? 1. The tip of the grass under the quilt

Recently, the Humanities Society has published two novels reflecting rural China, one is "The Golden Bough" by Shao Li, and the other is Li Er's "Cherrys on the Pomegranate Tree", both novels have female protagonists. One is "Xiangzhuang dances with swords, aiming at Pei Gong", competing for family status; the other is "Building plank roads in the open, crossing Chencang secretly", Fight for social status. In the previous part, they tortured and killed each other in the jungle, and finally let it go. The latter part is calm on the surface, but the undercurrent is turbulent under the water, and finally ends with an unexpected collapse of trust.

Putting these two works together, I vividly compare them to a concrete and perceptible trumpet. If "Golden Bough" is about going upstream from the trumpet mouth to find the source of the tide, then Li Er's "Cherrys on the Pomegranate Tree" is about sliding towards the open mouth of the trumpet to find a way out. This way out is the situation in contemporary rural areas. This situation The changes brought about by this change are also the complex reality of contemporary rural China.

The plot of this 160,000-word novel is not complicated. It describes a village election in the Central Plains region in the 1990s. Kong Fanhua, director of the Guanzhuang Village Committee, is rich in political wisdom, capable and devoted to the people. It stands to reason that she is the best candidate for re-election. She actively prepared for the election, using all democratic and non-democratic strategies to deal with the surging power of various factions in the village with ease. However, something unexpected happened at a critical moment. The family planning work related to her re-election went into trouble. The pregnant Li Xue'e suddenly disappeared, which threw the original political structure of the village out of balance. A drama of chasing and escaping, control and counter-control unfolds quietly amid the surging undercurrents. In the end, the truth came out. It turned out that the village committee members were working against each other, and even Meng Xiaohong, her most trusted and most powerful person, who was regarded as her successor, quietly stabbed her fatally in the back and was successfully elected in her place.

The plot comes to an abrupt end. This ending is like a blow to the head that wakes up instantly, and it is also like the wandering gods returning to their places instantly. The novel is full of clues. Ambushes everywhere. Created using traditional realism techniques, a large amount of rural reality and customs are introduced in detail. The book spans several months, and the work includes topics such as returning urban workers to their hometowns, family planning, rural land contracting, rural education, environmental pollution, foreign investment, and rural bipolar political structures. It can be said that it is complex and huge, opening up a long-axis picture of China's contemporary rural areas.

But while reading, I always felt like I was jumping out of a play, as if I was neither in the countryside nor in the city. Some people call it an encyclopedic encyclopedia of rural China. Faced with such a high reputation, I personally think it is an exaggeration. This novel, which deals with the family system, patriarchal system and Confucian ethics, does not have the majesty and weight of "White Deer Plain"; it does not have the depth and forward-lookingness of Jia Pingwa's "Gao Laozhuang" when it writes about contemporary people's existential confusion, cultural confusion and social differentiation. , is even inferior to "Qin Opera"; it describes the vicissitudes of rural families and the struggle of the soul, without the delicacy and affection of Zhang Wei's "Ancient Ship" and Lu Yao's "Ordinary World".

Of course, every writer is trying to find a mark that distinguishes him from others in order to determine his individual self. In the animal kingdom, survival of the fittest, whether the mighty lion or the weak otter, they all use the release of their unique scent to declare their sovereignty and defend their sphere of influence in their own territories. The ice breaking in Qinghai Lake and the returning bar-headed geese are definitely eye-catching representations of spring. In the field of literature and art, the author's distinctive personality is imprinted from the beginning of creation. In writing, authors strive to occupy a "trademark" to promote themselves in the noisy economic and cultural market with eye-catching and independent features.

In addition to the miscellaneous peanut trees in the layout, the most distinctive feature of Li Er's works lies in the black humor created by his humorous and lively language. He himself watched with cold eyes, but he let the revolutionary sentences that mixed elegance and slang, the drama that reversed black and white, the seemingly serious narrative, and the language that had no boundaries yet appeared in the picture to produce an allegorical cold humor, which made people laugh and gave readers a magical feeling. impact.

It has always been Li Er's dream to write a novel about rural China. This rural country does not have Shen Congwen's shallow dream, nor Chen Zhongshi's contemplation and inquiry, nor is it like those in "Red Flag Book" and "Golden Avenue" Description of rural China. He did not strictly identify the boundaries of rural China, but unearthed more noisy and unfathomable uncertainties in his striving for truthful narratives to demonstrate a new realm of contemporary Chinese rural novels. In this sense, Li Er's work does not have rural people in the strict sense.

Li Er tries to occupy the writing field from multiple angles and has created more than 3 million words of novels so far. He mainly writes about the lives of intellectuals and puts intellectuals into history to examine their destiny, such as "Ying Wu" "Brother" and "Coloratura", and have been translated into English, German, French and other translations. At the same time, he also began to pay attention to the changes in rural China. Just like Kafka said: If you can't cope with life while you are alive, you should use one hand to block the despair that surrounds your destiny, and at the same time use the other hand to write down Download everything you see in the ruins. In this way, he "took a two-pronged approach", writing about rural areas with his left hand and intellectuals with his right hand. This is his only novel with rural themes.

Why did he write such a novel? Every writer strives to break through his own actions. After Mo Yan finished writing the most controversial "Big Breasts and Wide Buttocks", he was unwilling to accept frequent interviews from reporters. He said that he had to go back to that place once during an interview. He wanted to get out as soon as possible, completely leave that thinking, and move on to the next step of creation. When Li Er was interviewed on different occasions, he mentioned "the tip of the grass under the quilt" several times. Isn't this sentence also a breakthrough that the author hopes for? This also became an experience of the avant-garde nature of his works.

Fanhua is confident and eloquent, and she knows how to handle things appropriately and adapt to changes. However, in the undercurrent of the temptation of power disputes, she fell extremely miserably. The erosion of power on people's hearts has reached a point where it is impossible to prevent. Trust between people is as low as a feather. China is a large agricultural country with 1 billion people. The author is obviously testing whether there is a real spiritual force in rural areas that can influence people's values ????and right and wrong. He understands "the kind of widespread resentment caused by inner imbalance", but how to make "life under the cover of lies and carry out real changes" less widespread resentment and less complicated and ambiguous. Li Er can't find a way to weigh things up, so his brilliance lies in filtering and restoring, presenting absurd realities and allowing readers to reflect with him. This village committee election may seem like a farce, but it is actually the author’s deep thinking on the political culture of China’s new rural areas in the contemporary transformation and development.

Pomegranates are produced in the Western Regions, and cherries are produced in the East. There are red cherries on the pomegranate tree. Is the game and entanglement between the branches reasonable or absurd? Is the story of Blossoms a tragedy or a comedy? Is it her one-man show or a wonderful group performance? It is really surprising that the cherries on the pomegranate tree bear fruit, but if you think about it carefully, the wisdom of farmers under the impact of the economic wave of the times cannot be underestimated.

There is an inconspicuous detail in the novel. The first party secretary wants the word width to be "one year old, one withered prosperity", and the flowers want "one flower, one world", and "one year old, withered and prosperous" is realistic Wisdom, "one flower, one world" is the world of Zen Buddhism, which contains a strong philosophical meaning and is the highest state realized by ordinary people in the secular world. The Chilean poet Neruda also wrote a poem like "The whole earth is a flower", so this is very meaningful. Does the "flower" in the author's poem refer to the individual flowers or to the person who represents everything that works for the people by himself? Traditional cadres like flowers? Is that a small personal world, or a big world where the world is just a flower? Is the capable and versatile Meng Xiaohong who replaced her the ideal new cadre in the contemporary new countryside?

The ups and downs of the plot require readers to carefully understand the complex context and complex reality in the drama and irony.

2. I have a mediocre personality, luckily? Alas?

Regarding the creation of characters in novels, Li Er once said: "I care more about the character's character than the character's morality." Throughout his works, the characters neither express great evil nor great good. Is this a kind of moderation? The psychological construction of the entire national culture based on Confucian culture is unconsciously infiltrated into the works of many writers, such as Chen Zhongshi's "White Deer Plain" and Jia Pingwa's "Abandoned Capital". In 2018, the 840,000-word novel "Brother Yingwu" by Li Er came out. It is both serious and gossipy, both decent and relaxed. The plot has no big twists and turns, the characters are not sad or happy, and the conflicts are not fatal. However, readers can read Confucius' external Confucianism and internal Taoism in the plot, as well as his progress and regrets. It can be seen that traditional Confucian concepts have a very profound influence on his creation.

