Chapter 30 Speaking of "Furong Town"

After the novel was published in the first issue of "Contemporary" this year, it attracted the attention of readers all over the country. Within a few months, the editorial department of "Contemporary" and I received hundreds of letters.The teachers and friends in the literary and art circles are also very enthusiastic. Xinhua News Agency, "Guangming Daily", "China Youth Daily", "Contemporary", "Wen Wei Po", "Works and Controversy", "Hunan Daily" and other newspapers have published related articles. News, interviews or reviews.This really shocked me, a rustic and unknown countryman, and at the same time, I felt a kind of friendly friendship and spring-like warmth.Most of the readers who wrote to me asked me the following questions:

What kind of creative path have you gone through? How did you write it? "Incorporate political situation into pictures of customs and people's feelings, and use the fate of characters to interpret the changes in township life." What is the specific connection between your life experience and the township scenery depicted in the novel? ?The structure of your novel is a bit strange. It is not easy to find similar analogies. It can be said that it is neither Chinese, nor Western, nor native, nor foreign. How did you get this structure? What are your literary heritage? Relationship? Which literary classics do you like to read? In the novel, "Is the cynical rightist Qin Shutian the incarnation of the author himself"? Comrades close to the literary and art circles say that you only spent 20 days writing this novel, and it was done in one go. Is that right?

These questions make me feel like I am facing the quiet, warm, tearful, and stern eyes of readers and friends, which make me think and excite me.Literature is the author's thinking and exploration of the social life he has experienced, and it is also a form of "self-questioning" about the life he knows.Of course, this understanding, thinking and exploration are constantly advancing and developing. Facing the latter two types of problems, I can't help but feel a little sigh and sigh.Because I am a person with slow writing speed and clumsy working methods, I was actually crowned as "quick and quick thinking" and "Nissan Wanyan". "There is no great hope in life, and the sun and the moon have a little drink." In the humble opinion of me, a countryman, if I can get three or two articles and a hundred thousand words a year, it is considered a good year with good weather and abundant grain. The satisfaction of the style will spontaneously arise and be self-satisfied.In fact, the writing time of a work cannot be calculated just from the start of writing to the completion of writing.The social customs, the conditions of the world and the people's feelings, and the stories of the characters written in the book were familiar to me since I was a child, and I began to conceive and conceive them when I was an adult.As Jin Shengtan of the Qing Dynasty mentioned in the first volume of the Fifth Witness Book: "However, if you manage with your heart, you will become a habit after a long time. You don't need to stretch out paper and write, and then play. Covering the dusk under the hedge, the fifth watch is lying in the quilt, hanging down When twisting the tape and looking at things, you will encounter something." I think, no matter how the posterity evaluates Jin Shengtan's merits and demerits on the issue of "Water Margin", the truth he realized about the creation of novels is Very incisive and unique, worthy of reference for future generations.

How did I learn to write novels, and how did I write them? This starts with my interest in reading.I have read a little, but it can be said that I have a mixed appetite and disorganized.At first, when I was a child, I read some swordsman novels and legends about swordsmen and ghosts in my hometown when I was half-baked in the countryside. I was lucky not to be led astray by "martial arts" and went to Mount Emei to find strange people and teach them strange skills.Then come down and read "Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", "Journey to the West", "Red Marsh" and "Water Margin".

"Building", read the masterpieces since the "May Fourth Movement", and only then did I get a little taste of the value and strength of literature.As for dabbling in Western literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, lingering indulging in the art world created by such great masters as Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Merimee, Balzac, and George Sand , Character face gallery, it is after graduating from high school.Later, when I got older, I developed some new hobbies, and read a little bit of history Works on literature and philosophy, biographies of Chinese and foreign figures, war memoirs, world events and so on.And because he is naturally curious and fond of traveling, he has no chance to see the moon of America, the sun of the "Empire on which the sun never sets", the narcissus of France, and the arena of ancient Rome.I also follow the various news disclosed in the newspapers about spaceflight, ocean patrol, nuclear bombs, flying saucers, aliens, Mayan culture, pyramids and the mysteries of the Bermuda Magic Triangle, to be a "spiritual self-dinner" for a small country intellectual. "The dream of "...is called "good reading, don't seek deep understanding", and masturbates with reading.Accumulated over time, ages have passed, and unconsciously, I have formed a relationship with literature that seems to be unfinished in previous lives.

