In the novel "Argentinian Steak", Chang Fang quoted a famous saying from the Greek poet Elytis in his acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature through the mouth of a character, that is, regardless of whether he has the right or not, Everyone is asked to allow him to speak for light and clarity, because these two states regulate the space in which he lives and what he can achieve. In fact, this sentence can also be regarded as a portrayal of Chang Fang's own creation. Since 2006, this female poet who was once extremely fond of poetry began to shift her focus to novels, and used her unique compassion, gentle and persevering character, and poetic heart that is famous for its light and clarity to write in the novel. He quickly carved out a niche in the literary world. Although the number of her works is not large, there are only more than 20 long, medium and short stories combined, but a kind of tranquil atmosphere is clearly visible, especially her creations in the past two years, whether in the aspect of spiritual care, Thematic aspects such as the perspective of thinking about the times, the textual aspects such as narrative strategies and tailoring concepts, or the carefully tempered and considerate language aspects can all be seen in his efforts to build his own unique aesthetic world.
The following will try to discuss the artistic practice of Chang Fang’s novels from the perspective of four groups of dialectical relationships.
Explicit and latent
Since 1932, Hemingway proposed the famous "Iceberg Theory" in his documentary work "Death in the Afternoon". The core understanding of this theory is basically It is anchored in the word "simplicity", which is Hemingway's own so-called use of "one-eighth" of words and images to convey the "seven-eighths" of emotions and thoughts hidden in sight. Ma Yuan, a Chinese follower of Hemingway, believes that in addition to simplicity, the inherent quality of the "iceberg theory" can be summarized as "empirical omission", that is, excluding all human perception methods and their laws, and directly stating the core of the facts. The details are left to the reader's experience to fill in. Whether it is simplicity or omission, "Iceberg Theory" seems to be far away from Chang Fang's novels, because in terms of language texture, Chang Fang's style is far-flung and soft. She loves to use dialogue, and those short-lived people in the dialogue Trivial and entangled, it is definitely different from the sharp and short tough guy style of Hemingway and Ma Yuan. However, if we don’t stick too much to the simplicity of writing style or the omission of experience, Chang Fang’s novels are actually quite consistent with the “iceberg theory”. She shows a unique way of literaryly dealing with obvious events and latent emotions in life. His writing wisdom and skills are impressive.
"Heding Red" is a typical piece of her urban emotional themes. The novel begins with color consultant Yi Yi feeling tired and rejecting her husband He Dapeng. Because she was "hidden" by the current head of the song and dance troupe in order to help the former leader when she was working in the song and dance troupe, Yi Yi suffered from frigidity out of disgust. However, the husband is rigid and does not understand the style, and the couple gradually drifts apart. The appearance of work partner Che Yanqing allows Yiyi to regain the feeling of love, but wandering on the edge of lust and morality makes Yiyi exhausted, just like the red crane-top flowers blooming in front of the grave, dazzling but yet... Extremely poisonous. As far as the shell of the story is concerned, the novel is not very new, and even the symbolic meaning of the red crane crown seems too obvious. However, the beauty of this novel is that it contains huge emotional tension outside of the story. Yiyi’s unspoken feeling of confusion and uncertainty in the face of the unknown is the “seven-eighths” hidden under the surface of the “one-eighths” of extramarital affairs. Because Chang Fang's focus is not on the substantive emotional progress of the extramarital affair, but on the hidden pain hidden in material life, those that are ambiguous, hidden, incomprehensible to outsiders but tangible. Tiny desires, reveries, and anxieties. At the end of the novel, Yiyi's mother suddenly fell ill, and she rushed home to take care of her mother with her husband. This long-lost scene of family harmony seemed to arouse Yiyi's unabated responsibility to watch over the family, but she and He Dapeng's withered lives could not help her. Will it bloom again like a flower?
