Chapter 19 Article 20 The Pan-politicized Death of Literary Language

Laoxia: Any style of writing in the May Fourth era, except the ancient Chinese, is original.If China has made any progress in these years, it is mostly due to the translation industry.Although there is no mature thing in language, at least it has contributed to the import of Western concepts and methods.Translation seems to be the only remaining fruit. Wang Shuo: I remember that Wang Xiaobo's article also mentioned the contribution of translation to literature.I don't know if it was sarcasm, I forgot. Old Xia: I don't think so. Wang Shuo: In my impression, he is not sarcastic, but a positive comment.In my opinion, most of the current translation styles are a kind of satire, especially this style is a relatively common phenomenon among southern writers.To be honest, I think some of this style of writing can still be read well.Because some written language, like Hu Shi's vernacular, I don't think it's clear, it's outrageous.If a writer encounters something complicated, I think you should write longer. The translation style is that the sentences are longer. If you write longer, it may be more pure and honest. It depends on what you are writing.But its bad influence is also obvious, that is, there are a lot of squiggly characters.This is specific to translation.

I have seen a lot of things written by younger children, and I feel that they are all very good.However, it seems that it is also a fashion among them to mention some foreigners, some foreign writers and so on.They seem to be willing to admit that these foreigners are their spiritual support, their creative inspiration, their writing experience, and everything they have comes from them.Writers like Borges without translations do not have the whole tone of them.I really can't judge this.However, this... This translation has obviously spawned many Chinese writers. If there are no translations by foreign writers, they seem to not know how to write.

It is through these translations that they learned some methods, and of course some people gradually formed their own style later. Lao Xia: The earliest translated works of contemporary literature are Wang Meng's stream of consciousness, quasi-hippie literature by Liu Suola, Xu Xing and others, Gao Xingjian's dramas, and the earlier "Today" literature.The imitation of Liu Suola and Xu Xing is a comprehensive imitation from emotion to words.Where is Wang Meng?Just imitating the stream-of-consciousness language of the translated body, the inner concept of the work is completely traditional.Gao Xingjian's imitation is close to plagiarism, and his structure is copied from "Waiting for Godot", but he added a Chinese-style bright tail.Berguet's waiting is despair, utter despair, Godot will never come, and people can only wait helplessly, until they are bored, until they grow old, until they die.

Gao Xingjian's waiting was finally no longer waiting. A man with the appearance of an intellectual got rid of those who continued to wait stupidly, and left alone to find hope, instead of waiting without doing anything.You see, this kind of avant-garde experimental drama at the time drew inspiration from Western absurd dramas, but in the end it still ended up with that kind of literary concept, the bright tail. Wang Shuo: It's not just me who is poisoned, but even art pioneers can be regarded as comrades and confidants. Old Xia: Wang Meng's stream of consciousness is nonsense, and the Chinese tense cannot be used to write stream-of-consciousness novels.How can such a simple language tense simulate the flow of human consciousness.Language is a way of thinking.The complicated concept of time of Westerners makes their language extremely rich in tenses.We Chinese seem to never have the concept of time. The cycle of dynasties is consistent with the stillness of time, and it is also consistent with the poverty and roughness of tenses in the language.Every emperor in China has to change the Yuan as soon as he ascends the throne, and he has to cut off time and start from the beginning again. This is how the cycle continues from generation to generation. Time is like a closed circle, and each emperor seals himself in this circle.Li Yang was lucky enough to use the "Oriental Stream of Consciousness" to name Wang Meng. It seems that this kind of thing is the creation of our Eastern writers, and it is the crystallization of the combination of the language practice of Western writers and our Chinese revolutionary practice.In fact, Wang Meng's stream of consciousness failed completely. As far as his own works are concerned, those stream of consciousness works must be the worst.

