A summary of Yan Lianke's novel research ...

Writers, writers and scholars

Last name: Yan Lianke

Gender: male

Date of birth: 1958

Birthplace: Tianhu Yaohou, Songxian County, Luoyang City, Henan Province

Ethnic group: Han nationality

He is from Song County, Henan Province. He graduated from Political Education Department of Henan University 1985, and from Literature Department of PLA Art College 199 1. He was drafted into the army from 65438 to 0978. He has served as a soldier, platoon leader, officer, secretary and creator in jinan military area command, a screenwriter, professional screenwriter and first-class literary writer in the Second Artillery Television Art Center. Published works 65438 to 0980. 1992 Join the Chinese Writers Association. He is the author of novels such as Emotional Prison, The Last Educated Youth, Life and Death, Life and Death, Life in the Sun and Being Accepted. His novels include Collected Works of Yan Lianke (5 volumes), Fable of Peace, Story of the Village, Golden Cave, Selected Novels of Yan Lianke, Crosswalk and Quiet Life. Two Hometowns and Ancestral Temple won 1988 and 1989 respectively, and Yaogou People's Dream won the fourth novel monthly report Hundred Flowers Award and the third October Excellence Award, 1990-65438. Xia Luo won 1992-1993 novella award, balao Mountain won 1994- 1995 novella award, Golden Cave won the first Lu Xun Literature Award, and its works won awards inside and outside the military. Jin Ping Mei (novella) —— The First (1995- 1996) Lu Xun Literature Award

Date of Month (novella)-The Second (1997-2000) Lu Xun Literature Award

The 8th Novel Monthly in Hundred Flowers Award

The 4th (1996- 1997) Shanghai Excellent Novel Award.

Balao (Medium-length) —— The Third Shanghai Excellent Novel Award (1994- 1995)

The first China Literature Selected Works Award

Song of Raking Heaven (medium-length) —— The 5th Shanghai Excellent Novel Award (1998- 1999)

Summer Night (Medium-length)-1992- 1993 Outstanding Works Award of Medium-length Selection

"Big School" (Medium-length) —— The 8th PLA Literature and Art Award

Going Southeast (Short Story)-1999 Outstanding Works Award of People's Literature

Black Pig Hair and White Pig Hair (Short Story)-2001-Excellent Works Award of Selected Novels in 2002

In 2004, his new work "Alive" attracted strong attention in the literary world. It was called China's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and won the third Laoshe Literature Prize.

Yan Lianke's novel creation has three distinct stages: at an immature age, the writer's "three schools" are full of understanding and tolerance and warmth in his choice, which is his temperament and emotion endowed by his early family fate and life experience. The writer did not get rid of his own experience, and failed to struggle out of specific people, events and experiences and enter a broader world; In the era of passion, illness has a great influence on Yan Lianke's writing. Living in despair and resistance shows strong will and passion. The events and characters in the novel appear in boundless space, without time limitation, specificity and stipulation. The writer's interpretation of the power of fate is a pun, both personal and human. It is both special and universal, full of metaphorical meaning. Violence is the obvious aesthetic tendency of works in this period; In Quiet Times, after having a deeper experience of life, fate and the essence of human existence, the writer turned his thinking direction to society and reality again, and thought and criticized the character of balao Mountains and its life in China in the historical and cultural context. No matter in which period, the value orientation of Yan Lianke's novels has a certain moral tendency, that is, "going home". In the process of describing this "going home", the writer's most essential thinking is shown: the relationship between the world and people, and what kind of conflicts and forms they exist. All his novels are devoted to finding and revealing the form and connotation of this existence.

one

The work signed by Yan Lianke was first published in 1979. The story of Gastrodia elata was published in the Battle Report of the former Wuhan Military Region. That year, Yan Lianke was 2 1 year old. That novel has long been lost, and its meaning at that time was not clear. Today, it marks the initial beginning of Yan Lianke's career as a writer.

