Wang Anyi's "Moonlight Touching People" is a different way of writing "Waste Capital".
Perhaps in the present era, grand narratives have become a kind of remembered narrative, replaced by the return to place, the rise of empty symbols or illusions, or indulging in the writing of a physical, desire, emotional illness, clinging to a catharsis, a superficial narrative, and lacking the pursuit of essence, meaning, and value.
This may also be the "cultural desert" and "money supremacy" that experts and scholars have called out in the past 20 years, and the spiritual emptiness and spiritual exhaustion caused by it. A lot of people, lost.
If living has no value and no meaning, then human writing is only a trapped beast fight in the array of nothingness, and there is no way out. Therefore, the extent to which writing can gain meaning becomes a question that we must take seriously. In Sisu's view, writing always meant being saved in a particular way. [1]
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The discussion of the text "Moonlight" also has to be attributed to this problem.
It gives an image of people haunted by a sense of emptiness, a sense of the end times, but neither in terms of the fate of the characters nor in the structure of the narrative, it has not gotten a solution, that is, no one has been saved. It is frustrated in the realm of meaning.
This brings me to a question posed by Maslow: How do you live in a world of deprivation where you have no choice?
In other words, living in a real world full of pathology, ignorance, falsehood, pain, and ugliness, how can we not forget the realm of existence and the value of existence that contain the most true, the most beautiful, and the most good? [2] This may be a search for meaning. There is no meaning, and everything will fall into the void and cannot be liberated.
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The reason why "Moonlight" has been criticized has a lot to do with its weak handling of structure. It's like a self-fight in the midst of nothingness.
Structure is a big concept, and in modern times it is the opposite of deconstruction. It seems to me that structure foreshadows a completeness, both formal integrity and interpretability completeness of meaning. Deconstruction is a subversion, and it executes a fragmented violence. Of course, this is not to say that deconstruction is not good, it is also a reflective structure of human beings.
When it comes to the structural problem of "Moonlight" here, it is not to explore the structure itself, but to explore its influence on the formation of text meaning and the narrative circle caused by its structural processing mode. In a sense, the structure foreshadows the way out of the text.
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In the treatment of the structure of the character relationship, the connection point of "Moonlight" is the relationship between men and women in the modern sense, which has a strong fluidity. The castration of the gender of the characters is also questioned a lot.
It appears in the text as a titi experience, but this is not a novel about love, and it has nothing to do with the word "body", which is full of temptations in modern times. It simply carries an explanation of existence with the help of such narrative content, or is simply a field designed to express the character's sense of emptiness and to escape from it.
Zigong in this text is by no means just a homosexual man, his beauty, his keen sensitivity, and his profound insight all hint at his unique existence as a perfect intersex person, but this is something that reality cannot accommodate, a kind of "nihilistic beauty, like an abyss, leading people to fall and fall." [3] His very existence is therefore in doubt.
Does the text use Zigong, a figure who has gone beyond the social orbit, as a witness to the connection of other characters, as discussed above, does this mean an embarrassment, showing that for a person with a gender, it is impossible to "intervene" in such a relationship structure? If this is true, then is the text's adoption of such a narrative perspective inherently in itself an internal crisis?
If we assume that ZiGong is only a man of normal gender, can he still explore Pan Suo and Jian Chisheng's sense of the end times in a transcendent posture, and can he still catch Titi again and again when she is abandoned, rather than out of male and female love?
Therefore, this kind of de-desired treatment of the character after being castrated becomes the only way to salvation.
We know that when Titi finally did not know where to go, the text gave the answer, "In this city, she only has to ask for zigong." It's a city of Desire and There's no desire between her and Zigong",[4]
Here we find that Zigong seems to assume a sense of salvation, but this salvation is undermined by the unreality of the image of Zigong itself. This has to be said to be a kind of role helplessness, and it is also the sense of powerlessness shown by the text in the processing of the relationship structure of the characters. However, when interpreting the meaning of the text, the presence of such a character cannot be ignored, so is such a meaning interpretation to some extent frustrated?
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Regarding the handling of the story structure of each character, "Moonlight" gives people a feeling of returning to the original point, as if the story never began, it has always stood in place.
This creates a sense of cramped narrative, as if it were over before it could begin. Everyone hurriedly appeared, and then hurriedly ended, from the backstage to the backstage, there was more loneliness and emptiness.
The emergence of Titi ends with countless other titos; Panso uses the method of escaping from nothingness, how it begins and how it ends; Jian Chisheng's resistance to time still needs another mention; Zigong, who appears unreal as soon as he appears, and still does not know where he is in the end; for Humari, she seems to be set up as a force in the text, she is strong.
