My Spiritual Homeland

Words are meant to be read and heard, not merely looked at. If looking is what you want, you might as well turn to picture books. Anyone who fails to understand this can only produce textual garbage full of noise. Thought, language, and writing are all of a piece: if the words sound muddled when read aloud, the ideas will be no better.

Wang is talking about fiction here. Recently, while reading short stories, I have found some that seize my attention within two or three lines, while others leave my gaze unfocused even after a page or two, the whole piece remaining hazy by the time I finish it. Later, I began making a point of checking the translator’s name; there are some translators I now skip at a glance. It seems that the writing itself matters a great deal in fiction.

I find Wang Xiaobo’s writing very easy to focus on. It is easy to quiet down and settle into the right frame of mind.

Spend a lifetime learning art. I studied both the humanities and the sciences. Yet in the classroom, it was my science teachers who mentioned the word art more often: my chemistry teacher said there was an art to conducting experiments; my computer science teacher said there was an art to programming. They said that knowing how to do something correctly is science, while knowing how to do it well is art. The former has rules for judging truth from falsehood; the latter does not. The essence of art is to make people feel that something is good—even flawless.

After the college entrance exam, I initially wanted to major in Chinese language and literature, my head full of dreams of writing fiction. But after several twists and turns, I ended up in artificial intelligence. AI—Artificial Intelligence—at least it still gave me half a claim to Art.

I also took quite a few online electives in art and literature: Buddhist art, appreciation of the Four Great Classical Novels, ancient Chinese literature, architectural art, and so on.

Later, though, I realized that these so-called “arts” were merely constructing systems of judgment and understanding. In the terms above, they were concerned with right and wrong, not good and bad. They had attained science, but had not become arts in their own right.

Seen that way, this accidental turn of events may have been something to be grateful for.

I have always felt that once you have read The Lover, you know what the art of the modern novel is; once you have read Wang Daoqian’s translated prose, you know what modern Chinese literary language is.

When I first read this in high school and saw Wang Xiaobo lavish praise on Wang Daoqian’s translation of The Lover, I immediately went out and bought that edition. It was my first work of French literature, dreamlike and unreal.

Later, after I lent the book to a female classmate, two more female classmates came to ask whether I had a copy of The Lover.

The Art of Fiction

I read essays myself, and sometimes write a few. As I see it, an essay is simply a matter of making an argument: once you see where the reasoning lies, you state it plainly.

To burden fiction with moral responsibility is, as the Greeks put it, to fasten the saddle onto the head.

Any art can be known only through its works. Those who like to read only essays, criticism, and summaries will never understand any kind of art.

So there is really no need for me to spout nonsense unless I cannot help myself. Otherwise, I might as well hold my tongue and keep copying passages. The more I write, the more likely it is to feel affected and contrived.

Still, reading an essay now and then can be a pleasure. It gives you the feeling of having arrived at a different point of view without having to use your brain.

On the Art of Fiction, Starting with The Golden Age

Being positive and aspiring may be a principle for conducting oneself, but it should not be kept on one’s lips at every moment. I believe my proper job is to make my fiction as engaging as possible, not to lace it with deliberate moralizing. My approach to writing is to create works for people who read fiction, not to lecture wayward young people.

Shaping people’s character and the like should be a concern for children’s books. The author’s proper task, and fiction’s proper task, is simply to convey another life, another world. As an extension of my brief life, if that world is rendered with fullness and in concrete form, then the work has already done its job. Moral instruction is not an author’s obligation; drawing insight from the work is the reader’s concern.

In truth, every book should be interesting. For some books, being interesting is their reason for existing; for some novels, it is the standard they ought to meet. I can remember every interesting book I have read, while with dull ones I cannot even recall the title. But it is not just me: all of us are close to forgetting what interesting even means.

What does it mean for something to be interesting? Every work by Xia Da is quite interesting, Song of the Long March most of all. That is what I think for now.