Author | Every night baby Ning
Anchor | Fan Deng Reading · Children
Interpret the trailer
Meet · Meet your unknown self in the book.
Good evening to all book lovers, welcome to the reading column "Encounter" produced by Fan Deng Reading.
Today, I will interpret xiao Hong's masterpiece of "Literary Roselle" - "The Legend of Hulan River".
This book is not only a collection of fragments of life in Hulanhe City at that time, but also a microcosm of the society at that time.
The indifference of human nature, the ignorance of society and the sadness of the times are clearly visible.
On January 22, 1942, when the war was raging in Hong Kong, Xiao Hong, who was ill, took out a pen and paper from under the pillow and wrote two lines:
I will be with the blue sky and clear water forever, leaving the half of the Red Chamber for others to write.
Half of his life was coldly received, he died first, unwilling and unwilling.
Subsequently, on the sickbed, he ended his sad and short life.
And the other half of the Red Chamber in her mouth is "The Legend of Hulan River".
"The Legend of Hulan River" is different from ordinary novels, it has no specific protagonist, and shows the collective group portrait of the residents of the small town.
Mao Dun once praised "The Legend of Hulan River", "a narrative poem, a colorful terroir painting, and a string of poignant songs." ”
In this novel, Xiao Hong not only writes about the customs and customs of the land, but also writes about the state of the world, but also sharply analyzes the human nature of human feelings.
Although she was born into a landlord family, Xiao Hong came into contact with the people who rented her own house from an early age, and the tragic situation of their lives deeply shocked her young.
They work hard every day, like tired cows and horses, but still live a life of unclothed, hungry and displaced.
What is it that causes them to struggle, but still unable to escape this tragic fate?
After reading "The Legend of Hulan River", you will understand that what really binds them is not material poverty, but their self-deception, ignorance, and closed stubbornness.
If the poor want to fight back, they first have to peel off three layers of skin.
The first layer: rip open the fig leaf of self-deception
Hulanhe City is very small, and the people here live a very monotonous life, they work at sunrise, rest at sunset, and are busy begging for life every day, and they live very hard.
For them, if they can eat shallots and mixed with tofu, even if they can improve their lives; the steamed bun seller fell down and stole two of his steamed buns, it was like taking advantage of the sky.
People here also like to talk about other people's private affairs:
The widow's son drowned, the apprentices in the dyeing vat house fought for the women, the donkey in the tofu factory broke his leg...
The big mud pit in the small city provides the most talking points for everyone.
There is a mud pit in the town, and when it rains, it is muddy.
The horses pulling the cart often fell into it, and often drowned poultry, and the people who lived nearby were miserable.
However, no one wants to fill this pit.
Because the existence of the big mud pit not only brings them a topic, but also brings some "benefits" to everyone.
Often, there would be cheap pork sold on the street, and everyone would eat happily while comforting themselves that this pig must have drowned in a large mud pit and could not eat anyone.
Even if someone gets sick from eating cheap pork, they still don't want to admit that it's plague pork.
And in this kind of Q-style self-deception, I gained an unprecedented sense of satisfaction.
They live hard and miserable, so they can't see the good of others, and they need to use the misfortunes of others to set off their own "tall".
Unable to control their own lives, they can only resign themselves to their fate, deceive themselves with lies, and continue to live a life of resignation.
Wang Xiaobo said:
"All human suffering is essentially anger at one's own incompetence."
Material barrenness is not terrible, but spiritual self-deception has great destructive power.
It deprives people of the ability to self-examine, and since they cannot change the present, they have to get by.
For the sake of face, you can deceive yourself, you can suppress others, but you are not willing to make efforts to improve yourself.
You can only continue to live a poor and hard life in self-deception.
The second layer: to break through the cognitive barriers of ignorance and ignorance
The people of Hulanhe are closed and ignorant, dancing gods, singing songs, wild stage plays, Niangniang Temple assembly... These ghost and god festivals, in the eyes of the Hulanhe people, are the most important things in life.
They are not only enthusiastic about this kind of activity, but even if they are sick around them, they also encourage others to cure diseases through such activities.
The little reunion daughter-in-law is the child daughter-in-law of the old Hu family, and when she came to the old Hu family, she was only twelve years old, lively and cute.
But the in-laws just couldn't get used to her, thinking that she was walking too fast, eating too much, laughing too loudly, and had to give her a dismount.
So he beat her up, who thought she would disobey discipline and cry and say "go home.". The mother-in-law was even angrier and beat her in a different way.