1One day in August, 958, Yan Lianke was born in Tianhu Town, a remote town in Song County, Henan Province. The balao Mountains extend from a distance. At the foot of the mountain is a wide and deep valley, and Tianhu Town is scattered at the end of this valley. A few miles away from Tianhu Town, it is the hometown of two brothers, Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao, the masters of Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty. There is only one temple left, with few relics and their descendants. This temple didn't have much imprint in the writer's youth. He only knows that "becoming a temple" is the holy land of the people and the birthplace of the whole traditional culture of China, but it seems to have nothing to do with his life. Until one day, when he picked up a pen and wandered among the "balao Mountains", the temple suddenly appeared in front of him. He seems to see the symbolic significance and intangible power of the temple, people's reverence for the "Cheng Temple" and the inheritance of the "Cheng Temple" spirit, which dominates the lives and souls of people in mountainous areas. This gave birth to a series of amazing works such as Two-way Hometown, Yaogou Series, Golden Cave, Year, Month and Day, Sun Time flies, Hard as Water and so on.

Under this rake mountain, Yan Lianke spent his childhood, adolescence and early youth. Both parents are farmers, kind and honest, and they have paid unimaginable hardships for their four children to go to school. My sister has been in poor health. "One of the strongest signs of my childhood was my sister's endless cries of pain in the hospital bed, including back pain, leg pain and even body pain. The elder sister was lying in a dark room, and the family was worried in the middle of a wall. Every scream of the eldest sister penetrating the wall deeply stung her parents' faces, making their thin and ischemic faces paler. Later, my father accompanied my sister to the provincial capital for surgery and often brought back information about asking for money. Xiao Yan Lianke helps adults sell fully developed pigs, freshly harvested grain and immature trees at home. All this left a deep pain and shadow in the young Yan Lianke's heart. The light warmth and sadness in The Sun in the Kiln Ditch and The Dream in the Kiln Ditch reflect his initial feelings about family life. 1988, Yan Lianke published a novella "Hometown of Liangcheng" in Kunlun (1), which was the beginning for balao and Cheng Si to truly enter the world of Yan Lianke's novels. As a symbol of traditional culture, "Cheng Si" appeared in Yan Lianke's novels for the first time, and it conflicted with the moral concept under the economic reform, and the rural contradictions were extensive and rich in connotation. In addition, the "stickiness" and "transparency" of Yan Lianke's language have also been displayed, which makes the atmosphere of his novels always have a subtle sense of warmth. It supplements the stagnation and gloom of rural life and the rush of fire, which makes the novel structure in a state of tension.

From 65438 to 0989, Yan Lianke entered the College of Literature of the People's Liberation Army and entered the first peak of his creation. As long as the manuscript paper is spread out, Yan Lianke is like an old monk, completely in a state, and the activities of his roommates do not affect his writing at all. At the end of the day, there are as few as 8,000 words and as many as 10,000 yuan. The manuscript is completed at one time, and there are not many changes. At that time, there was a saying that Yan Lianke wrote novels "short stories don't last overnight, novellas don't last for a few weeks", so you can imagine how fast he wrote them. In the first year of military art, Yan Lianke published seven novellas in large literary journals such as Kunlun, Literature and Art of the People's Liberation Army, China Writer, October, Mangyuan and Times Literature, which won Yan Lianke a wide reputation. In the following year, Yan Lianke's novels covered almost all major literary publications in China, and his novels were published in Harvest, People's Literature, Dangdai, Novelist and Yellow River. His unique creative style and tendency began to attract the attention of critics. From 1989 to 1994, Yan Lianke's novel creation can be roughly divided into three series.

