Comment 丨Wang Gan : Dust World Demon World Celestial Realm

Dust World Demon World Heavenly Realm

——Comment on "One Day, Three Autumns"

Wen 丨 Wang Gan

If I want to choose the best novel of 2021, I will not hesitate to vote for "One Day, Three Autumns"; if I want to choose the excellent novels of this decade, I will not hesitate to choose "One Day, Three Autumns". For the author Liu Zhenyun, "One Day and Three Autumns" is a summary and a new beginning, and for the literature of the new century, it is also a summary and a beginning; I wrote in my recommendation to "One Day and Three Autumns": "'One Day and Three Autumns' integrates magic and realism, and is a text successfully grafted between surrealism and postmodernity. The novel is rooted in the soil of current life, rooted in the fulcrum of folk culture and legend, and conveys the charm of Chinese gods and monsters, which is full of Chinese taste. At the same time, this novel is also the crystallization of Liu Zhenyun's many years of novel creation, you can read the original ecology of the life of "Tapu" and "New Soldier Company", you can also read the desolation and historical pain of "Hometown World Yellow Flower" and "Wen Gu 1942", and you can also read the language of "One Sentence Top Ten Thousand Sentences". Such works are also the crystallization of a long-term dialogue between Chinese literature and world literature, and are masterpieces of long-awaited dreams come true. ”

Liu Zhenyun, as one of the representative writers of "new realism", his earliest novels "Recruit Company", "Tapu", "Unit", "A Place of Chicken Feathers", etc., follow the principle of realism and original ecology, full of fireworks, those trivial trivia in his pen have obtained the furry state of life itself, and those who are trapped by life and tired of survival are also vivid, full of human troubles and the bitterness of the dust world. "Hometown Yellow Flowers" and "Wen Gu 1942" as the 2.0 version of "new realism", they enter the depths of history and the darkness of time to discover the great confusion of survival and the great strangeness of history. Such works that stick to the context of life and historical lines make Liu Zhenyun's observation and description of the current world in the dust world reach a very high realm of realism.

The world of dust is the world that writers are most familiar with, and it is also the most important phenomenon of life described in literature, and such works are often called realism. But the dust world written by Liu Zhenyun is different from the realism of the past, and it is another kind of space that has been filtered by philosophical thinking and aesthetics. The Tantra says that "Bodhi has no tree, nor is the mirror a platform, there is nothing in the original, where to stir up dust", in fact, it is not that we stir up dust, but dust that provokes us, we get up every day, rest every night, we are accompanied by dust, "dust settled", is the realm that people desire. Even if nirvana is nirvana, it will still turn into a wisp of green smoke, and this green smoke is also dust. The world of dust is reality, it is daily life, and it is where we dwell in the flesh.

In "One Day and Three Autumns", the signs of the dust world clearly exist, the fireworks of the dust world and the worldly atmosphere of daily life are very strong, and the existence of Yanjin as a region is so real. The life experience of Chen Changjie and Chen Liangliang's father and son is a true portrayal of the real world, and the people of Yanjin are busy for survival. In this specific description, Liu Zhenyun still maintains the fineness and accuracy of "new realistic" novels such as "Unit", and some chapters are similar to photorealism. Of course, Liu Zhenyun did not want to just show the power of "new realism", he created a demon world outside the dust world, which is the Vanity Fair where the Yanjin people are involved in the inner volume of disputes in order to survive, for desire, and for greed. At the beginning of the novel, it is said that Uncle Six liked to paint before he died, painting all the sentient beings in Yanjin in his life, also painting livestock and animals, and also painting the ghosts of Yan Luo, which disappeared after Uncle Six's death. The writer "I" began to salvage the historical clouds and the fate of the characters in Yanjin for nearly forty years from the painting, and turned from the dust world to the demon world.

In the past forty years, Chinese society has undergone great changes, the intersection of urban and rural development, economy and money, monsters like devouring people's knowledge, ability, rationality, but also let people release creativity, destructive power, sometimes feel like Pandora's box opened as difficult to control, I call it the demon world. The Demon Realm is the junction of the Dust Realm and the Celestial Realm, and we are more often entangled in the Demon Realm, entangled in the Demon Realm, and screwed in the Demon Realm. The Chen father and son who came out of Yanjin were also like falling into the demon world, temptation, greed, and power, which would grow geometrically in the demon world.

"One Day, Three Autumns" writes about the damage and loss of human nature in the demon world. Chen Changjie's father and son were sometimes in the dust world and sometimes in the demon world. Chen Changjie was originally the protagonist of the Yu Opera Troupe, and he played the Fahai, but the Yu Opera Troupe was in a slump, and his marriage also changed, and later went to Wuhan to work as a train furnace, and his life was full of ups and downs. Chen Changjie's story is a record of the first generation of Yanjin people fighting against fate, and it is also the presentation of the spiritual image of the generation before the reform and opening up. Chen Changjie's son, Chen Mingliang, is a representative of the second generation of Yanjin people and a type of the second generation of reform and opening up. Chen Liangming was nicknamed "Newton" when he was in junior high school, but the dream of a young scientist was soon shattered by reality. He went to Xi'an to open a restaurant to stew pig's trotters for a living, and the business was not bad. But the process of doing business has encountered all kinds of difficulties and humiliations, and even his own wife has been stigmatized. The novel writes that the bully who bullied Chen Liangliang is the devil of the demon world, and after he suffered a stroke, Chen Liangming also went to visit, which is a kind of compassion and a kind of tolerance.