Wang Shuo: You don't read the things of today's young people, which are all traces of translated styles.I don't think any style is important. The translation style is also the quintessence of our country, which is created by ourselves.I think the writer's own language creativity is the most important thing. With creativity, a good translation style can also be produced.Writing in Chinese mainly depends on the writer's Chinese sense. Even if it is a translation, whether the language is brilliant or not has nothing to do with the original text. Lao Xia: The ones with a few personalities are the translated works of Ma Yuan, Yu Hua, etc. in the late 1980s.Let’s just talk about Yu Hua. When he first came out, I read some of his works, such as his "A Kind of Phenomena" and "The Mistake by the River". The rare kind of restraint and calmness, the indifferent description of death, and the restrained face of cruelty, although it is a bit contrived, it still has a bit of fun to read.

I think his sense of language comes from Kafka's kind of calmness, or from Borges' kind of difficult-to-scholarize language calmness, probably a combination of both.Kafka is the toughest writer I have ever read, his indifference to cruel things is cold to the bone.Mrs. Borges was a writer among the piles of books, and only he became the librarian to draw inspiration for creation from a large number of documents.His heart and his roaming in the book are themselves a maze-like way of existence.Especially after he went blind.Ma Yuan’s reputation far surpassed Yu Hua’s at the time, but I really couldn’t read his books. Works such as “The Temptation of Gangdise” are playing a kind of text trap. As he writes, he interrupts the story and tells himself. The way the story is told deliberately creates falsehoods and leaves the reader at a loss as to what to do.He is really playing a kind of boring writing game.I have basically never read Yu Hua's later works, so I don't know how?

Wang Shuo: Let’s talk about Yu Hua.I think his original novel is very particular about language feeling, and of course there is a little bit of translation.But I think he has arrived, and returned to the relatively simple feeling of writing.As far as I am concerned, of course I really like the writing in front of him, but it seems that the writing behind him has fewer traces.But I also feel like I thought it was a total fad, and everyone is doing it. Many of the things I have seen, including the parts I like more, are rarely seen written in spoken language. Now when it comes to spoken language and writing, it seems to be Beijing accent.In fact, it is not only Beijing dialect that can be written in spoken language, but also Northeast dialect.

Lao Xia: Now the most popular comedic spoken language in film and television is mainly Beijing dialect and Northeast dialect.Beijing accent has a tradition of cross talk, which is the most popular tradition.In the Northeast tune, there are sketches by Zhao Benshan and others, which are very popular now.There is also Cantonese, which most people in the mainland cannot understand, but it is very popular in Guangdong.The dominance of the northern spoken language also has a lot to do with the official standard of Mandarin. Wang Shuo: At that time, I saw a Northeast writer named A Cheng, not A Cheng from Beijing, but A Cheng from Northeast China.Although he also has a kind of carving, but his writing has the charm of Northeast spoken language.There are actually a lot of spoken words in Sichuan dialect that can be written. I remember when I told Qiao Yu and the others "Love You Is Not Negotiable", they said a lot of Sichuan's messy words, but they can actually be written, and they are urban buzzwords.For example, it is Sichuan dialect to say "whitewashed" to a person, and it can be understood what it means when it is translated into Mandarin in the text.Although there are so many spoken language resources, I feel that there are at least far fewer people who rely on Chinese spoken language to supplement literary language than those who enrich Chinese writing through translation.Now there are some newcomers. For example, there is one named Ding Tian in Beijing, and another named Mian Mian in Shanghai. Both of these children dropped out of middle school before finishing middle school. They write novels and feel like playing.Some people say that they use their bodies to write novels, but Mo Yan said that they use their bodies to write novels along the way.They are also extremely experienced.Just write whatever you see.Write about any experience you have, and some of them even take drugs, and Mianmian is said to have drug use experience.Her writing is said to be very different, and a few sentences can fly.I think it’s a bit crazy for young people to write novels nowadays. Anyway, they really put themselves out and use their bodies to do experiments to find a sense of language. I really admire this kind of people, they really put themselves out.

Old Xia: Those "angry youths" in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the United States after World War II. The "Beat Generation", the hippies, used the extreme experience of the body to write and oppose the mainstream culture. Ginsberg's best long poem "Prayer" is that after he heard the news of his mother's death, he took drugs and then sat In front of the typewriter from six o'clock in the morning until late at night the next day, all in one go.Rockers, filmmakers, painters... There are people who play with their bodies in all kinds of artistic creations.