The little reunion daughter-in-law was sick, bedridden all day, and had a high fever.
The clear-eyed people knew at a glance that this child was severely beaten, his body was scarred, and the wound infection caused fever.
However, no one thought she was sick and was going to see a doctor. On the contrary, everyone said that she was "in the middle of evil".
The neighbors gave her mother-in-law all kinds of ideas, invited the godmother, danced the god, and took a bath.
In the end, the lively and cute little reunion daughter-in-law was tortured to death.
Before dying, the mother-in-law also cut off her braids and lied to the outside world that the braids fell off by herself, so as to prove that the little reunion daughter-in-law was indeed "evil".
Everyone is convinced of this.
The death of the little reunion daughter-in-law is the result of the mother-in-law's torture, and it is also the result of the collective evil of the residents of the small town.
Under the influence of superstitious ideas, they regard the theory of ghosts and gods as the highest faith, and become the puppet props of the kidnapped, completely losing their basic compassion and civilization consciousness.
In the end, it went down the path of group evil.
The people of Hulanhe, who live without hope and without purpose, struggle in suffering without knowing it.
They have no way to solve the problems of reality, so they have to find spiritual sustenance in the world of ghosts and gods.
This is a kind of "learned helplessness" that is resigned to itself, or "confession" for short.
The third layer: to break the shackles of closed and stubborn thinking
The poor and closed life made the people of Hulan River become closed and stubborn.
Everything that seems special to people and things is, in their eyes, deviant.
Moguan Feng crooked mouth and Wang sister free love, after marriage gave birth to a son.
In the era of matchmakers, this was an abnormal "big thing", and they hated the couple very much.
The landlord called Sister Wang a "wild wife", and in the weather of minus seven or eight degrees, the couple and the newborn child were driven out of the mill.
Fortunately, Xiao Hong's grandfather was a warm-hearted person, so they temporarily lived in the grass shed.
Although the conditions are difficult, this couple has made their little days prosperous.
Sister Wang has a cheerful personality and is very capable, and the neighbors have talked about it, saying that Sister Wang is not like a woman, and a woman should stay at home and not show her face.
Feng Crooked has a gentle personality and loves his wife very much, so that she eats more eggs and works less.
This is also very abnormal in everyone's opinion, and the neighbors say that he is not like a man, his personality is too soft, and he does not beat his wife!
Because the men of HulanHe almost all beat their wives.
A kind and gentle man, just because he is free to love with his wife, just because he treats his wife kindly, he is regarded as an "outlier" by others, ridiculed, teased, and suppressed, how ridiculous it seems, but this is a real scene that happened in Hulan River.
These residents, living in the rules of thousands of years, have never thought about whether these "rules" are right or wrong.
The more closed the environment in which a person lives, the more single the cognition, the more stubborn it will be.
I like to use a single standard, with my own inertial thinking, to look at the people and things around me.
Sugtila once said:
"I'm smarter than others because I know my own ignorance."
The larger the pattern, the more humble and tolerant, and the more ignorant people, the more arrogant and stubborn, encountering views that are inconsistent with their own mode of thinking, and all of them hold a critical attitude.
They put on a thick set of shackles for themselves and tried to use them to kidnap others.
Write at the end
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once made the famous "evil of mediocrity":
This kind of evil is not thinking, not thinking about people, not thinking about society.
Evil is banal, because you and I are ordinary people who can fall into it.
The people in the Hulan River are releasing negative energy all around them.
They lack the ability to think independently, do not know how to introspect, and will only go with the flow and follow the crowd.
Eventually, he fell into the trap of mediocrity and became a member of the "evil".
This kind of banal evil not only hurts innocent people, but also causes great harm to themselves.
After all, if a person refuses to face up to his own problems, he will not be able to progress, and will only find comfort in nonsense, get by, and rest on his own in his own world.
And these will eventually cause a person to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty.
Therefore, people from low births, if they want to achieve a counterattack, must peel off these three layers of skin.
Peel off the fig leaf of self-deception, no longer self-whitewashing, dare to self-examine, self-analysis.
Break through the cognitive barriers of ignorance and ignorance, no longer escape from reality, face the facts, and solve problems.
Break the shackles of closed and stubborn thoughts, no longer live in the "rules", but keep pace with the times, accept new ideas, new things.
Click "Watching" and encourage your friends.
Column Director | Come slowly
Typography | Zheng to the north
Image | The pictures in this article come from the Internet, and are invaded and deleted
音乐 | More Than Words Can Say