The celestial consciousness in the novel is mainly reflected through the dual narrative of cherry's undead and Tianshi Laodong, which is a wonderful narrative reminiscent of the ghost fox narrative of "Liaozhai Zhiyi". Liu Zhenyun recently said that he would pay tribute to China's Zhiwei novels. The inspiration in "One Day and Three Autumns" may come from the ghost fox words of "Liaozhai Zhiyi". As a Yu opera actress, cherry's love relationship with Chen Changjie and Li Yansheng led to her untimely death in the absurd era. Her soul wanders between the celestial realm and the earth realm, which gives the novel an additional narrative perspective and provides a value reference. The worlds of "nothingness" and "being" are so inseparable, and the celestial realm seems to be nothing, but it is closely related to reality. The floating and unsettled soul written in the novel is in a sense a symbol: social change, people's hearts floating, and homeland loss.

The novel is named "One Day, Three Autumns", which is also a kind of chaotic philosophical thinking, and this kind of time consciousness that turns long into short and short into long is a philosophical expression of spatial displacement. Time seemed to be frozen in Cherry and Tianshi, and in Chen Changjie and Li Yansheng, it was fleeting and fast. Love, marriage, desire, money, morality, hatred, friendship, soul, these spiritual abstract concepts seem to be mixed together in the aroma of stewed hooves.

The novel is also a testimony to the dialogue between Chinese literature and world literature over the past four decades. In the novel, we can feel that Liu Zhenyun is using his characters and plot to engage in dialogue with world literature. In the chapter "Second Lady of Flowers", it seems to be able to see Liu Zhenyun's dialogue with Garcia Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and the magic of South America and the mythical lies of Yanjin echo from afar; "The Painting of Uncle Six" can be seen that the writer is talking with Faulkner's "Noise and Commotion", and the sounds and smiles of the hometown characters appear from time to time on the stamp-sized map; and the jokes in the novel make people see the black humor of the Chinese countryside gushing out in the postmodern context. At the same time, in "One Day and Three Autumns", you can also see the figure of Liu Zhenyun's dialogue with the writers of the same generation, the Yu opera in Yanjin's hometown echoes the high-density "cat cavity" in Mo Yan's novel, while Chen Liangliang's fate melody and the character tone in Yu Hua's "Xu Sanguan Selling Blood" are played in the bass part.

This long story is very peculiar in structure, breaking the usual narrative mode of long novels, the entire narrative can be divided into two parts, yin and yang, the soul narrative of the first half, with the characteristics of retelling, and Chen Liangliang's process of livelihood, entrepreneurship and hard work belongs to the yang side of the positive narrative. Yin and yang cross narrative, like Tai Chi diagrams, hugging each other.

The way the novel begins and ends is reminiscent of "Dream of the Red Chamber". In the opening "Preface", it is said that his creation comes from Uncle Six, and the first time in "Dream of the Red Chamber" says that "The Book of Stones" comes from Daqingshan, "Some of Uncle Liu's paintings belong to postmodern, people and the environment are deformed, exaggerated, through life and death, gods and ghosts, some paintings are very realistic, painting is the normal state of daily life, is the normal state of daily life, is the continuation of daily life day after day; between the two, the style is not unified." This kind of metafiction was only noticed and named by novel theorists after the advent of postmodernism, because the general novel is to withdraw the writer from the novel. And Liu Zhenyun's "no silver here" blindfold method is both traditional and pioneering. At the end of the novel, it is written: "This is a book of laughter, but also a book of crying, in the final analysis, a book of blood." How many people have piled up jokes with their lives, are they not blood books? The first time the fat review said that Cao Xueqin "cried into this book (Dream of the Red Chamber)", Liu Zhenyun said that "One Day and Three Autumns" was "a blood book". Book of Blood and Tears, Literary Canon.

(Source: Selected Contemporary Novels)

Wang Gan critic, writer, calligrapher. He is currently the deputy editor-in-chief of Selected Novels and a professor at the Institute of Chinese Calligraphy and Seal Engraving. He is the author of "Selected Essays of Wang Gan", "Dialogues of Wang Meng wang gan", "Breakthrough at the end of the century", "Flowers of Ruins", "Southern Style", "Quiet Night Thinking", "Lurking Around Us", "Ten Years of Hidden Beijing" and other academic monographs, commentaries, and essay collections. In 2010, his work "Selected Essays of Wang Gan" won the Fifth Lu Xun Literature Award.