Yin and Yang are separated. How can the deceased know about the living? Novels on this subject are rare. On the other hand, Yu Hua's new work "The Seventh Day" takes this as a breakthrough point. Through Fei Yang, the protagonist who shuttles between Yin and Yang, he tells the terrible deaths in seven days, connecting the stories into memories, recalling and thinking about love and hate, and passing on the terrible regrets of the living and the dead to every homeless soul. A religious feeling of repentance fills the soul of every deceased in the book, and also makes readers understand the value of life more deeply.
It is true that absurdity and black humor, the rapid change of time and space, the reversal of time and the grotesque plot content have always been the narrative style of Yu Hua's novels. Yu Hua's early short story "Leaving at Eighteen" is one of the representatives. By describing the story of a 18-year-old boy going out for the first time, the novel supports the story with seemingly unreasonable and illogical plots, and abandons the narrative context that pays attention to the timing and integrity of time in traditional novels, which is refreshing. In a sense, the experience of 18-year-old boy running away for the first time in the novel "Running Away at Eighteen" is more like a strange trip in a dream. If every seemingly unreasonable and illogical plot is put in a dream, the instantaneous absurd plot becomes so reasonable and logical. In the real world, this story is absurd.
Obviously, the novel The Seventh Day has not got rid of Yu Hua's absurd and black humorous narrative style. The Seventh Day begins with Marquez's narrative, and tells the story through memories, with the help of something like Dante's Divine Comedy? The expression of "hell" gives a little outline of the current social reality in China. The difference is that the novel is full of plots describing death. In these different death stories, some are deliberately captured by the author, and some are arbitrary by the author. For example, Sister Mouse cheated on her boyfriend's fake mobile phone and Wu Chao died for selling her kidneys? These all describe the cruel, dark and ugly side of human nature.
Undeniably, the writer Yu Hua is good at describing the plot of death, and his novels are full of all kinds of death stories. For example, in the novel Smoke, the fortune teller is convinced that his longevity is based on the death of five children; In the article "Past and Punishment", torturers strangled different parts on different dates; In the novel April 3rd Incident, a harmonica player aged 18 died of illness. These are all related to Yu Hua's early experience. Because my father is a doctor and his home is opposite the morgue, he is used to death, and the influence of death on Yu Hua is everywhere in the novel.
More desperate than living, more absurd than brothers, is the slogan of Yu Hua's novel The Seventh Day. Corresponding to the propaganda slogan is the white figure sitting quietly on the dark wall on the cover, which may be the theme of the novel elaborated by the author Yu Hua intentionally or unintentionally: the soul with nowhere to put it.
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Day 7 Book Review: Part II
The Seventh Day is a novel with 6.5438+0.3 million words, much shorter than Brothers, which is equivalent to the length of Yu Hua's three novels in 1990s. You can know a thing or two from the pricing of this book long before it was published. Shouting in the drizzle, Living and Xu Sanguan Selling Blood show us his introverted talent as a writer. His restraint created a lot of imagination for the novel, and his works opened the door to the world for millions of readers in Qian Qian. In Brothers, Yu Hua shows us a China whose desire is rising and broken with almost vulgar expressions instead of formal language. To some extent, this is due to the content of writing. However, on the one hand, Yu Hua himself said: narrative language first, then narrative. ? On the other hand, what coexists with Yu Hua's crude language structure is the same unadorned narrative content: beauty pageant, artificial hymen and hidden rules. With these narrative contents without aesthetic precipitation, Yu Hua became the target of public criticism. My feeling is that in the unfolding of the plot of Brothers, the structure of the story gradually becomes clear. Under the clear structure, Yu Hua completely lost control of the characters, and the novel was fully extended by 500,000 words, much like the carnival of language in Mo Yan's novels. As a novel with only130,000 words, the seventh grade shows how restrained Yu Hua is, which is really worth looking forward to.