The stories about Humari have a strong taste, but she is always fighting against a kind of decline, and her huge figure only blocks the light for a moment, and she repeats that consumption all her life.
In the treatment of the fate of these similar cycles of characters, we see a kind of end-of-the-century mood that is in the text, and this nihilistic, decadent, and undependent mood seems to hint at the choice of this structure, that is, this structure has the ability to be called, that is, the passive nature of the structure. For narrative, this passivity heralds the failure of a strategy, and it reveals a kind of inclusiveness and meaning that the text itself can have.
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Regarding the end of the century, the term originated in the West.
At the end of the 20th century, both scholars and ordinary people in the West believed that the century had come to an end and that something might happen. The sense of the end of the century, which stems from Christianity, will be confused and sentimental because of the inability to turn back time, and there is also a sense of anxiety about the fleeting and inability to grasp reality. This means that the cornerstone and dependence of human existence have been removed, and what remains is a struggle and fear of the way out.
It can be said that Taiwanese female writer Zhu Tiantian's "Gorgeous at the End of the Century" seems to directly give a look at the end of the century. At the end of the novel, Mia says that when the world comes to an end, the world built by all men with theories and institutions will collapse, and she will survive and reconstruct it with memories of smell and color. [1] The world she reconstructs is a world of clothing or art. In her eyes, there is no country in the world, her world is superficial, flashy, without inner perception, it is an emptiness in the splendor of the end of the century.
"Moonlight" or the narrative uses this kind of cultural observation, hiding the end of the world in the prosperity, and the whole narrative moves towards the blankness of meaning in this observation.
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Therefore, the characters lack a sense of reality, reality is withdrawn, there is a sense of "Zhuang Sheng Dream Butterfly", due to the loss of the sense of reality and a self-confirmation obstacle, that is, "Who am I?" Who am I? " question. Yet in Jonathan Brown's view, before we know ourselves, we must first know our existence. [2]
Once existence itself is questioned, then everything else, the so-called meaning, becomes empty talk, which leads directly to the character's confusion about the future. It can be said that Panso is one of the characters who lack the most realistic presence in the novel. He is presented almost in an imagery way, and the reason for saying this is because of the variability and situationality of the image itself, in other words, the existence of the image needs to be proved by external interpretation, and without interpretation, it will collapse violently.
Panso's existence is in a dangerous situation where it can collapse at any moment, and his existence depends on art, on women, and of course on the narrative itself. It is only that the narrative and he have reached a certain complicity, that is, the establishment of the narrative lies in the maintenance of Panso's existence, and Panso's dilemma becomes the flesh and blood of the narrative.
In the novel, Panso is described as follows: "His mind is at the poles of nothingness and the senses, and the reality in the middle is crossed, so that as soon as he is freed from the occult, he immediately enters into carnal desire." ”[3]
Zigong said that what Pan asked for was a "none" word, and that he was not in the relationship between men and women, but in existence and non-existence. He is a great void. "The materialist eye can only see the body of the tree, and the eye of nothingness is far away, he sees the end, and panso sees, and this is the point; what is on the top, is the end, disappears into the emptiness and dazedness; ... Time, every minute of continuation, is a passing; space, you think for sure, is out of sight, panso can see, the walls, under the roof, the interior of the foundation, are falling apart;
The large-scale "speaking" here makes Zigong act as a narrator of the soul, and to some extent achieves the purpose of the text narrative. However, there is a paradox in this narrative, that is, the narrative itself is hollowed out and narrated for the sake of the narrative, as if all of this is for this expression that lacks the elements of character action and thought, which seems to constitute the weakness of the narrative, or the narrative itself lacks an existential reference, reduced to an endorsement without a sense of real life. It can be said that this "nothing", this empty end-of-the-century perception of the narrative has formed an oppression and tension.
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The characters in "Moonlight" are either in a state of escape from their own past, and the past is hidden.
For example, Zigong; either the past is simply a mystery, let people guess, and the guess result is "none", there is a Kafka-like narrative of "0", such as Panso; or the past has become a symbol, symbolizing the irreproduction of beauty and power, becoming a tragic contrast to reality, because of the fierce and rejected, such as Hu Mary, Jian Chisheng.
They are a group of people living in the present, without a past, which means that their existence has a fractured texture, which means that they may lack a consistent sense of the continuity of their personal experiences. Individuals may not be able to acquire a continuous conception of their lives.
