Writer Ge Fei Literary works are expressions of experience

Ge Fei is a professor in the Department of Chinese, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, and a famous writer and scholar. Born in 1964, he is a native of Dantu, Jiangsu. He began his literary creation in the 1980s and is one of the representative writers of Chinese avant-garde literature. In 2001, he was transferred to the Department of Chinese, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, and is now a professor of the Department of Chinese, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese Writers Association, a member of the Presidium, and the vice chairman of the Beijing Writers Association. He is mainly engaged in teaching, literary creation and academic research. His representative works include "Peach Blossoms with a Human Face", "Mountains and Rivers in a Dream", "Spring in the South of the Yangtze River", "Invisibility Clothes" and "Looking at the Spring Breeze", etc., and his works have won the Lu Xun Literature Award, Lao She Literature Award, Mao Dun Literature Award, and have been translated into nearly 20 languages and published around the world. His academic monographs such as "** Narratology", "Invitation to Literature", and "Snow Hidden Heron - The Sound and Nothingness of the Golden Plum" have been reprinted many times, which have aroused great repercussions in the academic circles, and his teaching work has been more than 30 years, and has been commended by the school many times. In 2017, as the initiator and person in charge, Ge Fei set up the "Literary Creation and Research Center" at Tsinghua University, which is committed to international literary exchanges, domestic writers' workshops, and campus literary creation guidance. Narrative Studies Course for Literary Masterpieces and Writing Training.

Today I would like to discuss with you the question of "the relationship between literature and experience".

Why do we want to discuss this topic, this is also a question that I have been focusing on lately, and it is also our experience in literary creation. The first question we often talk about is whether we have experience. It may seem strange to you that everyone, whether it's writing or people in general, actually has experience. If we say very simply, this experience constitutes a very important ** of writing, and this is certainly not a problem. But I don't think that prevents us from asking, do we really have experience? Just now, Dr. Huang Jianxin mentioned that I wrote "Spring in the South of the Yangtze River", "Mountains and Rivers into a Dream", or the earlier "Peach Blossom with a Human Face". I've learned a lot about the role that experience plays in me.

For example, in our hometown, our home is in Jiangsu Province, a place called Jiangnan, and there are many elderly people in the village, and I played with them when I was young. There was an old man who was always talking to me, he was growing vegetables at home, he was very ordinary, and his beard was gray at that time. Everyone in the village thought that this old man was a madman, and that this person was unreasonable. He also often came to talk to me, but you couldn't understand what he said, and you didn't know what he was talking about for a long time. I thought of him as a madman when I was a kid. The man was a little farther away from him and was very afraid. But he was very kind to people. What exactly is he talking about? I've always had a mystery in my head. Later, when I went to college and came home from Shanghai, this old man was still alive, and he said something to me when he passed by me, and I understood, he spoke in English. One of the things that got me thinking was that if I had never left our house and never learned English, that experience would have been sleeping in my mind. Later, I went to find out what this old man had done before. There are many parts of it that I wrote into "Peach Blossoms with a Human Face". It constitutes my experience of writing, but this experience is not automatic.

We go through different things all the time, and we have a lot of memories, but it's hard to say whether this thing will necessarily be used by you to write. We know that there are two types of writers, and there is one type of writer, such as Shen Congwen in China. Before Shen Congwen went to Beijing to start writing, he had traveled almost half of China and experienced countless things. At that time, many things in China were facing the test of life and death. When he said one day in Beijing that I want to write**. Everyone knows that Shen Congwen graduated from primary school, he may not have graduated, and his cultural level is very poor, Yu Dafu They all think it is strange, how can a person with such a cultural level as you write? Shen Congwen said that I am not sure of anything else, I am sure that I will surpass Shakespeare. He was very arrogant, because he had accumulated too many things, and a large number of things came to his pen.

But there is another type, Hawthorne and Kafka, who will not have more experience than us, only less. What kind of things make up the writing of these people as a junior clerk all their lives? This is also a question that has puzzled me for years. For example, literary works are really the expression of experience, for example, I often give lectures to students at Tsinghua University, and when I talk about this issue, everyone knows Du Fu's "Jiangnan in the Year of the Li Turtle", "It is common to see it in King Qi's house, and Cui Jiutang has heard it a few times before; It is a good scenery in the south of the Yangtze River, and the season of falling flowers is a good time." Wen Zuoan analyzed the incident in his memoirs, and he said that it would be terrible if the poem was translated into English. That means that I often see you in King Qi's house, and I have heard of you in Cui Jiu's house. Now we meet again in Gangnam, and it's that easy to change to English. So the poetry of the Americans does not know what to do. This is a very important poem in Tang poetry, this poem was written a year before Du Fu's death, he didn't say anything about his experience, not to present any experience to everyone. Rather, he wanted to hide the experience. "It is common to see it in King Qi's house, and Cui Jiutang has heard it a few times before; It is a good scenery in the south of the Yangtze River, and the season of falling flowers is a good time." "You don't get much experience from this literal sense, but it's not easy to make this poem. You have to understand the Anshi Rebellion at that time, you have to understand that Du Fu couldn't go home at that time, he missed his hometown very much, and his memory of his hometown was suddenly triggered by an old man Li Guinian. It was the hidden thing behind the poem that emerged, which was very common in the works of the time. Is he presenting experience? Or do you hide the experience?