"Yaogou Series". This series includes novellas "Yaogou Man's Dream", "Yaogou Sun", "Going Back and forth on the Plateau" and "Country Stories". Among them, Yao Gou Man Meng won the Excellent Works Award of the Fourth Novel Monthly, the Hundred Flowers Award, the Selected Novelette, and the Excellent Novelette Award of 10. Later, he collected and published the novel Emotional Prison. In a sense, this series is actually autobiographical novels. Although the author denies it, the life experience and emotional experience contained in the work do have the truth of life in it. Yan Lianke once said, "The dream of Yaogou people and the sun in Yaogou are stupid and simple, but they are very kind and simple, which is a true description of real life feelings. Ordinary people like to watch it, especially young people from rural areas. But now, if you want to go back and write such a simple and warm novel, I'm afraid you can't go back. ..... Yaogou series is probably the most directly related novel to my daily life experience among all my novels. ..... can be said to come from mental injury. I would rather not write such a novel than have such harm. " (Yan Lianke and Hong Liang: The Witch's Red Chopsticks, Feng Chun Literature and Art Publishing House, 2002, p. 40) It should be said that "Yaogou Series" is the beginning of Yan Lianke's true description of suffering, and his sister's moans echoed in the depths of balao Mountain. He can't forget this pain, his efforts to get rid of poverty, his family and his lost dignity. They surround people who live in them like "emotional purgatory", which makes him feel and understand the survival logic of the countryside, the suffering of the countryside and the meaning of power, and influences his later novels. In this "emotional prison", the protagonist is always in a strong sense of shame and confusion. "I" was put on the political stage in the countryside, and I was not allowed to have the slightest willfulness, dignity and self-expression. And every action of "I", including love, is highly utilitarian and has to be exposed to hundreds of pairs of eyes, which leads to the loss of personality.

Tokyo Nine-stream People Series. For the author, this is an accidental series of works. According to Yan Lianke, he bought a volume of literature and history materials in Kaifeng Street, which contained figures. So he imagined and unfolded according to the above plot. Finally, he created the novella Through Life (1989). However, for the literary world of that year, it brought great freshness and surprise. The novel is full of rich folk flavor and legend, and the characters have different fates, so we can feel the author's careful management of the story and language. 1990 The author published "Cockfighting", which shows the social changes and human experiences of China in the past hundred years through the life of the old cockfighting man in Kaifeng. The language is vivid, the plot is tortuous, and it is very readable, which is very popular with readers. However, it is precisely because of the excessive pursuit of stories and legends that in these two novels, the language and novel concepts with Yan Lianke's characteristics are rarely displayed, and the novel meaning is relatively weak. In The Famous Prostitute Li Shishi and Her Descendants and Lotus published two years later (1993), we can see that the author's language skills and literary feelings have made great progress. For some specific reasons, the author gave up this series of writing and never picked it up again.

"Peace Warrior Series". In this series, the author pays attention to two aspects. First of all, Peasant Warrior is devoted to showing their experiences and self-choice in the contemporary context. His major works include Return of the Sergeant (199 1), Joining the Army (1992), Searching for Land (1992) and so on. Second, the spiritual dilemma of soldiers in peacetime, such as Snow of Peace (1992), Sacrifice of Free Fall, Summer Fall (1992), Fable of Peace (1993), Mourning of Peace and War of Peace.

two

"Maybe this is fate. I fell ill after writing this novel, not because I wrote this novel, not because I was overworked. But this short 200,000 words is a healthy watershed in my life. Before that, I could write novels with thousands or even tens of thousands of words a day for a long time, which once stunned my colleagues. Later, because of lumbar spondylosis, I can no longer sit at my desk and write novels, even if it is a slightly longer letter. For this reason, whenever I lie prone on the bed to write, I often cry; Now because of lying down for a long time, the cervical pain is not limited, and the impact is not great. When I have to write, when I force myself to write on my back, no one can understand my nostalgia for sitting at my desk. " (Yan Lianke: The Last Female Educated Youth: Introduction, 1995, Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House)

When writing this passage, it was 1995. Yan Lianke is ill.

In the early years, my sister and father's illness has been deeply immersed in Yan Lianke's blood and emotions, and has not come out of that shadow so far. This time, it was his turn. In fact, symptoms have already appeared since 1992. At first, I thought it was a simple lumbar spondylosis, and it would be fine to treat it. So, I didn't care, and I still concentrated on writing. From 1992 to 1995, Yan Lianke wrote nearly 20 novellas and one novel, and also created several long TV dramas. The disease is getting worse. Extreme lumbar disc herniation, leg numbness, low back pain, can not walk, can not sit, can not work, can only lie still. So Yan Lianke tied a wide belt around his waist, made of steel plate, and supported his waist to write hard. At the worst time, I couldn't sit up with a wide belt, so I had to lie in bed and write, but it caused cervical pain. Later, Yan Lianke found the "posture" of writing: lying down and writing. He ordered a chair for the disabled in a machinery factory: the seat was half lying with a sloping board fixed in front. The manuscript paper is clamped on it, and his elbow hangs like a brush.

