Chapter 11 The Happiness of Sitting in a Well and Watching the Sky——Reading Su Tong

There are scattered photos of some writers in my computer, including Su Tong.Originally, I seldom looked at a writer himself when I was reading a book, but since Xiao A got me these photos, I started to form a hobby: I like to look at the writer’s photos after reading a writer’s text, see His eyes, eyebrows and the arc of his mouth. For a long time, Su Tong has shocked me with his cold and flamboyant imagination and erratic writing style. Before I saw him in person, I always imagined how stern and vicissitudes of life a man must have to complete such writing.later you see Arrived, a man with a peaceful and warm smile, but his eyes are still sharp.

I remember that the first time I read Su Tong’s story was when I was in the second year of junior high school. I have forgotten the name of the book, but I will always remember the hometown of maple and poplar. Critics say that there is a return of thought in Su Tong's writing.All the inner displacements are tied to the same place, and this kind of tie is the hometown of maple and poplar that he imagined.In that place, there are bluestone slabs scalded by the scorching sun, stone bridges covered with moss, and a small ditch with black and smelly water. By the river are some aggressive women washing clothes and vegetables. The shaggy dog ​​sticking out its long tongue in the corner, and the people crawling in the cracks of life.

Su Tong often sets the background of his novels in summer, where the sun is scorching hot.Su Tong seems to be deliberately violating the old adage "there are no secrets under the sun". He uses his words to weave too many beautiful and weird illusions under the bright daylight. I have always liked summer, because I think it is a season of exuberant personality.Just like Zhou Jianing said: I need bright sunshine, make me dark, make me boil.I am a child born in summer, Gemini, with a restrained and flamboyant personality. I was educated to hide my edges and corners in normal times, but I am unwilling to be ordinary in my heart.I yearn for all the gorgeous and cutting-edge things, just as I yearn for the noisy colors of Van Gogh.And Su Tong let me find such a secret back garden, a back garden full of summer sunshine, where colors flow silently but ostentatiously.

Su Tong created too many images of the south, and the world he described always exudes a humid and hot southern August.Critics say that Su Tong is like a southern broad-leaved plant, with thick and wide leaves, interlaced branches and leaves, free and loose, often dripping with water, exuding the pungent smell of the plant in summer.And sometimes I feel that Su Tong is like a black mandala blooming in the night, with a dark fragrance surging.Southern consciousness, southern temperament, and southern atmosphere constitute the background of Su Tong's novel world: restless desire for survival, weird and mysterious history and nature, and free and easy narrative style.

Flipping through a magazine that day, I came across an article criticizing Su Tong for his narrow creative scope and his obsession with describing his inner world. It said that Su Tong "sees the sky from a well".Then I saw an article under the banyan tree called "The Happiness of Sitting in a Well and Watching the Sky".So I thought of two things together at once, and I thought it was amazing. Su Tong is a person who is very persistent in details, a bit like Zhang Ailing.Zhang Ailing always used a lot of pen and ink to describe a cup with brown tea stains, a curtain entangled by the wind, a pair of sharp and bright eyes of a man, a circle of lace around a woman's neck, a silent falling City, a wisp of charming and swaying smoke.She described all this with an extremely calm and objective attitude, making people feel trivial in their hearts and at the same time produce indescribable emptiness and fear, and at the same time, they are afraid of being entangled in this kind of life for a lifetime.I have always wanted to write something for Zhang Ailing, but this woman whose palm is full of prosperity and soul in the last days but who is deeply imprisoned really makes me helpless.It's not that I don't want to write, it's that I can't write.

However, Su Tong's attention to detail has injected too much psychedelic color.For example, in the well he described in the novel, the inside of the well is dark and cold, and the well platform is covered with moss.Song Lian has been entangled in this well all her life. The world in the well is a black temptation to her. She wants to see it clearly so that she will no longer be inexplicably afraid, but she never dares to approach it, but she also walks away. out of the shadow of the well.So she had to keep turning around the well, saying, "I won't go down, I won't go down."

There are also red sandalwood beads in Wu Zetian's hands, red petals on the fingertips of a drowned girl, corpses floating in the dead man's pond, and wild vegetables on the shore. Su Tong doesn't like to deal with those big themes. His novels focus on people's inner struggle.But for a while, the critics lashed out at Su Tong's novels, saying they were narrow and flimsy.So Su Tong gave in and wrote some words that made me feel distressed for him.But Su Tong later returned to his own unique narrative style.I think he may have discovered the "happiness of sitting in a well and watching the sky".He is a willful and individual person, and I admire him.

Some people have said that people who write are displaced in their hearts.Annie exiles herself, but Su Tong is more thorough, he is fleeing.Escape from poverty to prosperity, from history to reality, from the hometown of maple and poplar to the present concrete forest.Fleeing because of sinking, wandering because of fleeing, and returning because of wandering, but the way back has been cut off and lost, so you can only continue wandering, wandering means that there is nowhere to rest and homelessness. My hometown of maple and poplar has sunk for many years we fled here It's a wandering black fish

The way back is lost forever However, the escape in Su Tong's works often forms a loop, a knot.After struggling in fragments but never being able to defeat the huge palm of fate, it returned to the original state, at least similar to the original state.For example, Yang Bo in "Divorce Guide", for example, such as "Red Pink".Everything is like a wheel of fortune manipulated by the gods. Once started, it cannot be changed and cannot be stopped. The passion Su Tong narrates is nothing but blurred flowers adorning the decadent homeland. Under the superficial magnificence and hustle and bustle, there is too much despair hidden.

However, even after Su Tong paused to pull down, he still thought that he would always be a foreigner, unable to integrate into the life around him, so he stood in the wilderness under the sky with a gesture of rejection. The city where our family lives now is the end point of the little girl’s escape from Huanzi. This city is nine hundred miles away from my hometown of Maple and Poplar.Since I was seventeen or eighteen, I like to say to my friends in this city, "I am a foreigner". What I tell is actually the story of the escape.The flight happened so early, the flight began so early.

I would like to present a huge flower basket to my family with the death of my grandfather Chen Baonian.Immediately I will take this flower basket and go out, through the streets at night, and through your windows.If you open the windows, you will see my shadow floating in the city. Who can tell what shadow it is? It was a lonely and sad shadow, destined to shake my whole life.