wine country

Chapter 1 Defending the dignity of the novel

——Preamble
Mo Yan
About two years ago, "Selected Novels" was launched, and I was asked to write a few sentences, but I declined, and boldly wrote: "Length, density and difficulty are the hallmarks of novels, and also the dignity of this great style."

The so-called length naturally refers to the length of the novel.Without a length of more than 20 words, novels lack the dignity they deserve.Just like a leopard, although it is also brave and fierce, it is difficult to become the king of the mountain because of its small size.Of course I know that many short novels are more powerful and valuable than some bloated novels, and of course I also know that many short novels have become classics, but the magnificent beauty like the Yangtze River is those who Sophisticated articles do not have.A novel is meant to be long, so what is a novel if it is not long?It is certainly not easy to write a long story.What we are used to hearing is to make a long story short, but I appeal here: the long story is to be written in the long story!Of course, writing a long novel is not the accumulation of events and words, but a kind of atmosphere in the chest, a kind of artistic creation.Those architects who can build exquisite Jiangnan gardens and those who build small pavilions on rockery are of course great, but they probably cannot build the Forbidden City and Pyramids, let alone preside over such a huge project as the Great Wall.This is like in war, some people may command a regiment very well, but if they are given an army or a regiment, they will be in a mess.General talent is general talent, handsome talent is handsome talent, and most handsome talents do not grow up step by step from the ranks.Of course, one cannot simply call a writer of novels a handsome talent, let alone degrade a writer of short stories as a general.The metaphors are all clumsy, please forgive me.

A writer who is good at writing novels does not necessarily have to take the short-medium-long path, although many writers, including myself, follow this path.Many great novel authors, such as Cao Xueqin and Luo Guanzhong, wrote long novels at the beginning.I think the key for a writer to be able to write and write a good novel is to have a "length mind". Those who "have a long mind in their minds" have big ravines, big mountains, and great atmosphere in their chests.There must be a rough and reckless spirit, and the tolerance of all rivers.The so-called master's handwriting is just the external expression of the big gully, the big mountain range, and the big atmosphere in the chest.Great depression, great compassion, great ambition, a great spirit like a powerful and unconstrained style, and a great feeling that a piece of white land is really clean-these are all the connotations of "long-length mind".

There is no need to expand on the great depression, great ambition, great spirit, and great understanding. I just want to say a few more words about "great compassion".In recent years, "compassion" has become a fashionable discourse, just as "ultimate care" has become a fashionable discourse a few years ago.I naturally know that compassion is a good thing, but what we need is not the kind of compassion that has just finished eating braised squab and then hastily bandaged a pigeon with a wounded wing; , Sensational compassion; not the kind of compassion in which the whole society gives love to a sick panda, but ignores countless people waiting to die at home because they have no money.Compassion is not just "slapping your left cheek and letting you hit your right cheek", compassion is not just maintaining a kind heart and graceful posture in suffering, compassion is not just fainting at the sight of blood or shouting "I'm going to faint" It’s over.” Compassion is not about avoiding sin and filth. The "Bible" is a classic of compassion, but there are also scenes of blood and blood in it.Buddhism is a religion of great compassion, but there is also hell and heinous torture.If compassion means covering up the evil and ugliness of human beings, then such compassion and hypocrisy are the same thing. "Jin Ping Mei" has a bad reputation, but insightful critics say it is a book of compassion.This is the Chinese style of compassion, and this is the compassion based on Chinese philosophy and religion, not on the basis of Western philosophy and religion.The novel is a huge and all-encompassing genre, in which there are lambs and birds, lions and crocodiles.You can't say that because a lion ate a lamb or a crocodile swallowed a bird, they are not compassionate.You can't call them cruel just because they kill their prey with great skill and beam with joy when they get it.A world with only lambs and birds is not a world; a novel with only good men is not a novel.Even lambs eat grass; even birds eat insects; even good people have evil thoughts.Looking down from a higher angle, both good and bad people are poor people.Small compassion only sympathizes with good people, while great compassion not only sympathizes with good people, but also sympathizes with wicked people.

