Chen Yan, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize: "Reading is like a tree, and if you find the trunk, the more you read it, the more lush it will be."

Original title: On the eve of World Book Day, Xinhua News Agency's "Everyone's Happy Reading Class" invited a "everyone"

Chen Yan, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize: "Reading is like a tree, and if you find the trunk, the more you read it, the more lush it will be."

▲Chen Yan recently took a photo. Photo by reporter Li He

■If you open the column

The "14th Five-Year Plan" proposes to further promote reading for all people and build a "book-scented China". Nowadays, reading for all has risen to a national development strategy, providing a strong spiritual driving force and intellectual support for the realization of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

On the eve of the 27th World Book Day, Xinhua News Agency launched a key all-media column "Everyone's Happy Reading Class", which is held once a week, inviting well-known writers to share their creative experience and reading experience.

Reading finds beauty, and reading creates value. Let us follow the "Everyone's Happy Reading Class" and jointly open up the imagination space of reading in the new era.

"I like to sit in the last row of the theater and watch the actors perform and the audience react during the stage performances. In the interaction between the stage and offstage, you can feel the overall spiritual quality of the people of an era. ”

At the recording site of the Xinhua News Agency's all-media column "Everyone's Happy Reading Class", Chen Yan, winner and writer of the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award, talked about reading and writing, and his eyes were frank and sharp.

In his spare time, he likes to quietly observe in the theater - the actors and the audience, in front of and behind the stage, inside and outside the play - starting from the small world of the stage, cutting the fabric of life and witnessing the changes of the times.

He is a writer who embarked on the path of fiction writing from the theatrical stage.

Before focusing on novels, Chen Yan was a successful playwright. He has been a professional screenwriter at the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Opera for more than 20 years, and has also served as the head of the troupe and the dean. He is well-known in the theater industry with his opera masterpiece "Xijing Trilogy" ("Late Blooming Rose", "Big Tree Moving West", "Xijing Story"), including various industry awards including the "Cao Yu Drama Literature Award" - even if he does not count the Mao Dun Literature Award that made him "out of the circle" in the literary world in 2019, he is already a veritable "award-winning professional".

Frequent awards also bear witness to his creative diligence. Chen Yan inherited the down-to-earth and thick realist tradition of Shaanxi literature, and like Liu Qing, a writer of Shaanxi's predecessors, he paid special attention to going deep into life. When writing "The Tree Moves West", he stayed in Xi'an Jiaotong University for more than 4 months, lived in Shanghai Jiaotong University for 35 days, and recorded dozens of interview recordings; when writing "Xijing Story", in order to show the living conditions of migrant workers, he successively went to xi'an's two largest migrant worker settlements at that time to collect styles, and the writing lasted 3 and a half years, and successively changed 7 times.

"Writers need to go deep into life." Chen Yan observed that current writers are sometimes limited to second-hand materials, ignoring real life and not being able to write "fireworks". He suggested: "Be sure to go to the field, to the most authentic field of life, to write the furry texture of life." ”

"I can't imagine how a writer could write about a life he's not familiar with." In the interview, Chen Yan repeatedly mentioned the relationship between creation and life. His masterpieces of novels are known as the "stage trilogy" ("Loading Stage", "Protagonist", "Comedy"), and the theme of the novel goes around and around, and he does not leave the life he is familiar with inside and outside the stage: he pays attention to the stage workers behind the stage; tells how the shepherds in the mountains grow up to become the "Queen of Qin Cavity"; writes about the tragic and joyful lives of the three comedians of father and son...

He jumped out of the stage and walked into the novel, and then installed the whole stage in the novel.

He likes to use stage-style metaphors. He once described his state of writing this way: "Leaving only one light source in the darkroom is enough to illuminate a circle of light that is only enough to cover the elbows of two crouching clients." Beyond the aperture, the darker the better, the gaze stops, the thought moves forward. Like a stage scene; he described the relationship between the actors and the audience as "tidal", "the moon and the earth", showing "all kinds of diseases and all kinds of beauty of society" through the theater...

His works pay special attention to the fate of small people, and he likes to "make a biography for small people". In the play "Late Blooming Rose", he portrayed a big sister Qiao Xuemei who carried the dream of her family and carried the burden of life. Since 1998, this drama has been adapted into various local dramas, and has been performed for more than 20 years, receiving countless applause and tears. In the TV series adapted from the novel "Loading Stage", diao Shunzi, a "chicken thief and cute" stage worker, let the audience understand the fireworks dust in a short period of time among parents, and read out the responsibilities and responsibilities of ordinary workers.

