The ambition and call of "returning to the field to learn" | Xu Chenliang

"The Return of Criticism"

Author: He Ping

Publisher: Yilin Publishing House

Publication date: December 2021

Synopsis

"The Return of Criticism" is divided into three series: "Ideological Trends", "Writers" and "Scene".

"Ideological Trends" is an exploration and reflection on Chinese literature in the era of reform and opening up, especially in the twenty years of the new century, involving literary issues such as the overall view of Chinese literature in the era of reform and opening up, literature and intergenerational, literature and new media, world literature and Chinese experience, youth writing and public life, and multi-ethnic literary communities.

"Writer" is a series of reviews of writers' works. The five writers, from Alai, born in 1959, to Qiu Huadong, who was born in 1969, all became famous in the 1990s and are "contemporaries" in a broad sense. They were once named the "New Generation" and remain the most dynamic part of Chinese literature today.

"Live" is a private literary archive. From 2017 to 2021, Flower City Concern has been doing it for five years, a total of thirty issues. This is a "return to criticism" in the practical sense, hoping to reconstruct the dialogue between the academy's criticism and literary scene, discover the new power of literature, and let the possibilities and differences of contemporary Chinese literature surface on the surface.

The ambition and call of "returning to the field"

Xu Chenliang

Professor He Ping, the author of "The Return of Criticism", plays a dual or even multiple role in the current literary world, which is the surveyor of literary ethos and the instigator of literary ethos, which may give a sense of "literary events" to the discussion around this book, and touch on a number of real, major and symptomatic issues.

As a critic teaching in colleges and universities, He Ping not only examines the source stream, tracks dynamics, and interprets texts within the scope of the "contemporary literature" discipline system, but also deeply participates in many aspects of literary production and dissemination with full preparation, sufficient enthusiasm and full vitality, editing series of books, initiating dialogues, convening workshops, presiding over magazine columns, and promoting new and different literary forces, a person is like a team. Finding an appropriate way to comment on the team's "record" is not easy. On the one hand, this is because his familiarity with literary trends, the wide range of topics he pays attention to, and the huge amount of works read test the vision and accumulation of critics. On the other hand, he himself is a literary critic who is good at interpretation and summarization, and he has a strong expression of his own critical planning and strategic blueprint, and it seems that there is not much room for other work. For example, the preface to the book "Return to the Scene of Criticism", "Return to the Scene: Reconstructing the Literature of Dialogue and Action", first sorts out the changes in the literary field since the new century - the change of the boundaries and boundaries of serious literature, the aesthetic degradation brought about by marketization and capital entry, the demarcation of different literary genres, the overload and dissipation of information, and even the "circle layering" and "tribalization" of literature. Then the question is asked in this context: "Can professional literary criticism in the traditional sense be continued?" And how will it be carried out? In the process of development, how to integrate the fragments of information rushed by writers, mass media practitioners, ordinary readers, and even writers themselves in an orderly manner? The keywords of "reconstruction", "dialogue" and "action" in the title of the article are not only a response to the above questions, but also constitute the skeleton that supports the entire book, and the representative articles included in the three units of "ideological trends", "writers" and "scenes" in the book show the power of dialogue and action in different ways, and also allow readers to rebuild their confidence in contemporary literary criticism, even if they are not familiar with the works and issues analyzed in it, they can still get a kind of inspiration from the original viewpoint and the enlightening discourse process.

As a professional editor who has long served in literary magazines, I have long experienced the power of summoning emanating from Brother He Ping. For many years of acquaintance, we have exchanged opinions on topics of common concern, in the venue, on the phone, and in WeChat, which naturally benefited me a lot, especially in 2017, when he began to host the column for "Flower City" magazine and became a "person in the same way", he frequently echoed each other because of his understanding of the "possibility" of literary magazines, I not only paid attention to every plan of the "Flower City Attention" column, but also regarded it as a potential interlocutor in my own editorial work. Therefore, talking about the experience of reading the book "The Return of Criticism" is also an inventory process. The question he posed in it was that "the literary scene is becoming more and more expansive and complex, and do the professional literary criticism practitioners, who are concentrated in universities and specialized research institutions, have the ideas, thinking, visions, abilities, techniques, methods, and styles that match it?" Replacing "professional literary criticism practitioners" with "literary magazine editors" still has the pertinence of seeing blood into the bone. And his criticism of the inherent interest and vision of literary journals also resonated with me, if such a voice came from a simple critic, and his editorial colleagues could also use "the art industry has a specialty" to justify it, then his personal practice of hosting the results of "Flower City Attention" undoubtedly proved that literary magazines could have been "more than that".

