Subtle hint

Author: Han Shaoong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features: This book marks Han Shaoong's breakthrough in his writing: it stems from the completion of The Dictionary of Maqiao and attempts to overturn some of its conclusions. You have various social experiences, life journeys, and rational reflections, yet you may find it difficult to express them or let them slip away unnoticed. Implication seems like a confidant who engages in boundless and unrestrained conversations with you, gently guiding simple topics into deeper discussions, offering you a fresh perspective: leisure programs become the main course, abstract concepts are banished from the classroom, "like a group of unruly students who start lessons when the dismissal bell rings and end them when the school bell rings." A glance, a hat, an old station, a street vendor's call—all these transform our memories into a museum and constitute real life. I have always wanted to interpret these concrete details, to decipher these scattered remnants, as if searching for their definitions in a dictionary. These details often lie beyond people's words, revealing life's hidden messages and the underlying reasons, which are rarely perceived—though I lack such a dictionary. Moreover, these elements contain both the natural essence of things and the constructed imagery of media culture, almost omnipresent, chaotic, and dazzling, seemingly far beyond my capacity to analyze and interpret. More importantly, like most people, I have long been accustomed to thinking through language, accustomed to its confinement of the mind, and may have lost the ability to perceive "non-verbal" information. Once I step away from language, I do not possess any greater intellectual advantage than a dog or a child. I remain trapped in language, but I cannot suppress the urge to explore beyond it, to venture into the subconscious realm beyond speech. I must engage in a confrontation with myself, challenging language with language, unveiling the deeper truths of life hidden beneath it. After finishing The Dictionary of Maqiao, I once said, "People can only live within language." This bears some resemblance to the tone of Wittgenstein or Heidegger. Yet as soon as I said this, I doubted myself, and from then on, I began to think about writing a book to overturn this conclusion, to explore the places where words fail to reach and to see whether life truly exists there, or how it might exist. The Dictionary of Maqiao is a book about words, dissecting their lived meanings, and it gradually became a novel as I wrote it. Now, it is a book about concrete imagery, extracting their significance and constructing interpretive frameworks, which begins to resemble theory—but though I have no intention of writing theory, I simply want to compile fragments of experience. In this book, I will present some common examples of hidden messages, including how scenes, expressions, faces, clothing, rituals, and other objects speak to us. Next, I invite readers to examine the role and function of concrete symbols in life, including how they engage with our memories, senses, emotions, personalities, and destinies. We can also explore their position and function in society, such as how they influence our education, politics, economy, violence, urbanization, and traditional culture. Finally, as an indispensable yet challenging part, I will return to examining how language and concrete imagery mutually generate and control each other, and from this perspective, understand the crisis of modern knowledge. In my view, the crisis of knowledge is one of the fundamental crises, with wars, poverty, indifference, hatred, and totalitarianism merely its outward symptoms. If these disasters can never be completely eradicated, they should at least not spiral out of control in people's minds, nor be tragically amplified in a knowledge crisis. In my opinion, overcoming this crisis may require occasionally breaking certain stylistic conventions—for instance, always treating concrete sensory experiences as raw material for literature, turning them into paintings, music, novels, poetry, and TV dramas, as if they were pleasant drinks readily consumed. This might be part of the way ideology dangerously tames us. Each of these subconscious ailments is formed within this stylistic dominance. Therefore, if I have always handled and used concrete imagery in this way, now I am more inclined to spit out the "pleasant drinks" and examine them under a microscope, breaking them down into less palatable medications. If I have always treated auditory and visual phenomena as leisure programs, as natural extracurricular activities, now I want to try bringing them into the classroom as a core subject, sparking thought and debate, while pushing many abstract conceptual systems aside—treating them as if they were outdoor picnics, soccer, playing in the mud, or fighting grasshoppers—regarding them as objects of perception. That is to say, sometimes we need a stylistic substitution: writing literature as theory, or theory as literature. This is like a group of unruly students who start lessons when the dismissal bell rings and end them when the school bell rings. As for this stylistic disruption, I ask for the audience's understanding.