"After all, the successful people who stand at the top of society are a minority, and more people are towers and pedestals." It is important to recognize the majestic power of the successful. Chen Yan emphasized, "If you can't see this huge impetus for successful people, and don't affirm their life value and labor value, as a writer, his creation has great shortcomings." ”

In the afterword to "Loading the Stage", he wrote: "Some people say that I am always making a biography for small people, and I think that all the strong things still need you to add icing on the cake? Even if Tim, how much does it mean to others? Therefore, my writing, I try to lick the wounds of those who are helpless, find a little warmth and brightness, especially a little extravagant love. It is not so much for others as for yourself, in fact, life needs to be told, all need to lick wounds, and all need love. ”

Reading is like a tree, if you find the trunk, the more you read, the more lush it will be

Meadow: You've been writing literature for more than 40 years, can you look back on your first encounter with literature?

Chen Yan: I grew up in the mountains, it is said that my youth had little to do with literature, and I really started reading at the beginning of reform and opening up, when bookstores were suddenly enriched, and foreign literary works such as Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo, Turgenev, etc., as well as Chinese literary works such as "Dream of the Red Chamber", "Journey to the West", and "The History of Ru lin", were published in large quantities. I was so impressed that I waited for half a year to buy a set of Shakespeare's Complete Works—I could only get one or two sets at a time in the bookstore, and it was quickly taken away.

Zhen'an County, where I was born, is a relatively closed mountainous area in southern Shaanxi. But you can't imagine that in this mountainous area, there were so many young people who loved literature and had literary dreams. The county trade unions organized a place for young people to read, and writers from the province and from the Magazine of Yanhe often spoke about literature. I learned a lot there, and naturally I liked literature and laid the foundation for creation.

Meadows: In your experience, how should you cultivate young people's interest in reading and guide them to read the classics?

Yan Chen: Reading is too important for the growth of teenagers. If I hadn't entered into reading in my youth, my whole life would probably have nothing to do with creation. Reading is a very strange thing, and once you like it, reading one book can implicate ten books. After you read Shakespeare, you want to read and study his books, to understand what historical stories his plays borrowed, and to bring out other writers' works, so the more you read, the richer you become. Reading is sometimes like a tree, and if the trunk is found, the tree will grow more and more lush the more you read it.

There are many ways to read in this day and age, such as through mobile phones or other mediums. I see that some children are reading books now, although there is a pleasure of reading, but they are incomplete for the construction of the spiritual world. Teenagers still have to read the best works that have been selected by mankind for hundreds of thousands of years, starting from some basic works and gradually moving towards broadness and richness.

When I was younger, I read some classics, which were also plausible and could not be fully understood. Over time, when I read it well, I feel very happy, which reflects the value of reading. When I was 19 years old, I was first exposed to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and it was always said that writers had to read them well. I read it again, didn't understand it, over and over again, still couldn't understand it, but when I was thirty or forty years old, I read it differently. Especially during the pandemic last year, I read these books again. The more I read, the more I feel that I still have to return to the classics and read the classics.

Reading habits are the basic spiritual outlook of a country and a nation

Meadows: What does it mean for ordinary people to read, especially classics? How to understand the phrase "reading, creating value"?

Chen Yan: My upbringing was completely constructed by reading, and I am really grateful for reading. Reading is an experience gained from the lives of others, an experience from history, so that we may live a better life, closer to the ideal. Reading should become a way of life. I often say that reading is two readings: one is the reading of life, that is, the accumulation of life experience; and the other is the reading of culture and books.

Furthermore, reading constructs your outlook on life, values, and worldview. If you want to cultivate the reading habits of the next generation, you must first develop the habit of reading. Because reading habits are the basic spiritual outlook of a country and a nation, it embodies the temperament of a country and a nation. And I've always felt that reading should be a stupid effort, not some quick fix. Utilitarian reading should be as little as possible.

Meadows: Now that we have entered an all-media era, short videos and other forms of communication have begun to penetrate into people's lives, what impact will this phenomenon have on reading and literary creation?

Chen Yan: I sometimes watch short videos, and there is very good content in short videos, which is like a compressed cookie. After all, today's life is very fast-paced, and it is necessary to provide diversified spiritual food. But if fragmented, entertaining, or even spoofed videos flood all kinds of communication platforms, it is necessary to pay attention. If you just "extract" a piece of content, it may feel very exciting in a short period of time, but it is likely that you will eventually become very paranoid in the long term. Insisting on comprehensive and holistic reading is good for people to solve problems, so that you must take into account all aspects, and then form your judgment and cognition, and form your outlook on life, values, and worldview.

Writers engaged in literary creation should maintain quiet thinking, writing and reading that distance themselves from the world, human beings, and the social life around them. The world is like this, there must be someone who wants to look up at the stars, someone who wants to look down on the earth. No matter how difficult the environment and the impetuous era, there are certainly people who are not impetuous, can seriously calm down to read and write, and think about society and human beings as a whole.

One hand reaches out to tradition, the other hand reaches out to life

Meadows: Can you share with us your reading and writing habits? Do you have a "unique secret" in your creation?

Chen Yan: For me, the creation is still part-time in nature to some extent, of course, I prefer this state, I can participate in social life, understand the world, understand the rich appearance of life.

I've been writing since I was a teenager and haven't stopped for nearly 40 years. My colleagues and friends who are engaged in writing have also had various changes in the middle, and I have never changed, and I like this. I generally didn't have any social interactions, and when I came home soon after work, I started reading and writing, and I basically didn't go out on Saturdays and Sundays. When writing, I would close the doors and windows tightly, even at noon, I would close the curtains, use a light to hit it, and focus on the manuscript paper at first, and then focus on the computer. This kind of focus is very good, I can all enter my world and talk to literary characters, to create. I don't have any "unique secrets", that is, falling in love with something can not be distracted. "Zhuangzi" says that "there is no distinction between intentions, but concentration on God", people can't do much in a lifetime, and if they want to do something, they will use their minds more than they want, and naturally there will be gains.

Cao Cao: As one of the representative writers of Shaanxi, what kind of feelings do you have for Shaanxi?

Chen Yan: Shaanxi is the place that has nurtured me for decades, and it is a very rich and nourishing land for me - on the one hand, it is the feeding of nature and life, and on the other hand, it is the feeding of the spirit.

There is a Chang'an school of painting in Shaanxi, they have two sentences, I think it is also very valuable for literary creation, called "one hand reaches out to tradition, the other hand reaches out to life" Shaanxi is a thick soil of history and literature, and a large number of writers such as Liu Qing, Lu Yao, Chen Zhongzhong, Jia Pingwa and so on have set a benchmark for their creation in the Chinese literary world. I learned a lot from them, and in a way, I should also count their juniors and late generations, and my creation has always drawn nourishment from their creations.

Meadows: Critic Mr. Li Jingze once commented that your works are "rooted in Chinese traditions, fully reflect the changes of the times in China, and are a model for the creation of realistic themes." In your opinion, how should new era literature respond to the call of the times?

Chen Yan: We live in this era, and we must respond to and speak out to the times. I always adhere to the creation of realistic themes, and I pay more attention to the people and things around me, and pay attention to all aspects of the social evolution I have experienced. To some extent, this is also inheriting Shaanxi's excellent creative tradition, striving to pay attention to reality and pay attention to the fiery current life. Writers really have to write about their own familiar lives, and we have a thorough understanding of the life in which we can write well. Otherwise, even the fur is not well depicted, let alone deep dissected. Of course, life is not the little self, the little thing, the little person who is stuck to your side. With life, and then use a vision and pattern to refract a broader social vision, what may be written will have a certain depth, breadth and breadth.

The writer wants to write about the life he knows best

Cao Cao: Your works embody the tradition of realism on the one hand, and are deeply influenced by classical Chinese literature on the other. In particular, the subject matter of the works often involves traditional culture, especially the living conditions of opera practitioners. At present, how can China's excellent traditional culture be rejuvenated?

Chen Yan: I always feel that a writer should write about the life he is most familiar with. I have worked in the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Opera for more than 20 years, and there are also literary and art groups in the research institute, and these contents have naturally become a creative direction for me.

I have been in theater groups for a long time, read more classical and classic works, and often think about how these works can travel through hundreds of thousands of years, and to this day the audience still recognizes and likes them so much. Of course, there is feudal dross, but there are also things that can transcend history, cross time and space, and move towards the future. For example, Sima Qian's "Records of History", many of which are put today, have the deep penetration of modern civilization; including Song and Yuan miscellaneous dramas, some plays even use modern consciousness to candlelight, but also have a certain "civilization" value orientation, which is very remarkable. You can find tradition, find the present, find the reality, find the future. Immersed in it for a long time, it will naturally integrate the excellent traditions of the Chinese nation into it.

This is related to reading, through reading to construct your judgment, and then with a modern eye back to history and tradition, you will naturally make your judgment on the excellent tradition - which is civilized, which is still applicable to us today, which is to be innovated and transformed, which will be tomorrow, which may be human beings are constant and eternal. We must use a vision to discover and pass on the beautiful things in the tradition.