The ending of "Red Crane Head" is a typical Chang Fang ending. We can often see similar sudden changes and sudden turns of events at the endings of her other novels, such as "Blissful Beauty". At the end, Tang Sancai's ex-husband was killed abroad, and her friend Yuan Yuan failed in her beauty treatment but was disfigured; in "Paper Ring", Coco finally got a uterine tumor and had to have her uterus removed; in "Virus", she wanted to divorce her married wife Hua Xiangrong. Bian Xiangnan was suddenly killed in a car accident, and so on. However, for ordinary novelists, sudden changes and sudden turns may be necessary to construct the ups and downs of fate, and they are the prelude to the climax of the story, but in Chang Fang's case, sudden changes and sudden turns are the precursor to an abrupt end. Try to avoid stylized exaggeration, let alone promising prospects for whether things are good or bad. This kind of ending is different from the so-called blank space in traditional theory, nor is it something implicit, but an anti-climactic narrative aesthetic. In other words, in others, sudden changes and sudden changes are used to solve problems, but in Chang Fang's case, sudden changes and sudden changes are used to suspend problems - Yiyi will meet Che Yanqing again, she Will the throbbing of love continue or cease? After Yuan Yuan's disfigurement, did Tang Sancai's road to self-improvement become wider or narrower? Can Coco's accident really allow Zhu Jie to get rid of his own troubles? After her husband died, Hua Xiangrong seemed to be freed from the confusion of marriage, but she still had to face the child her husband had with another woman. In the long journey of life, the wounds in her heart may never heal. You see, all those "seven-eighths" hidden under the mutation event will not only not melt away, but will expand and become an insurmountable obstacle that must be faced in life.
Sometimes, Chang Fang will also use a virtual sharp turn, as if to make the "seven-eighths" out of sight suddenly surface, while the reader is still thinking about this sudden suddenness. When huge objects are startled and astonished, she will make them disappear again like magic, but the reader's aroused surprise and amazement will not disappear with it, but will inevitably cast deep doubts where the huge objects stay, and then gain insight into This thing hidden out of sight may be controlling people's lives and the flow of their lives.
Let’s look at her "Shanghai, Shanghai". This short story also has an old story shell. Pomegranate, a country girl who grows vegetables, is full of curious and mysterious yearning for Shanghai, especially the famous Nanjing Road. When the people around her After girls of the same age were attracted to that magical city, her desire became even more urgent. Shiliu's brother Shi Kang is a long-distance truck driver transporting vegetables to Shanghai. Shiliu especially hopes that his brother can take her to Nanjing Road. However, on the other hand, Shiliu found that the young people in the village who had been to Shanghai became a bit unfamiliar, which made her resist Shanghai. The novel obviously wants to use Pomegranate's psychology of longing for and rejecting Shanghai to project the fate of pure and simple rural ethics that will inevitably dissipate and collapse in the historical process of urbanization and modernization. This is also a theme that has been written repeatedly in Chinese literature in the 20th century. What makes this novel harmonious but different from similar works and can turn the cliché into freshness is the wonderful ending given by Chang Fang. Zhang Xiaomei, the girl who Shiliu's brother Shi Kang likes, was the first in the village to make a living in Shanghai. She opened a watch shop and her attitude towards Shi Kang gradually became cold. One day, Shi Kang was delivering groceries to the city and went to visit Xiaomei in her shop. He happened to be robbed by gangsters. Shi Kang was shot and killed while protecting Xiaomei, but Xiaomei actually clapped his hands and sneered. When readers read this, they will be horrified and stunned. At the same time, they will also feel that this sudden turn is too sudden and too dramatic. The tragic death of a rural youth in the city certainly best exposes the coldness of the city and its alienation from the warm nostalgia, but the problem is this Conception is actually a kind of trick, a kind of avoidance, a kind of cutting out the complex aspects of life and simplifying it. Chang Fang then wrote that under Xiaomei's sneer, Pomegranate woke up in tears, and it turned out that everything was just a dream. The cause of the dream was that in reality, my brother’s cell phone was unanswered and he had not returned for a long time. The novel actually ends with Shiliu anxiously waiting for her brother to come back while longing for Shanghai. The previous dramatic death in a foreign land is just a virtual sudden turn. However, this ending is obviously much more powerful than the tragic plot in the dream, because Chang Fang replaced the horror that only had an emotional effect with Pomegranate's confusion about Shanghai, because Pomegranate's last wait was facing the huge devouring power of time and the unknown. The waiting, the "seven-eighths" of uneasiness under the pomegranate Shanghai complex is a monster more formidable than death. This may be the gist of Chang Fang's anti-climax aesthetics. Her treatment of the apparent and potential aspects of the novel involves her unique way of perceiving similar situations and circumstances in life, which makes her narratives full of tension. , and will definitely mobilize readers' hearts to explore the difficulties that creep inside life.
