【Explore the charm and tension of details】
opening words
If the theme is the “soul” of a literary work and the plot is the “skeleton”, then the details are undoubtedly the “flesh and blood” of the work. Whether it is describing people, painting scenes, objects, or narrating, expressing emotions, or creating environments, it is inseparable from the detailed descriptions that are full and detailed. The Russian writer Gorky once regarded creation as “combining many small things into a large or small whole with perfect form”.
A wonderful detail is worth a thousand words. In classic literary works, characters often reveal their emotions in a gesture of raising their hands, frowning, and throwing their feet, and reveal their individuality in a sigh, a monologue, and a close-up.
Starting from this issue, this edition opens the column “Exploring the Charm and Tension of Details”, inviting writers and critics to interpret the charm and functions of detailed descriptions, and seeking ways and paths to polish the literary world with compact and lifelike details.
Author: Nan Fan, researcher at Fujian Academy of Social Sciences
Two factors play an irreplaceable role in making literary narratives fascinating and even addictive: the legendary nature and suspense within the plot create a strong attraction, and people are firmly caught by the desire to “know what will happen next” and cannot escape ; Many dazzling, lifelike details to construct or restore lifelike life scenes, making people feel like they are on the scene and empathize with them. Details are the capture and interception of a section of the event as a whole, or focus, enlargement, and display of a certain point to make it a close-up shot.
A literary detail can be a facial expression, a wrinkle, a stain on a skirt, or a street scene, a cliff, the sound of wind blowing through the treetops of a forest, or a bicycle leaning against a corner. For literature, clear images and sensual vibrancy produced by details are an integral part of aesthetics. If there is only the legend and suspense of the plot without sufficient details, if what people read is only the outline of the story, the charm of literature will be greatly reduced. Among the classic Chinese literature, the reason why “A Dream of Red Mansions” is full of flowers and beautiful things is largely due to the reproduction of rich details. Otherwise, people cannot imagine the Grand View Garden that is both poetic and secular.
Of course, the reproduction of details is not a stacked description, which indiscriminately magnifies what you see and hear. Outstanding literary masters often quickly grasp a detail, thereby activating a special character image, or driving a complete life atmosphere. The fifth chapter of “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” “Guan Gong warms the wine and kills Huaxiong” can be regarded as a famous example: “Guan Gong said: ‘Pour the wine, and it will come when you go. The sound was loud, and the shouts were loud, like the sky and the earth collapsed, and the mountains collapsed. Everyone was shocked. Just as they were about to inquire, when the Luan bell rang, the horses arrived at the army, and Yun Chang took Hua Xiong’s head and threw it on the ground. His wine Shang Wen.” The author doesn’t even bother to directly describe the fierce scene of the two generals’ confrontation. The loud drums and call signs are used as the background, and the details of “his wine is still warm” show Guan Gong’s bravery.
For portraits of characters, many writers are good at finishing details. Sun Li’s “Reed Flower Dang” described the “old man on the boat without much flesh, as thin as an old osprey”, and his hale and hearty demeanor is vivid on the paper. Zhao Shuli’s “Xiaoerhei Marriage” describes the details of Sanxiangu’s “old and pretty” with embroidered shoes, trouser legs, black handkerchief covering her bald head, and powdered old face like “donkey dung has frost on her egg”. Lu Xun’s narrative style is restrained and restrained. He often outlines a few vivid details with simple pen and ink to make the characters come alive. In “Blessing”, Mrs. Xianglin’s expression is dull, “the face is very thin, yellow with black, and the previous sad expression has disappeared, as if it is a woodcut, only the eyes are occasionally round”; “The True Story of Ah Q” Among them, the various details surrounding Ah Q’s acne scar make people laugh, and the scene of catching lice with Wang Hu is both exaggerated and vivid. A fine detail in a literary work can outweigh many lengthy descriptions hovering around it. Due to the magical power of details, many writers have been diligently pursuing, searching extensively, and even praying for the good luck of capturing wonderful details.
