The French writer Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in 2014, once asked this question: "Why were the writers of the old era able to build such a magnificent literary edifice like a Catholic church, while today's writers can only Have some scattered, fragmented works come out?" - In my opinion, this question is a bit harsh on the requirements of the writer. When words have changed from stone and bricks to loose sand, the current writers have to pull out of the context of the times and build sand towers with words, which is easier said than done!
Looking through the clouds of history, it is not difficult to see that the words are disenchanted step by step, from the altar to the world of fireworks: from the divination prayers engraved on the tortoise shell, the history of merit and casting engraved on the bronze ware, to the ink permeated by printing, and then In the era of Shuangwen in the Internet age, the texture of text is getting softer and softer - it seems that the stars in the sky have turned into meteorites and fell into the world, and iron and porcelain have turned into salt and sand - no matter how ingenious architects, want to use Salt and sand are used as materials to build magnificent buildings, are they all on paper? The field of literary existence has changed from solemn temples and churches to bustling theaters and stores, and the role of writers has also changed from high priest, secretary, storyteller to consumer goods manufacturer. Dilemma and even predicament - after all, they are not people who can dance with their own hair.
Facing the changes of the times, writers may only have two postures: retreating and persevering and going with the flow, otherwise there is nowhere to escape.
In the beginning, literature was high in the temples and churches, which were the places where the soul communicated with the gods, the soul and the soul, and it was a field constructed with spiritual stones such as divinity and fraternity.
Mythology is the mother body of literature, and it has witnessed the awe of the early people for all things in the universe and the imagination of the creation of the world. The subsequent ancient Greek tragedy is full of nostalgia for the era of heroic legends. After the Renaissance, although humanism began to rise, literature did not immediately give up the tradition of carrying the Tao, and batches of missionaries and ascetics of literature still lived in churches, sympathizing with others and saving themselves. Woolf, a British stream-of-consciousness novelist, said in Modern Fiction: “In every great Russian writer we seem to see the characteristics of a saint—if sympathy for the suffering of others, love for others, and It is this saintly spirit of theirs that confounds us, that we ourselves are shallow and boring because of our lack of faith, if we strive to achieve something which is a severe test of the human spirit, that is, constitutes the character of saints." . . . such writers are clearly building grand narrative buildings, with two things hanging high above the dome: "One is the high moral standard in our hearts, and the other is the splendid starry sky above us." (Kant )
In the twentieth century, especially in the period of modernism and postmodernism, the pantheon of literature began to disintegrate, but there were still many who stood by it. With "One Hundred Years of Solitude", García Márquez bucked the trend of history and deduced a classic myth: From the founding of Macondo and the reproduction of the Buentia family, to the flood and the end of the world, God and man are interdependent. The fate of the town and the family is intertextualized with ancient myths such as the Bible, the magical stories of the heroic legend era, as the ancient Greek tragedy "Oedipus the King" shows, with " "God's Mandate - Escape from Fate - Prophecy Fulfilled", constructing a magnificent fable of the Latin American nation and even the entire America. In the current Xinjiang of China, Liu Liangcheng is also looking back at the miracle. He said in "The Essays of Prose": Chinese people have established a system for observing and expressing all things very early. There are more than 300 kinds of animals and plants in the "Book of Songs". to human attention. There are gods and ears in the sky, and prose is to express upward, to speak to all things, and to talk about things on earth to the sky. Our earliest poems were the prayers of wizards, and they were also said to the sky, and to all things between heaven and earth. Therefore, speaking to heaven and earth and interacting with the spirit of heaven and earth alone is a hidden tradition of Chinese prose.
Talking with the gods, writing in the church, such literary gestures are often related to repentance and salvation.
After walking out of the church, some people were displaced.
Franz Kafka, the twentieth-century Austrian novelist, may have been rejected by God. His novel "The Castle," about the land surveyor K's futile efforts to enter the castle, is a "labyrinthine, dizzying novel." This "castle" is not necessarily a symbol of the temple. K looked for the entrance to the castle, but could not get the grace of God, so he could not enter the castle and became an outsider. Surrounded by a hostile social environment, he is isolated, alienated and hopeless. The strangeness, loneliness and fear of the society have become the eternal themes of his writing: In The Metamorphoses, the heavy physical and spiritual oppression makes him feel Humans lose their self-essence and become inhuman; in "The Hunger Artist", the performers on hunger strike are locked in iron cages for 40 days. The group hired him to put it in a cage and put it at a crossing very close to the animal farm, so that tourists could see him by the way when watching the beast. But people forgot to replace the diary cards, and the hunger strikers went on hunger strike indefinitely, and finally died of starvation; and in "When the Great Wall was Built", the huge project is isomorphic with the imperial institution, and the messenger of the order has been striving to pass through the inner palace. in the palace but not out. If it is said that building the Great Wall is to set up a siege, then passing an order is to break out of the siege. The paradoxical entanglement formed between the two makes people at a loss - perhaps "castle" and "maze" are isomorphic, and "no entry" and "Not to be found" all point to the same mental dilemma.