It is not difficult for someone who writes a story of suffering to make up a story of suffering, but that kind of sense of fate that can only be felt by those who have not suffered through suffering, the kind of compassion based on the insurmountable weakness of human nature , but it cannot be fabricated by virtue of talent.Describing the suffering brought about by external factors such as politics, war, famine, disease, accidents, etc., imposing a lot of suffering on the weak and kind, and letting the weasel bite the sick duck alone. , let alone great compassion.Only describing the scars left by others, but not the scars left by yourself, is not compassionate, or even shameless.Only revealing the evil in other people's hearts, not revealing the evil in one's own heart, is not compassionate, or even shameless.Only when we face up to the evils of human beings, only when we realize the ugliness of ourselves, and only when we describe the tragic fate caused by the insurmountable weaknesses of human beings and pathological personality, is the real tragedy possible, and can it have the depth and strength of "torturing the soul", is the real tragedy. great compassion.

The topic of compassion should have stopped here, but I still feel that there is still more to say.Please allow me to quote a column article written by a well-respected old revolutionary editor-in-chief of a well-known southern evening newspaper after his retirement, which may give us a new understanding of the issue of compassion.The title of this article is "Unforgettable Enemy Killing Scenes", and the full text is as follows:

Wars between China and foreign countries in ancient and modern times are cruel.Talking about humanitarianism on the battlefield of fierce struggle is all a scholar's talk.This is especially true in the special circumstances of the struggle against the enemy.The following is an unforgettable scene of killing an enemy that I will never forget. It may make young people in peacetime shudder after hearing it, but in those days, I treated it with a normal attitude.However, this memory still haunts me for the rest of my life.

On the eve of Japan's surrender in July 1945, a brigade belonging to the 7nd Division of the KMT's recalcitrant army seized this favorable opportunity and launched a frenzied attack on the town where the "Northern Branch" was stationed. Our army was forced to retreat to the mountains near the station.Before retreating, our army captured four stubborn army scouts (that is, Kuomintang secret agents) lurking in Dazhen.One of the agents appeared as a local doctor.When they were taken away, they were all blindfolded with black cloth (to prevent them from knowing the route of our army's withdrawal), and at the same time, their hands were tied, and the four guys were "stringed" together with a straw rope to walk.Due to the urgent situation of the enemy and being attacked on all sides, they were forced to walk around with these four living burdens on their backs. In case of an exchange of fire between the two sides, these four "old specials" might slip away.Wu Qiang, the head of the Beijiang branch, immediately signaled to the head of the group, Zheng Weiling, to execute them all.

Zheng Weiling considered that shooting them was a waste of bullets and would alarm nearby enemies, so he decided to stab them all to death with a bayonet.But it was laborious and extremely brutal.But in Zheng Weiling's eyes, it's just a "pediatrics".When the troops withdrew to the hillside southwest of Tongle Street in Dongxiang, Yingde, he first called out the first masked enemy agent to lie prone on the ground, and then killed him with a hoe and a bayonet.

In order to gain the last chance to obtain intelligence from the enemy agents, I severely interrogated one of the enemy agents and asked him to explain the problem immediately.In the meantime, after hearing the screams of the "forerunner" among his accomplices, he was trembling all over and could not speak.Furious, I slapped him hard across the face.Another enemy agent also screamed wildly, ran wildly and fell to the ground.Zheng Weiling continued to do the same, and executed the other three enemy agents in the same way.Although I saw this bloody scene for the first time, I was not moved. It can be seen that the color of emotion has also changed in the cruel battle between the enemy and us.

Decades later, I asked Zheng Weiling, how many enemies have you killed in your life?He said: more than a hundred.It turned out that he also used Japanese military power to kill six enemy agents, but this is an irony.

After reading this article, I realized how hypocritical and false our past novels and movies about war were.The author of this article is known to many friends in the southern literary world. In his later years, he is a kind grandfather and a leader who cares about his subordinates. He has a good reputation.I believe that the Zheng Weiling mentioned in his article will not be vicious, but in the special environment of war, they are truly murderous.But do we have reason to condemn them?That Zheng Weiling who killed more than 100 people must be a hero who has won countless medals, but can we say that he is not "compassionate"?It can be seen that compassion is conditional; compassion is an extremely complicated issue, not a scholar's imagination.

Blindly emphasizing the length of novels can easily lead to ready-made rebuttals. Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing, Wang Zengqi, Chekhov, and Borges are all ready-made examples.I certainly do not deny that the writers listed above are all good or great writers, but they are not like Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Joyce, Proust Writers, it is probably an indisputable fact that their works do not have the magnificent and vast scenes in the brilliant masterpieces of the above-mentioned writers.

The novels are getting shorter and shorter, related to popularity, printing and packaging, profit, impetuous mentality, and those pirated DVDs.Great works can be written by obtaining creative resources from the suffering life (the suffering here does not only refer to the poverty of material life, but more of a kind of spiritual suffering) and the tragedy caused by personal character flaws, and from pirated DVDs. In order to seize creative resources from China, I can probably only write exquisite gadgets that deviate from the Chinese experience and feelings of China.Some people may say, in today's era, who wants to read too long novels?In fact, those who want to read will read it no matter how long it is; those who don't want to read it will never read it no matter how short it is.Length is not the root cause of those excellent readers.Of course, the premise of goodness is length, only length, like the foot wrap of the old grandmother, of course it is not good; but if it is a piece of brocade embroidered with exquisite patterns like "Surfing the River During the Qingming Festival", it is good to be long.

Length is not stretched noodles, not pouring water, not blowing air, not foam, not macaroni, not rushes, not paper tigers; length is real, it is the legs of a crane, it has to grow, it cannot grow, it must grow like this long.The Great Wall, why are you so long?It is the magnificent Jiangshan Sheji behind it that makes it so long.

The density of a novel refers to dense events, dense characters, and dense thoughts.The tide of thoughts is surging, engulfed in events and characters, overwhelming the mountains and seas, making people dizzy, not the kind of novels that can be explained clearly in a few words.

Intensive events are certainly not a simple list of events, and certainly not a journal.Hemingway's "iceberg theory" is also applicable to such novels.

The dense characters are of course not as dense as canned sardines, but they must still be fresh and different from each other.In a good novel, the main characters should be able to enter the gallery of literary characters, and even the secondary characters should be living people with flesh and blood, not for understanding.It is a prop to make up the number to solve the author's narrative difficulties.

Intensive thought refers to the conflict and strangulation of multiple thoughts.If a novel has only so-called correct ideas, only so-called good and noble, or only a simple and formulaic opposition between good and evil, then the value of this novel is questionable.Those progressive novels were probably written by a reactionary writer.Those novels with philosophical thinking are probably not written by philosophers.A good novel should be full of voices, ambiguous, and in many cases should run counter to the author's subjective intention.Between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, between love and hate, there should be a fuzzy zone, and this may be the broad world for novelists to display their talents.

It can also be said that dense novels should be novels that can be misread by generations.The misunderstanding here is of course aimed at the subjective intention of the writer.The charm of literature is that it can be misunderstood.A novel in which the writer's subjective intention matches the reader's feeling after reading it may be a bestseller, but it will not be a "great novel".The difficulty of a novel refers to the originality of art. Original novels are always unfamiliar and always require readers to use their brains. They are always more painful and difficult than reading those light and slippery novels.Difficulty also refers to structural difficulties, language difficulties, and ideological difficulties.

The structure of a novel can, of course, be described in a straightforward manner, which is the usual way of writing for those classic writers who criticize realism.This is also a rather convenient way of writing.Structure is never simply form, it is sometimes content.The structure of the novel is an important part of the art of the novel and the expression of the writer's abundant imagination.A good structure can highlight the meaning of the story, and can also change the single meaning of the story.A good structure can go beyond the story and deconstruct the story.I also said a few years ago that "structure is politics".If you want to understand "structure is politics", please read my "Wine Country" and "Song of Paradise Garlic".The reason why we can still write novels after those long classic writers, in a sense, is that we can also show our talent in the structure of the novel.

The difficulty of language in novels, of course, refers to the language with distinctive personality and defamiliarization.But this defamiliarized language should be a basically domesticated language, not deliberately using dialects to make reading difficult.Dialects are naturally the rich mine of our language, but it is a misunderstanding to use dialects only in the dialogue part of the novel and hope to realize the individualization of characters' language.Integrating dialects into narrative language is the real contribution to language.

The length, density and difficulty of a novel contribute to its majesty.It rejects opportunism, it is clumsy, magnanimous, full of mud and sand, without sensuality and shrewdness, without flattery and coquettishness.In today's era, readers tend to follow popular customs and don't want to use their brains.There's nothing wrong with that, of course.It is hard to find a bosom friend in a real novel, but it is normal that a bosom friend is hard to find.Great novel, no need to roll around like pets or bark like hyenas.It should be a whale, swimming alone in the deep sea, breathing loudly and heavily, copulating with rolling waves, and giving birth in a mighty way, keeping a sufficient distance from the swarms of sharks.

Novels cannot sacrifice their own dignity in order to cater to this sensational age.A novel cannot shorten its length, reduce its density, or reduce its difficulty in order to adapt to certain readers.I want to be so long, so dense, and so difficult, I can watch it if I want to, and I don’t want to watch it if I don’t want to.Even if there is only one reader left, I will write like this.

(End of this chapter)