Wang Shuo: I read "Almost Infinitely Transparent Blue" written by Ryu Murakami in Japan. That guy must be taking drugs.Some of his feelings can’t be written if he doesn’t take drugs, and he can’t imagine that people will have those feelings at that time.I think these kids nowadays are very particular about the sense of play, maybe they don’t worship this translation style so much. I think it may be that those who have received systematic education and training have different attitudes towards this than those who have not.If he has not received this kind of education, he will tend to use himself to generalize. If you have received this education, you can use foreigners to generalize. The latter is much more convenient in this regard.Of course, my comparison is not to belittle or praise anyone, because the translated text can also look good.

Lao Xia: The plight of contemporary Chinese writers is actually a kind of language plight to some extent.The language that we can absorb is very little, and the language experiment of vernacular Chinese is cut off by the crude pan-political language just after some mature language experiments, so we have nothing to inherit.From the perspective of language resources, ancient Chinese is dead, and some of the vernacular in ancient Chinese, novels in the late Qing Dynasty, and essays in the Ming and Qing Dynasties have been partially transformed into vernacular in the "May 4th" period.From the point of view of literary language, only the unimitable Lu Xun and the imitable American literary tradition remained. The flamboyant language of Chen Duxiu, Guo Moruo and others was completely absorbed by the later pan-political language.Another language is the style of translation that we both talked about just now. The success of many writers during the "May 4th" period or the entire Republic of China period benefited from this style of translation.For example, Cao Yu's famous work "Thunderstorm" was a product of imitating O'Neill, and the later most famous "Peking Man" was inspired by Chehev's play.Lu Xun's famous works also have traces of Gogol.But for the creative writer, imitation is a creative language experiment.Successful ones such as Lu Xun and Cao Yu. Wang Shuo: I just read the novels by Shi Cunzhe, Mu Shiying, etc. in Shanghai. The translation style is particularly heavy.They even added English to the text in fashion at that time. Old Xia: The use of English in writing has been around since the 1920s. Wang Shuo: Do ​​you think there is such a distinction between classical Chinese and vernacular in foreign countries? Old Xia: I knew that English is divided into Old English and Modern English, but the difference between the two is definitely not as big as the difference between our classical Chinese and the vernacular.If you want to be consistent.The vernacular revolution in China was due to the overall anti-traditional needs, and also because the popularity rate of ancient Chinese was too low, and it was too different from the spoken language of the people, so ordinary people did not speak classical Chinese. Wang Shuo: Chinese has been spoken for thousands of years, but it has only been more than a hundred years for us. Starting from the vernacular, our language is completely the tradition of the vernacular. Lao Xia: The deepest, broadest and most original source of language in contemporary Chinese literature lies in spoken language, but there is something particularly troublesome in contemporary spoken language, which is the pan-politicization after 1949. , no matter where the spoken language is, it is forcibly assimilated by political language, and I think it is time to carry out a vernacular revolution. The language revolution in the West was the Renaissance's rebellion against Latin. Dante began to abandon Latin, which symbolized the power of the Roman Catholic Church, and wrote in the national language of Italy, and wrote a treatise on national languages, "On Common Language".Martin during the Reformation.Luther translated the "Bible" in the Germanic national language, and his greatest contribution to German is here.That linguistic revolution is actually part of a nationalist ethos.It is the rebellion of European countries against the unified Latin language, and it is also a rebellion against the unified church authority of Rome.There is no local folk feeling inherent in China's ancient Chinese language itself.This kind of pan-political language has three characteristics: one is its vigorous publicity, and this kind of publicity is based on empty slogan-like lyricism. All the language that sings praises has this kind of publicity.In the end it became a pseudo-language, a recitative accent. That is, it does not convey anything personal about the speaker, but only conveys a big concept under the manipulation of power. Even the most personal word like love points to big things. "The sun is the reddest, Chairman Mao is the closest", "I love Beijing Tiananmen" and so on.Another characteristic of pan-politicized