A few days ago, the famous writer Liu Zhenyun walked into Peking University, came to the class of the "Novelists' Lecture Hall", and delivered a speech on the theme of "Quantum Entanglement of Literature and Philosophy". This lecture is also the first lecture in the series of lectures of the "3rd Wang Moren-Zhou Anyi World Chinese Literature Award".
The title of my talk today is "The Quantum Entanglement of Literature and Philosophy."
The so-called "quantum entanglement" refers to the crossing, crossing, and mixing between the two. What is literature? In layman's terms, literature is a reflection of life. It is true that some literary works are reflections of life, but if literature is only a reflection of life, such works must be third-rate works. So, I often make the point that good literature appears where life stops. Where does life stop? The same thing, the same person, the same emotion, the same thought in life, we don't have so much time to ponder and think about it repeatedly, the past is gone. But literature, it has time to analyze and stack the same thing, the same person, the same emotion, the same thought.
◤ I never admit that there is anyone in this world who is smart
I also have the idea that a good writer must be a scholar. He must have enough knowledge and insight to know the philosophers of Confucius, Plato, Hume, Kant, Sartre (these people are of similar level). It is very important to know them in order to know who in the world thinks differently about the world. I often read some works, the beginning is well written, the middle does not work, and the back collapses. What is the reason for this? There are also some writers, the first work is well written, the second and third are not, why?
Of course, there are many reasons involved, some people say that there is a lack of life, to experience life. I feel that life does not have to be experienced, life is always coming, and no one lives on another planet. Didn't I come to Peking University today to live? Some people say I participate in variety shows. In fact, isn't this also experiencing life? A new form of life.
I have a deep experience when I participate in stand-up comedy: it is really not easy for stand-up comedians. Hulan, a graduate of Columbia University, speaks English better than Chinese, and returned to China to use Chinese talk shows. I find the structure of this relationship interesting. There is also Xu Zhisheng, who looks like Pan An. Crosstalk generally ridicules each other and ridicules, but stand-up comedians are self-deprecating, saying that they have encountered embarrassments, and brushing up the unreliable things done by the eight generations of ancestors from beginning to end, and finding a laugh from the inside to make others laugh. I watched stand-up comedians seem to see Lu Xun. Mr. Lu Xun said that it is better to dissect yourself than to dissect others. Stand-up comedians dissect themselves like frogs, and it's not easy. I went to a talk show and was full of sympathy and respect for them.
So, why, exactly? Many writers will always present themselves as a storyteller. That's right, but everyone's starting point for writing is very different. The person who writes the story, he meets an interesting person, meets an interesting story, including a cloud floating in the sky, an emotion, a selfishness, a wisp of cooking smoke may allow him to write. But I'm not like that, I have to find a fulcrum, and this fulcrum is like Archimedes said, you have a fulcrum to be able to pry up the earth, whether you can pry the earth up, is another matter, but at least you can pry up a novel. This is very important.
When the writer writes to a certain stage, you will find that the language is not important to the meaning of the novel, and there is no problem in forming a language style through professional training; The story is touching and easy to reach; The most difficult thing is the structure of the story and the structure of the characters—this takes into account a writer's ability to speculate (embodied in the quantum entanglement of literature and philosophy), and of course the breadth and pattern of his knowledge.
Thoughts and cognition underpin writing. How much insight, how pattern, and how much knowledge you have determines your output. This output may even only take up one percent of your storage. If you don't even know so many smart people in ancient and modern China and abroad, the angle and depth of their understanding, breadth, and their vision, it is impossible to write good works with your own cleverness alone. I never admit that there is anyone in this world who is smart.
◤The background of literature must be philosophy◢
The undertone of literature must be philosophy. The two poems in Bai Juyi's "Selling Charcoal", "Poor clothes are single, and the heart is worried about charcoal and wishes for the cold". These two poems are good enough to be full of philosophical speculation, a charcoal seller, hawking on the street on a snowy day, clothes are very thin, but hoping that the weather will be colder, why? Because charcoal sells better.
