莫言推荐及评川沙长篇小说《阳光》——试图用小说探索中国人的信仰问题
原载2004年台湾商务印书馆出版长篇 小说《阳光》推荐序
莫言 2004 7 12 北京
川沙是谦谦君子,但在小说创作中却野心勃勃。这部《阳光》,就是明证。他试图用小说探索中国人的信仰问题,试图用小说解构历史并重新建设历史。于是,历史和哲学就交织在一起,波澜壮阔和柔情万种就融会于一炉,过去的痛苦与未来的焦虑就并存于文本之中。整部小说贯穿了川沙诗人的激情和美国诗人金斯伯格式的反叛。在人文哲理方面让人联想到昆德拉的《玩笑》、《生命中不能承受之轻》,奥威尔的《1984》和《动物庄园》,车尔尼雪夫斯基的长篇《怎么办》,英国女作家伏尼契的长篇《牛虻》等小说里承载着巨大的思想内涵的作品。正如川沙所说,这部小说就是要让千百万念着“阿弥陀佛”的中国人知道世界上还有千百万念着“阿门”的西方人、人除了“托福”外还要有忏悔。如果说人的思想和信仰就是人的灵魂,则川沙的小说《阳光》是试图为后共产主义时期物欲横流拜金主义盛行的中国人招魂。一本书本不应该承担这么多,但偏偏承担了这么多,这也是我推荐这本书的重要理由。
莫言,原名管谟业,1955年2月17日出生于山东高密,第一个获得诺贝尔文学奖的中国籍作家。他从80年代初开始发表作品,1984年因《透明的红萝卜》而一举成名 ,1986年发表的《红高粱》成为他最著名的代表作,入选“20世纪中文小说100强”。 2011年莫言凭借《蛙》荣获茅盾文学奖。2012年莫言获得诺贝尔文学奖 ,获奖理由是:通过幻觉现实主义将民间故事、历史与当代社会融合在一起。据不完全统计,莫言的作品目前至少已经被翻译成40种语言。 莫言毕业于解放军艺术学院文学系,于北京师范大学鲁迅文学院研究生班获得硕士文艺学学位。获得得中国“大家文学奖”、 “冯牧文学奖”、 “法兰西艺术与文学骑士勋章”等奖项。主要作品:长篇小说《红高粱家族》、《天堂蒜薹之歌》、《十三步》、《酒国》、《丰乳肥臀》、《檀香刑》、《四十一炮》等九部,中篇小说《透明的红萝卜》、《爆炸》、《欢乐》、《三十年前的长跑比赛》等24部,短篇小说《枯河》、《白狗秋千架》《拇指铐》等80余篇,还有剧本、散文等多部、篇。
Chuan Sha is a modest man, but his novel is full of ambition. Sunlight proves the point. He uses the novel as a medium to explore Chinese beliefs, to deconstruct and reconstruct history. Therefore, history and philosophy mingle, the beautiful and the sublime merge, old pains and new anxieties coexist in his text.
His writing is sustained with a poetic passion and a Ginsbergian rebelliousness. It moves with an irresistible gravity reminiscent of novels such as Kundera’s The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Animal Farm, Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, and Voynich’s The Gadfly.
As Chuan Sha states, he wants his novel to remind millions of Chinese who chant “Amida Buddha” that there are millions others who say “Amen,” and that there are other ways to approach Western culture than “TOEFLE.” If thought and beliefs represent the human soul, then Chuan Sha’s novel is a courageous gesture to the Chinese soul in our post-Communist, materialistic age. A novel need not be burdened with such weight, but Sunlight carries precisely this much weight, and this is also why I recommend it.
Mo Yan
July 2004
Beijing, China
Guan Moye (simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè; born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan (/moʊ jɛn/, Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as “one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers”, and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.
Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981.Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Clan is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The author deals with upheavals in Chinese history such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Communist Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example from the point of view of the invading Japanese soldiers.
His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine is a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun. Big Breasts & Wide Hips deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts.The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics regarded Big Breasts’ perceived negative portrayal of Communist soldiers.Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days.He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush. He prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by typing using a pinyin input method, because the latter method “limits your vocabulary”.Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a meta-fiction about the story of a landlord who is reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land reform movement. The landlord observes and satirizes Communist society, such as when he (as a donkey) forces two mules to share food with him, because ” the age of communism… mine is yours and yours is mine.”