For writers, discovering all kinds of wonderful details is often more difficult than conceiving a complete plot. If a hundred writers can conceive a twists and turns of grievances and grievances, only twenty writers are expected to arrange appropriate details for it, making it reasonable and complete. As for the conceived details of perfection, one or two writers. The ups and downs of the stories are exciting, and the strong dramatic conflicts endow the plot with powerful energy. However, the reasonable details that depend on the plot skeleton often become a problem for writers. In many cases, the intensity of ups and downs just constitutes a contradiction with reasonableness. Gongdou plays are intriguing and intricate, and the writer cannot conceive of two court ladies sending WeChat to exchange key information; the charge on the battlefield is about to begin, and the desperate decisive battle is about to begin, and the writer cannot call tanks to fly over a 50-meter-wide ditch and jump into the enemy’s line at will. If numerous details are of poor quality, the overall believability of the plot can quickly diminish. Jia Baoyu went from being a playboy in the Grand View Garden to resolutely becoming a monk after cutting off his love. The turning point of the character’s fate is quite sharp. However, due to the countless solid details of “Dream of Red Mansions”, people feel that this turning point is just an irreversible necessity of life.
Writers can’t just rely on so-called inspiration or imagination to capture details. The superb details are sometimes obtained by accident, and more are based on rich life experience, sufficient historical knowledge, sharp observation and unique insight. Only with enough background information can a writer know what a bankrupt entrepreneur wears to a dinner party, or a mortgage-strapped clerk looks embarrassed when he receives a wedding invitation. In short, the details are not an insignificant subsection in literature, on the contrary, the unfolding of the details almost condenses all the cultivation of a writer.
Not all narrative works are equally concerned with detail. The reason why narratives in myths or historical records are relatively crude is often due to the author’s special intentions. German scholar Erich Auerbach’s “Imitation: Reality Depicted in Western Literature” once compared the narrative differences between Homer’s epic and a religious myth of the same period. The former has a clear context, clear pictures, and the causal relationship is clear at a glance; the latter is abrupt and brief, and the connection between one scene and another is hurried and blunt. This is not an oversight by the author. Compared with the sacred and sublime emphasized by religious myths, secular clothing, appearance, means of transportation, landforms and scenery, cause and effect, etc. are irrelevant. “Historical Records: Biographies of Assassins” describes Jing Ke’s departure to assassinate the King of Qin. The author only picks out the details of the generous and tragic song “The Wind is Rushing and the Water Is Cold” from the grand scene of Jing Ke’s farewell to the prince and guests, and it reproduces Jing Ke’s heroic hero who went to death boldly gas. Other matters such as who drove the car, how far the road traveled, how to eat and live, etc. are all hidden behind the curtain of history because of their insignificance.
At this time, it is necessary to mention a principle that many writers follow invisibly: art has no noise. The content that appears in the works must bear a certain meaning, and the content that does not bear any meaning will be eliminated because of redundancy. The same goes for detail descriptions. Literary narrative does not flow evenly and calmly, but sometimes dense and sometimes sparse, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, ups and downs, twists and turns, sometimes summarizing twenty years in one sentence, and sometimes writing five pages of experience for only half an hour. Facing a room, it can be a brief description in a few words, or three hundred sentences in eloquence. The important thing is which part of life the writer tries to focus on, which level to dissect, and at the same time cut out which leftovers are considered cumbersome. For example, in most martial arts novels, swords, lights and swords, heroes emerge in large numbers, cross the rivers and lakes, and love and hatred, the writers will not spare energy to pay attention to the details of daily life such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, weeding and farming, and going to the market.
Engels once pointed out in a letter to Ma Hucknas that the truth of details is an indispensable feature of realist literature. Compared with the high-level romantic literature, the daily life in the realist literature is gradually clear, and various details with pyrotechnic flavor emerge intensively. The study of literary history shows that mediocre characters, mundane life scenes, various furniture and utensils, or detailed descriptions of dialogue between characters are important symbols of Western realistic novels in the 19th century. This situation involves the rise of a new kind of value. In relatively peaceful days, the passion of ancient tragedies began to recede, and daily life such as daily life, market consumption, and family atmosphere took up more and more weight, and the echo of literature was the continuous increase in the details of daily life. The history of Chinese literature also showed a similar turning point. If “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Water Margin” show the open and closed lives of emperors, generals, and heroes, then “Jin Ping Mei” and “Dream of Red Mansions” turn to the trivial sophistication of the world and the shortcomings of parents. Lu Xun’s “A Brief History of Chinese Fiction” summarizes the latter “mostly because of the joys and sorrows of separation and reunion, and the abnormal things of fortune and fortune, interspersed with karma, and not too much about ghosts, and because it describes the state of the world and sees its coldness, it may also be called ‘the world. Love Letters’ also”.