"Pipa Xing" wrote "the same world has fallen people, why should they have known each other", reflecting a philosophical speculation, the relationship between people and time, people who have worked together for decades every day, may not know each other, but the first time they meet but become such a close friend. He and she didn't speak at all, how did they know each other? Through the "big beads and small beads fall on the jade plate". "Who is crying the most in the seat? Jiangzhou Sima Qingshirt is wet", I heard the crying, and it was the green shirt that was wet, not the sleeves wet.
Li Shangyin has a poem, "Junwen has not yet returned to the period, and the night rain in Bashan rises in the autumn pool." How to cut the candles in the western window, but when it rains at night in Bashan Mountain. "Junwen's return date is not due" is the past and present tense, there was no WeChat in the past, there was no mobile phone, and a letter from his wife sent here;" "Bashan night rain rising autumn pool" is the present tense, "How to cut the western window candle" is the present and future tense, and "but say that Bashan night rain" is the past tense in the future. For the feeling of time and space, for destiny, I think it is quite remarkable. There is also a theory that when he received the letter from his wife, her wife had already died, and what was written in the poem was an imagination. If it is an imagination, the value of the poem doubles.
All good poetry must not only be an expression of emotions and feelings, but also philosophical speculation. Li Bai wrote the two best poems, "Today's people do not see the ancient moon, but this month once looked like the ancients." These two sentences are ancient sayings, that is, we can't see the moon of the Tang Dynasty, but this moon once shone on the people of the Tang Dynasty. There was a poet Chen Tao in the Tang Dynasty who was not particularly famous, who wrote "Poor Wuding Riverside Bones, still a person in a spring dream". The Wuding River was in northern Shaanxi, and at that time, people had turned into white bones, while in Luoyang or Chang'an, a person returned to his dreams in spring, thinking that he was still alive and would return. The real pity is this "lady in the middle".
In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and many people thought the judges were crazy. Don't be angry, think about it, read Bob Dylan, listen to Bob Dylan. He published a book last year, "The Philosophy of Modern Songs." He is not your average pop singer, and his lyrics are very well written, including "Blowing in the wind":
How many years does it take for a mountain to stand before it can be washed into the sea; (Soon to catch up with Li Bai)
How many years some people have to exist before they are free; (Catching up with Mandela)
How many times does a person have to turn his head to pretend he has not seen anything; (Never wake up a person who pretends to be asleep)
The answer, my friend, blows in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind.
In addition, the good writers in this world not only write their works well, but also have extraordinary names. Turkish writer Pamuk's "My Name is Red", when I didn't read it, I thought it was writing a poignant love story, like Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu, but it wasn't. This "red" he wrote is blood (blood), and it is thrillingly written. There is also a Chinese writer Li Er, his novel "Cherries on the Pomegranate Tree", the title of this work also shocked me very much, why can a pomegranate tree bear cherries?
However, when I say that the background of literature is philosophy, I do not mean that literature should be written as philosophy. My other quote is: where philosophy stops, literature appears. The background of literature is philosophy, but where philosophy stops, literature appears, which is also a quantum entanglement.
Where does philosophy stop? Philosophy tries to explain the world, whether it is the Analects or the Tao Te Ching, trying to explain the truth in the depths of the world. What is the thing that philosophy can't tell? For example, people's hearts, people's emotions, people's emotions, people's selfishness, people's thinking and people's souls are all things that philosophy can never tell. Philosophy can't tell who says these things? Literature. Heraclitus said it particularly well, you can never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you search all the ways. Because its reasons are very deeply hidden.
