisions are going on, scary but happy. And when happiness is not satisfied, what kind of emotion do we send out? Teresa Teng's singing voice in the novel, and the Meiping Hotel where Teresa Teng was killed by the protagonists reminds us that love and death are a new historical starting point. This is of course not only our exclusive product. The same is true of Thailand and Laos mentioned in the novel. People of different classes and categories are involved in it, which constitutes a bastard picture in the era of globalization. At the moment when the monks would also take the goat and steal the wood carving of the sun god, we know that everything has long since collapsed. In Marx's words, everything that is sacred has been desecrated, and people finally have to calmly face the real conditions of their lives and their interrelationships. In the process of narrating the novel, along with the protagonist's sightseeing, unbearable past events are constantly pouring into their hearts and fermenting in their hearts. Therefore, the unbearable lightness and unbearable weight become the variations of the protagonists' trip to Chiang Mai.

In fact, Cheng Yongxin's novels often have two clues in ambush. I'm talking mainly about emotional clues, that is, two clues that are intertwined with light and heavy. They are endlessly entangled, tight or loose, extending forward together with the actions of the characters until the actions of the characters take a sharp turn. It was originally a sensual journey, but the final destination turned to the search for family affection. Agger leaves the three-person team and embarks on the road of family search alone. It may seem like a simple escape, but this escape is synonymous with search. Cheng Yongxin seems to be reminding us that family love is always a precious emotion of human beings. But wait, if I'm not mistaken, the novel has been vaguely written that the brother Agger is looking for is actually similar to the character in the Oedipus play. Is Agger doing this out of expectation of family affection, out of forgiveness, or out of longing for his father and brother? Is there any reason to guess that an internal conflict might be brewing? Do we have reason to believe that the once separated family will be separated again? Don't know, because it's really a mystery.

Cheng Yongxin is indeed a master at solving puzzles, and you seem to see preset mysteries in all his novels: some remain in the text, which is the origin of suspense; some extend beyond the text, as if it is another novel Some can be unraveled to temporarily satisfy the reader's wishes; some, like existence itself, remain to be solved after careful analysis. Could it be that Cheng Yongxin is reminding us once again that his novels are meant to communicate with readers

Let's explore the mystery of existence together, so he will tirelessly investigate the origin of the wind, describe the shape of the wind, and see where the wind is going?

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After Cheng Yongxin interrupted his creation for many years, the works he wrote during the epidemic are special remembrances for Cheng Yongxin himself and his readers and friends who follow him. Since the mid-1980s, Cheng Yongxin has been surrounded by countless writers who move on the platform, and Cheng Yongxin and the "Harvest" he works for are not only a platform, but also the lamp that illuminates the platform.

It should be admitted that there are too many talented and aspiring novelists, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. However, not everyone can achieve themselves, because the success of a novelist is often quite accidental, and sometimes it depends on whether they can be illuminated by a lamp in the dark. Afterwards, those figures began to shine, becoming individuals independently in the vast and complex group. In the process, Cheng Yongxin, as the person holding the lamp, was hidden in the dark. This makes people almost forget that Cheng Yongxin, as an outstanding novel editor, was also a novelist.

To borrow an analogy from Brodsky, for literary editors who love novels, novels are like a recoil cannon. While you're reloading, the recoil might force you to squat. I mean, the creative impulse of a novel editor diminishes or even disappears with that squat motion. Such examples are not uncommon in the history of literature, but rarely mentioned. Nowadays, where the tide of novels ebbs, criticism is often heard from the sea, and indifference is often felt by writers. Cheng Yongxin started novel writing again at this time, which can only show that he is a person who really loves novels. As we know, who is swimming naked only when the tide goes out.

Every moment, the wind blows on the beach, is that wind blowing from the statue of Eros, or is it going to blow towards the statue of Eros? Who knows. One thing is clear, just as your shape is the shape of the wind, we have already felt that the shape of Cheng Yongxin on the beach is the shape of the wind we can see at this time.