According to this, women are beautiful and fall in love with the country. Once they enter the literary narrative, it will obviously imply an extraordinary result. "The emperor of China longed for the beauty that might shake an empire" led to Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow, which created an eternal love legend.
However, after reading Zhang Ailing's novel, we will find that it is an anti-legendary story rather than a legend. Bai Liusu, the hostess in the book, is not beautiful. Tassel and Fan Liuyuan are married, and there are more factors in trading than in love. However, in another sense, the love of the whole city is worthy of the name: overturning, collapsing and falling. The fall of Hongkong helped Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan become an ordinary couple.
Obviously, the practical significance of this ending is a subversion of readers' possible expectations. Let's start from here and discuss the drift, vacancy or proliferation of the hidden layer caused by this flip.
One or two times
Reading Zhang Ailing's works is different from reading the works of many writers in that era. Simply put, this different feeling is jet lag.
Ling Ke recalled: "The first time I came into contact with Zhang Ailing's works and herself, it was a very severe period. From 65438 to 0943, more than one year has passed since the Pearl Harbor incident, and two years have passed since the end of World War II and the victory of China's Anti-Japanese War. Shanghai was then an occupied area under Japanese military occupation. " [2]
Lingke summed up his feelings about that era with "severity", which can be seen in many works: Lao She's Four Generations under One roof, and Ba Jin's trilogy Fire. Before and after (around 1943), there were Xiao Hong's life and death fields and Lu Ling's son of a rich man ... These are all historical times in collective memory, severe and autumn of life and death.
From the beginning, Love in a Fallen City involved a completely different time situation: "In order to save the sky, all the clocks in Shanghai were put forward one hour, but Bai Mansion said,' We used old clocks'." Their ten o'clock is eleven. They sing far away from the chessboard and can't keep up with the huqin of life. "[3]
People's eleven o'clock, this is public time, the story of Zhang Ailing, not in this track or music score. She writes personal time, personal time and special time, and weaves stories of people she cares about in this time network. Old Zhong, representing the characteristics of Bai Mansion's daily life, is still the master of parents. When several generations of extended families live together, it is still a property dispute between family members, a change in marriage, and Chen's death. The conflict between father and son and the shadow of the new era in Ba Jin's Home are really out of the question here. It's just like Ye San, tassel's brother, who advised tassel to attend her husband Dai Xiao's funeral before the divorce: "Don't always scare people with the law! The law, change today, change tomorrow, I am just a mortal, with three cardinal guides and five permanent members, but I can't change it! You were born in his house, and death is his ghost. Trees take off, and fallen leaves return to their roots ... ". In this passage, only a few words have been changed, which can be regarded as Bai Mansion's perception of historical time. In other words, it expresses Zhang Ailing's feelings about the relationship between the characters in the novel and the times. Times are changing, but in many families in Zhang Ailing's novel world, everything is as usual. Individuals have nothing to do with the mainstream and torrent in the historical, ethnic and political sense.
This is also Zhang Ailing's discovery of the times and society. While many writers, especially those in the 1940s, are eager to capture the social changes, historical footsteps and the phantom of the new era, Zhang Ailing is peeking behind it-behind the times and society. It is a side that sinks into darkness, has no future, and is getting more and more chaotic. Today, we can safely say that, just like Hemingway's metaphor of "iceberg", it really sinks into the water, which is much thicker and heavier than the bright part above the water. Zhang Ailing's explanation of the cover of Legend is rather a portrayal of the female writer's own posture: "The cover was designed by Yan Ying. Borrowing a picture of a fashionable lady in the late Qing dynasty, it shows a woman playing dominoes vaguely there, sitting next to a wet nurse holding a child, as if it were a common scene after dinner. But outside the railing, a human figure with a wrong proportion suddenly appeared, like a ghost. Very curious, very diligent to peek inside, is a modern person. " [4] This modern ghost reflects the author's own tastes and interests.
Mystery files was born in such an almost frozen era. This is a woman who wants to create her own destiny. Her creation can be said to be the time to struggle out of the time track of Bai Mansion and start her personal life. This enlightenment began at a special moment-the death of her ex-husband. Mrs. Xu came to pay homage, and tassel faced a choice. Her brother and sister-in-law unanimously accused her and forced her to return to the widow. Tassel can't help but find a home for herself. This home can't live any longer.