Everyone also knows Bai Juyi's "Flowers Are Not Flowers" "Flowers are not flowers, fog is not fog, come in the middle of the night, and go in the morning." How long has it been like a spring dream? It seems that there is nowhere to find the clouds. "What is a flower? What is Fog? The relationships that make up our experience are very complex.

I can also give an example. Everyone knows the Chinese classics, "Golden Vase Plum" and "Dream of Red Mansions". Why did Cao Xueqin say that all the works written before him are nothing more than emperors and generals, and nothing more than traditional Chinese works. Even if I wrote so many *** before, it was all persuading people to be kind and full of preaching. Why did a work "Golden Vase Plum" suddenly appear on the middle page of the Ming Dynasty, and the notes written were not related to the previous script, and the previous **, but why did it appear completely different? I think there is a very important issue involved in this. The role of "Golden Bottle Plum", everyone knows that "Golden Bottle Plum" has two types of functions, the first type of role: the role of the word book, the first to write "Golden Bottle Plum" in the Wanli period. There is also an author who revised it again after 30 years, and we call him Chongzhen's "Golden Vase Plum". It is very important in the history of Chinese literature, and for the first time it proposes a completely new thing, which has a direct impact on the traditional Chinese culture, the reorganization of all cultural experiences. How could such a situation occur? I'm doing this research this time, and I want to combine the appearance of "The Golden Vase Plum" with the intellectual history of the Ming Dynasty to do a combing. Without such an ideological struggle, "The Golden Vase of Plums" would not have been possible. Because everyone is born, old, sick and dead, they are all wine-colored and wealthy. People have written in the past why there is an anti-moral work in the Wanli period. All morality is null and void. It cannot be imagined without the influence of intellectual history. So it also reminds us that experience is definitely not a simple thing. So do we really need experience? Not necessarily. You may go through many things, but they may not pose any threat to your mental condition, to your writing, to your phenomena in the world.

Of course, there is one aspect that we can mention in passing. We also can't say that I've experienced something and can write it right away. Experiences are stored in your memory. It will be reserved in the first place. Can't say what happened today and write today, impossible. The process by which this experience is stored in memory is also very delicate. For example, when we were young, we went fishing, and if we went fishing with our father, if you caught a fish, you would tell your classmates, "How big is my fish?" When I was a child, I had a classmate who caught a 22-pound fish, and this person talked about it all his life, and it was the most beautiful thing in his life. I replied that he was still telling me about it, and of course I thought he was sad, but it was completely understandable. This thing was so big that he only had the weight of this fish left. This kind of memory is usually called a voluntary memory, and we are willing to remember it. We can't forget if we want to. But behind this memory there is a great deal of experience that actually slumbers in our heads. We never wake it up.

Until a few years ago, there was a very important French writer Proust, whose most important contribution was that he discovered another memory, the involuntary memory. You don't want to remember it, but it happened. It's sleeping soundly in your brain's memory. When will these memories be awakened? When Proust had asthma and was in a state of boredom, and everyone else was busy earning money and living, he spent endless time meditating there, and all these unintentional memories appeared one by one, which constituted all the material of "Reminiscences". My son is now old, and he is old enough to read "Reminiscences". I didn't let him read it, but he did it secretly lately. When he was about to finish the first book, he suddenly came to my room and said, "Dad, I can't read this, and I still can't read it even though I have tried a lot of effort." I explained to him, why are people doing this? He said so I want to see why he wrote it that way. My son's judgment was accurate, and when Proust was salvaging and chasing this memory, he had a different eye on than any of us. This is also a realistic consideration. That's the first question I'm talking about, and it's a very complex one.