Meadows: You have created a large number of theatrical works in your 20s, and you have been working hard to this day, how do you maintain your enthusiasm for writing?

Chen Yan: Of course, when you can't write, you can't find a feeling in your creation, and you will stop. For example, when I wrote the stage play "Big Trees Moving West", the background was shanghai jiaotong university moving west to Xi'an. I stayed at Xi'an Jiaotong University for more than 4 months and Shanghai Jiaotong University for 35 days, collecting a large amount of materials. At the beginning, I was ready to write a TV series, but I couldn't write any way, because the subject matter was really huge, the life involved was complicated and complicated, and there were many things that were not easy to handle, so I couldn't get by for a long time. Later, I wrote it into a stage play of 20,000 or 30,000 words, which has been performed for seventeen or eight years. It is true that creation may encounter many difficulties, but in general, it is still necessary to familiarize itself with it repeatedly, and to enter the essence of life to catch dry goods.

Break up life and knead it, and then construct your work

Meadows: Many critics believe that one of the reasons for the success of the "Stage Trilogy" novel is that you have more than 20 years of experience in theater troupes. What was your original intention when you wrote the Stage Trilogy?

Chen Yan: I wrote the "Stage Trilogy" because I was familiar with life. In order to write about her characters and that era, Liu Qing was able to stay in a village for 14 years, that is, to go deep into life to study problems. You have to completely grasp life, break it up and crush it, and then construct the story, characters, and world in your work. When I wrote "Loading the Stage", I lived on the third floor, the theater at the bottom, and the backstage entrance was under my window. The theater has performances every day, people come in and out, and almost every day there is a process of adjusting the stage, reinstalling the stage and dismantling the stage.

Stagers and actors live two completely different lives, and when they start rehearsing, they retire, and when the rehearsal is over, the stage is handed over to them to install. A large number of stage installation labor has given birth to the new industry of stage installation. In fact, at first they didn't get my attention, and after a long time, I found these people very interesting. Some things particularly touched me, such as the protagonist on the stage to do a flying action, and the mechanical device that controls the action requires many people to push. They make great sacrifices, but no matter how hot they are on stage, it doesn't matter to them. What the audience sees is the most beautiful part, and the people who install the stage are in places where the audience can't see. I thought about the relationship between these people who were on the stage and the glorious beings in front of the stage.

"Loading The Stage" is written behind the scenes, while "Protagonist" is written in front of the stage, telling how a person becomes the protagonist.

Now this era is relatively impetuous, the choice is also diversified, a person's requirements for growth are more urgent, and there are some dilemmas in the art of opera to give birth to some big artists. Fewer and fewer people are quietly dedicating their lives to an art. Some young people think that it is easy to become famous, and even have an illusion, and today they make a short video and suddenly have hundreds of thousands of people forwarding it, and they feel that they have been very successful. This illusion may make many people who could have achieved a lot sacrifice on the road to growth.

In creating "Protagonist", I am more thinking about the setbacks and endeavors of a life, as well as the relationship between her and society, the driving force of society on her, and her ability to cope, judge, and climb in the face of social impetus. This novel combines my own growth experience and spiritual feelings over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, of course, I am not anyone in the novel.

Life, especially success, is reserved for those who are prepared

Meadow: The protagonist of "Protagonist" Yi Qin'e has grown into the "Queen of Qin Cavity" through more than 40 years of continuous efforts and the blessing of various internal and external factors. What qualities did she have that led to her success, and why did she create such a character?

Chen Yan: Remembering that Qin'e is "not crazy, not magical, not a drama". I wrote "Protagonist" in response to today's more impetuous society: many people are eager to succeed, hope to quickly gain social recognition, but are not willing to make too much dedication and dedication.

Su Dongpo once said: "Those who have established great things in the ancient world will not only have supernatural talents, but also have the will to persevere." "Life, especially success, is reserved for those who are prepared. Only when you are prepared can others push you to the high point of life in various ways. More than 40 years of reform and opening up have made many people become talents in this big era. I want to remember Qin'e and also be grateful for this era, so that a child in the mountains finally succeeded. Of course, her success can be said to have been hard and tortured, and even she herself did not want to sing in the end, but there were so many audiences who needed her to sing, so she kept carrying heavy pressure and kept climbing towards the top of the mountain.

Meadow: After "Protagonist", you created the novel "Comedy", which tells the life story of three comedians of a father and son. Why turn to comedies and comedians?

Chen Yan: I think "Comedy" presents some of the problems that need to be considered urgently in this era: such as the problem of entertainment, the problem of pursuing happiness, the problem of pursuing happiness. The pursuit of happiness and happiness is the essential requirement of people, but what kind of happiness and happiness to pursue is the issue that the spirit of the times should pay attention to. The general aspect of social evolution is to strive for goodness, and goodness is the "ten thousand waters facing east" of mankind's long river of day and night. And happiness and happiness must be based on the aspect of goodness. Happiness is closely linked to comedy, and comedy is a concentrated expression of happiness. Comedy is also the spiritual dimension of the people of an era. If happiness is left with only a stimulating one-dimensionality, then comedy will deviate.

I feel like acting is a "tidal" relationship, like the moon and earth, and the audience and the actors are huge gravitational fields. The actor attracts the audience through the performance, and the audience will attract the actor's performance through applause, joy and grief. In this process, all kinds of diseases and all kinds of beauty in society can be displayed in the theater.

I'm a screenwriter and I often like to sit in the last row of the theater and watch the actors perform and the audience react when they're on stage. A sensitive person can feel the overall spiritual quality of a person of an era through performance. When the audience desperately asks you for baggage, when you ask for comedy, you try to give, how you perform, how he gives you applause. Once they reach the limits of entertainment they can't stand, they will say in unison that you're vulgar. A person with judgment and a deep understanding of the true nature of comedy is likely to hold the bottom line of comedy, and one of the two brothers in "Comedy" did not, and I wrote about the process of his crash. In this book, I want to do some more in-depth thinking, and as for how it is presented, it still needs to be considered by the reader.

It is important to recognize the majestic power of the successful

Meadow: From the "Xijing Trilogy" to the "Stage Trilogy", you have always focused on the joys and sorrows of the little people, and the fate of the little people. How to use "small people" to witness the "big times"?

Chen Yan: It may also have something to do with my social contacts. In the life memories of a person, especially a writer, the memory of adolescence may be particularly important. When I was very young, I lived with my parents in the mountains, and at that time I saw people who were relatively low in society. After coming to the city, I worked in the literary and art academy for more than 20 years, and there were a large number of migrant workers coming and going at the gate of the unit. Many people in the literary and art groups are also from the countryside, and I have come into contact with more of these people, of course, I have to think about the lives of these people.

When I wrote Roses That BloomEd Late, I told the story of a family with many children. Due to family problems, the eldest sister in this family, Qiao Xuemei, gave up the best years of her life and has been holding up several younger siblings, and finally the younger siblings have become social talents, and she is "sinking" step by step. I was thinking about the value and meaning of this big sister's life in this violent "rise and fall" of "sinking" and "rising".

Society is like a pyramid, after all, the top of the successful people are a minority, and more people are towers and bases, and everyone's success is paved by how many bricks and how many thrusts are pushed up. Our society cannot lose its deep understanding of the bottom and the base of the tower, but only recognizes the brilliance and beauty on the spire. Of course, successful people should be respected by society, so that everyone can strive to make greater contributions to society. But we must also realize that the strength of the successful people and the value of their lives are equally important. Many of the works I have written in recent years have actually affirmed this value.

If these things collapse, the whole society will collapse. The recent hit TV series "The World of Man", I think it is also playing such a story. In such a populous country as ours, how many of the more than 1.4 billion people are setting the stage for others to succeed. If you can't see this huge impetus for successful people, and don't affirm their survival value and labor value, I think as a writer, his creation has great shortcomings.

Meadow: In recent years, serious literary works such as "Loading Stage" and "The World of Man" have been adapted into film and television dramas, which have caused great repercussions among young people. What do you think of this phenomenon?

Chen Yan: My novel "Loading Stage", including "Xijing Story", has been adapted into film and television dramas, and "Protagonist" and "Comedy" are also adapted. Film and television dramas are based on literary texts and then move forward one step, which is a very good practice. This adaptation allows more people to enter the literary aesthetic. I think "Loading Stage" has been changed very well, although there are different interpretations between them and novels, after all, TV dramas are another creative style, and they have their own rules of creation and operation. The TV series of "Loading Stage" is warmer and more full of fireworks in the city than the novel.

Ma Xiaoyong, screenwriter of "Loading Stage", director Li Shaofei, as well as artists such as Zhang Jiayi and Yan Ni, including cast members in front of and behind the stage, have paid huge creative labor and sacrifice for this novel to reach a wider audience. I said in the chase that I should pay tribute to them. (Reporter Liu Xiaocao)

Source: Xinhua Daily Telegraph