In this way, I emboldened, stumbled to start, and learned to write novels.He even sits on a well and believes that the life he has experienced, the society and life he has known are things that the predecessors—even the ancient philosophers have never seen or heard. It would be a pity not to write them down.I am not too old, and there are no life-threatening ups and downs in my experience, but I have also come out of the spring rains and autumn frosts of life and the canyons and ravines of sports.I grew up in the rural areas of southern Hunan. After working, I lived next to a small town in the Wuling Mountains for 14 years. I labored, sought knowledge, and sought food, and was involuntarily involved in various sports. , experiencing the vicissitudes of the times and the vicissitudes of the earth.I am naive, obedient, and stubborn, and I occasionally set off a fanatical storm deep in my heart, and I once made a plan to commit suicide in front of the fangs and claws of the "red terror".The ancient Qingshiban street in the mountainous town, the newly built red brick and blue tile houses, the old camphor trees with four branches and leaves, and the crooked stilted buildings all have a simple attraction and a sense of historical intimacy for me.The ups and downs of the residents' promotions, sorrows and joys, red and white festivals, cock crowing and dog barking are all vivid in the eyes and familiar to the heart.I found that the material production in the mountain town is progressing very slowly, while the relationship between people is undergoing various rapid and artificial changes.

Before the "Cultural Revolution" and during the "Cultural Revolution", I was deeply immersed in a kind of depression, which can also be said to be a contradiction between sensibility and rationality.One is that the life I can express is whitewashed, pale and weak, far from the real social life I have been exposed to, and sometimes it is completely opposite-this reason is self-evident today.Second, due to my lack of literary foundation, living in a remote mountainous area, far away from the capital city, it is precisely because I have no hope of seeking a teacher and nowhere to ask for it.Therefore, in the past twenty years, every time I write an essay, even if it is a prose of three or two thousand words or a novel of four or five thousand words, I am always in a state of tension before writing, as if I am facing a big exam.In the process of writing, there are also moments of "clear writing" and "flowing clouds and flowing water", but I always worry about whether the next chapter can be written after finishing the previous section (whether it is written well or not).Once the first draft is published, you will be proud for a while, but after three or five days, you will sigh and lose confidence, creating a gray "sense of failure".My lover has grasped this disposition. Whenever I couldn’t hold back my narcissism during the writing process, and happily told her about a certain character, a certain plot, or a certain paragraph of text I wrote, she would laugh and scold, “Look! You’re crazy! Within three days, you’ll be moaning and sighing again!” Sure enough, a few days later, when the first draft was finished, I went from self-satisfied to negative—discouraged.It was not until many days passed that I was unwilling to fail and took out the manuscript, and asked my friends to see if it was worth revising.Many of my novels were encouraged by my friends, and I started from scratch with two or three drafts.I can't even make major revisions in the top and bottom corners of the original manuscript, but I am used to using another pen and paper, copying and revising, and spend a considerable amount of energy on the deliberation of words and sentences.I sincerely envy those colleagues who write fast, and admire their ability and talent to "succeed at once".If it wasn't for the superiority of the socialist system to guarantee my basic life, I would have to be poor and hungry if I went to any other system to participate in the competition for survival.

In the autumn of 1978, I went to a large mountainous county to conduct interviews.At this time, the whole country is discussing the "standard of truth", and urban and rural areas across the country are beginning to rehabilitate the unjust, false and wrongly decided cases caused by leftist policy mistakes in the past ten or twenty years.A music cadre of the county cultural center told me about the unjust case of a widow in their county.The story itself is very tragic. Two husbands died one after the other, but this female commune member is full of fatalistic thoughts, blaming her own fate, fate alone, Kefu.At that time, I listened to it and used my brains, but I felt that it was just a pot, which didn't make much sense.Not long after, I went to the provincial capital to hold a creative symposium, and I also told this story to some comrades.Everyone also gave me some ideas, such as "Widow Crying at the Grave", "Double Visiting the Grave", "A Woman's Revelation", and so on.I know that everyone didn't really use their brains, just talking and laughing.