Discourse has a significant impact on writing

For example, in the past, if a person wanted to go to Sichuan, he would die on the way. A family living in Dongcheng District, there is a child, in the twenties, this child was admitted to Tsinghua University, he wants to go to school from home, and his parents will shed tears. Because it's too far. From Beijing's Dongcheng to Haidian, it can now cost 70 to 80 yuan to take a taxi, and if there is a traffic jam, it will take two to three hours, but if there is no traffic jam, it will only take 20 minutes to get from Dongcheng to Tsinghua. But back then, Ye Shengtao and Yu Pingbo made an appointment to see Zhu Ziqing's widow, they lived in the Dongcheng area, and he was going to Haidian. The other day the course of action was discussed, where to eat at noon, and when it arrived at dusk, a donkey cart was hired. Today due to the change in space, due to the convenience of transportation information, it is smoothed. I arrived in Hong Kong yesterday and they asked me, how many times have you been to Hong Kong? I've said I've been here many times. But I didn't know anything about Hong Kong, because after I came to Hong Kong, I stayed in a hotel in Hong Kong, and the next day I slept at home in Beijing. I think the biggest threat to today is culture, discourse.

The experience we have ourselves is nothing more than a statement of what we have today. For example, what kind of society I live in today, what kind of ideological struggle is it now, whether you are a leftist or a rightist, whether you are a center-left or center-right, or a centrist. Everyone is taking their seats. There is a lot of cultural information in this society, there are a lot of fashions, we are all following them, and we don't have time to think about it. They brought me newspapers this morning, and the Hong Kong newspapers were scary. Three newspapers, one thick. He shapes you and influences you all the time, he influences your judgment and helps you discover your own experience. Therefore, the discourse of culture, the discourse of reality, and the discourse of ideology influence us all the time, making us fall into a kind of automatic identification that Tolstoy once said when we mobilize our own experience in writing. Everybody's talking, everybody's discussing, and my opinion is to put it in for the time being. And such a trend, I think, is getting stronger and stronger.

So when I talk to writers in Beijing in Beijing, there are basically three kinds of leftists, one right, and one centrist, and they fight all day long. I found that the left became the right at night, and the right became the left at night. Therefore, there is a saying in Beijing: every left must be right, and every right must be left. What do you mean? It's just that you belong to the left, and I will immediately become a rightist, otherwise I don't have room to speak, and I'm like you, so what else is there to discuss? It's the kind of stuff that has a huge impact on writing.

Let me give you an example here, back then, Li Qingzhao's husband was called Zhao Mingcheng, Zhao Mingcheng was a military scientist who liked to collect, and he often went out with Li Qingzhao to collect things. A lot of the sweet things in their love are related to collecting. After receiving the things, suddenly the times changed drastically. The family moved south in a hurry and fled. Because Zhao Mingcheng was an official, he slipped away alone, and the family's old and young, baggage, and everything were all handed over to a woman, Li Qingzhao. This is the case in traditional Chinese morality, or the norms of experience. In the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Lao She fled to Kunming, and a lot of mothers and children at home had to be handed over to his wife, so when his wife brought the child to Kunming to see Lao She, from such a woman's thinking, what kind of feelings would she have in her heart? No one asked. I didn't ask Mr. Hu either, because I didn't think I needed to ask, it was just important for a man to be an official. He left first, he did big things, and of course the other things were left to the insiders to do.

Li Qingzhao was the same at that time, she escorted things and fled to Xuzhou, Xuzhou fell again, fled to Nanjing, and then to Zhejiang. When he fled to Nanjing, Zhao Mingcheng had already gone to Huzhou to become a prefect and an official. Presumably, the situation in the south has stabilized. Then the two began to say goodbye, Li Qingzhao stood on the shore, and Zhao Mingcheng was on the boat. Li Qingzhao felt unsteady in his heart, and felt that breaking up between the two of us was the difference between life and death. But the husband was so ruthless that he didn't explain anything. Li Qingzhao shouted, saying that if I encounter the enemy again and capture the city, what should I do? My husband said, "If the enemy is attacked, you should throw the baggage to me first." If that doesn't work, you throw your clothes away. If you can't escape after throwing it away, you can throw away these things in my collection of scrolls and paintings. If that doesn't work, you can throw away my collection of antiques as well. But in the end, there is something that cannot be thrown, the bell, it really can't be done, you and the bell will live and die together. Li Qingzhao understood, my value is the same as this artifact. Hu Jixing didn't ask, and we didn't ask, but Li Qingzhao did. Li Qingzhao suddenly wrote a very important article in that era that has been circulated to this day, "Jinshi Lu Follow-up", Li Qingzhao's question asked a big question. For all women, where can a woman under the constraints of traditional morality, her emotions, her life, all her feelings about this matter be sustenance? In this, Zhao Mingcheng drew an order for him, what to throw first, then what to throw, and finally you live and die with this thing. As everything is explained, what should I do? The husband said you were dispensable. This is the traditional experience of China, and everyone doesn't ask. In this aspect, in addition to order, there is also hierarchy. In today's society, we have to do what we do first, what we do next, what is most important, what is secondary, and what can be given up. We basically live under the control of such a discourse. We also think that we are held by this experience, and this is a very important aspect for me.