Use literary techniques to express the good and evil of human nature to touch the soul's understanding. In different eras and different countries, there are similar manifestations. For example, in Western classic works, love, hate, beauty and ugliness are clearly defined in the creation of characters. The confrontation between Jean Valjean and Javert in "Les Misérables", the confrontation between old Grandet and his daughter in "The Comedy Humane", the confrontation between Jane and Jane in "Jane Eyre" The opposition between the aunt and the opposition between Quasimodo and Asmeralda in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". With the development of the times, the theme of the binary opposition between good and evil gradually turns into the reverse turning and fusion relationship between form and body. The golden mean of traditional Chinese Confucianism is a moral outlook that has been developed to this day. "To hold on to both ends is to go beyond the point." In traditional cultural cognition, both extremes are undesirable. Finding the most harmonious point in the middle of the two extremes is the "middle". This "middle" includes Many factors: courage, persistence, respect, straightforwardness, righteousness, and benevolence. "Brother Yingwu" is majestic and magnificent, but the whole book is still based on Confucianism, with details from multiple angles superimposed. The Analects of Confucius and the Book of Changes are everywhere in the novel. The group of characters standing high in the literary space seem to be talking to themselves but unable to hear their cries. They live like summer flowers and die like autumn leaves. In the author's writing, these characters are neither hideous nor flawless. With activity and stagnation, they move forward side by side in time and space. Just like what is shown in "Cherrys on the Pomegranate Tree", there are those who take advantage of tricks, some who are frustrated, some who are timid and cowardly, and some who pursue ideals. But in these characters, you cannot see great happiness, great sorrow, great evil or great treachery. This kind of writing is just as the author believes: "Both absolutely false writing and the most authentic writing may lead to the unsustainability of writing." Is this moderation of characterization a trend in writing?

The rural China of the past conveys a slight warmth, and Shen Congwen's utopian description is unforgettable. In the remote and barren ravine, Lin Lisheng's "The Lost Villa" is still full of picturesque original ecology. In "Cherrys on the Pomegranate Tree", the farmers' wisdom is increasing day by day. They are no longer isolated from the world, but undercurrents of contradictions are full of The smell of gunpowder smoke makes people full of stress and discomfort. The two major surnames in the village are Kong and Meng. It was obviously intentional on the part of the writer. It stands to reason that the teachings of Confucius and Mencius are the inheritance of Confucianism. It is logical that Kong Fanhua was replaced by Meng Xiaohong, but the method of replacement was black cooking. Is this a question from the author? I still want to reshape a new kind of values. It seems that the discussion on the inheritance and innovation of Confucian etiquette is the after-class reflection that the author brings to the readers.

It is said that the German translation of this book was given to Premier Wen Jiabao by German President Merkel. Is Merkel interested in the Chinese countryside described by Li Er, or is this a reminder to the Chinese Prime Minister to pay attention to rural construction? However, the indisputable fact is that it would be a bit blind to understand China's rural areas from this book alone.

The famous critic Han Shishan said: "Novel is essentially a contest of intelligence between the writer and the reader.

The writer is setting a trap step by step, and the reader is solving the trap step by step. In the process of solving the trap, he kills time, delights his temperament, and increases his intelligence..."

To understand a society, it is best to study it A specific figure, Kong Fanhua's image has many labels: women, village chief, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, family planning, so a series of labels make him a microscope of an era, which focuses on an era. But Li Er supported moderation in his understanding. Next, the multiple complexity, sensitive confusion, tolerance and conflict of cultural traditions are sometimes opened up to allow readers to feel the power of words, and sometimes they are restrained to allow readers to return to the special level of Confucian reflection. It is like graduating from East China Normal University with him. Like Ge Fei, they all use traditional culture to express modern wisdom. Putting the works of these brothers together, apart from the very different language features, we can only find out from Ge Fei's "Jiangnan Three Parts". Are the characters in it also wearing veils? It is said that there was a discussion titled "How to Cultivate Creative Talents in Colleges" based on the two of them. Is this kind of use of moderate characters something writers should imitate? Is the power of moderation what we need in reality? Does it contain the spiritual power we need?

From this, I think of another local writer Yan Lianke, who uses his extraordinary imagination and unparalleled coldness to express his views. In ancient and modern times, he takes stock of the suffering of the entire nation with astonishing realism, criticizes the greed and cruelty of human nature, praises the beauty and nobility of human nature, and helps them "find the original meaning of life" on the real fate of farmers and rural politics. It can be said that he uses "suffering". "The rural story of "Written a myth of the nation. This myth has always shown people to jump out, fight, fight, and move forward! In Yu Hua's "Living", didn't Fugui also have a profound enlightenment after experiencing great sorrow and great joy? ? "Cherrys on the Pomegranate Tree" debuts and ends with neither great joy nor great sadness, even at the expense of the husband's madness.

Therefore, the novel's character construction cannot "You can only see the plateau, but not the peak."