Chapter 4 Take a walk on the lawn

About the author, works and others Think of a work as an engine, a wheel, or a sickle. But don't think of it as decoration, a tablecloth on a conference table, or curtains on an office window. Nothing is more real than the pleasure and comfort that a work gives us when it is finished.No deeply prejudiced critic can take away this joy and consolation; nor can any stubbornly prejudiced enemy diminish one iota. It's better to be naked than to wear clothes that don't fit your body. The more ardently passionate an author is about art, the more joyously naked he is. Why should we abandon preaching?For preaching is often airy, artificial, and false.

It is difficult to produce good works when your emotions have not reached complete innocence. The mutual help between writers and editors is: writers can send "good" manuscripts to editors, and editors can return "bad" manuscripts to writers. The noble friendship between writers and editors should be: writers take "good" manuscripts and enhance the editor's reputation, editors return "bad" manuscripts and enhance the writer's reputation. When I listen to a person expressing his opinion about another person, I often pay attention to the activities in his heart—that is, through his seemingly objective language, I can see his real opinion hidden behind. I found:

There are not many people who can criticize others openly, most of them are cunning. Some people are full of jealousy inside and pretend to be indifferent on the outside.When you ask him his opinion on a certain writer or work, he snorts a sneer from his nostrils, pretends to be disdainful, and keeps silent; A great work of art must contain something, and this is what an era entrusts to writers in order to choose its spokesmen. Immortal works often contain a spirit of upward beauty common to all ages—a spirit that guides mankind from triviality, narrowness, and despicability to kindness, generosity, and nobility.

Petty bourgeois complacency is the most terrible enemy of an artist on his way to success. All conscientious writers are very clear about the distance between a genuine work of art and a false fabrication. We often have to use a lot of effort to read those things that are pretentious.When we have read it, we feel sad—sorrow not so much for the work as for the author, for his poor motive for publishing it. Imitation, plagiarism, and plagiarism are all the result of lack of creativity. I really hate plagiarism. When you have just created some language or image with your heart and soul, the next day you see the copies of those plagiarists-those copies often seem so clumsy. Things, made vulgar.

The requirements for a writer are not only concise and fluent articles, this is a minimum requirement - but for many of our writers, even this minimum requirement has become the highest requirement. Sophisticated style is not the result of painstaking carving and difficult embellishment. The sophisticated style is the result of the author's thorough understanding of the thoughts and emotions with which he is exposed. The job of a critic is to discover the writer, to discover the writer's proximity and distance to reality, to discover the proximity and distance between the work and reality.

But not shouting and giving orders on the command platform. Our literary world has produced some literary anecdotes, but very few literary historians, because many of our so-called literary historians use anecdotes as historical materials, not works as historical materials. Therefore, who knows more anecdotes in our literary world is the best literary historian; therefore, many of our critics are collecting anecdotes all day long-but they are seldom willing to devote energy to researching works. Most critics somehow seldom reflect a writer correctly to their readers, as if their ability were forever limited to the use of empty terms, unable to understand patiently and concretely with the correct aesthetic point of view. a writer.

A writer, in addition to writing succinctly and fluently, must contain a kind of thought in his works. The characters you write must have social roots, and characters without social roots cannot become typical. An individual is attached to a class, and criticizing him should be criticized together with his class. His success and failure are linked to the success and failure of his class. Why write characters?Writing characters is nothing more than writing society through characters.If this is not the case, then the characters written are inanimate, a kind of silhouette. Most of our readers are still at the sad stage of understanding nouns and verbs, and they don't have much respect for adjectives, adverbs, and words of succession.

Generally speaking, the author does not know if the article is badly written or does not make sense; if he knows, he must be ashamed to publish it; of. This shows the importance of criticism. A good critic should not first pay attention to what the author writes, but more importantly, pay attention to how he writes—what kind of attitude he uses to deal with the subject matter, what angle he looks at the world from, what method he uses...etc. A clever theorist does not measure a work by the class distinction of the subject matter used in the work; but by the reality of each class reflected in the work and the degree of contradiction between them.

Copied in Lanjiaping in the beginning of spring in 1942 February 12, 1942 "Liberation Daily"