Details will speak. Literary details imply relatively independent ideas. Sometimes, the unique meaning of literary details may form a certain tension with the dominant narrative, and the interweaving and dialogue between the two create complex artistic tension. In the “May 4th” new literature, resistance to family patriarchy is a striking theme. As a masterpiece of this theme, Ba Jin’s “Torrent Trilogy” accused the tyranny of patriarchy. Living in a gloomy deep house, Mrs. Gao’s authority cannot be offended. He bosses and orders Juexin and Juehui, and does not hesitate to suffocate the lives of young people one after another. The younger generation can only rush out, throwing off the shackles of patriarchy to seek an independent space. To a large extent, the sons’ rebellion against their father constituted the dominant narrative at the time. Nevertheless, when people read Zhu Ziqing’s “Back View” and read about a father wearing a black cloth cap and a dark blue padded robe staggering across the railway and platform to buy some oranges for his son, what comes to mind? Another dimension of the father-son relationship. Even in the cultural background where father and son are opposed, sincere fatherly love still flows silently, which makes people cry. At this time, literature reveals the rich texture and even the interweaving of contradictions in the picture of life. For literature, such complex connotations do not resort to chattering, but only rely on the details of an image.
In Zhu Ziqing’s prose “Back View”, the sincere details are described in tears.profile picture
The internal analysis of literary narration shows that the plot implies a kind of kinetic energy. It is often said that the guns hanging on the wall in the first act must be fired in the last act. This not only shows that the plot is an organic whole, but at the same time, the plot maintains a continuous evolution from the beginning, to the climax, and finally to the ending. Relatively speaking, the appearance of details often brings a sense of pause. Generals of the two armies fight with knives in front of the battle, two lovers meet in a coffee shop for secret talks, a spy sneaks into a secret room to steal information, and a football player is about to make a kick at the door – at this time, any portrait, clothing, demeanor, posture, psychological and external The detailed description of the environment will suspend the action, so that the plot will stay in place. The denser the details, the fuller the plot, and the slower the progress of the plot; on the contrary, the rarer the details, the more concise the plot, and the faster the progress of the plot. This is the dialectical unity between the internal plot and details of literary narrative. According to narratology, the former is regarded as the abscissa of literary narration, and the latter is regarded as the ordinate of literary narration. However, the different narrative tendencies of plots and details once caused a profound debate within realist literature.
Lukacs, a Western Marxist theorist, proposed the opposition between plot and detail in his essay “Narrative and Description”, and expounded the meaning of this opposition with a unique analysis. Lukacs compared Zola with Tolstoy and Balzac. Zola’s “Nana” and Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” jointly describe a horse race: Zola’s meticulous reproduction of details is just a kind of “interlude” between the plots, Tolstoy The horse racing is an integral part of the plot; Zola’s “Nana” and Balzac’s “Disillusionment” co-appear in theater: Compared with the close connection between the theater and the fate of the characters in “Disillusionment”, Zola’s understanding of various theaters Rigorous descriptions of details merely produce a complete isolated fragment. In short, Zola’s description of details is precise, precise and meticulous. However, these details may be separated from the plot or character and expand without restraint, and even become a cumbersome addition within the plot – “the hypertrophy of real details”. Lukacs believes that Zola’s tendency implies the danger of naturalism, and the realistic reproduction of appearances does not help to understand the historical movement mechanism behind the appearances; the reason why Tolstoy or Balzac became great realist writers is that a The important reason is to get rid of the static accumulation of details and show the trend of history in the narrative.
Lukacs eloquently argues for what he sees as realist literature, but the relationship between plot and detail is still perhaps more complex than he expected. Lukacs’ implicit expectation for “narration and description” is that the continuous evolution of the plot is like an allegory of the historical movement mechanism, and the many complicated details completely reflect the connotation of the plot. Therefore, details, plots, and history form concentric circles that symbolize each other. Perhaps, this is just a philosopher’s artistic ideal. In fact, the way of echoing among the three is far more intricate and tortuous, even hidden. In many cases, precisely because of the gap between details, plots, and history, literature may show unexpected special discoveries. To a large extent, this state of affairs indicates the real contribution of realist literature. Of course, no matter what objections people have to the views of “Narrative and Description” or how many supplements they provide, an undeniable fact is that Lukacs’ discussion of the relationship between plot and details has opened up a huge space for theoretical thinking.
“Guangming Daily” (page 14, April 26, 2023)
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责编：李昱莹 ]