Hard and Soft
So far, Chang Fang’s novels have mainly focused on two types of themes: one is about the humble fate of migrant farmers and urban poor; It is about the material life and emotional life of the urban middle class, and what unites these two very different themes is her rather hard-faced attitude towards life. The so-called hardness refers to the fact that Chang Fang never avoids the reality of sluggishness and even overcomes difficulties, reflecting a clear sense of urgency. Her novels may be called "issue novels" of the new century, such as the huge gap between urban and rural areas, the alienation of rural ethics, serious pollution problems, low treatment of migrant workers, common marital itch and extramarital affairs among the urban middle class. Chang Fang is involved in the proliferation of education, the rigidity of education systems and concepts, etc. She has always maintained a high sensitivity to the chaos of the times, and is good at turning events that people have ignored or forgotten about into material, and weaving them into novels, trying to once again arouse readers' attention to the chronic diseases or hidden dangers that pervade life. For example, in articles such as "Dead and Alive", "Flying Butterflies" and "Awesome", it is not difficult to find the shadow of real news in them. It can be said that Chang Fang is one of the female writers who has emerged since the new century with the strongest sense of social responsibility and the strongest awareness of issues.
However, an excessive awareness of problems also means a problem for novels. In fact, works named "problem novels" usually lack meaningful aesthetic quality and often degrade literature. In order to express social indignation, for example, the "problem novels" that were once popular in the initial stage of new literature, including the works of famous writers such as Bing Xin, Wang Tongzhao, and Ye Shaojun, read today, mostly have only literary historical and sociological significance. Writers pay attention to so many difficult social issues. How to touch and reveal the crux of the problem without speaking outright about the problem is obviously not an easy task. Chang Fang's answer to this is to use poetic depth to match the hardness of the problem, to use softness to "transform" hardness, and always spread gentle lyricism into the hard narrative. Specifically, it can be divided into two points.
First, the creation of lyrical imagery. Some people comment that Chang Fang's novels have a classical charm because she is very fond of writing about scenery. She always likes to write about the surrounding scenery at the key points of the event. In my opinion, this writing method is not so much rhetorical. , it is better to say that it is of strategic significance.
There is a core image that can be found in almost every novel by Chang Fang, and this image is usually beautiful and ethereal. Because of the existence of this image, the pain in reality can diffuse a layer of poetic brilliance, revealing the difficult situation. People's persistence in a beautiful and tranquil state.
Take her "Flying Butterflies" and "A Crow Is Thirsty" as examples. "Butterflies Flying" focuses on the families of autistic children. Gu Xin suffered from uterine tumors when she was pregnant. She wanted to have an abortion, but because of her mother-in-law's opposition, she had to wait until after giving birth to her son Xia Mang. However, due to her condition, In severe cases, hysterectomy is the only option. Xia Mang was diagnosed with autism, and Gu Xin faced her mother-in-law coldly all day long in despair and pain, with dogs as companions. Husband Xia Heping was torn between his mother and his wife, and he had to take care of his son who was always immersed in his own world. He was exhausted both mentally and physically. Although the novel uses an omniscient perspective to promote the flow of the story, the focus of the narrative is on Xia Mang. Chang Fang uses delicate and quiet language to present the gifted and sensitive heart of this autistic child. The core intention of the novel is "butterflies flying". On the narrative level, Xia Mang has an extraordinary perception of the colorful outside world with butterflies. He chases the butterfly all the way, getting farther and farther away from home, and finally jumps into the world for the butterfly. The river. In a deeper sense, Xia Mang's pursuit of butterflies is actually a pursuit of warmth and dependence. The novel constantly superimposes his impression of butterflies with his impressions of his father, mother and grandmother, using his ignorant and soft heart to Exploring various conflicts and entanglements in the family, readers can see that behind the increasingly cold and hard relationship between the three adults is grievance, sorrow and reluctance. The theme of "A Crow Is Thirsty" is similar, focusing on the problem of children's nature being harmed under the rigid education system. The novel also shows the difference between the clear spiritual world of children and the spiritual world of adults that is tainted by various unspoken social rules. The contrast between children uses the innocence of children to reflect the burden of adults' lives. The novel begins with Lin Lin's wonderful imagination of snowflakes, and ends with his father Lin Mu looking out the window at the falling snow. The image of snow runs throughout the novel, and has become a token of Lin Lin and his son's resistance to the filthy loneliness of the world.