The Albanian writer Ismail Kadale also has his own "The Great Wall". The novel uses two perspectives of the frontier Ming general Song Inspector and the Mongolian barbarian warrior Kutluk, respectively, to ponder the Great Wall of China in a monologue style - that It is a confrontation between territory and psychology. In the end, someone from the Ming Dynasty Court Jiaofang Division revealed the truth about the restoration of the Great Wall: "China built the Great Wall to protect itself from nomadic tribes, but so long has passed... Now we are in such a time, barbarians Fear of the Celestial Empire, that's why they insisted on rebuilding the Great Wall... its palaces, its women, its silks. In their (barbarian) eyes, all that means death" - Qatar Is Lai's "Great Wall" also a kind of historical, cultural and psychological "labyrinth"?
The Argentine writer Howard Lu Borges walked into the "labyrinth". With a vision beyond ordinary people, he extracted his own understanding of the universe and the nature of life from the huge and complex system of Greek literature, Hebrew literature, medieval philosophy, Eastern Buddhist and Taoist classics, and witchcraft stars, making it a symbol of time. The Garden of Forking Paths became the writer's shelter after leaving the church. He continues to weave one ingenious, eerie, endless labyrinth after another - confusion about self, space, and time.
The "labyrinth" constructed with words contains the secrets of history and human nature, and the writer may only be a guesser in such a literary field.
From the church to the market, the street becomes a theater.
As a place for people to communicate with each other, the theater is the habitation of writers after returning to the secular world. At this time, the characters in literature completed the process of "dwarfing" from gods, heroes to mortals, and writers entered the realm of daily life, becoming ordinary people or even abnormal people who could touch and feel. In minimalist Raymond Carver's novel "The Cathedral," the protagonist's wife has been in touch with her blind friend for years. On this day, a blind friend came to visit, the protagonist was hostile and contemptuous, and then let go of his inner resistance, and closed his eyes under the touch of the blind to feel the cathedral - this is writing the trap of people's indifference, or the temple of redemption ? Some people say that Carver is good at showing the subtle changes in the hearts of the characters from the trivial matters of life, and a clueless dialogue is endowed with a specific meaning. It is also said that Carver wrote ordinary things in ordinary but accurate language, but gave them vast and amazing power. Others say that Carver's works hide wonderful surprises that transcend everyday life, hilarious humor and poignant sense of reality - and his minimalism is not just a rhetorical simplification, but It is expressed in the real life situation of people, there is a huge silence, a silence that contains pain that cannot be expressed in words - what kind of church is such a "cathedral"?
In the theater, the writer looks for his own shadow in life as a commoner.
Literature enters the store and becomes a virtual game.
Perhaps there are "new gods" in the current era: in the movie "American Gods", people of various nationalities immigrated to the United States and brought their own gods with them, but these old gods are declining day by day. With the establishment of new beliefs, some new gods such as media goddesses and high-tech boys have grown stronger day by day, triggering a battle between old and new gods - this is a fable about the "god" of the times. Dai Jinhua, a scholar engaged in mass media research, said in "Culture and Society in the Age of Digital Transformation": We are in the era of the critical point of modern civilization transformation. Digital transformation and biotechnology revolution have impacted human knowledge production and reception methods. changed human society. There was an invisible change at the 2012 Oscars ceremony, when the most important character at the ceremony, Kodak Films, went bankrupt, signaling a "digital transformation." The impact of this on the film industry is very direct, that is, film is dying, and film is dying. If it was said that "cinemas are replacing churches" in the past, then virtual cinemas are replacing physical cinemas, which means that people's community relations will be changed. Movies are the art of public space, and digital technology has enabled human beings to have a virtual life, which has brought us into an era full of illusions, pictures but no truth.
On the other hand, in the field of literature, technology has changed people's way of life, as well as people's demand for literature, the way of creation, the way of dissemination and the way of consumption. At present, literary reading has fallen into crisis. People's reading volume of paper books is decreasing year by year, reading methods are being networked, and reading patience is being exhausted by overwhelming information. Literary reading requires taste and comprehension of subtle and deep things, but the electronic swiping screen pursues the speed of one eye and ten lines, which will inevitably ignore the deepest and essential things in literature. Therefore, this reading crisis will inevitably bring about a result: that is, the decline of literary aesthetic ability and literary judgment ability. But at this time, a social gathering game called script killing is becoming popular among young people. After players get their own scripts, they can play specific roles, and through communication and reasoning with other players, restore the game. The whole picture and the truth of the story - not necessarily the truth of literature, of course, but more like a mirage.
I'm just a little worried: In this consumer-style literary field, will writers become hallucinogenic bosses?
I have believed that literature is an architectural complex on paper, a refuge for the spirit.
I don't know: the literary field, from the church to the store, is a triumph of human nature or a carnival of vulgarity.
In the current literature, it is not that we are constructing the world, but that we are virtualized by the world, and the words are dim and noisy. Malcolm Cowley of the United States said in "Return of Exiles": "This is an era of light, fast, and adventurous, and it is pleasant to pass the youth in this era; but it is gratifying to come out of this era. , like walking out of a room with too many people and too loud talking into the sunshine on a winter street" - I want to sneak out from this era and do a "Come on" like Kenzaburo Oe the person who sent you the letter."
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