Half a month ago, when I learned that Yu Hua's new work was called "The Seventh Day", my first thought was the Old Testament. ? God created everything in the world and human beings in six days. On the seventh day, he finished the task of creating everything and rested. ? This passage is indeed written on the title page. However, readers like me who have only read for half an hour will find that the seventh day is more like an internal imitation of another structure: in a traditional funeral in China? Top seven? Ideas. My impression of the whole book changed from sadness to joy. Yu Hua has always been a westernized writer. Although his works depict the reality of contemporary China, his thoughts and skills are influenced by western literature. Even Living, which is rooted in reality and has a strong friction with major historical events in modern China, lacks some traditional colors. I often feel that a story like To Be Alive is completely appropriate even in any cultural environment. Although no new works have been published in recent years, my dissatisfaction with Yu Hua is growing day by day. Dare to touch the seventh day? Top seven? With this traditional concept, my impression of the whole book changed from sadness to joy.
My first surprise on the seventh day was the catalogue. Yu Hua's previous novels never had a catalogue, but there are two novels with chapter names, namely Fine and Xu. However, in those two novels, the title only reminds readers of the separation of chapters, and the structure of the whole works is still hidden. The structure of the seventh grade is obvious, which shows that Yu Hua is fully confident in grasping the structure of the seventh grade.
Yu Hua himself said:? Simple narrative is the most attractive. ? However, under the clear structure of the seventh day, Yu Hua's narrative is extremely closed. There are a lot of explanations, explanations, turns and assumptions in the narrative process of the novel, which makes the rhythm of the story very slow. ? Me? I was supposed to go to the funeral home, but I found on the way that I didn't change my shroud, so I returned halfway. During the period, I waited for the bus by the roadside, but the bus didn't come, because I saw many cars colliding together, causing traffic jams, so I walked past. This kind of content is very modular and monotonous. If Yu Hua's language in Brothers is indulgent, but it also has rich narrative content and fast narrative rhythm, then in the seventh day, the characters walk in a mechanized gloomy world, and such a plot is written in 1000 words, so I can't help worrying about the capacity of this130,000 words.
On the seventh day of junior high school, Yu Hua subconsciously alienated the reality. For example, the plot of "Waiting for Bus No.203" is described by Yu Hua as: I saw a stop sign that said Bus No.203; For another example, I walked to the funeral home and stood still, which was expressed by Yu Hua as: I stopped walking to my father and walked to the funeral home. The technique of constructing a new cognitive world through defamiliarization and guiding readers to think about the truth hidden under the external truth can be regarded as avant-garde literature 30 years ago, but it is nothing new now. This is completely Yu Hua's imitation of pioneer consciousness. Sadly, this is his imitation of himself.
There are many absurd descriptions in Yu Hua's novels, such as the plot of dislocation of five senses and the plot of walking on the railway track. In a word, it is ridiculous that a person can attend his own spark ceremony after death and begin to look back on his life. Pamuk also said at the beginning that my name was red. Now I am a dead man, lying in an abandoned well. ? Absurdity is incomprehensible to some extent, and I am not stupid enough to analyze the hidden texts behind these absurd plots.
I just mentioned Pamuk's My Name is Red. In fact, in the process of reading, I keep jumping out of all kinds of novel plots I have seen. Faulkner, Marquez, Borges, Kafka and even Rulfo. I found their shadow between the lines on the seventh day. I don't want to mention the specific plot, because I'm not saying that Yu Hua is copying.
Here I want to digress and tell you a story. I once wrote a plot in a novel: one day, in Conan City, which had been dry for a long time without rain, suddenly dark clouds were gathering, and there was a rustling sound in the sky, followed by rice. After reading it, a friend of mine suddenly realized: You are copying Marquez's novels. ? I soon knew that he was talking about the rain of Sophora japonica in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which flooded the road and suffocated the chickens and dogs. The plot is really similar, and I didn't mean to copy Marquez. I told her that if I really plagiarized, I'd rather be accused of plagiarizing Huainanzi? People used to write books, and ghosts cried when it rained at night. Plot. I mean, I don't care whether Yu Hua is influenced by the tutor, but I care more about where Yu Hua's inspiration comes from.