The significance of the column "Flower City Concern" is not only to be "patrons, discoverers and supporters", so that "the writing with more youthful characteristics and creative attitudes in contemporary literature", "the new forces of barbaric growth outside the traditional literary vision" and the crossers, border-crossers, and circle-breakers who explore various literary possibilities appear and speak out through magazines - these new sharp, marginal, cross-border and wild forces with unique pursuits, like "lists" scattered everywhere, it is difficult to classify them into "scars", "reflections", "roots-seeking". Trends such as pioneers and "new realism" have been described by He Ping as "whispers", and proposed that in this "era of whispered public voice literature", there is no clearly and recognizable "main tide", and there are no longer "literary revolutionaries" who flaunt "anti-currents", and "tribes and tribes, tribes and individuals are no longer confrontational, conquering, and absorbed, but appeased and peaceful." It is precisely in order to make these "whispers" of "can't form a regiment, can't become an army, and can't deploy a line" not to continue to dissolve and dissipate in "self-talk" and "enclosure and self-germination", he adopted a strategy of "literary curation", specifically, through the new themes planned by each column, to construct a literary magnetic field, so that the "list" without intersection is aggregated. For example, in the second issue of "Flower City Concern" in 2017, the works of Duan Aisong, Sansan, Li Mi, and Wen Renyue were gathered from the north and south of the world to show different imaginations of the world; in the 4th issue of 2018, three texts with very different themes were excavated from Douban, NetEase and other online platforms, Li Ruo's working life record, Shen Shuzhi's Beijing rental career, and Datouma's Travelogue in Japan, which were explained under the theme of "the overlap of multiple subjects": "These 'subjects' have their own 'identities'. 'Identity' becomes their respective starting point and path, the limit of their arrival at the details of the city in which they live, and the limit of their imagination and writing. In this way, the "single" and "single" collide with each other in the flow of the atmosphere, and the resonance symphony of "whisper" and "whisper" is no longer a meaningless noise, but a new sound with another melody. The "Scene" series of "The Return of Criticism" includes a total of 30 issues of the "Flower City Concern" column from 2017 to 2021, such as the "exhibition hall" of thirty literatures, which constitutes a literary theme park, if you can read this outline and lead the tour, combined with the reading of the specific texts of the exhibition, a number of new veins of contemporary literature will naturally emerge.

The operational process of "literary curation" also echoes the statement in the article "Returning to the Scene: Reconstructing the Literature of Dialogue and Action" - "to organize the literary logic of our times, to micro-develop the aesthetic new quality of our times and to name them". Although He Ping himself does not like to use the fashionable terminology of Western literature as some academic critics, I still want to make an "over-interpretation" here, comparing his critical approach with the "cognitive mapping" proposed by Frederick Jameson. The similarity between the two is that they both hope to rediscover the sense of direction in the fragmented space, find out the clues of the association through local surveys, and draw new maps in the ever-changing multiple combinations, so as to present the overall structure and logic that is difficult to describe directly. The metaphor of "mapping" has long been used in the field of literary criticism, but it still needs to be analyzed when it is implemented into specific programs. The strategy of "cognitive mapping" itself involves skepticism about existing cartography and its cognitive devices, rather than the blind optimism of filling in every gap on the map, as was the case in the Age of Discovery. Similarly, He Ping's criticism and "curatorial" practice also presupposes reflection on existing horizons and coordinate systems. This is reflected in the rejection of the "CNKI" style essay writing system and even the existing literary naming method. His vision extends to new spaces such as drama, lyrics, science fiction literature, and online writing, while constantly proposing new naming and interpretation, correcting the cognitive framework behind old or popular concepts, such as "Flower City Concern" in 2017 No. 3's "Making 'Post-85s'" is a parody of literary intergenerational formulations, "Literary 'Journey to the West'" in Issue 6 of 2018, hoping to investigate the different possibilities of fiction and imagination of the "West" in addition to "customs, historical reflection and novel rhetoric", and the "early style" proposed in Issue 5 of 2019 ", on the other hand, contains vigilance against the "ripening" of new literary blood. These dynamic nomenclatures and reinterpretations with argumentative colors echo the combing and analysis of contemporary literary ecology in other chapters of the book, and combine a literary topographic map that is different from previous cognition.