language is its violence, which is full of hatred and gunpowder. Similar violent and bloody words have become part of our language, part of our thinking, and part of our lives after the "Cultural Revolution".If we want to expel these teeth-gnashing languages ​​from our daily spoken language, we must wait for the next generation to be completely assimilated by the popular culture of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Another characteristic of contemporary spoken language is a standard, authoritative, and broadcast-like tone. It started from the Xinhua News Agency in Yan’an, and later became a normal language expression in daily life. This tone is 100% power language. The tone of Xia Qing and Gu Lan has become the standard tone of all radio, TV news, and feature films, a controlled recitation tone, and has also become the standard blueprint for people to speak at meetings in their units. Now CCTV's "Focus Interview" still has this tone, what it conveys is condescending and looking down on all sentient beings. At that time, there was also a folk dialect represented by Zhao Shuli, mainly the so-called "Yamdanzi" language. However, writers in northern Shaanxi after the "Cultural Revolution" seem to no longer use it.There is also Sun Li's so-called pure language, which is actually a tradition of American literature. After being popular for a while, it was swallowed up by pan-political language. The works of a large number of right-wing writers and educated youth writers in the new era are the continuation of this pan-political language, but with Liu Baiyu's lyrical and beautiful writing. After "Flowers Replayed", a group of rightist writers flourished, and because they had suffered, they felt that we are qualified to announce the truth to the public and society.Later, everyone found that this language was no longer good, and the language began to divide.Spoken language like yours, beautiful prose like the root-seeking school, and lyrical and beautiful prose like Zhang Chengzhi's.Judging from the award-winning works in the 1980s, they were either truth precepts by right-wing writers or beautiful essays.Zhong Acheng's "Three Kings" followed the path of Meiwen.However, I think Chinese American writing has fundamental problems since ancient times.This kind of beautiful writing turns language into an empty thing, which can smooth out all the suffering and inner struggle in the world. It is equivalent to decorating the wound with a rose. Of course, this rose may be beautiful, but it does not grow in the soil. Roses, but artificially cultivated and ugly roses specially used to decorate wounds.The role of this pretense is the same thing as the grand lyricism of pan-politicized language.Zhou Zuoren's essays can treat him as a traitor, and when he is reviled by the whole nation, his inner struggles are seamlessly wiped out, as if he has been traveling in mountains and rivers, gliding birds and watching the moon. Zhu Ziqing's "Moonlight in the Lotus Pond" and Sun Li's writings belong to this category.This kind of Chinese style of writing can also be compared with that of Japan's Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima.The Japanese have a tradition of writing, the sorrow of aestheticism, but the kind of thing under this aestheticism is extremely tragic and ferocious, especially Mishima's, the sharp and delicate writing reveals such a sharp edge, Difficulty in communication between man and the world, hatred for beauty, longing for death.Looking at the works of A Cheng and others, their beautiful essays show the detached personality of the old and Zhuang style. An exception is the language of a female writer, that is Can Xue in Hunan, which is strange and cold, and there is a kind of cold and strange smile in her language.Her characters are of the particularly dark psychological kind.As for her works, influenced by Kafka, she often writes something about Kafka. In 1985, her first novella "Old Floating Clouds" was published in "China". It was circulated as a manuscript in Beijing.I think she is a writer who has learned something about Kafka. Wang Shuo: I think some of her recent writings are still the same. She wrote about something on a train, which is absurd and weird.I think that every famous writer must have one or two real things, which are not blind.The well-known writers I have read feel that Ke Yunlu is blind and has never written anything too high. Later, he wrote reportage, which is clouded in traditional antiques. In fact, there is nothing No.Most of the remaining writers have one or two strokes, and I don't think it is possible to say how good any writer is.You say that some of his works are good, but most of his works are not always so good, which is justified.As for most writers, I think his or her famous works are better, and the more they write, the better they become.In fact, I think the water after the famous works is a common phenomenon, and he personally lacks a kind of motivation or inner strength.This is wild