Author: Yang Qingxiang (Vice Dean and Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Chinese Min University)
Wanfang's "You and I" is a very good work, and one of the best biographical and non-fiction works I have personally read in recent years. As the author said, she is not just writing about Mr. Cao Yu, nor is she just writing about Mr. Fang Rui, she is actually writing a group portrait of a generation. In a sense, the time of the book has been extended, not only involving Mr. Cao Yu's generation, but also involving the author, readers, and so on. The book returns to a very basic and important quality of literature, namely the ability to empathize. Many novels, poems, and TV series don't actually have enough empathy. The most basic dimension of literature and art is to impress and infect people. To do this, first of all, be sincere. Sincerity is the emotional dimension throughout the book, and it is also the starting point of the author's wanfang writing. Through this book, Wan Fang is not only sincerely reflecting on the fate of Mr. Cao Yu's generation, but also reflecting on the fate of his own generation.
Cao Yu family portrait. The pictures in this article are selected from "You and Me"
The book begins with a sincere character. It begins with the death of the mother and the fact that the daughter is out of town without even knowing it. It's a very tragic scene, very substitutionary. But the author is very restrained in dealing with this scene, she does not limit herself to sadness or accusation, but reflects on what kind of history, culture, and mechanism caused this tragedy, and what role each specific individual plays in this mechanism. True intellectuals and cultural people must have the ability to self-reflect. If you just blindly blame others instead of reflecting on yourself, it must be biased. Many people begin to lose the ability to self-reflect after reaching a certain age, and are often trapped by the whirlpool of life and popular ideas. But the book "You and I" has a very strong spirit of self-reflection, and WanFang constantly reflects on itself and questions itself, thus reaching the spiritual height and spiritual dilemma of Mr. Cao Yu's generation.
Mr. Cao Yu's generation was very remarkable. More than 100 years have passed since the "May Fourth", which sounds particularly distant, but in fact, it is not so, as the most important spiritual resource of modern China, the "May Fourth" is still alive in the present. The biggest difference between the May Fourth generation and ours is that they were deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture, so they also saw the darkest and most inhuman side of traditional Chinese culture. When Mr. Cao Yu was a child in a small Western-style building in Tianjin, he saw his parents lying there smoking opium cigarettes. When his father was angry, he kicked his brother's leg off. It's hard to imagine that kind of old-fashioned parental authority right now. So the core theme of that generation was to run away from home, because home represented an oppressive system, and traditional Chinese culture thus became the object of elimination and revolution in that era. That generation was also the most knowledgeable about the West, and Mr. Cao Yu had already studied abroad at a very young age and realized the progress and importance of modern civilization. Later generations, including young people born in the 1980s and 1990s, have too little understanding of traditional Chinese culture and Western civilization compared to Mr. Cao Yu's generation, and lack a lot of cultural comprehensive cultivation.
"You and I" also writes about the warm love of that generation, and the readers' favorite love letters should be the love letters in it, both Mr. Fang Rui's love letters to Mr. Cao Yu and Mr. Cao Yu's love letters to Mr. Fang Rui. I personally believe that Mr. Fang's love writing is better than Mr. Cao's, and the strength of women's love and the explosive power of love are much warmer, more unrestrained and much higher than many of the expressions of love now. Their generation's pursuit and imagination of love is also different from now, they very naturally combine personal love with love for home country, and children are also the heads of family and country. The love of the individual, the pursuit of freedom by the individual, and the love of the individual for the country, the love for the nation, and the love for culture can be naturally combined. Mr. Cao Yu and Mr. Fang Rui are in love, not only saying I love you, they are also exchanging whether they have read Marx recently, whether they have read "Quiet Don River". They also explore understanding of philosophy and understanding of the world. The love of that generation was connected with the revolution of the self and the revolution of society, and the more love the more revolutionary, the more revolutionary the more love, the more remarkable.
Cao Yu manuscript.
We all know that the most successful portrayal of Mr. Cao Yu's works is almost always female figures, such as Xuan Yi, Chen Bailu, etc., which is related to his deep observation of the situation of women. When it comes to the situation of women, we can go back to the depths of history. In ancient Chinese history, the living conditions of women were very diverse, and the social status of women in the Tang Dynasty was very high, and the degree of socialization was also very high. The history of the desocialization of Chinese women that we are talking about mainly focuses on the fact that after the Ming and Qing dynasties, rigaku as an official philosophy affected not only aristocratic women, but also women at the bottom of society. For example, foot binding was not common before the Ming and Qing dynasties, and slowly became a universally oppressive system through the advancement of social imagination and aesthetic imagination.