The Return of Criticism impressed me not just about youth writing or crossover writing. On the one hand, He Ping set his sights on the boundaries of the inherent literary system centered on literary journals, literary awards, and writers' associations, and on the other hand, he also talked to literary history and writers who had entered the "canon" in his own way. In several of the writer's treatises included in the book, I can also read about the discoveries with unique personal color. He quoted the anthropologist Scott to analyze how the "lowly people" and even the "uncooperatives" and "troublemakers" in contemporary rural novels used the "weapons of the weak" to maintain their dignity, and used Chi Zijian's novels to question the hypothetical "double-line history" and the ambiguous and contradictory symbolic treatment of people. These perspectives form a potential correlation with his solidarity with the wild, offensive forces of the current literary ecology. And when he studied "how Chinese literature narrates places in the past thirty years", he mentioned that "the emphasis on the 'strange' of places in literary local narratives after Wang Zengqi must have a implicit or explicit contrast or confrontation with the center of imagination" - we can also extend slightly, his own concern for cross-borderrs, cross-borderrs, and circle-breakers is actually looking for literary practice with "locality" and "strange" and "different" colors, trying to break and reverse the "unattractive hierarchical order" within literature. The contrast between the invisible and the invisible, calling for vigilance and reflection. For example, in his articles, he uses the lyrics of folk songs as a mirror to illuminate the "sweet, sweet, comfortable and sleepy ambiguity" between the current poetry and the wider literature "and the world, and the reader, and the critic" Only by breaking the "sweet" and "ambiguous" can he "re-recognize and recognize" the literary, and then "alleviate the lack of literature". Such an ambition can be said to run through all parts of the book "The Return of Criticism" and even his literary actions in recent years.

In 2019, I invited writers and critics to share their personal observations of original literature over the past year for the publications I hosted at the time. He Ping's article is entitled "Living and Writing in an Anonymous World", which writes: "An 'era of circle of friends literature' in which the whole people write is precisely the era when literature has become literature again and become a writer again. In this era of 're-literature', some seemingly outdated topics also need to be re-examined. The "re-recognition" and "recognition" of criticism itself also have independent literary practical significance, "making literature become literature again" - this is not only a kind of inheritance and restoration of the lost critical tradition, as stated in the book, but also an invention for the current situation, such as referring to his own way to "micro" the new quality and "naming", or borrowing the popular "entry" and "acceleration" on the Internet in recent years, summarized as "back to the field". Literary criticism and the practice of "curation" are like the wings of a bird, driving him to rise by the "atmosphere".

The core value of "back-to-field learning" lies in mapping the relationship between specific works and the dynamic structure of the "literary field" in which they are located, and then discovering the complex relationship between individual experience and the overall logic of the times. When the old methods of perspective, coordinate systems, and cartography become ineffective and idling, criticism, like the subjects of other literary practices, must adjust positions, change horizons, update tools, reset focus, and even invent entirely new topic spaces. It must be a difficult process, but it also gives us a call. Just as the short article quoted above ends: "Our literature should start with 'can not avoid talking about' to name the era of no name, although the final result may still be "nameless", but the stubbornness, determination, and even being hurt and destroyed in the naming process are all meaningful in themselves." ”

(Xu Chenliang, born in Tianjin in 1979, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Tsinghua University.) He was the executive editor of Novel Monthly and the Selected Chinese Literature, and is currently the executive editor of the People's Literature Publishing House Contemporary Magazine. ）

Editor: Deng Jiefeng

Second instance: Liu Ya

Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang