Lin Jianfa | Mo Yan
At first glance at this topic, you may be a little confused: Mo Yan, Lin Jianfa, wind and horses and cattle are not in harmony. The officials were in no hurry, and they listened to me from the beginning.
First of all, I knew Mo Yan in the 1980s, and after that, we both had the opportunity to meet almost every year or every other year, sometimes to say hello in a hurry, and sometimes to casually talk about it. Similarly, I heard that lin jianfa's name was a long time ago, and I can't remember exactly whether it was in the 80s or 90s, but my first meeting with him was in the late 90s or the turn of the century. The scenes of the first acquaintance have been forgotten, but the subsequent interactions are still fresh in their minds.
Secondly, Mr. Lin Jianfa is a maverick and never follows the clouds, the key is to devote decades to creating a local publication and making it a hot literary criticism town in the country, which is really not something that ordinary people can do. As a result, he was jokingly referred to as "the one-man writers' association" or "the president of the second writers' association".
I vaguely remember that our earliest topics focused on the following aspects: first, why the Nobel Prize for Literature is non-stop; second, the geometry of the influence of modern and contemporary foreign literature; third, who can be called the first-class writers in contemporary China; fourth, whether there are standards for literary criticism, and so on. And so on. In fact, there are only two core issues, one is the basic judgment of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the influence of foreign literature, and the other is the basic understanding of contemporary Chinese literature. Because of the high degree of understanding of these two key issues, Mr. Lin and I have had frequent contacts for two decades. Sometimes, these exchanges are long, night-time conversations, and sometimes they are handled in the form of a text-
Mr. Lin's maverick is not only in the way he evaluates writers, but also in his reasons for criticism. The so-called ear is false, seeing is believing, and the reader only needs to look at the comments published by this "chairman" in the "Contemporary Writers Review" to gain insight. In the simplest terms, except for the Contemporary Writers Review edited by Mr. Lin, I am afraid that there is no longer a journal that can publish more than a dozen reviews of the same writer in one journal. Over the years, Mo Yan was second to none, with hundreds of comments about him. More importantly, even when some of Mo Yan's works were criticized, Mr. Lin bravely moved forward without complaint or remorse, and he sincerely admired Mo Yan's almost wild imagination and realistic insight. I have also asked him about his critical ideas, and he always downplayed them, saying that it was for the prosperity and development of Chinese literature.
However, in the end, it is a big matter, and it is easier said than done, but my emphasis on contemporary writers such as Mo Yan is intentionally or unintentionally related to him.
Kenzaburo Oe
In order not to fall into endless details, I may wish to make a little comment here on the two topics that Mr. Lin often talks about. One is about the Nobel Prize in Literature. As we all know, the Nobel complex of the Chinese people has a long history. This is a big problem worth explaining with a doctoral dissertation, far more than literature itself, it involves multiple factors such as political society and national psychology, and it can be clarified in two words. As early as the turn of the century, because a Chinese writer won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, public opinion was in an uproar. Whether it's good or bad, there are good reasons to follow. At that time, Mr. Lin and I had a long conversation about this incident. I have always thought that it is first and foremost a political event and a literary event second (to paraphrase Eagleton). Mr. Lin highly agrees with this. At the same time, we are very worried that the award of this Chinese writer is not only not beneficial to the direction of contemporary Chinese literature, but also harmful. Sure enough, the Nobel complex of the Chinese people has increased since then, and it can be seen that the difference in nationality is not an ordinary two-ordinary matter. We do not want to deny the award-winning writer's contribution to the introduction and borrowing of Western modernist or avant-garde literature, especially his achievements in experimental theatre in the 1980s. However, as far as the achievement itself is concerned, the root-seeking writers and avant-garde writers on the mainland have long surpassed him in the clouds and clouds, the ebb and flow of the tide. To illustrate the mystery, I would like to reveal the first time I invited Mr. Kenzaburo Oe to visit China. The institute of foreign literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where I work, invited Dajiang's first initiative to come out in the 1990s. Due to special political and historical reasons, the mainland is suffering from an all-round blockade by the West. In order to break through this blockade, the best cut must be literature. This is a tried-and-true method since the "Hundred Days Restoration" and the "May Fourth" Movement. Mr. Oe visited China with a delegation of Japanese writers as early as the 1960s and was cordially received by Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. Mr. Xu Jinlong, an expert in Japanese literature studies, and I coincided in inviting Mr. Oe to visit China. Mr. Oe has also been a visiting scholar at the Mexican Academy where he studied, and we have many mutual friends, such as Fuentes and Vargas Llosa. It was indeed an ice-breaking trip, and Mr. Oe was overcrowded everywhere he went. Enthusiastic Chinese writers and readers finally got in touch with a true Nobel Laureate in Literature for the first time, and had face-to-face dialogues and discussions with him.
Another noteworthy is that Mr. Lin and I have exchanged numerous views on contemporary Chinese literature. He repeatedly invited me to write reviews of contemporary Chinese writers. But because of the fleeting time and chores, the ensuing unbroken covenants and difficult feelings eventually delayed my delay until I began to put it into action.