The convening of the historic Third Plenary Session of the Party formulated the correct line of "seeking truth from facts and emancipating the mind", which brought about a historic turning point in our country's political life.The people are thinking, and the party and the country are reviewing and summarizing the experience and lessons of the past 30 years since the founding of the country.The literature since the smashing of the "Gang of Four" has already touched and explored the major issues of art with its sensitive spiritual whiskers.I am also reviewing and summarizing the writing path I have traveled.The line and policy of the Third Plenum of the Central Committee opened my eyes, gave me a high level of epistemology, and gave me the courage and courage to re-understand and analyze the life in the villages and towns in southern Hunan that I am familiar with.It was as if I had ascended to a hillside, and looking down, I could clearly see the turbulent gatherings in the towns and villages in southern Hunan for twenty or thirty years, the mountains and rivers flowed away, and the people's sentiments changed...

From July to August of 1980, during the scorching heat, I hid in a cool and quiet forest farm in the hinterland of the Wuling Mountains and started writing drafts.At that time, it was indeed a bit "emotional and thoughtful, writing with spirit", and I wrote with tears every day, laughing and cursing, and was very excited.In just 150,000 to 60,000 words, it includes and condenses my observation and understanding of society and life in the past 20 to 30 years, my love and hatred, tears and joy.In this sense, it is not too much to say that it took me more than twenty years of hard work to write it.

