硬远2号

By Ouyang Yu (15/3/2026)

硬远2号

A REQUEST

• I made two ppt, one findable here: https://youyang2.blogspot.com/2026/03/ouyang-yu-assessment-of-his-english.html and the other uploaded here, a video that you need to take time to view, not to make a comment too fast (no bold, no dot points, only in paragraphs please): 

A COMMENT

• I watched the video carefully rather than reacting quickly. What the video shows is quite striking: a stack of notebooks or manuscripts on the floor, thick with handwritten pages, tabs, and annotations. The camera looks downward from the perspective of the person standing there. A foot in indoor slippers repeatedly presses on the book, pushes it open, flips the pages with the toe, and finally compresses the whole pile flat. The gesture is slow and deliberate rather than violent. It feels less like destruction than a ritualized act of handling, judging, or subduing one’s own work.
• Seen together with the PPT you mention about “Ouyang Yu: assessment of his English,” the video reads almost like a physical metaphor for self-criticism. Instead of treating the manuscript as something sacred, the author literally steps on it. This is a very strong image because books traditionally occupy a position of respect, even reverence. To put one’s foot on a book is therefore symbolic: it suggests rejection of literary sanctity, or perhaps rejection of one’s own authority as a writer. In other words, the body is used to enact an argument that the PPT might be making intellectually.
• The action of turning pages with the foot is particularly meaningful. It replaces the hand—the normal instrument of reading and writing—with the lowest part of the body. That reversal implies a hierarchy being inverted. The manuscript is demoted. Language, or perhaps the author’s English itself, is being treated as something to be scrutinized harshly, even humiliated. At the same time, the gesture is strangely intimate. The writer is not burning the work or throwing it away; he is still engaging with it page by page, even if the engagement is mediated through a foot rather than a hand.
• Another layer emerges if we read the video in relation to bilingual writing. Many migrant writers who work in a second language carry a complicated relationship with that language: pride, mastery, frustration, and doubt coexist. The act of stepping on one’s own manuscript can therefore be read as dramatizing the struggle with English itself. It is as if the writer is saying: this language does not sit comfortably, it must be wrestled with, pressed down, tested physically. The manuscript becomes a body that the author must dominate or discipline.
• There is also a performative aspect. Because the act is filmed from above, the viewer becomes a witness to the gesture. The camera angle resembles a first-person viewpoint, so the audience temporarily inhabits the author’s position. This pulls the viewer into the ritual. Instead of merely reading a critical statement about the author’s English, we watch a symbolic act of judgment being carried out.
• What I find interesting is that the video does not actually destroy the manuscript. The pages open, close, and flatten, but they remain intact. That restraint suggests that the point is not annihilation but confrontation. The work survives the act. In that sense the video could be read as a commentary on the endless cycle of writing, doubting, criticizing, and rewriting that every serious writer goes through.
• Overall, the video works as a kind of visual poem. Its language is gesture rather than words. By using the body—especially the foot—it stages a provocative relationship between author and text. Instead of reverence for the written page, we see an almost brutal honesty toward one’s own work. The result is uncomfortable but also compelling, because it exposes the tension between creation and self-critique that normally remains hidden behind finished literature.

A FURTHER QUESTION

• Let's limit your comment to 3 paragraphs. Question: what did you manage to read at all if any?

A FURTHER RESPONSE

• From the video itself, I was not able to read any complete sentences clearly. The camera angle is high and the movement of the foot turning the pages is continuous, so the pages pass too quickly to allow sustained reading. What becomes visible are mainly fragments: dense handwritten lines in English, corrections, and what look like editorial marks or layered revisions. The writing appears compact and heavily worked over, suggesting draft material rather than a clean final copy.
• In a few frames it seemed possible to glimpse individual English words rather than full clauses. Words like “English,” “assessment,” and what might be “language” or “writing” appear momentarily, though they pass too quickly to confirm with certainty. The overall visual impression is of manuscript pages that mix running prose with marginal notes and insertions, as if the text has been repeatedly revised or reconsidered.
• So what can actually be “read” from the video is less the literal content of the text than the nature of the pages themselves. They look like working documents: handwritten English prose, dense paragraphs, and frequent corrections. The legible information therefore lies mostly in the form of the manuscript—draft-like, annotated, and layered—rather than in any sustained passage of readable sentences.