Different from the runaway women in Ba Jin's works, tassel can't see the temptation of any new ideal. She wants to go, which is the cry of life itself at this moment, and the cry of life instinct. This instinct of life needs activity, which is the only remaining capital of tassel. Here, Zhang Ailing has a vivid description of a period:
In the middle of nature, there is an enamel clock in the glass cover. This machine has been out of order for many years. Red couplets are hung on both sides, golden birthday flowers are shining, and a flower holds a Chinese character dripping with ink. In the twilight, every word seems to float in the air, far from the paper. Tassel felt that she was just a word on the couplet, floating in vain and not falling to the ground. The White Mansion is a bit like a fairy's abode of fairies. A day has passed here, and a thousand years have passed on earth. But after a thousand years here, the same day is almost the same, because every day is the same monotonous and boring. Tassels crossed their arms and hugged their necks. 78 passed in the blink of an eye. Are you young? Never mind, you will be old in two years. Youth is not rare here. They have plenty of youth-children are born one by one, new bright eyes, new red and tender mouths and new wisdom. After years of tempering, eyes are dull and people are dull, and the next generation is reborn. This generation has been absorbed into the brilliant background of scarlet, and a little pale gold is the timid eyes of the former people.
The struggle and resistance of tassel finally turned into a positive result, and finally got the goal of everyone's attention, Fan Liuyuan. In this marriage, they encountered a war of collective time rather than personal time. I think this is an encounter, not a participation. This is still the difference between Zhang Ailing and those writers who pay attention to expressing collective feelings and national consciousness. As a threat to this individual's life time, the war intervened in the relationship between tassel and Fan Liuyuan, which forced them to reconsider the value of their relationship, thus speeding up the procedure of concluding a formal engagement. In such a process, we can see how Zhang Ailing transformed the traditional beauty "Allure" into a realistic "Allure". Under the high wall of a mountain on Repulse Bay, Fan Liuyuan said to tassel, "This wall reminds me of something for some reason, like the end of time. ..... One day, our civilization was completely destroyed, and everything was finished-burned out, bombed out, collapsed, and perhaps this wall was left. Tasso, if we meet ... tassel was under this wall, maybe you will be a little sincere to me, maybe I will be a little sincere to you. "
This scene was once called by Fu Lei: "What a vast and broad-minded realm!" [5] In fact, this is not only the feelings of the characters, but also the feelings of Zhang Ailing on the relationship between personal time and historical time when they meet. In that era when many writers thought it was very severe, what was more important to Zhang Ailing was its threat to individual life. Compared with many writers' national standard, Zhang Ailing is individual standard. This is her understanding that personal time meets historical time. She said more than once: "Even if individuals can wait, the times are hasty, they are already being destroyed, and more destruction is coming." One day, our civilization, whether lofty or flashy, will become a thing of the past. If the word I use the most is' desolation', it is because there is such a threat of desolation in my ideological background. " [6]
Because of this feeling, the husband and wife in Zhang Ailing's novels have gained unusual significance, and they have become the representatives of a completely troubled life form. The people in troubled times have no intention of promoting history, nor do they fantasize about being integrated into the public for collective immortality. All they want is a personal life and the existence of this life. The so-called "floating life is like a dream", the so-called "green hills are still there, and the sunset is a few degrees red" is nothing more than this sense of impermanence that people in troubled times can't get rid of. Seeking constancy in impermanence is the best state in the marriage meeting between tassel and Fan Liuyuan, and it is also a passage quoted by Fu Lei:
Sitting on the fringe, listening to the sad wind. She did know that a gray brick wall near Repulse Bay must still be there ... She came to the foot of the wall like a dream and came face to face with Liu Yuan ... In this turbulent world, money and real estate, everything eternal, are unreliable. Only the tone in her mouth and the people sleeping next to her are reliable. She suddenly moved to LiuYuan side, hugged him across the quilt. He reached out from under the covers and took her hand. They looked at each other transparently, only for a moment of thorough understanding, but this moment was enough for them to live in harmony for ten or eight years. [7]