Many readers are interested in the structure of the book and asked how this "neither Chinese, nor Western, nor native, nor foreign" style of writing came about.I think the structure should serve the content of life.The content is the foot, and the form is the shoe.Foot discomfort is inconvenient to walk.Neither can the feet be cut to fit the shoes, nor should one walk with bare feet.Human beings have entered a modern society.The rapid advancement of scientific civilization has accelerated the speed and rhythm of human life.People pay more and more attention to efficiency and color.Today's readers (especially young and middle-aged readers) will be impatient if our literary works still stay or follow the slow pace and meticulous description of Western literature in the seventeenth and eighth centuries.Moreover, in Chinese classical literary works, the rhythm and speed of story development are relatively fast, and readers are also accustomed to reading them happily. As mentioned earlier, it originally started with the story of a widow rehabilitated.I didn't write it in those years because I thought that if it was simply written about the fate of a woman, this kind of work has been seen frequently throughout the ages, and it would have fallen into the trap long ago.It wasn't until last summer that I finally came up with such an idea: take Qingshiban Street in a small mountain town as the center, intersperse the story of the widow into a group of characters, and form a small society with these characters, Write about their respective performances in four different ages, joys and sorrows, write about the big society through the small society, and write about the whole moving big era.With this overall idea, I was secretly happy for a long time, thinking that when this exercise is written in the future, at least it will not fall behind in the large structure.Therefore, I made a further detailed design and decided to write four years (1963, 1964, 1969, 1979). Each section focuses on the performance of a character.There are twenty-eight sections in four chapters.Each section and each character must be closely and naturally connected to each other, with interlaced canines and warp and weft weaving. Of course, this structure may be an artistic desperation.It first requires me to mobilize all my village and town life savings in the past 20 to 30 years, infuse my passion for life, and compress a lot of life content.At the same time, it is also a new test for my ability to control language and characters.The time span is large, and there must be many narratives.I think narration is the main means of novel writing—especially the writing of novels and novels. Narration can best reflect a writer's language style and writing skills.When I read novels, I especially like the relief narrative in Balzac's works, and I often enjoy talking about narrative when I write novels. After it was published at the beginning of this year, I worried for a while whether readers could get used to this "combination of local and foreign" plot structure and the whole narrative text.But not long after, the enthusiastic letters from readers dispelled my worries, and most of them said "read it in one go".Of course, there are also some different opinions. For example, an old man who cares about me The writer was basically affirmative, and pointed out that I wasted the material, and the life that could have been written into several works was compressed into a space of hundreds of thousands of words.Also, some time ago, a literary critic told me that a comrade in "Talent" magazine and his whole family had read it and liked it very much. It's all written." Some readers also wrote to say that it was like a small town in their hometown. The main characters in it, such as Hu Yuyin, Qin Shutian, Gu Yanshan, Li Mangeng, Wang Qiushe, Li Guoxiang, etc., were all familiar with them and seemed to have done it before. Neighbor, as if I have been a neighbor... One day in April this year, I was revising a manuscript in the guest room of the People's Literature Publishing House, when a middle-aged man suddenly broke in and declared his name as a middle school student on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. teacher.He said, "Old Comrade, I am the Qin Shutian you wrote... I was tortured endlessly during the 'Cultural Revolution' because of a draft of a historical novel. ..." As he spoke, tears welled up in his eyes, and he couldn't make a sound.My eyes were also hot, and I was deeply moved by the sincere feelings of this "Qin Shutian" on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The main characters written in this book all have life archetypes, and some have several life archetypes respectively.A comrade engaged in contemporary literature research at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Social Sciences once conveyed to me such a question. Gu Yanshan is a positive image of a veteran cadre in the village. He is a sympathetic and respected old man. The human side? I think this is indeed a question worthy of discussion by critics.There is no doubt that many touching images of veteran cadres have been created in our contemporary literary works.Most of these images stand out from the all-powerful commanders in the war years, with a majestic heroic spirit and a high-level talent.But what I want to write about is a veteran cadre who went south to work and live in a small mountain town in the south during peacetime.There is no hail of bullets, nor is it a construction site for the great battle of thousands of horses.First of all, Gu Yanshan is an ordinary person, a member of the common people in the town, sharing fate with the common people in the town, and also has personal likes and sorrows.However, he is primarily a caring, considerate, helpful, honest and loyal communist.His existence has invisibly produced a force that keeps life in the small mountain town balanced and stable.In the minds of the mountain people, he became the incarnation of the new society and the Communist Party, and a "leader" recognized by the masses.Of course, writing the image of the grassroots leader of the party in this way, especially the various situations of his personal life, joys, sorrows, sorrows and joys are written without any concealment.Perhaps it is easy to have a question: in the limited number of literary and artistic figures such as "heroes", "positive characters", "intermediate characters" and "transformed characters", In the category of objects, which category should it be classified into and which volume should it be included in? What if it cannot be classified into any category or into which volume? From this, it reminds me of what our literature should be. Do you write about living people in real life or some imaginary concepts? Do you write about real and credible newcomers or some kind of categorized model people, "people in sets"? So I think that Gu Yanshan, despite all kinds of Insufficient, but as the image of our party's grassroots cadres, there is nothing wrong with it. Simply categorizing characters is a metaphysical point of view derived from the leftist ideological trend in the field of literature and art, a kind of habitual force, and an important reason for the conceptualization, similarity, and formulation of characters. Prosperity is hindered.In recent years, I have tried to reduce its shackles in my own works, but little progress has been made. I still need to spend a lot of effort and do long-term exploration in the future. Many old writers from Hunan are always asking and persuading our younger generation to be rooted in the soil of life, broaden their artistic horizons, write about the colors of life, and write about the mood of life.They teach by precept and example, and provide us with examples by their own works. "Write the color, write the sentiment", this is the heartfelt words of the predecessors, the sound of gold and stone in art.To meet this requirement, various factors are involved, such as language skill, life experience, living area, ideological quality and so on.This is by no means to say that the color and mood have already been written in the exercises.On the contrary, my work is far away from the teachings of the older generation of writers, and my expectations are very far away, which requires me to devote my whole life to persistent pursuit.Many readers and commentators have enthusiastically pointed out various deficiencies, and I am digesting them, and making serious revisions and corrections. "Looking at the world is different from the author, and reading works is different from the reader."It should be said that the majority of readers have the most say and are the most impartial reviewers.The above is nothing more than an after-dinner "gossip" about it. Gu Hua In early November 1981 in Beijing