However, for writers, although illness is painful, it has also become a way for them to gain unique life experiences and social feelings. When the author asked about the influence of physical illness on Yan Lianke's creation, he replied, "Physical condition will affect a person's understanding of life, and its understanding of life will definitely be different from that of health. Unhealthy people may feel more complicated and sensitive to life. Although the disease is not fatal, it has strengthened its resilience to life and increased its desire for life and life. An unhealthy person often has a feeling of despair about life, but he often bursts into a passion in despair. A person's physical resistance is weakening, but his inner and mental resistance must be increasing. A healthy person may not need anything against life, but an unhealthy person may always be against something in life. (The Witch's Red Chopsticks) Illness inevitably influenced Yan Lianke's outlook on life and philosophy. 1995 has thus become an important watershed in Yan Lianke's writing. If the works before 1995 are mostly from his life, his family and his military experience, then the works after 1995 are inseparable from his physical feelings, thus re-entering the world and entering the balao Mountains. At this time, the composition of heaven and earth and the world is different from previous works in the writer's thinking. The basic color of sakura court began to appear.

The world is sick. Lake Mountain is sick. Contrary to the faint tenderness of Mount Palao in previous works, the world is stained with the color of disease. The morbid Mount balao, the morbid society and people are dim and gloomy, but there is also the author's faint violence, which is despair, helplessness and resistance and struggle after despair. He expressed all these feelings in words. The novella "Year, Month and Day", "Song of the Rake" and the novel "Time flies in the sun" convey this kind of life struggle and cry, despair and resistance. Unprecedented strength, intensity, density, raw pain, raw struggle, raw will, live, live! This is the weakest and hardest cry of life, which travels through time and space and reverberates in the Lake Mountains. Readers are stunned by the breath in the works, and they can't get used to the writer's extreme misery, let alone the rage, despair and passion in the works. They don't understand where it came from.

No writer in China interweaves the hope and despair of life, writing so complicated, so thorough and so true. The will of life is so strong that the colors, sounds and desires contained in the text merge into a huge torrent, which shocks and tears the readers. From senses, sight and hearing to experience, reason and wisdom, they are all undergoing the fiery test of purgatory. This powerful current and this passion are finally transformed into a huge symbolic power, which is presented in the text. "Year-Month-Day" and "Song of Raking Heaven" are basically myths or fables: an old man, a blind dog, a corn that may die at any time, a desert, a arid Yuan Ye, and endless hungry mice are fighting to the death; A mother, walking in the endless cherry blossoms, is looking for health for her four silly children. The image of a mother is a symbol of maternal love, which can also be said to be sacrifice, dedication, anxiety and the greatest desire for human survival, and can explain multiple themes and meanings. It is no exaggeration to say that this is also the secret requirement and desire of Yan Lianke's inner world, which has been suffering from illness for a long time. The experience of pain and life, and the desire for survival and survival are reflected in his novels, which become the basic background color and philosophical consciousness of the novels. These characters have no names, but they have a concrete sense of life. They live for a survival instinct, but in the end they show something noble, solemn and even broad. The world is a transcendental myth and fable, and balao Mountain with local color is incorporated into the universe and spiritual world.

There is no time limit, concreteness and stipulation in "Year of the Month", "Song of Raking Heaven" and even "How the Sun and the Moon Flee", and events and characters appear in boundless space, which is an eternal existence and has some symbolic significance. The characters are caught in an unknowable fate, and they can't escape, and they can't escape. In this sad world, the interpretation of the power of fate is a pun, both personal and human; It is both special and universal. Characters struggle and conflict in a meaningless way, and finally fall into the trap of fate, just like Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother, which is inevitable. They are not faced with social pressure, or rather, the background of social oppression is diluted in the novel, but the power of fate is strengthened. My grandfather is facing a year of drought, especially Sipo is facing genes, and the villagers with three surnames are facing trace elements in nature. These are insurmountable and unavoidable things, and they are fate. People just want to fight against this irreversible fate, so what is more tragic and desperate is their will. In fact, in The Day flies, the author also touches on the influence of social morality, culture and power on the villagers with three surnames. But you will feel that it is only the background, and it has not had a decisive impact on the fate of the villagers with three surnames. What really exerts pressure and violence on the villagers of the three surnames is fate, that is, irresistible "fate." The author focuses on the struggle between man and fate, and the villagers' desire for survival is actually the epitome of human destiny. Therefore, the author wrote in the preface: "I would like to dedicate this to the surviving human beings, the world and the land, and take it as my last words that I will eventually leave the human beings, the world and the land."