...... The rupture in time experience is often a fundamental feature of this emotion. Time is understood as a series of separate moments, each of which separates subsequent experiences from the original experience in an unattainable continuous "narrative" way. [5] In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens analyzes the formulation of the choice of self-identification, illustrating a problem: a continuous perception of existence has essential significance for the individual's self-identity or for a continuous "narrative" of the self.
The rupture of experience means the rupture of narrative.
In "Moonlight", the characters generally lose their history. Or, the text narrative itself is to establish an innuendo — to use the state of the characters to depict a cultural symptom of the current reality, to convey the current human survival situation, survival problems, survival methods and changes in the meaning of survival.
As Zigong said, "He [Panso] was born with some extremely empty questions: What is the meaning of life?" Why should people be born? What is the purpose of life? ”[6]
It's just that for a man like Panso, who was born in philosophy, these questions seem hollow and powerless. It's a kind of essential anxiety of people who lack a sense of survival, there is no past, and now it is just a mirage. Therefore, the narrative of the text is trapped in a kind of nothingness array, which is entangled in a kind of hanging questioning and exploration, so that the narrative encounters the question of reality.
Just like Jeffrey C. Alexander said that if intellectuals want to define the "meaning" of their "epoch", they must identify the epoch before the present,[7] in order to find a basis for existence in the present.
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The future is illusory.
Or from the above we may know that this is a world with no way out. It should be said that the whole text reveals a strong eschatological color, there is no past, the untrustworthiness of the present, the lack of human meaning, and the disappearance of the everyday nature of existence, almost everything is in a state of wandering.
As a character throughout, she is unable to live in time, and even so, she has only become the one who has been replaced in history, the one who has been repeated. She only exists as a kind of need, and once it is not needed, then it can only be abandoned. "In Jane's eyes, they have a common name, which is Titi",[8]
This seems to become a kind of "ti ti" fate, they continue to appear, constantly being replaced, and then becoming an abstract noun, the future is hidden.
For Pan Suo and Jian Chisheng, whether their past does not exist or cannot be reproduced, they are all trapped in a kind of "waste capital" situation, and the constant carnal pursuit can not give a future after all, and they become a decadent category.
If "Wasteland" also has value and awakening significance, it is to expose an unconcealed lonely and sick soul mixed with filth and blood. How does a certain personality cultivated by traditional culture go to the spiritual tragedy of sinking in this era of rapid change, the end of the century, and impetuousness. [9]
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For Moonlight, its narrative lacks a cornerstone to demonstrate this spiritual tragedy, its narrative does not even have a place for basic human behavior, the characters do not know where to retreat after appearing, and it is filled with too much character discourse or the characters' wishful confessions. In other words, the character's characteristics are spoken by others, and the characters themselves lack the ability to act. Does this mean that the characters are pale? Thus, the author shrewdly chooses a zigong, who is a man without a gender, which enables him to see the men and women of this world from the perspective of all mankind, or rather, it is his presence that perpetuates the narrative of the text.
However, as Gottier points out, hermaphrodites are nonsocial people because they are absolutely self-sufficient. His heroine, who is immaculate in both body and spirit, is detached from human relationships and collective value orientations. Sex itself is removed. [10] Zigong, as a beautiful and intelligent man, is perfect to some extent, but he has no age, no gender, he is a person who is broken from real life, his own lack, allegory this story is only a story of scarcity, and our solution to the meaning of the characters is in a stalemate.
Here, the narrative is mired in an embarrassment, a narrator who has been questioned in itself, what can his narrative really represent?
bibliography:
[1] (French) Elena Sisu. From The Subconscious Scene to the Historical Scene[A].Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism. Zhang Jingyuan, editor-in-chief. Beijing:Peking University Press,1992,p.223.]
[2] Maslow. The Wisdom of Maslow[M]. Liu Ye compiled. Beijing: China Film Press, 2005, p. 151.
[3] [4] [6] Wang Anyi. "Moonlight Seduction"[M]. Yunnan: Yunnan People's Publishing House, 2009, pp. 5, 140, 58, 142.
[5] Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity[M]. Zhao Xudong, translated by Fang Wen. Beijing: Life, Reading, And Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 1998, p. 59.
[7] Jeffrey C. Alexander. Social Theory at the End of the Century[M]. Translated by Zhang Luping. Shanghai: Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2003, p. 9.
[9] Radar. "The Flight of the Desire Spirit: Some Thoughts on Literature in the New Century"[A]."Trends of Thought and Style: Observations on novels at the end of the 20th Century"[C]. Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House,2002.]
[10] Camilla Paglia. "Sex Mask"[M]. Wang Mei translation. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia University Press, Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 2003, p. 445.