A novel full of poetic and picturesque beauty

"Oh, Xiangxue" is the masterpiece of contemporary famous female writer tie Ning, which won the National excellent short Story and the first Youth Literature creation Award in 1982. In 1991, it was adapted into a film of the same name, filmed by China Children's Film Studio, and won the highest award for youth film at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.

In the early 1980s, the long-established way of thinking seriously affected the value judgment of literary works. At that time, although political preaching was despised, the social content of the work was still regarded as the first. Therefore, the widely respected short stories of that period are: Jiang Zilong's "Happy New year", Liang Xiaosheng's "this is a magical land", Sun Shaoshan's "800 meters deep", Hangying's "Ming Girl", Jinhe's "not just nostalgia" and so on. Most of these five novels are excellent. The main reason why they are popular is that they have heavy themes and novel ideas. The novel "Oh, fragrant Snow" appears to be a maverick, and at first it did not enter the candidate works. Fortunately, the old writer represented by Sun Li had a discerning eye and supported this work, which made it famous and remarkable.

With tie Ning's unique sensitive, delicate, gentle and affectionate emotional characteristics, and his keen pursuit of romantic and dreamy writing style, the novel became a milestone in tie Ning's early creation. it also established tie Ning's important position in the literary world as a young generation of writers at that time.

"Oh, Xiangxue" takes Taiergou, a remote mountain village in the north, as the narrative and lyric background, and portrays a group of naive, lively and simple mountain village girls such as Xiangxue. It describes the waves that the train which stops for only one minute a day brings to the quiet life in the mountain village, and thus expresses the beautiful and rich feelings. Oh, in a colorful minute, you are full of the joys and sorrows of the girls in Taiergou!

Xiang Xue is also the image portrayed by the author in his works. Xiang Xue is a 17-year-old girl from a small mountain village in Taiergou, the only junior high school student. She is innocent, simple and kind-hearted, resolute and persistent, and like other girls, they are full of novelty and attention to the world beyond the mountain. The difference is that in their pursuit, Xiang Xue pays more attention to cultural items such as schoolbags and pencil boxes, and whether they can go to Beijing to study at university. The author mainly describes a little adventure of Xiang Xue: during the one-minute parking gap, she resolutely stepped into the train and traded her accumulated 40 eggs for a long-awaited styrofoam pencil case with magnets. Reading and appreciation of American articles

For this reason, she was willing to be blamed by her parents, and she walked thirty miles alone in the dark, which required a great deal of courage for a girl from a mountain village who usually didn't talk much and was timid. The psychological motivation of Xiang Xue's move is the yearning for civilization outside the mountains, the urgent desire to change the closure and backwardness of the mountain village and get rid of poverty, as well as the self-love and self-esteem of the girls in the mountains. So she pursues higher, braver and more prominent than others.

The tone of the novel is clear, fresh and moving. The novel is well conceived and contains rich connotations in a short length. The work does not focus on vigorous scenes, fierce conflicts and twists and turns, but only captures moments, captures a few small life scenes, and focuses the artistic description on the characters. They describe their psychological changes and emotional waves in detail, which reflects the evolution of life between the new and the old, with a strong local flavor.

The novel's style is fresh and meaningful, the text is fresh and vivid, the style is elegant and chic, the artistic conception aftertaste is long, has the poetic beauty. Not only Xiangxue's pursuit is full of poetry, but even the village girls' yearning for jewelry and flight attendants is also poetic, even those inanimate objects, the author also endows them with aura to explore the railway tracks, shyly cowering small wooden boxes, mountains like mother's chest, leaves singing in the night wind, and streams running jubilantly, which not only sets off the poetry of the whole article, but also shows the writer's childlike innocence.

The more profound significance of the novel lies in taking advantage of the corner of the Taier gap to write about the pain and joy of China coming out of the shadow of history, getting rid of isolation, ignorance and backwardness, and moving towards opening up, civilization and progress after the reform and opening up. At the beginning of the novel, it is about the great changes in the mountain countryside:

If someone hadn't invented the train, if someone hadn't laid the tracks deep into the mountains, you wouldn't have found Taiergou. It and its more than a dozen villagers, wholeheartedly hidden in the deep folds of the mountain, from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, silently accept the warmth and rudeness given by the mountain.

However, two slender, shiny subway tracks extended. It hovered bravely over the hillside, and quietly tried to move forward, twisting and twisting, and finally went round to the foot of Taiergou, then drilled into the dark tunnel, rushed to another mountain sorghum, and ran towards the mysterious distance.

This is a novel full of poetry and spirituality of life, and the writer Sun Li's point of view is the most representative. He said: this novel is a poem from beginning to end. This is a pure poem, that is, a clear spring. The place it passes through is also the realm of purity.

Sun Li appreciates the central word of Xiangxue, that is to say, it is a poem from beginning to end. Poetry and novel are two different styles. Poetry is called lyric literature, while novel is regarded as narrative literature. Why is a novel such as a poem a good novel? The good thing is that the lyric in the narrative has achieved the same aesthetic effect as poetry.

Liu Xie, an ancient Chinese literary theorist, pointed out in his Wen Xin Diao long: the scripture of emotion, the latitude of reason, the meridian and then the weft, the arrangement and then the smooth speech, which is the origin of the text. The writer resigned with emotion, and the viewer fell in love with the article.

Every work of art should be the fruit of enthusiasm and should run through it. If there is no enthusiasm, it is impossible to understand what makes the writer pick up the pen. It is often the emotion that the writer once experienced that causes the creative impulse. He wants to use the image system composed of language form to convey it, so that readers can get the same experience and produce similar feelings, which is the activity of literature. In this sense, all creations, including novels, are lyric.

Tie Ning is lucky among contemporary writers. She is one of the writers with few and few family origins mentioned by Shu Ting. In that cultural desert era, she had the opportunity to receive valuable artistic edification through family learning, which enabled her to gain a unique artistic vision and develop elegant artistic taste and keen artistic sense. Tie Ning has expressed her views on the tendency of critical circles to emphasize ideas rather than art. She said: the novel is not metaphysics, in fact, the active circle of thought on which the novel depends is very narrow. The offensive ability of the novel to the reader does not lie in the arrangement and combination of various esoteric thoughts, but in the expression of thought created by the novelist in the breath of life and the richness of the expression. The novel has its own unique performance, the novel can express philosophy, but it is different from philosophy, the novel can tell history, but it is not history after all. The novel has its own internal stipulation and artistic law.

Tie Ning's novels can stand in an invincible position. For more than 20 years, the momentum of creation has not diminished, and the level of creation has been continuously improved. What is its secret? Compared with other writers, she has no memories of the scars of anti-rightist and Cultural Revolution, nor does she have personal legendary experiences. one of the important reasons why she has been able to maintain the vitality of art and the life of creation for a long time is that her novels win with art.

Tie Ning's message: I still hope that from this ordinary story, readers can see not only the simple and pure beautiful hearts of the girls in the old mountain village, but also their strong and sincere yearning and pursuit for a new life. And the price paid regardless of everything for this pursuit. What else is there? Can you feel the poignant severity of life itself? Can it arouse our younger generation's strong sense of responsibility to change their lives and society? Maybe this is my extravagant hope. (youth Literature, No. 5, 1982)

Shanghai, November 30, 2019

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