The enthusiasm and profundity of women's pursuit of freedom and liberation in the "May Fourth" era is unprecedented, and it is difficult to say whether there are those who have come after. I want to describe them in one word, and that is radiant. Women who are at the forefront of the times are radiant. Echoes that verse – great women lead us up. The first woman to devote herself to the pursuit of the modern nation-state liberation movement, Qiu Jin, was great. Qiu Jin was married at that time, had two children, and then ran away from home, dressed as a man to study in Japan. It is said that one day a group of Chinese students were drinking and getting drunk in a tavern. Qiu Jin broke in with the knife in his hand, slapped the knife on the table, and reprimanded these people for being cowardly, ignorant, and dim-witted. According to the description in Zhang Chengzhi's "Lu Xun's Intersection", Lu Xun was sitting in that tavern at that time. Thus this scene became a very crucial moment in the history of modern Chinese thought. As the father of modern Chinese literature, lu xun, when faced with qiu Jin, such a modern mother, what was he thinking? Why was he silent? When Qiu Jin later revolted in Zhejiang and was executed in defeat, she said that I loved my children very much, but I was willing to dedicate myself to the thousands of children like my children to live happily. This is to see death as a homecoming.
Whether it is Mr. Cao Yu or Mr. Fang Rui, they both live in the tide of the "May Fourth" era, and they will be called by and interact with the souls of those times. There is a sentence in Mr. Cao Yu's letter to Mr. Fang Rui that is particularly well written, saying that we are all spiritual beings, so we can feel that great love. How can love be perceived without spirituality? One of the big problems we have now is that our culture is bound by material life, without spirituality, without a heart, without a soul. Our generation is a generation that is severely limited by external material life. But Mr. Cao Yu and Mr. Fang Rui's generation is not like this, although there are some constraints on the external cultural system and concepts, but they have a strong inner spirituality, so they can rush out. Mr. Cao Yu was a genius figure whose generation together created the beginnings of modern Chinese culture, but we have now forgotten about that beginning. We should go back and claim the power of these souls so that we can restart our present lives.
When reading this book, we will notice a phenomenon that Mr. Cao Yu, a genius figure, has not written particularly outstanding works since the 1950s, so that many people once used "Jiang Lang's talent" to describe him. In my opinion, this problem is actually not as simple as "Jiang Lang is exhausted". Sometimes a genius sits in front of us and we don't know he's a genius, and a lot of times we don't know we're living with a great person. This has happened often throughout history. When Sholokhov wrote The Quiet Don, many people suspected that he did not write it, and until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, many people still looked around for evidence to try to prove it, because he was too young at the time. So literature and art are sometimes particularly cruel, recognizing only the first, not the second. A playwright with such a pursuit as Mr. Cao Yu, if he can't write such works as "Thunderstorm", "Sunrise", "Beijinger", and "Wilderness", he will not write again, because there is no meaning. Tolstoy didn't write in his later years, and one day he watched Anna Karenina and was taken aback and said that the book was so well written—he had forgotten it was his work. So I don't think there is a problem of Jiang Lang's talent here, some writers are the peak of writing at the beginning, and Mr. Cao Yu is such a writer. Some writers may be late bloomers, like Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, who only started writing at the age of 60. After 1949, many modern writers have encountered the transformation of writing, such as Shen Congwen, Ba Jin, Zhang Ailing, etc., Shen Congwen did cultural relics research, and Zhang Ailing's writing after coming to the United States was much inferior. A person's creativity is closely related to the context of the times, and Mr. Cao Yu has reached the highest peak he can reach, and at the same time the highest peak of the drama art of his time.
"You and I" by Wanfang
Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
Finally, it needs to be emphasized that as a non-fiction biographical work, the book "You and I" is very worthy of our study and study. The non-fiction creations of these years have been very hot, but there are not many non-fiction works that really make us feel that they are particularly well written. There are many training institutions that teach people how to write non-fiction works, including some media outlets that are launching similar writing camps. In fact, writing is not very directly taught. Writing requires freedom, it needs nature. A basic premise is that the writer should read the best works, take the law from above, and only get it. Reading "You and Me" written by Wan Fang may have a new understanding of non-fiction writing. At the same time, this book is also a research book about Mr. Cao Yu, which is very important for the study of Mr. Cao Yu and the understanding of Mr. Cao Yu and the value of his works. We know that there are many research works about Mr. Cao Yu, such as the biographical research of Tian Benxiang, which has a great influence in the academic community. But if I recommend a book to undergraduates, graduate students, or ordinary readers, the first thing I recommend is definitely "You and Me", because I want young students to remember Cao Yu first and fall in love with him. Fall in love with him first, and then read his works, and in the process the reader will understand him better. The important value of "You and Me" is to provide us with an overall image of Mr. Cao Yu and Mr. Fang Rui who can arouse our empathy, kindness, ups and downs, and love and hatred. They are men, not gods. They are neither high above nor creeping underground, they are people who walk, live, love and hate in the world. Such a person is the most worthy of our perception, understanding and love.
Guangming Daily (2021-04-19, 15th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily