Zhang Li, | new scene: "Beauty begins to ferment"

The host |

Reading Sun Pin's works, I always think of Jia Zhangke's films. As an artist of our time, Jia Zhangke recorded the intersection of our feelings in time. When I think of the years that have passed, I often think of Zhao Tao's face in "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers", where the era and vicissitudes of a Chinese woman have walked.

Although they are both fellow villagers in Shanxi, Sun Pin and Jia Zhangke's artistic understanding and artistic expression are actually not the same. However, there is also a certain sense of the same way in how to represent our times. ——In recent years, Sun Pin has written down her understanding of history and human survival with a series of extraordinary novellas such as "Night Feast in the Pine Forest", "Glorious Years", "Night of All Beasts", and "I See Blades of Grass". It is a batch of excellent works that surprise readers and have unique thinking and insight into our time, which fully demonstrates the sharp thinking of a new generation of writers.

In this column, I invite three friends of different generations, Yi Zhou, Han Songgang and Yan Dongfang, to participate in the discussion. Yi Zhou's "Impression Record" is practical and sincere, and it is touching to read. This is not only an impression, but also a good writer's "pity for his peers". Yi Zhou's careful reading of "White Tapir Night Walk" has won my heart, and I especially like his understanding of "struggle" - "struggle" is not a struggle in the usual sense, and the most precious and rare "struggle" on the road of writing is to fight with "Chen Chen Xiangyin" and "Mastery" in writing. This can also understand why Sun Pin's works always refresh our understanding, because there is always an indomitable struggle in her writing, which is also as Yi Zhou lamented in the text, "The fundamental object of our 'struggle and struggle' is the haggard and hasty self." ”

How difficult it is to mature how to constantly forge new grammars. Sun Pin seems to have been looking for another path, as Han Songgang keenly identified in "The Moment of Beauty, Its Secret", "Sun Pin seems to constantly refute and transform her early novel experience, narrative techniques and ideological expressions, in order to achieve a kind of self-innovation or rebirth." It was a difficult, torturous time. It is also in such moments that beauty begins to ferment and secrets begin to appear. Yan Dongfang wrote the gradient of Sun Pin's writing style from a gender perspective. In her view, Sun Pin's "going to abandoned lead mines, hidden gardens, mountains, forests, and islands cannot be simply seen as fleeing the world, but shows that the writer chooses to keep a certain distance from the whole society when he uses the characters to deal with his own problems." Moreover, unlike the female characters in the early creations who always establish themselves by dealing with the words and deeds of men and others, the actions and pursuits of 'I' in these novels have absolute self-consciousness. ”

For many years, I have loved Sun Pin's novels. Especially the tone of her novels. Whether it is "Phaseless", "Celestial Poetry", "Jiao in the Middle of the Water", "I See blades of grass and leaves" or "In the name of birds and beasts", her novels are calm and full, barren and rich, gray and bright, pure and vicissitudes,—— her pen, ordinary people are not small and ordinary, she often regards them as "real poets" in our lives, and what she pays attention to is those who can really write the whole life into poetry. In my eyes, each of Sun Pin's novels is a way to greet those whose lives are barren but constantly rising, to those who are stuck in the mud but eager to clean, to those who pull their hair out of the mortal dust. With these solid and influential works, Sun Pinzu can be called the best of the new generation of writers.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 1, 2022

Responsible Editor | He Ziying Xiong Mengrou

Zhang Li |

Zhang Li is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts of Beijing Normal University and a doctoral supervisor. He is the author of "The Occurrence of Modern Women's Writing in China", "Sister Mirror", "The Bearer of a Micro-Fire", "Distant People Must Have Stories" and so on. In March 2019, the "Survey of Gender Perceptions in Our Time" was launched to 127 contemporary Chinese writers, causing widespread social impact. He is the chief editor of "Selected Works of Chinese Women's Literature in 2019/2020", "Twenty Short Stories in 2019/2020", "Twenty Chinese Essays in 2019/2020", "New Women's Writing Album: Beauty is Changing", "Beijing Flavor Floating and Sinking and the Development of Beijing Literature", etc. He is a member of the Theory Committee of the Chinese Writers Association and a judge of the Mao Dun Literature Award.