林白:文字给我安全感

来源:中国文化译研网

作者:中国文化译研网

2018-10-22

  林白,女,1958年1月生于广西省北流县。1982年毕业于武汉大学图书馆学系。曾在广西图书馆、广西电影制片厂、中国文化报社、武汉市文联工作。1982年开始发表作品,1992年加入中国作家协会,现居北京,为自由作家。著有长篇小说《一个人的战争》《说吧,房间》《万物花开》《妇女闲聊录》《北去来辞》等,散文集《林白散文》,出版《林白文集》(四卷),共出版作品四十余部,有法、意、韩、日四种文字单行本问世。长篇小说《妇女闲聊录》获华语文学传媒大奖2004年小说家奖。《北去来辞》获第九届茅盾文学奖提名。

  林白与陈染等女性作家的作品形成了中国当代文学史上“女性主义文学”创作思潮。她的作品常用回忆的方式叙述,女性意识强烈,对女性个人体验进行极端化的描述,讲述绝对自我的故事,善于捕捉女性内心的复杂微妙的涌动。

  林白的代表作《一个人的战争》是部具有相当自传色彩的长篇小说。借着这本小说,林白有意总结她早期的生活及创作经验,并思索一个女性为写作所必须付出的代价。全书是始自五六岁的叙述者林白通过抚摸自己,初识自己的身体,一路描写她的少年学习经历、初燃的创作野心、流浪四方的奇遇、一再挫折的恋爱,被迫堕胎的悲伤等情节。最后叙述者辗转由家乡来到首都北京,“死里逃生,复活过来”的叙述者洋洋洒洒地写来,使得小说有一股直率动人的力量。小说以“我”的叙述声音横贯全局,但作者不时加入第三人称观点,旁观一个名叫多米的女子的遭遇。我与多米代表了林白的不同身份——过去与现在、虚构与现实、内里与外在、血肉与鬼魅、恋爱与被恋爱的身份。分裂的主题,流动的视角,多元的声音,使《一个人的战争》成为九十年代中国女性主义文学创作的蓝本。林白在《妇女闲聊录》里揭开了我们看似熟悉的农村所不为人知的一面。比如木珍这样的女性所言说的,她内心的隐痛,她周围大多数人的日子,甚至农村中凋敝的日子,怎么打牌,怎么做二奶等。我们从中可以看到一些人物内心的感觉,属于心灵史发出的东西。林白为读者打开了一个观看世界的新视角,她的作品回到生存本身,展开了一片我们非常陌生的生活真实。

  《北去来辞》是林白最为丰厚复杂的作品,她以宏达的格局和独特的视角讲述了两代人不同知识层次的女性由南方到北京的坎坷经历与精神成长,并围绕她们,记录了一个时代的变迁。


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林白

Lin Bai

  Lin Bai was born in Beiliu County, Guangxi Province in January 1958. She graduated from the Department of Library Science of Wuhan University in 1982, and has worked at Guangxi Library, Guangxi Film Studio, China Culture Newspaper, and Wuhan Wenlian. She began publishing works in 1982 and joined the Chinese Writers Association in 1992. She now lives in Beijing and is a freelance writer. Her novels include A War of One's Own, Speaking, My Room, Wanwu Huakai, The Records of Women’s Gossip, Letters from the North, and so on, and the prose collection Lin Bai’s Prose and The Lin Bai Collection (Four Volumes), a total of more than 40 works published that also came out in French, Italian, Korean and Japanese. The novel The Records of Women’s Gossip was awarded the 2004 novelist award in the Chinese Literature Media Awards. To the North was nominated for the 9th Mao Dun Literary Award.

  The works of female writers such as Lin Bai and Chen Ran formed the creative trend of “feminist literature” in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. Her works are often told in the form of memories, with strong feminine awareness, extreme descriptions of women’s personal experiences, the telling of absolutely personal stories, and are good at capturing the complex subtle surges in women’s hearts.

  Lin Bai’s magnum opus A War of One's Own is a long novel with considerable autobiographical elements. Through this novel, Lin Bai intended to summarize her early life and creative experiences and consider the price a woman must pay for her writing. The entire book comes from Lin Bai, a five-or-six-year-old narrator who learns about her own body for the first time by touching herself. In the story, she describes her childhood learning experiences, her original creative ambitions, her wandering adventures, her frustrations in love the sadness of being forced to have an abortion and more. In the end, the narrator moves from her hometown to the capital Beijing. The narrator, who had “escaped with death and arrived through resurrection” writes eloquently, which gives the novel a straightforward and moving power. The novel traverses the whole world with the narrative voice of “I”, but the writer sometimes uses the third-person view and looks at the unfortunate meeting of a woman named Domi. “I” and Domi represent the different identities of Lin Bai – the identities of past and present, fiction and reality, inner and outer, flesh and blood and ghosts, love and loved ones.

  The theme of splitting, a flowing perspective, and diverse voices have made A War of One's Own the blueprint of Chinese feminist literary creation in the 1990s. In The Records of Women’s Gossip, Lin Bai uncovered the unknown side of what we seem to know about the countryside. For example, women like Ms. Muzhen, who said that she had pain in her heart, the days of most people around her, and even the days of desperation in the countryside, how to play cards, and how to be a mistress. From this we can see the feelings of some people’s hearts, which come from the history of the mind. Lin Bai has opened up a new perspective for readers to view the world. Her works have returned to the very existence of life and have opened up the realities of life that are very strange to us.

  To the North is the most rich and complex work of Lin Bai. She describes the experiences and spiritual growth of two women from two generations with different levels of knowledge on a journey from the South to Beijing on a grand scale and from a unique perspective. She uses these two characters to record the changes of an era.


责任编辑:霍娟