guessing, it's hard to say.Which way do you think Zhang Chengzhi’s language came from?He also puts a lot of emphasis on American writing. Lao Xia: The language of a group of educated youth writers such as Zhang Chengzhi is the kind of beauty and lyrical things. The traces left by Yang Shuo, Liu Baiyu, He Jingzhi and others are particularly obvious in their works.Their words and what they want to express in this kind of words are actually the same way as Wang Meng and other right-wing writers, that is, whitewashing suffering, romantic feelings of the yellow land, like Zhang Chengzhi's "North River", Liang Xiaosheng's "A Storm Tonight", by Wang Anyi, including Shi Tiesheng's "My Distant Qingping Bay", either romanticizes the educated youth and rural life, or even tenderizes it. How pure and noble is the ambition.Either they are lost after returning to the city, at a loss in the vast crowd of big cities, and they don't know where to go.In the 1990s, this false romantic feeling of the educated youth turned into a revisit of the hometown of returning home. Many educated youths who had a roll call and some money even took their children to "remember bitterness and think sweet" education, but no matter how lyrical ,romantic.Nostalgia and simplicity, everyone stays in the city and thinks about the past, but no one really wants to live a simple and romantic life.On the contrary, those educated youths who got married and had children in the local area showed endless helplessness in their speech.Such a mighty movement of going to the mountains and going to the countryside has almost ruined all the opportunities of a generation of young people.The Red Guards who colluded with each other in the city, fanned the flames, and beat and killed, have become a new generation of farmers who "do a lot".However, the hard life of the educated youth, the strong desire of the educated youth to return to the city, and how many families are involved, a kind of forced population migration, is packaged with noble slogans.Alas, it’s so weird, but once they returned to the city, they admired the black land where the old cows cook smoke and the vast jungle stretches as far as the eye can see. All the disasters were wiped out, and it became a romance of youthful idealism and simple pastoral scenery in their works. Feelings, no one has ever seriously introspected.Zhang Chengzhi went too far. In the 1990s, he sang the idealism of the Red Guard era, and rejected or resisted the materialistic flow of mass culture. Compared with his works of educated youth in the 1980s, his works in the 1990s were less tender and more Cruel and hateful, there is a violent tendency of the Red Guard era, tearing business cards with gnashing teeth.In fact, in this era, the authentic Hong Kong and Taiwan-style mass culture is much better than the idealism of these self-proclaimed elites.I would rather watch "Han Zhu Ge Ge" than "Yongzheng Dynasty". I would rather watch Qiong Yao and Jin Yong's leisure than Zhang Chengzhi's hatred and violence.In the 1990s, elite culture packaged the mainstream more viciously and harmfully than mass culture.The lesser of two evils. Let’s talk about these educated youth writers again. After expressing their feelings for the yellow land for a while, they followed Ah Cheng to find their roots, Han Shaogong’s "Dad, Dad, Dad".Wang Anyi's, Zhang Wei's "Ancient Ship", etc., became a hot spot for a while, no more than being influenced by gods and ghosts. The "root-seeking faction" doesn't have anything of their own, it's all made up.These people don't drop their book bags, they start to "lose the county annals". When writing about a place, they must use the things recorded in the county annals to prove that the root of this place is the birthplace of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, and the true root of the long history of civilization for thousands of years. Wang Shuo: I also had this feeling when I first started writing novels. I used big words and lyricism. The reason why I started speaking was because I later found that I had nothing but big words.Especially when it comes to emotions, some abstract imaginations are involved, either using idioms or nothing. I have my own limitations in the use of such big words, and I can't use them as well as others.Moreover, during the "Cultural Revolution", it was exaggerated to express our feelings. We don't know that the specific and subtle things are closely related to us. We are only expressing our love for huge abstract things.This kind of language is rich in daily life, and it is ridiculous because of its huge size. Lao Xia: Among contemporary writers, you are one of the very few who extract literary language purely from contemporary spoken language, and you are relatively successful.Distilling literary language from contemporary spoken language is very difficult, because our contemporary language has been raped by politics to nothing but big words and empty words.But you have desecrated this red and violent