The works of this period are full of violence. The "violence" mentioned here does not refer to violent events, but a kind of impact and shock and the resulting aesthetic tendency. Violent images are rare in Yan Lianke's original novels. Writers after illness are interested in strong will, tough life and extreme things. The language, plot and structure of the novel have become very strange, beyond people's general imagination, and far beyond life experience and usual tolerance. When you finish reading Yan Lianke's novels unsuspecting, you will really be knocked down, your whole sensory nerves will tremble, and the conventional rational thinking will be completely disrupted. You will be horrified at the desperate state of life, and you will be shocked and confused at the absurdity and cruelty of life. It poses a great threat to your inner world, and you have to enter his world to think. You should be prepared to be invaded and challenged from all directions. This aggression and shock will eventually become a violent aesthetic and gradually become the aesthetic characteristics of Yan Lianke's novels. However, this violent passion contains special poetry and poetry. We are shocked by cruelty, but often at the same time, we feel some kind of gentle poetry. Every event, every dialogue and every life scene in Yan Lianke's novels involves the whole of balao. The author always presents us with an overall atmosphere: the sound of plants growing, the smell of sunshine, the hard shadow of mountains and the gloomy sky, which constitute the color, background and earthy atmosphere of the novel, everywhere. This colorful and earthy atmosphere makes the novel full of tenderness and poetry.

The stylistic features of these novels also suggest some essential changes in Yan Lianke's creation. The great symbolic significance of "Year of the Month" and "Song of Nature" makes the novel itself have stylistic significance, while "Daylight flies" unfolds the fate of the characters with a grand stylistic structure and reverse narrative of life restoration. Some people call his novel "a root-seeking novel" and "explore the cycle of life and death, the paradox of life and death and their relationship with the primitive life and death ceremony in reverse narration, so as to explore the deep mystery of China people's modern living situation. (Wang Yichuan: The Restoration of Life-and-Death Game Ritual —— The Characteristics of The fleeting Origin of Sunlight, Contemporary Writers Review 200 1, No.6) However, Yan Lianke has his own views on style. "Personally, I prefer to experience the style from their stories, rather than the story from the style. ..... Mastering the balance between story and style, I think it is not only a skill, but also a sacredness. It seems that there is no hint from the Oracle, and it seems that you will never reach the balance you want. " (Yan Lianke: Looking for Support-Style I Think, Contemporary Writers Review 200 1 No.6) In a sense, Time of the Sun is an attempt and an exploration of the "balance" between the story and the style he longs for.

three

Just like the struggle against life expressed in his works, Yan Lianke has been fighting against illness and his body has recovered to a great extent. The physical pain and despair in the early years gradually faded away. After reviewing his early high yield and health, Yan Lianke gradually slowed down his writing, writing every morning, reading in the afternoon, thinking, walking and dealing with some trivial matters. The chair has been placed on the balcony, which has become a witness and symbol of the pain in the past. For Yan Lianke, life is like a river. After a shallow and transparent movement and a difficult and tortuous torrent, it slowly enters a wide but gentle deep stream.