◤The "gaze" in literature: the intervener and the runaway◢
In addition, there is a "gaze" in literature. For example, Mr. Lu Xun, he has many differences from his contemporaries of writers, especially his contemporaries in local literature - of course, they also write very well, but they write local literature, and Mr. Lu Xun writes about local literature. What's the difference? The difference is not that Mr. Lu Xun is more familiar with rural life than those writers, but that the gaze in Mr. Lu Xun's works is different from that of other rural writers. Other local writers see the world from a village, and Mr. Lu Xun sees a village from the world, so he writes characters like A Q, Xianglin Concubine, Kong Yiji.
For myself, when I wrote "One Sentence Top 10,000", I felt a little more enlightened. "One Sentence Top 10,000" is about people who don't like to talk, such as those who sell tofu, kill pigs, shave their heads, dye cloth, break bamboo, and preach. People in our village don't talk much, including me, because he doesn't take up space, he doesn't listen, he turns the conversation into self-talk, and over time in embarrassment and self-deprecation, he doesn't speak.
But not talking doesn't mean he doesn't have words. So where did his words go? His words were swallowed. In the past, there was a saying that "if you break your teeth, you swallow into your stomach", and "if you break it, you will swallow it in your stomach". So many people who don't like to talk walk on the street, thousands of hearts converge into thousands of torrents, changing life and determining the direction of human social development. This is a philosophical dialectical reflection.
In "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences", I wrote the story of the missionary Lao Zhan. In the twenties and thirties of the last century, many missionaries did come to China. One of the missionaries came to Yanjin, Henan, and he was a native of Milan, Italy. The names of Italians are particularly long, and the Yanjin people are troublesome and call him Lao Zhan. Old Zhan's eyes were blue when he came, and when he drank too much water from the Yellow River, he turned yellow; When I came, my nose was high, but I used to eat mutton stewed noodles in Henan, and it turned into a dough. Forty years have passed, and Old Jen walks on the street, with his hands on his back, no different from an old man who sells green onions. He came to Yanjin forty years and developed eight believers.
He met Lao Zeng, a pig slayer, by the Yellow River, and said, Lao Zeng, you believe in the Lord.
The old once said, what are the benefits of believing in Christ? (This is Chinese's habit of thinking)
Old Zhan said, when you believe in the Lord, you will know who you are, where you came from, and where you are going.
Lao Zeng said, if I don't believe me, I know that I am Lao Zeng, who came from Zengjiazhuang and went to various villages to kill pigs.
Lao Zhan said, you are right, then you can't say, you are not worried in your heart. If you are worried, who do you not turn to the Lord? The Lord immediately tells you that you are a sinner.
Lao Zeng is anxious again, I don't have a friendship with him with a bag of cigarettes, how do I know that the fault lies with me?
Lao Zhan's church was later taken away by the county magistrate, and he lived in a broken temple and gave incense to the bodhisattva every day: Bodhisattva, bless me to develop another believer. The teachings in his heart had nowhere to be told, and every night he wrote in Italian to his sister's grandson, who was far away in Milan. Because he spoke the gospel of the Lord in Yanjin, his understanding of the doctrine was very profound. These profound and unique understandings led to the return of the sea to Milan and into the world of an eight-year-old. The eight-year-old thinks that Old Jen is the greatest missionary in the world, his adherents have tens of millions, and his church must be as majestic as Milan Cathedral. Old Zhan died, and those who killed pigs, grinded tofu, and shaved their heads went to give him a funeral and found a drawing, like the drawing of the second church of Yanjin, which is as magnificent as the Duomo of Milan. At this time, the drawings came to life, and the large bell on the top of the tower made a deafening roar ...
Old Jen was indeed the greatest missionary in the world, and his mission was not passed on to others, but to himself. What is the best place to preach, where you are not religious. This place, with the intervention of Lao Zhan and without the intervention of Lao Zhan, is very different.
When the French version of "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences" came out, I went to a bookstore in France to communicate. A French lady stood up and said, do you know what our grandson of Old Jen and his sister are doing now? I said I didn't know, because he was a kid in the book. The woman said he was now the archbishop of the Duomo of Milan. After listening to it, I was particularly shocked and blamed myself, feeling that "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences" was not written well - the quantum entanglement of philosophy and literature appeared in me. If I had known that there was such a character structure, that the eight-year-old child would become the archbishop of Milan Cathedral in the future, if I had such a vision and pattern at that time, "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences" would be different.