language with a kind of folk wisdom that is almost oily.Big talk has nothing to do with our actual emotions in everyday life, and that's all we have.Either we are completely speechless and cannot find a real way of expressing it, or we joke and tell others what seems sublime as a joke.Laughter, especially ironic humor, can easily overwhelm a dignified countenance in light-hearted conversation.Humans don't really smile when taboos seep into every corner of our lives.Serious, straight-faced, deep like yellow earth... People are interested in your novels, not so much because you wrote those ruffians, but because of your language that is close to political jokes and cultural jokes, sometimes in a certain On certain occasions, this kind of joke is irritating, especially ruthless, but you still laugh when you know it is irritating. Wang Shuo: At that time, I thought Lu Wenfu's novels were beautiful.I re-read it a few years ago, and I found that if the language of the "Cultural Revolution" was removed, the text of his novels would actually be very pale and unreadable.What you said about Liu Baiyu and Yang Shuo are exaggerated when expressing their feelings, and most people are like this.Including Zhang Chengzhi also has this problem. Everyone is familiar with expressing exaggerated emotions, and it can even be said that there is this tradition. Old Xia: It is definitely a tradition. Looking at all the epitaphs and various titles of the Han Dynasty Fu and ancient times, we are fundamentally a nation of empty words, and the "Cultural Revolution" is just the pinnacle of this tradition.No, I dare not say that the "Cultural Revolution" reached its pinnacle, because this tradition still has a strong vitality, and maybe it will become popular again one day, and create an era of big talk that is even more "Cultural Revolution" than the "Cultural Revolution".Our current elites are talking big words in another tone, like Zhang Chengzhi’s resistance to literature, like the 21st century is the century of Chinese people, like Zhong’s big talk, like Li Zehou The big talk about how Chinese culture will save mankind is just repackaged with imported vocabulary and sayings. Wang Shuo: Now some of the words I see are gradually getting rid of such big words, but the traces can still be seen. Later, when Liu Zhenyun, Chi Li and other newcomers appeared, everyone said that their writing was "white", and trivial matters could not be too big.Of course, I think Liu Zhenyun's writing is not white, but still has some charm.I think the subsequent texts can be divided into two types: one is emotional and passionate, such as popular reportage.One is calm and introverted. For example, I think that Wang Anyi's novels are neither passionate nor ostentatious. Her writing has an analytical flavor and is pretty good-looking, not simply talking about things.The group of writers in the 1950s, such as Wang Meng and Zhang Jie, still had a kind of combativeness and edge.But for others, such as Cong Weixi, Liu Xinwu, etc., I have a feeling that the author is too energetic to do it.Their posture is very forward, but words can't help.But who knows?Trying to write down, maybe I will bump into it, the old tree will take out new branches or something. Old Xia: I still have to talk about oral English.Your Beijing spoken language is not the authentic old Beijing, and the children in your military compound belong to the new Beijing.Your tone is Beijing-style, and the pronunciation is "er", but the words in the language are all political. In recent years, cultural trends have been added, and a large number of fashionable words have entered.Including fashionable foreign writers, poets, theorists and so on.Your spoken language is a spoonful of political solemnity and these cultural fashions, profane one by one, from the lofty ideals of the "Cultural Revolution" to Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud...you create that in various dialogues This kind of joke situation, no matter how serious something is, is sure to make people laugh once you enter it.Those little ruffians denied it at all, and took what the intellectual circles enshrined at that time.The serious things that draw resources from it are expressed in a joking way. Although your writing has a low profile and is close to specific life and marginal characters, there is a kind of self-love.Those cultural people who are constantly changing faces and chasing fashion have abandoned the revolution.You also embrace all kinds of imported doctrines and tricks, and you made fun of the "Cultural Revolution" all the way to the latest idol in the intellectual world. Wang Shuo: I don't intend to make fun of anyone, but I just write how I feel.The tone of spoken language is my last retreat when I have nowhere to go in writing. If I don’t use spoken language, I will have no language, I will not be able to write novels, and my childhood dreams will be in vain.In order to dream of writing a novel, I can only talk about things in spoken language.