Second, the use of symbols. Chang Fang loves to use symbols, which is easy to see from the titles of her novels. Noun-named chapters such as "Red Crane Crown", "Virus", "Argentinian Steak" and "Paper Ring" obviously have different meanings. The latter two are particularly noteworthy, because they are the most "vague" novels written by Chang Fang, but also because of their "vagueness", compared to works such as "Red on the Crane's Crown" and "Virus", where the symbolic meaning is clear at a glance. Provides a richer interpretable space. "Paper Ring" describes the true and false love entanglement between two couples, Zhu Jie, Zhang Hui and Ke Ke, Song Dazhi. The mysterious life is just like the Mobius paper ring that Zhu Jie likes to cut. Every day A person trapped in a life trap who tries to escape from the paper ring can only end up entering a bigger trap. And just like the Mobius strip cannot distinguish between the positive and the negative, Zhu Jie's pursuit of the truth about her husband's cheating means a lot. A meaningless endeavor. The paper ring is used as a metaphor for the difficulties in life, which can be said to be vigilant and accurate. Equally exciting is "Argentinian Steak". The intrigues and intrigues in the academy surrounding Bian Minggu's personnel struggles in the novel are actually just a shell. The core that Chang Fang wants to explore is the meaning of life between soul and body, origin and end, finiteness and The multiple dialectics of infinity, Dasein and transcendence. Bian Minggu, who had been torn between his wife's worldly utilitarianism and his lover's romantic poetry, finally had the opportunity to calmly examine his life because of his terminal illness. Only then did he realize that his exhilarating feeling of "living elsewhere" from his lover Xia Yang was no longer the same. Unable to truly save himself from the predicament of life, "Argentinian steak" became Bian Minggu's life self-explanation: a cow can produce six steaks, and "six steaks, compared to one cow, it However, these essences, no matter how essential they are, can never be compared with a complete cow." He puts the essence of life in his lover, but that doesn't mean that all of life can be kept safe.
Essentially speaking, whether it is lyrical imagery or symbolism, their significance to Chang Fang’s novels can be understood through the “halo” described by Benjamin. "Halo is a unique mist originating from time and space: it can be very close, but it is an unparalleled artistic conception at a certain distance" (see Benjamin: "Artworks in the Age of Technical Reproduction", "Experience" and Poverty", Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006 edition, page 265). These "halos" cast a soft halo on those hard, rough and even vicious realities, exuding a poetic luster. They do not exist to beautify or eliminate hardship and suffering, but to express the author and the characters of the work. It exists to reflect the feelings of solidarity and passion in life, and it exists to demonstrate the life experience with more texture. We may see sharper and sharper discoveries, questions and criticisms of various life issues in other writers with a sense of mission than Chang Fang, but we cannot see this kind of "halo".
Pain and Joy
As discussed before, many of Chang Fang’s writings about farmers and urban poor can be summarized into the sequence of writings from the lower classes that have become a phenomenon since the new century.
The huge narrative inertia of subaltern writing, which is formed out of anxiety about suffering and sympathy for the victims, puts every writer who touches on this subject at risk of being swept away. This is usually reflected in the neglect of doing detailed work on the complex subaltern. Chang Fang is no exception, and we can see similar anxiety in some of her novels, such as "A Man Standing on a Tall Tower". "Cloud", a poor couple who escaped from marriage. The husband worked hard at a construction site besides selling vegetables, and the wife worked in a cake shop, but was fired because of her pregnancy. Later, his wife had a difficult childbirth and both mother and son died because they had no money to pay for the surgery. This kind of novel is painful, but among the many works by peers with similar ideas, it is difficult to show its brilliance. Instead, it leaves readers with the feeling that it is difficult to write a novel. Equating suffering with the bottom class certainly has its positive social significance and does reflect strong humanistic care, but it is undeniable that this simplistic thinking also means a kind of obscuration. Mo Yan once expressed this view in an interview: Since Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" and "Blessing", the image of Chinese farmers has been solidified. Lu Xun's insight into the weaknesses of farmers is indeed extremely penetrating. However, does Ah Q have the joy of his own life apart from numbness and confusion, and do Mrs. Xianglin and Runtu have their own joy apart from the hardship and desolation? Mo Yan believes that there is, and his own novels often show the high-spirited, full, vivid and joyful life emotions unique to farmers. This is indeed the case. The companionship of suffering and the bottom class did not start in the new century, but has existed since ancient times. However, this does not prevent the bottom class from retaining the joy of their own class for thousands of years. Chang Fang's recent works seem to be aware of this. After "A Man Standing in the High Clouds", her works still have a lot of suffering, but they also contain more stubborn life beliefs and optimistic and healthy attitudes of the grassroots in the face of suffering. attitude towards life.