The meaning of literature lies in the relationship between experience and the other

At this point, we have to introduce a concept again, what is the regularity of reality. We live in such a social reality, there are many things, a lot of truths, there are big truths, there are small truths, big truths can control small truths, if you have small truths, unfortunately, you have to sacrifice. For example, I don't think about this society like most people. That's tragic, and in a culture like ours, you're likely to be isolated. You may well not get an explanation, your life will not be explained. I think this process is very painful. But I want to tell you that all these words are actualized, and they are all under the control of reality, that is to say, all these words belong to a scope, which I will call the scope of reason and logic. Our reason can see it, and our logic can cover it up to such an extent. One of the things it most commonly expresses is what we call morality. The requirements of morality are the most ingrained. Many of us have no way to get rid of this moral bottom line. But whether it is morality, rationality, or all the requirements of reality, he belongs to the scope of such a rationality and logic. In addition to the things in this range, these things illuminate my experience, and I have experience that I can prove. We automatically activate our own experience to prove this right. This certainly constitutes a tragic part of the writing. A lot of people write that. And I think they don't write well, and the big reason is that they can't see that there's something bigger than that.

Adorno called this thing "being", Kant called such a chaotic and unopened thing "thing in itself", Schopenhauer called it "the unity of power", it is a very large object that we do not yet recognize, and it has not yet been illuminated by the light of reason. A good writer deals with both. For example, when Nietzsche began to look at the world as inhibition and representation in 1840, he read Schopenhauer's "Criticality", and he suddenly felt that the world had collapsed, and the most important issue he discussed in his life was the question of morality. Nietzsche said that yesterday's morality is likely to become immoral today. Your morality is likely to become immoral to me. Nietzsche is talking about the universality of morality, and of course he attacks mainly on the church and morality.

I think that after the middle of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, the world they presented constituted one of the most important aspects of our contemporary knowledge. Why? Because in the era of Nietzsche's writing, there were already very good writers who wrote at the same time as him, and these writers were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. They were concerned with the same problem, and in his later years Nietzsche was very excited when he was looking at Dostoevsky's works. As a thinker, he and writers see the same problems from different perspectives. This is what Nietzsche thinks, how did his Dionysus come about? It's a Greek choir, and the part of the performance is rational, there is a story, there is a plot, and we see it very clearly. We can't see what is behind him. What's behind it is expressed through the choir. So Nietzsche has a quote that I later used at the beginning of the book "The Cloak of Invisibility". Nietzsche said: If there is no **, our world is a mistake and a fallacy. He went to listen to the deepest wisdom contained in it. This is also a question that Adeno has repeatedly discussed about the Odyssey. When the Odyssey was sailing, he came across a monster called Sailen, and this Sailon would make a very beautiful singing voice. Sailors are subject to **. A sailor who will bypass him from a distance and walk rationally will obtain a safe life. But there is another category that needs to be able to get a real life. So the man went, and when he had gone there the ship ran aground and died. Is there a way - how can I not die at the same time as I want to get the truth of society and listen to wisdom? In fact, in the early days, in the Homeric epic, there was already an answer mentioned in the Homeric epic, that the Odyssey had people tie themselves to the mast. Then let the boat go over, he can both hear the ** and not fall into the sea. A very important symbol at this time. Later, Adeno devoted himself to this myth in the Enlightenment Dialectic, and we are dealing with both parts of the experience at the same time. An experience is illuminated by reason, and an experience is asleep. I think this aspect is particularly important, because it is meaningless for us to write today if we only look at all the experiences that can be summarized and analyzed in front of us. This is what Tolstoy called the writing of automation, or the life of automation. He said that each of us is actually living an automated life, never thinking about why we exist. Tolstoy said that such a person lived a lifetime, and I am afraid that he did not live a single day. Today, this social automation is even more obvious. This is the problem we face, and it's the problem that writing faces today.