MORE QUESTION

• Any comparisons with any artists or writers, contemporary or not?

MORE ANSWER

• What comes most immediately to mind is the tradition of artists who deliberately violate the sanctity of the book or the artwork in order to question authorship. One parallel is with Ai Weiwei, especially works where he destroys or alters culturally respected objects, such as in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. The point there was not simple destruction but a conceptual gesture: forcing viewers to confront the value we attach to cultural artifacts. In your video, the manuscript becomes that artifact. Stepping on it destabilizes the reverence normally given to a written work, especially one produced through years of intellectual labour.
• Another comparison could be made with the experimental tradition around John Cage and artists connected to the Fluxus movement, including Yoko Ono. In pieces like Cut Piece, the body performs an action that becomes the artwork itself. The act is simple but symbolically loaded. Your video functions in a similar way: the gesture of using the foot to manipulate the manuscript becomes the “performance.” The meaning lies in the action rather than in the textual content of the pages.
• From the literary side, there is also an echo of writers who turned self-criticism into a visible practice. Someone like Samuel Beckett relentlessly stripped down his own language, often rewriting and translating himself between languages. Another distant comparison might be Franz Kafka, who famously asked for his manuscripts to be destroyed after his death. Your gesture is different because it does not actually destroy the text, but it stages a similar tension: the author confronting his own writing with almost ruthless skepticism, as if testing whether it deserves to survive.

MORE QUESTION

• What sort of a book is that? Can that count as a book?

MORE ANSWER

• From what can be seen in the video, it looks less like a finished book and more like a working manuscript or compilation of drafts. The pages appear handwritten, heavily revised, and thickly stacked rather than bound in a conventional printed format. That suggests something closer to a notebook archive, a pile of drafts, or perhaps a self-assembled manuscript bundle. In literary practice, many writers accumulate such piles during long projects—layers of drafts, corrections, and rewritten passages—before anything becomes a formally published book.
• Whether it counts as a “book” depends on how strictly one defines the word. In the narrow publishing sense, a book is a finalized, edited, and bound work prepared for readers. By that standard, what we see would not yet be a book but a manuscript. In a broader sense, however, a book can simply be a sustained body of writing organized into pages. Many important literary works existed first exactly in that form—handwritten stacks, notebooks, or folders—long before printing. In that looser definition, it could indeed be called a book in embryonic form.
• There is also a conceptual angle. Some modern writers and artists deliberately blur the boundary between manuscript and book, treating the draft itself as part of the artwork. In such cases the physical stack of pages—complete with revisions, crossings-out, and marginal notes—becomes the “book,” not merely preparation for one. If that is the intention here, then the object functions less as a conventional book and more as a material record of the writing process, almost like a literary artifact rather than a finished publication.

NO MORE QUESTIONS, NO MORE ANSWERS

YES QUESTION

• What's your take on the title《硬远》

YES ANSWER

• The title 《硬远》 immediately feels unusual because the two characters do not form a familiar compound in standard Chinese usage. “硬” suggests hardness, rigidity, toughness, or something unyielding. “远” indicates distance, remoteness, or something far away in space or time. When they are placed together without a conventional grammatical relation, the phrase produces a kind of semantic tension. It does not resolve into a clear meaning, which gives it a poetic or conceptual quality rather than a descriptive one.
• One possible reading is metaphorical: a kind of “hard distance” or “unyielding remoteness.” That could evoke emotional, linguistic, or cultural distance—something that cannot easily be crossed or softened. If the work relates to writing in another language or to the experience of living between cultures, the phrase could suggest the stubborn gap between languages or identities. The hardness might refer to the difficulty of bridging that gap, the resistance of language itself, or the effort required to reach across it.
• Another possibility is that the title intentionally disrupts normal Chinese collocation to create a new compound. In modern poetry and experimental writing, breaking habitual word pairings is often a way to force readers to reconsider meaning. In that sense 《硬远》 works less as a phrase with a fixed definition and more as a conceptual signal: something distant that resists approach, or a distance that has become solid, almost material. The title therefore feels deliberately austere and slightly abrasive, which matches the kind of self-interrogation and physical gesture suggested by the video.