"Three Meals a Day" published in the 2009 issue 4 of "Shanghai Literature" and "Just Around the Corner" published in the 2010 issue 7 of "Times Literature" are companion novels with connected plots. . Both novels begin with animal imagery. The image of the former is "a goshawk with white eyebrows." This goshawk was adopted by the protagonist Tang Guangrong. It is said that when the eagle "lives to be forty years old, it will be unable to catch its prey and its flight will become very difficult." It's hard. At this time, it has only two choices: one is to wait for death, and the other is to be reborn. The eagle that chooses to be reborn has to go through a very painful process for more than one hundred and fifty days. The curved beak needs to be struck hard against the rock until it completely falls off and a new one will grow. Then, the new beak will be used to pluck out the talons one by one, and then the feathers will be removed. Pluck it off piece by piece. When new feathers grow back, the eagle can fly in the blue sky again." Tang Guangrong and his wife Liuxiang in the novel are clearly Goshawks who chose to be reborn. They were laid off from flour mills and spinning mills respectively. After a brief wandering, they quickly established the coordinates of their lives. Tang Guangrong drives a three-wheel motorcycle to pick up passengers at the train station in the morning, and works hard to run a small lottery station during the day. My wife Liuxiang goes to the square every morning to teach people how to dance for free, and then goes to the pet market to set up her own stall. Chang Fang deliberately writes about Liuxiang and the dance steps of the sisters in such a poetic style: "Everyone seems to have regained an extremely gorgeous bloom here, enjoying the glory of a flower in the sun. She also likes the canopy of the tree. Those vertical and horizontal branches and leaves on the tree, even the weakest leaves, can withstand the wind and rain. Many times, Liu Xiang saw the leaves still dancing happily in the sunshine after the storm, just like a tree. They are dancing under the clouds..." The novel no longer deliberately presents the misery like "A Man Standing in the High Clouds", but instead narrates the pain of life in detailed daily situations. Tang Guangrong, a security section chief The status gap of laid-off workers, the burden of supporting the family to support their younger brother's education and their children's education, etc., have not overwhelmed this poor couple, which shows the tenacity of their characters. The novel mentions several times that Tang Guangrong calls Liu Xiangri and leading the sisters to dance "poor and happy". Being poor but happy is the simple and simple life creed of this couple. They cannot be called strong men in life, but they must be "dancers" in life. The novel makes it clear through the words of the characters: "In this world, the beauties have all the worries of the beauties, and the oil sellers also have the oil sellers." "Peony is a flower, and foxtail grass is also a flower." Isn't it a kind of underlying joy?
In "Just Around the Corner", Tang Guangrong goes a step further. In addition to working hard to run his own small family, he uses enthusiasm and charisma to gather the strength of laid-off colleagues from the original unit, and together they become a man who has suffered many accidents. The battered workers were running around. At the beginning of the novel, it is written that Tang Guangrong vaguely heard the neighing of a horse sculpture on the Hero Mountain Square. In fact, the neighing was coming from his chest. This open-minded man interpreted his name "Glorious" with his hard work and responsibility. The meaning also explains that the beauty of life may be "just around the corner".
Chang Fang once said in a creative talk: "Perhaps, with a ray of sunshine and a ray of warmth, life can continue." Perhaps in the eyes of some critics, her love for the kindness of human nature is Watching is a bit cheap, and betting on a better future seems superficial, because Tang Guangrong and Liuxiang are not trying to defeat suffering, but just enjoying themselves in suffering, and even have a hint of self-deception. But I think it is here that Chang Fang truly fits the hearts of those people and shows her abundant compassion.