The third question is how can we gain experience. You may also be concerned, you have said so much, how can we see the experience? I can't help it, I'll tell you a story first. There is a story in "One Thousand and One Nights", which was later written as **, titled "The Story of Two Dreamers". There was a man who lived in the area of Baghdad, and there was a man who slept at night, and a man with a gold coin knocked on his door and said, "You have a fortune buried in the city of Isfahan." So he hired a camel and went to the city of Isfahan, and when he went there, he found that the place was full of desert, and there was nothing, and he had used up all the money he had brought with him, and he slept in a monastery, and then there was a thief in the city, and the police came in to catch the thief, but the police did not catch him, and he took the man away. The police interrogated him, you came from **, what are you doing here. The man said that I was from such and such a place, and I had a dream in which I said where my wealth was, and I came. As soon as he finished speaking, the captain of the patrol laughed and said that there are such fools in the world. I had the same dream last night as you, about where my wealth was. The place he was talking about was exactly the city from which the dreamer had set out, and the two men were upside down from each other, and he went on to say that there was a wall, and there was a path into it, and there was a great courtyard, and in the courtyard there was a fig tree, and there was a fountain, and under this fountain was buried a great deal of wealth, and this place was his home. After coming out of the monastery, he hurried home, returned to his own house and dug under the fountain, and sure enough, he dug up countless riches. This story can be analyzed from different aspects. When I talk about experience today, I think it can also be inferred from the aspect of experience. You have an experience that you don't know, you need to take a big turn, you need to be strongly inspired before you can dig out your wealth from under your nose. All the riches are around you, near you, but you don't know it.

There's something special about that, and one of the concepts I'm going to talk about in Part 3 is that this experience is actually related to others. How do we gain our own experience? There's a very good way to do it. You put your experience in it, and then you touch and understand something new that can help you discover yourself. For example, if you're a woman, you don't know you're a woman, and you meet the first man, you know you're a woman. Because of the appearance of others. As soon as you compare, you know what my characteristics are, what my physiology is, and what I have. If you have lived in a pile of women since you were a child, and you have never been in contact with a single man in your life, you will not know about your wealth.

I was influenced by rationality and reality in my university studies. When I arrived in Shanghai, the Shanghai side told me, you hillbilly, you don't know which way the tap is going. All cities are new to us. So I went through four or five years of torture in Shanghai, a sense of guilt, and when you go into this new environment, your old experience is useless. But today, all Shanghainese and Beijingers, writers in Shanghai and writers in Beijing, will be very envious when they meet authors like me and Su Tong. Say you're different from us. You've lived in Shanghai for 20 years and Beijing for 10 years, but at the same time your most important life, from the age of one to seventeen, was spent in the countryside. And we don't have this memory. I began to understand what my memories of those 17 years were, not suddenly, but step by step, I slowly began to understand what that life meant to me and what kind of experience it provided for the whole of modern Chinese history. Part of "Peach Blossom with a Human Face" and "Spring in Jiangnan" are all related to the re-understanding of this memory. If I hadn't left my hometown, I would still be in the middle of complaining about reality, just like the men in my hometown.

What is Chinese culture? In the past, there was no such concept, and it was precisely because after Western culture came in that we had the concept of Chinese culture, the concept of Chinese literature, and the concept of Chinese culture. Young people reading a lot of works will not only not affect your own experience, but it will be very useful. You should try to understand things that are different from you. I once posted a Weibo, and I posted a Weibo almost a month. Sometimes Sina and Tencent call me and say you haven't sent it for a month, send us one. There is a Weibo I wrote: In fact, the meaning to be discovered in literature lies not in experience, but in the relationship between experience and others. Just as the truth is not in the facts, but in the interpretation of the facts.

Finally, a little thing. I read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago and saw Seryosha at the end, Seryosha is the purest character written in Tostoevsky**, like an angel. All the characters are dirty, full of lust, and have problems of one kind or another. Dostoevsky looked at them with great humility, and all of them were full of love. But there is one exception in this **, this is a child, and every time I read that Seryosha appeared and she went to protect a child, she would shed tears every time. Such a child in this very bad world, you will sweat for yourself. This little boy finally one day worships an elder of the monastery, and he feels that I am going to leave this world, that I am going to serve God in the monastery, that I am going to give my life to God. When his family was fighting, his brothers, his father, of course, had not killed anyone at that time, and there had been no major problems. So he ran to this monastery and said to the elder, I ask to stay by your side and serve God by your side for the rest of my life, and I am ready to give up in this outside world, and it has nothing to do with me. Elder Zosima said to him, you can serve God, but not now, you can do what you have to do now, because you can't understand your God yet, and you're going to go through all the things that this world has to have, and then one day you'll come back. This is Dostoevsky's advice to Seryosha, and I take it as advice to all writers. Thank you.

People who read a lot can have a lot of temperament