If Yan Lianke put all his thoughts into thinking about the existence and fate of life in the passionate era, then since 2000, the writer has gradually turned his pen and started to pay attention to the relationship between man and society and the social existence of man. The former shows the nihility, despair and struggle of the essence of life, while the latter focuses on the stipulation of society and civilization on people and the reflection on history. In fact, in Yan Lianke's The Age of Immature, most of the author's concerns are social themes, but more of them are empirical descriptions, and the author's own strength is not strong enough. After 1995, the writer's outlook on life and world changed his observation point of society. After experiencing the theme of fate and having a deeper understanding of life, the writer turned his thinking direction to society. At this time, the author transcends the original over-realistic experience narrative and enters the historical and cultural context to think about balao Mountain's character and China's life. In Time flies, the tragedy of three villagers building a Lingyin canal and drawing sewage from outside the mountain has initially shown the author's anger and accusation against society and civilization. In the subsequent novels "Hard as Water" and "Alive", the author developed this critical consciousness to the extreme, focusing on describing the stipulation of society to people and the resistance and price paid by people to this stipulation. "What is shocking is not the shocking thing itself, but its natural clarity." (George Luacs (Hungarian): Franz Kafka or Thomas Darling Mann (excerpt), On Kafka, China Social Sciences Press, 1988, p. 339) Yan Lianke pushed this "natural clarity" to the extreme, pushing characters and their readers into this absurdity, that is, into history. Once you become a person in history, this "natural clarity" becomes chaotic. Absurdity comes into play, acting on history and life. "People in history" began their lives with an innocent attitude, and they also had various concrete connections with the external world in which they lived, which were simple, true and absurd, which constituted the narrative tone of the novel.

200 1 Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House published Hard as Water, which shocked readers again. The most obvious is the sudden change of language style, from the previous "heavy, depressed" and "secret" to "wild, eager and publicity". On the surface, it doesn't seem to be in line with the feeling that Yan Lianke should have in a calm period. However, this is a real peace. Getting rid of the obstacles and emotional things on the surface of the event, Yan Lianke directly entered the cultural symbol level. He saw the password function of language in the Cultural Revolution. When talking about Hard as Water, the author once said that when writing, only a quotation from Chairman Mao and an old newspaper from the period of Zhang Wenge were put on the table, and the feeling and language of the whole era were immediately restored. The overwhelming language. Couplets, quotations, speeches, folk three sentences and a half, model operas and other cultural revolution language forms appear in the novel. At first, you may feel that the author's language is a little out of control or shows some poverty in the author's thinking. However, with the repeated use of language forms, it is metaphorical in the text: it provides us with some symptoms of emotions and times. Lyric, rhythmic and slogan-like excitement replaced the language of national daily life, and a nation embarked on an extreme riot of poetic thinking. Among them, political discourse controls people and humanity, and people completely lose the right to speak, but are only symbols of the times and passive participants. This lack of "human" consciousness and the inequality between human and politics are the most basic deficiencies of China culture. Hard as Water reveals the absurdity of the times and the tragic characteristics of national culture with an almost symbolic carnival language and style, which reminds people of a sentence by the German philosopher karl jaspers, "The amazing result of the French Revolution was that it changed to its opposite. The determination to make people free has evolved into the horror of destroying freedom. " (karl jaspers (Germany): Spirit of the Times, translated by Wang Defeng, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1997, p. 6) In 2002, Yan Lianke published a short story "Black Pig Hair and White Pig Hair" in Guangzhou Literature and Art, which also showed the author's rethinking of the cultural character contained in social problems. The mayor killed someone with his car, and people in the village rushed to plead guilty and go to jail for the mayor, even kneeling down to plead for others. In the end, "going to jail" became the best way to "run to the future". The tragicomedy in this village makes people sigh and face China's suffocating power and cultural network.

The writing of the novel Shouhuo means that Yan Lianke's further exploration and thinking on society and politics has also undergone all-round changes in language and style. There is no doubt that this will bring new shock to the literary world. This novel is absurd and cruel, full of incredible passion and symbolic significance. Many people who have read this novel think it is an unspeakable novel. "It brings together incredible miracles and the purest real life." The Royal Swedish Academy's evaluation of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude may be suitable for this novel. Here, miracles do not contradict real life, nor do imagination and exaggeration contradict real life. On the contrary, any miracle is a manifestation and symbol of real life. In a sense, this novel is the author's challenge and redefinition of realism. There is such a preface on the manuscript of Shouhuo, "Realism, my brothers and sisters; Realism, please roll aside. " I don't know if I will use this sentence when I publish a pamphlet, but at least it shows the author's thinking. Realism is a double-edged sword for China writers, from which all their literary nutrition comes. China's realism is a revised realism, which has long lost its proper connotation and extension. For writers, it is more of a constraint that affects their creativity. In a conversation with Yan Lianke, he said that there is no doubt that realism is the most vital creative method. After many twists and turns, China writers finally returned to this road, but what is realism? This is a question worth thinking about.