It is said that there is nothing new under the sun, and toiling and running around is an inevitable part of life, so why not smile every day? This is the optimism of the untouchables and the resilience cultivated by life. It is the projection of the traditional "musical culture" among the people, but it is rooted in the underlying soil. It is not like the "musical culture" of the scholars, which has a detached and carefree state. It is not as decisive and broad-minded as those resolute and noble struggles, but it is real and long-term. This reminds one of a scholar who saw the difference between Lu Xun and Shen Congwen through beheading. In Lu Xun's view, the beheading incident in the slideshow reflected the numbness and decadence of the people's spirit. When Shen Congwen was a boy, he followed the warlords in western Hunan and saw too many beheadings, but he had a different understanding of life. In "My Education", he recalled that he once "had an inexplicable mood" when he was a boy. One day, I went to visit the place where the warlord was beheaded. "What I saw were still four dead bodies. The heads had been thrown into the soil in the fields by the soldiers. Near one of the corpses, someone quietly burned some paper money early in the morning." , the remaining paper dust seems to be the blue wildflowers usually seen on the roadside, the gray-blue color is very desolate, contrasting with the blood stains that have condensed into black pulp." Everything was quiet as usual, and he retreated without saying a word. In the brutal killings, what Shen Congwen saw was the stubborn survivalism of the Xiangxi people. Those who were spared the massacre "survive like this."
Chang Fang’s outlook on life is obviously Shen Congwen’s, and in “Waste Postal Deposit: For a Poetry Writer”, Shen Congwen also said: “Sacred and great sorrow does not necessarily involve a pool of blood. Tears, a smart writer expresses human suffering with smiles." This reminds us that we should not easily judge the joy and laughter in our works, dismissing them as escapist or relaxed, but look at the joy and laughter behind them. Does it involve the "holy and great sorrow"? Pain and joy are like the two sides of the palm and the back of the hand. Neither side alone can constitute a flesh-and-blood life. The advantage of novels such as "Three Meals a Day" and "Just Around the Corner" is also the compassionate beauty of sadness and joy, and the use of laughter to deal with pain.
Things and Words
"Tell Me Where North" is of special significance among Chang Fang's published works, not only because it has been widely reprinted and read, and has been adapted into a movie, What's more, it established a paradigm for Chang Fang's storytelling. The novel tells the story of a newlywed couple from a rural area who traveled to Beijing and got separated at the station. The husband spent six years looking for his wife. The novel begins when the male protagonist Wen Chengzhuo misunderstands Hu Fengxia, a waiter at a bun shop who looks exactly like his wife, and ends when he is stabbed to death while trying to protect Hu Fengxia. The middle part is used to supplement the life experiences of Wen Chengzhuo and Hu Fengxia. Six years of searching for a wife is unusual. This is the core of the story and what attracts readers the most. The narrative sequence of flashbacks and supplementary narrations is not due to enthusiasm for rhetorical experiments in the sense of narrative discourse, but out of a simple desire to tell the story in a wonderful way, to highlight the exciting points first, and to fully express the story. Whet the reader's appetite, and then calmly unfold the multiple clues of the story one by one. As mentioned earlier, as a writer with a sense of mission, she always pays attention to the extraction and reshaping of typical details in real life, and can dig out the unique and moving features from the inconspicuous little details, embodying Shows special sensitivity to storytelling. This is the purpose of putting Wen Chengzhuo's misidentification of Hu Fengxia at the beginning. It is also the same in her other novels, such as the first sentence of the opening chapter of "Death and Life": "Bai Xiaohua lives a busy life every day and does not know that he Has been dead for many years. "This is undoubtedly a huge suspense. Another example is that "The Majestic" opens with Niu Hanjin being arrested, and "The Third Street" opens with Xiang Qing arriving at Sun City inexplicably, etc. They are all exactly the same.