One of the actions is to spend more time focusing on Chinese literature. In fact, I have always believed that the translation and study of foreign literature is ultimately to "take" to strengthen the maternal literary culture. However, just as the so-called art industry has a specialization, the differentiation and refinement of modern scholarship is an invisible gap in front of hundreds of thousands of practitioners of foreign Chinese literature on the mainland. Admittedly, anyone who knows Mr. Lin Jianfa knows that his dedication and passion for contemporary literature make it impossible to push back.
Chen Zhonghui
As a result, I re-examined and immersed myself in reading a number of Chinese writers such as Mo Yan. I pride myself on being the most concerned about Chinese literature in my peers, at least one, but when I really try to get into their work, the problem arises: its size is like a towering mountain, an endless sea, always prohibitive. Myths that less is better than more no longer work.
Admittedly, everything has a first step, and time has changed, and it doesn't hurt to talk about it now, not to mention that this can somewhat share a little even insignificant and sometimes inexplicable pressure for Mo Yan. Moreover, because of Dajiang's visit and the award of the Chinese writer, Mr. Lin and I really felt helpless and worried. Mr. Oe is thankful to say that his visit has brought him to know a large number of Chinese writers, especially in Beijing. He sincerely felt the mastery of these writers. Therefore, I have to be a person who eats crab first. I'm ashamed to say that my forgetfulness about time and numbers has a long history, and can even be said to be innate. I can't remember when I started recommending Mo Yan to the Swedish Academy (most likely late 2000), but I also recommended one or two other Chinese and foreign writers. But Mo Yan was fortunate, even though the process went on in my mind for too long, and I sometimes even casually complained to Mr. Lin, who was almost a complicit, that the Swedish Academy's judges and the six or seven Nobel Prize writers who were invited to visit had no eyes until Mr. Oe began to intervene in the work. In the process, I never revealed a single bit to Mo Yan until he returned with a reputation: when someone asked or speculated about this "pie in the sky", first of all, Mr. Lin, who first launched two large volumes of Mo Yan's commentaries belonging to a journal; and then there was some testimony that I myself was belatedly late. This is not to ask for credit, but to share the pressure of confession, because Mo Yan has been suffering from more and more severe groundless accusations and boring accusations than ever.
But I keep asking myself: If we get deeper and deeper into the vortex of the Nobel complex, what if we start to give up our self-confidence? Mo Yan's award prevented this possibility. Similarly, Mo Yan's award has finally made us wait for the day when we can look at the world literary world.
Mo Yan's significance lies in this, and it is more than that. In fact, his literature has long been a monument, and he has long since gone from being afraid to read through "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to finding one or two horse feet of Márquez.
It should be noted that I have never considered the Nobel Prize in Literature to be the yardstick of literature, let alone the only one. But it was indeed a knot in the hearts of the Chinese people. Someone has to untie this knot, and the more the merrier, because our good writer is by no means the only one. They have been and are increasingly being recognized by our countrymen and the world.
The Biography of García Márquez
New World Press
In 2003
Yangtze River Literary Review
Catalogue for Issue 1, 2022
Famous Editor Vision Lin Jianfa
Mo Yan | Brother Jianfa is all right
Jia Ping | Say Lin Jianfa
Yan Lianke | Sister-in-law and construction law
Chen Zhonghui | The meaning of Mo Yan - a tribute to Mr. Lin Jianfa
Chen Sihe | Bile liver to take care of the real brother - Lin Jianfa and his editorial style
Wang Yao | A personal imprint of a magazine
Zhang Xuexin | Brother Jianfa's "Heart"
Xie Youshun | I often think of Teacher Lin Jianfa
Famous triangular prism Yemi
Ye Mi | Look up
Chi Zijian | Miya Yemi
Li Denan | Mental Traces and Psychology in the Transition Period - Ye Mi Theory
Writer wide angle
Zhang Qinghua | The Question of Drama and Lyricism: The Two Dimensions of Fictional Narration
New Horizons in Literary History
Zhang Fugui | The Historical Evolution and Classical Understanding of New Chinese Poetry
Jingwen Dong | Apocalypse from Dust Settled
Chen Jun | On the subject field of chinese contemporary drama acceptance
Young Critics Forum
Fang Wei | The "excess" of language and the "supergram" of transformation anxiety- Reappraisal of "The Happy Life of poor Zhang Damin" also discusses the secularization of the 1990s
Wang Dongdong | The concept of yuan poetry in modern Chinese poetics
Writer's Work Theory
Liu Jun | Darkness, Local History, Realism/Symbolism: On Li Zishu's "Flowing Place"
West crossing | Intellectual Imagination in Gomeck's Poetry - One of Gomeck's Poetic Methodologies
Zang Qing | The Legacy of the Pioneers and the Cultivation of Style: On Bi Feiyu's Novel Creation
Literary scene
Li Jingze, Ah Lai and other | Ecology: Methods as Literature - Selected Speeches of the Forum on Ecological Literature and Natural Poetry
List of "20 Books/Departments of Literature in the Twentieth Decade of the New Century"