Where is Yu Hua's inspiration? Many people will say, real life. If this is the case in real life, it is also the case in the works of all excellent writers, and it is not important whether to learn from them or not. Yu Hua is really describing real life. On the seventh day, we saw many unadorned news reporting languages such as poisoned rice, poisoned milk and poisoned steamed bread. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez showed many important Latin American historical themes such as banana craze and dictatorship. In The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom and Faulkner also showed racial conflicts and discrimination. However, when they express these themes with strong characteristics of the times, they often use this as a metaphor, or see the big from the small. Only after repeated tasting can readers find that the novel world is inextricably linked with real life. This excellent quality will enable readers in a thousand years to get the voice of * * * from another level. Although the plot of the novel is fictional and puzzling, readers can still see the reality and themselves in it, because it is a sublimated reality. In Marquez's mysterious words: the magical Latin America is the real Latin America. Common sense can't win the understanding of people in other regions, which is the crux of loneliness in Latin America. ? The direct record of news reports like Yu Hua lacks aesthetic distance, and the grasp of reality has not precipitated at all, so it is difficult for such rigid works to have long-term artistic charm. The reality in Yu Hua's works is inevitably fixed on the current time scale. He perished with the characters in the book and achieved equality with those works that passed by in the history of literature. Yu Hua made such a mistake once in Brothers.
The theme of this book is nothing new. Yu Hua was moved again? Fission? The proposition of the times seems to have become Yu Hua's basic understanding of China. The only difference is that Brothers shows us the fission in time, and the seventh day is the fission in space, that is, the fission in social class. In the funeral home, the VIP deceased sitting on the sofa and the ordinary deceased sitting on the plastic bench constitute a very poor symbol. To make matters worse, a similar symbol was actually laid out in a novel of130,000 words, and it was piled up on the seventh day.
The narrative language of characters is also the development of overlapping bedsteads. ? Bring your spark reservation form. ? Where is the reservation form? The reservation form is on the door. ? This kind of boring and bloated dialogue can be seen everywhere in the novel. Think about Yu Hua's previous works. There are many distinctive languages. Fu Gui objected to his son becoming an athlete. He said. You still have to learn to run, and chickens can run. ? The rambling Xu Sanguan said: Uncle, my face is burning. Uncle, I ate a lot of watermelons. Uncle, my stomach is about to burst. Uncle? Song Gang said? Don't worry, mom, there's only one bite left. I'll give it to Li Guangtou. There is only one dress left. I'll give it to Li Guangtou. ? Even the most inarticulate Sun Guanglin said to Sun Guangcai in the firelight. I want to find Sun! ? Those unique languages used to make me laugh. However, in the Seventh Day, the avant-garde writing state weakened Yu Hua's cognitive ability of character language. He once put the characters in the drizzle and shouted? Speak for yourself? This ability is gone. The editor on the seventh day said? The language of The Seventh Day is different from any of Yu Hua's previous works. He completely retired from the background, trying to eliminate the writer's personal traces? After Yu Hua retired from the background, he actually had more control over his works, and the activities of the characters were even more unnatural? On the seventh day, he was as thin as a shadow play.
Yu Hua, the seventh grade student, died as early as thirty years ago. This novel constantly reminds me of Yu Hua's short story Noon Whistling in the Northwest Wind a long time ago. The pioneer is not warm in form, but trembling in content. The sermons in the last two paragraphs of the novel almost destroyed the artistic diversity of the seventh day. I know that many readers who are biased towards Yu Hua will defend him and try to find other interpretation angles for the seventh grade. But what if the author uses one sentence? Bad end? After determining the interpretation space for the work, those readers who defend Yu Hua are helpless. If despair is destroying people's hope, then it is really too simple to write despair.
What I want to say is that the seventh day is really a novel that makes me despair more than Brothers. Not only did I fail to meet more expectations, but I also lost my previous characteristics, so that the vanguard posture survived. There is no richer cultural heritage and deeper realistic cognition in the seventh day of junior high school. Instead, he lost his introverted talent and aesthetic distance, and extended a novel that was not rich to130,000 words. Seven years later, Yu Hua once again missed the opportunity to prove his artistic understanding.