China News Service, Beijing, September 27 (Reporter Shangguan Yun) Not long ago, the 8th Lu Xun Literature Award was announced, and the famous writer Ai Wei's novel "The Past" was on the list.
This is one of Ai Wei's important works in recent years.
It tells the story of an "alternative" mother.
Ai Wei said that the starting point of this novel is to shape this unique mother.
So far, Ai Wei has written many novels, including the novels "Wind and Sunshine", "Comrade Lover", "South", etc. The latest works are the novella "The Past" and the novel "In the Mirror".
His works have won the 5th Wang Zengqi Literature Award and many other awards.
Writer Ai Wei.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Ai Wei also has experience on how to taste a novel: as a reader, the best way is to let go of all notions, treat the characters in the novel as your own relatives and friends, and don’t judge it from the only dimension, “Literature is a three-dimensional and multi-faceted life. . . . Fiction can return infinite vitality and possibility to life when words somehow pierce through the vast and solid fortress of ideas.”
In the Internet age, how can pure literature use the power of the Internet to enjoy both refined and popular?
Ai Wei thinks that this is a complicated issue. "Writers are different from writers, and the differences are huge. Some writers can be both elegant and popular, and some cannot."
He believes that novels such as Tolstoy and Stendhal should be regarded as both elegant and popular, but the works of Borges and Kafka may not be.
"As a literary world, every writer has a reason to exist. Having a broad audience is part of a writer's destiny."
China News Service: What kind of story does the novel "The Past" tell?
Ai Wei:
"The Past" tells the story of an "alternative" mother, one that is extremely rare in our existing literary descriptions.
The image of the mother is a deified presence in our cultural lineage.
The word mother has its own aura and represents virtues such as kindness, devotion, tolerance and love.
In fact, the mothers in our lives have different personalities and are not all perfect.
Fiction writing must return to each specific person, and the starting point of this novel is to shape this unique mother.
I think novelists still have to contribute characters. After many years, readers may forget about the story, but they will remember the characters in the novel.
Ai Wei's "The Past".
Photo courtesy of the publishing house
Chinanews.com: Where did the inspiration for the writing of "The Past" come from? How did you conceive this work?
Ai Wei:
The image of the mother in this novel comes from a story told by a friend of mine.
She's a talented comedian, and once she mentioned her mother as a joke.
But at the end, she cried a lot, and it was her cry that moved me.
I think our Chinese people's way of expressing the twists and turns of blood is very moving. There is love deep in the roughness, and it is especially tense.
Of course, the stories of novels are completely different from those of friends. The novel world carries the novelist's personal life perception and understanding of people.
There is a difference between fiction and real life, more depth and emotion and more drama than life.
Chinanews.com: Your new novel "In the Mirror" was published and published in the first half of this year. What is the biggest feeling of completing "In the Mirror"?
Ai Wei:
"In the Mirror" was really conceived in 2017. As I said in the postscript, "In the Mirror" was also inspired by the personal experience of a friend from abroad.
While feeling his grief, I felt deeply helpless, and at the same time, I thought about how people can settle our hearts and how to get along with the world and our hearts after facing the "impermanence" of life.
The real inspiration came in the second half of 2020. When I woke up in the morning and saw myself in the mirror, I suddenly thought of a structure with multiple mirror images hidden inside the text, a life labyrinth constructed by mirror images, and derived from it multiple interpretations. possibility.
Writer Ai Wei.
Photo courtesy of the interviewee
I explored the sense of "impermanence" that people often feel, while trying to find the inner language of us Chinese, that is, how Chinese people solve our own spiritual problems, we have our own cultural traditions, which is completely different from the approach given to us by the West .
Therefore, "In the Mirror" is, in a sense, a novel that pays tribute to our oriental culture.
Chinanews.com: You have written a lot and are regarded as one of the representative writers after the avant-garde literature. Regardless of genre, what elements should a literary work have in order to be recognized by readers?
Ai Wei:
The relationship between writers and readers is very complicated.
I think every writer wants to have a wide range of readers. A work being read by readers is actually giving the work a second life, because readers can read out the meaning that the writer never thought of based on their own life experience.
But when a writer writes, it must be because he wants to express, to express his discoveries and understandings to the world, to express his confusion and even ignorance. This is the starting point of writing.
Readers are smarter than writers think. They have all kinds of tastes. Writers should not be clever and make recipes for readers, thinking that these recipes can be recognized by readers.
But one thing I do believe is that readers like works with real feelings.
Chinanews.com: For a work, readers' evaluations are often different. How do you view readers' comments?
Ai Wei:
Readers are very smart, but the fashion of the times does shape the reader's taste.
From my personal experience, Chinese readers are relatively tolerant of foreign literature and past literature, and rarely judge stories and characters from a moral point of view.
For example, in works like "Madame Bovary" and "Red and Black", I rarely see readers raising the moral banner to criticize them, but for the works written by contemporary Chinese writers, they often use moral methods for stories and characters. be judged.
All in all, I think it's a bit of a double standard.
Milan Kundera said that the novel is the place of moral suspension.
This sentence also applies to works like "A Dream of Red Mansions". A character like Wang Xifeng actually has a murder case on his body, but we all accept the image of Wang Xifeng, and even sympathize with her tragedy, and have a sense of pity for her.
If this character appeared in the pen of today's writers, I don't know whether readers would accept her so leniently.
Ai Wei's novel "In the Mirror".
Photo courtesy of the publishing house
So, time is very important.
Human beings are conceptual animals to a certain extent. I think reading with too strong ideas is not a good thing, and writing with too strong ideas is also the enemy of writing.
Chinanews.com: For some literary works, readers may feel that they "can't understand" when they first read them, but they are highly rated in the industry. So as a writer, is there any way to bridge this seemingly disconnected phenomenon when creating?
Ai Wei:
Since modernist literature, literature has begun to dig into the spiritual world of people. The latest concepts, ideas and methods since the 20th century have made the novel's perspective no longer only focus on the surface life on earth, but also on the inner universe of people.
Compared with the period of classical novels, the novel seems to have become more professional.
This kind of "professionalism" will indeed reject a group of readers from entering the novel, and there will be a feeling of "unreadability".
Someone like Kafka is called a "writer's writer", and many writers after that have been inspired by his writing, but I don't think he will be a writer that will be widely welcomed by readers.
Worldly love novels are a long-standing tradition in Chinese literature. Chinese writers are particularly good at describing the life of the world, and Chinese readers also like novels that are full of the flames of the world.
But I personally feel that the experience in the novel needs to be analyzed and discovered, and the novel needs to write an unnamed experience, which of course needs to resonate with the readers.
But this resonance has a public sense, and there is another situation, that is, some readers feel the author's writing experience, and some readers do not.
It all depends on the reader's own life experience.
That's why I say that readers give novels a second life.
Even for the same reader, with the increase of experience, the feeling of reading the same work will be completely different.
The best way for the author is to give everything to time.
Time is the greatest connoisseur.
(Finish)