What exactly is literature?

This question is bothering me more and more. Since I published my works at the age of eighteen, along the way, I have written traditions, poems, essays, and best-selling works, until now, I have been put on the hat of a "famous officialdom writer" in a daze, but my thinking about literature and understanding of literature are far less clear than when I was young.

I don't blame me, most of the people who have literary feelings live in this kind of entanglement. When people reach middle age, they suddenly find that falling in love with literature is actually quite troublesome. Engaging in literary creation is a troublesome thing. This trouble, first, comes from the heart. Our minds are often separated from our physical bodies, and our minds' perceptions or delusions about the material world are often in conflict with our physical feelings about the materialistic world, so much so that I can't make a judgment on which side to go towards. The second is the conflict between literature and reality, especially the conflict between literary propositions and literary practices. This conflict is particularly acute today, when literary concepts are rampant and literary practice is seriously lagging behind, so much so that I have to ask the question: Is there still literature now? Are we engaged in a kind of labor called literary creation? Is there any value in this kind of labor? What's the value?

There is a voice that says that literature is dead. In this era of entertainment to death or pan-entertainment, anything with spiritual value has been hit by a wall, and literature has been hurt the most. There is also a voice saying that the marginalization of literature has become an ironclad fact, and the emergence of the Internet and the development of modern media have seized the original hill of literature, putting literature in an embarrassing situation that it has never seen before. For this reason, too many writers sigh for a long time, or change careers, or abandon their pens, or also join the spread of fashion culture and secular culture.

None of this is important, what is important is whether we have figured out the word "literature" and whether we have figured out the relationship between literature and the public. Also, while we pay too much attention to the external environment of literature, do we also ask ourselves, what are we missing?

Honesty, and the awe and respect for literature.

I think that these are the two things that are most lacking in all Chinese writers today, including me. Literature is the true writing of our hearts, the expression of freedom, the tenacious struggle of the soul in squeezing and distortion, and the cleanliness! And we have imposed too many things on literature, and literature has not only changed its shape and flavor in our hands, but now it has added a worldly burden, that is, relying on literature to exchange fame and fortune that should not be exchanged. When literature is pulled into Vanity Fair again and again, divided and disintegrated by fame and selfish desires, is there still literature?

This is a question worth pondering.

To put it bluntly, literature is the study of people, and literature is inseparable from the study of people at any time, and I am talking about research, not education. When literature is forced to educate, it becomes a tool of some people or some forces, and such a tool has no vitality. Literature is still not spiritual opium, and for too many days, we have allowed literature to act as an anesthetic.

What exactly is literature? No one can answer clearly, and there is no need to answer it. When we are faced with manuscript paper, we want to express the pain in our hearts, the happiness in our hearts, and the pain in our hearts, pour them out, and disseminate them in a certain way, literature has been produced. In my opinion, literature is the exchange, communication, and collision between people, but also the communication between oneself, the stretching of one's own heart and the flow of spirit, and the warmth of language shared by all human beings.

From childhood to the present, on the road of literature, he has run for most of his life, written a large stack of words, and won a certain amount of love from readers. But I still feel that I am ashamed of literature. For one, I don't have the courage to be honest; Second, my writing is still not very clean. At the request of Chongqing Publishing Group, I carefully selected the words that I thought were "qualified", compiled them into a book, and published them in a collection called Selected Collections, which is actually a summary, a reflection and a review of my own creative process.

When people reach middle age, they should look back. No matter who you are, no matter what your profession is, you should stop and look back to see which paths are wrong, which steps are still crooked, which strength is not strong enough, which qualities still contain impurities, and where there is still dirt and rust in the soul. Then he shook his head and continued on his way. Because our mission is not over, our life is in a sense called the beginning. The same is true of literature, where reflection leads to progress, and review leads to advancement. Facing literature with the heart of a primary school student is a lifelong choice I have made for literature.

The first one selected into the anthology this time is the short stories, which have been written one after another over the years, some of which have been published in literary journals, and some of which have been hidden in the computer after they have been written, reluctant to show them. At a certain time, they hollowed me out and made me experience life and death again and again, making me feel that the writer's ability is so limited, obviously when you encounter what you strongly want to express, but you can't express it, and when you encounter something you have to drill through, you just can't get into it. Human nature has a thickness, wrapped in a very solid shell, which is what I thought at that time. When I wrote these works, I was in a monastery and was experiencing a day called spiritual practice. Later, when I came out of the monastery, I decided to break the shell and decided to use a magnet-like gaze to suck life and the earth. During this period, I wrote "The Vegetable is Yellow", wrote about the difficulties and struggles of a woman, wrote about the hometown that I had hidden in my heart for a long time, and the golden rape flowers. I dance on the rape flowers of my hometown, and I scream or scream in the distortion of human nature. I know that my hometown is just a dream, a dream that I don't want to wake up from all my life. This dream is actually the ultimate pursuit of literature, the hometown is not dead, the vitality of the writer is not dead, and literature is not dead! It's a pity that all writers are spiritual wanderers, who come from their hometown and can never go back, which is the biggest embarrassment and dilemma in literature.

As for "The Great Corps", it was another attempt of mine, and I was so excited that I was used to writing about the countryside, and suddenly I touched the military and touched that special period of history. I was like a lone wolf in the northwest, roaring and roaring in the vast wilderness, and finally from the smoke and vastness, I brushed off a layer of dust for history and touched that hot heart. Tenacity, perseverance, and never giving up, this is the soul of that generation, our eternal spirit. Remember the Great Northwest and remember that generation of reclamation people.

In this screening, officialdom novels were deliberately not included. First, officialdom novels have a bad reputation, are sought after by readers, sneered at by the mainstream, and continue to be controversial to this day. If I don't choose it, it's not that I look down on it, but writers have the right to sift through their own lives and take care of their works. If you don't take it out for the time being, it doesn't mean you won't take it out forever. Therefore, I just want to tell the reader that the writer is not positioned by the outside world, and the writer always belongs to his own heart, to his own words, and of course, to the reader. Let readers see the other side of me and read the other side of me is the original intention of publishing this anthology.

Thanks to Chongqing Publishing Group, a writer who has been far away from the so-called "tradition" can return to tradition again. Tradition is the root, tradition is the foundation, and tradition is the deepest and deepest soul of literature.

Literature is immortal.

The value of human beings is immortal, the spirit is immortal, and literature will always have a place to live.

2012.5.29