So Confucius has a saying that is very correct, "My body in the three provinces of Japan and Japan." "Three people must have my master" is right, and "Dying at the end of the day" is right - but there are indeed different "ways". When you write this work, you definitely want to write it well, but you will have a lot of regrets when you look back. Of course, shortcomings are not a bad thing, failure is not a bad thing, it is the biggest motivation to write the next one.
◤ Not three million deaths, but one person died three million times ◢
Finally, I would like to talk about humor. The whole world knows I'm humorous, but they didn't come to our village – I'm the least humorous person in our village. Humor has many levels: first, it is the humor of language, but there is not a single sentence in my work that is humorous, but the humor of the story structure and character structure behind. Of course, the best humor is the one behind the structure.
The novel "Wen Fu 1942" writes about the disaster of the Henan famine, but you can see the humor in this novel. Why? That's because the truth behind life is humorous. In <>, three million people died in Henan due to drought and the lack of relief by the Nationalist government. I think, to explain it philosophically, it's not three million deaths, but three million repeated deaths. Three million deaths is a fact, and three million deaths for a person is a reflection. Because the three million people died in exactly the same way, the causes, the motives, including the final result. Why can an event be repeated three million times on the same land, and it is death? Why would they treat three million repeat deaths with such humor?
Before writing the novel, I went back home and wanted to ask the survivors of 1942, like my grandmother. I said, Grandma, let's talk about 1942. What year was 1942? The year that starved to death. There are too many years of starvation, what year are you talking about? Oblivion touches me more than cruelty. Man's fear of fear is one fear, and the forgetting of fear is another fear.
Okay, I said I'll try it in order to forget. Then I read all the documents from 1940 to 1945, including the Times, the Republic of China Daily, and the documents of the Kuomintang government. After reading it, I suddenly discovered a philosophical problem between "big and small": three million people are important for a region, especially for us Henan people; But a lot happened in 1942: the Battle of Stalingrad, Soong Meiling's visit to the United States, Gandhi's hunger strike, etc., from the New York Times to The Times, all the world's news focused on Stalingrad, on Soong Ching-ling's visit to the United States, on Gandhi's hunger strike. There are reports that Churchill caught a cold, but there is no small tofu block talking about Henan, which proves that Henan has died three million people, which is not important in the world pattern, and it is not important to Chairman Chiang, who needs to deal with relations with the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, including the Sino-Japanese war that entered a state of stalemate—those things are not handled well, and China will deviate in other directions. But the death of three million people in the interior will not affect the pattern of the world. It dawned on me that they weren't starving to death from drought.
These are the attitudes of others towards us, and what kind of attitudes do we have towards ourselves? I found that when they were dying, they did not blame anyone, did not get angry, but remembered their fellow countrymen - he starved to death three days ago, I lived three days longer than him, I was worth it. Such a big disaster, finally told with a joke; Such humor, sad and cruel. The way people who die of hunger and those who suffer from disasters is more important than the way they treat others and the way the world treats them.
In the movie "1942", after the Great Famine passes, a conversation between Chiang Kai-shek (played by Chen Daoming) and Li Peiji (played by Li Xuejian), chairman of the Henan Provincial Government, on the bridge. Chiang Kai-shek asked: How many people died in Henan? The chairman of Henan Province replied: According to government statistics, there are 1284,300 people, and the actual number is <> million. Such humor is a cold breeze from the story structure, the character structure, including the cracks of human nature and soul. When you take the harsh truth seriously, the harshness turns into a wall and the egg breaks when it hits it. When you approach harshness with humor, humor is like the sea, the harshness turns into ice, it falls into the sea of humor and melts.