But Chang Fang is more interested in exploring the spiritual power hidden in the story. Still taking "Tell Me Where North" as an example, he sets up the exciting story of "searching--misrecognition". After the amazing story skeleton, the "strange" dimension of the story is replaced by the protagonist Wen Chengzhuo's simplicity and perseverance in adhering to love. The author uses poetic language to present a rural youth's loyalty to his lover. When it comes to character creation, Chang Fang relies most on dialogue and monologue, both of which occupy extremely important positions in her novels. For example, there is a scene in the novel where Wen Chengzhuo talks to a street lamp: "Street lamp, I have found plums. I have found plums. Do you know? This year, I can take plums home for the New Year. We have been separated for six years. We haven’t been home for six years. Street lamp, I’ll bring you plums here someday, okay? You’ve been watching me for six years, but you haven’t seen plums yet, have you? This passage deeply reveals the loneliness and watchfulness of a rural youth. In fact, all readers who have read Chang Fang's works will be deeply impressed by her thoughtful and warm language, which is probably related to her long-term training in poetry writing. Language gives her stories—even cruel ones—a kind of gentle and warm beauty. So basically speaking, Chang Fang is a novelist who pays attention to the refinement of language, and to using words to tell things and to use words to consulate.
However, in order to pursue the quality of life with rich dialogues, Chang Fang sometimes Using too much force will inevitably reveal her excessive control over the characters' language. Of course, this may also be related to her passionate and introverted writing attitude. A writer's excessive language control can easily lead to two problems: First, the characters' dialogues are too trivial and concise due to a lack of restraint.
For example, in "Red Crane", Yiyi and Che Yanqing were on their way to see the peach blossoms. When Yanqing saw Yiyi's silence, he made her happy. The novel uses several paragraphs to describe the dialogue between the two people, such as: "It's strange, we are not going to a campus in the United States, a mosque in Iraq, or withdrawing money from a bank. Why are you so nervous that all the muscles in your face are... "Are you stiff?" "These are the three most dangerous places in the world right now. Shootings are happening on campuses in the United States at any time, and bombings are happening on mosques in Iraq at any time. In our newspapers, they are in banks every day. The case of being robbed while withdrawing money. In this way, do you think that going to a bank is as dangerous as going to a campus in the United States or a mosque in Iraq? "Wait, this kind of dialogue is full of life, but it is more suitable. As for the presentation of images, it seems cumbersome in the novel because this dialogue only takes place in a transitional scene and has no great significance in shaping the characters and advancing the plot. In fact, removing them will have no effect on the novel as a whole. damage. Secondly, there are obvious traces of the author speaking on behalf of the characters, as Natalie Sarraute criticized: “These ‘sayings, sayings’ are either cleverly inserted into the middle of the dialogue, or extend the dialogue harmoniously. They all secretly tell people that the author is always there. Although the dialogue of this novel appears to be independent, it cannot break away from the author like the dialogue of a drama, and cannot hang in the air by itself; these things are a kind of light and strong connecting lines. Connect the character's style and tone to the author's style and tone, and make the former subordinate to the latter." ((Cui Daoyi et al., "Iceberg Theory": Dialogue and Unspoken Dialogue, Volume 2, pp. 578-579, Workers' Publishing House.) Press (1987 edition)) Take "Crane Red" as an example. There is a description in the novel: "Yiyi suddenly felt that life is a bit like Crane Red. Its attractive, seemingly bright and warm color is behind the interpretation of , it is precisely the poisonous mixture of absurdity, shamelessness and chaos. In this era of materialistic desires, everyone is busy opening companies and doing business. You speculate in stocks, others illegally buy and sell land, you engage in real estate, and others sell their jobs. It seems that everyone has unlimited glory, but what about the suffering of the soul? Maybe the punishment of the soul that is hidden deep in the sleeves has gone far beyond the punishment of the system in the formal sense. "Yi Yi's words here. The sentiment clearly vents the author's anger, and the moral expressed is too explicit and lacks charm.
Similar situations exist more or less in Chang Fang's other novels. In fact, the writer should give the characters the right to dialogue and let the characters speak for themselves instead of continuing to act as the writer's speech. people. Wayne Booth has a piece of advice on this: "We should object to any reliable statement by a dramatized character, not just the author speaking in his own voice, because even the most highly dramatic narrator's narrative actions , itself is the author's presentation in a character's extended 'inner observation'." (Booth: "Rhetoric of Fiction" p. 20, Peking University Press) We believe that when Chang Fang solves this problem, she The novel will definitely be more refined and bring more surprises and touches to readers.
Ma Bing, Ph.D. in Literature, is an associate professor at the School of Literature and Journalism of Shandong University and a special researcher in literary criticism of the Shandong Writers Association.