"I was twenty-one years old that day, in the golden age of my life. I have a lot of extravagant hopes. I want to love, I want to eat, and I want to turn into a half-light and half-dark cloud in the sky in an instant. ”
This widely quoted and regarded as a classic is from Wang Xiaobo's masterpiece "The Golden Age".
In the history of modern literature, there are two good stories about the Golden Age, one is the biographical film of Xiao Hong shared last summer (the title of the film comes from Xiao Hong's letter to Xiao Jun), and the other is Wang Xiaobo's masterpiece. The Golden Age is a blood-boiling phrase, it is synonymous with youth, freedom and brilliance.
People who have read this book will be crazy to recommend it to you: this book is very famous and good, but they may also give you a kind reminder: don't read this book in public. Because some people say it is a "yellow book".
If you are glanced at by a stranger next to you, it is possible that you will be "socially dead" on the spot. Successive blatant organ descriptions make unknown passers-by blush and can't help but cast a complex gaze at you that is difficult to hide.
Because of the large number of sexual depictions in "The Golden Age", the book was criticized and even resisted by many people in Wang Xiaobo's time, and four or five years ago, people who read this book were regarded as unhealthy in their thinking, and now, people are no longer surprised by this, and can finally give it a relatively fair evaluation.
Why on earth is this book about sex?
Share today: The Golden Age
Recommended Index: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5)
Suitable for people: people who like Wang Xiaobo
Rebellion and escape
Let's go back to the background of the story.
In terms of time, it was the most special period in The history of our country, the Cultural Revolution, and the entire cultural environment was not optimistic and extremely depressing. In the countryside of Yunnan, a group of urban youths were sent to this remote border to do farm work, and the spiritual world was extremely poor and lonely.
How lonely is it? Wang Xiaobo said in an article that when he went to the countryside as a Zhiqing, he brought a copy of Ovid's "Metamorphosis", and the Zhiqing borrowed it from me to and F. In the end, he was "lost". Backward material conditions, as well as a repressive ideological environment, deprive people of their way of entertainment and obliterate people's joy of life.
People have to find fun from people themselves, not only the primitive desires in their own human nature are stimulated, but at the same time, they do not relax in finding the handle of revelry in others, so "there is a traditional local entertainment activity, that is, to fight and break shoes." Everyone was tired when the farm was busy. The captain said, tonight on the entertainment, fight broken shoes. ”。
In such a depressing atmosphere, the intellectuals and young people from the city must be dissatisfied in their hearts, and the protagonists Wang Er and Chen Qingyang are their representatives.
In this fanatical and blind momentum, Wang Er and Chen Qingyang are a minority element, they all have a stubborn spirit of not cooperating and daring to insist, they see the hypocrisy of the moral code established by most people, so they do not care about people's accusations and criticisms. The sobriety and fearlessness of this fanaticism made them out of place with the crowd.
Zhiqing Wang Er often worked against the captain, so that he was put on small shoes, arranged the most tired work, and exhausted his waist. Chen Qingyang, the team doctor, refused the pursuit of the military representative and slapped every man who flirted with her, so she was framed as a broken shoe.
Therefore, Wang Chen and the two people have a strong spirit of rebellion.
Since they are not allowed to talk about sex and not to touch sex, then they prefer to touch it, and after being discovered, they simply and blatantly touch it, and Wang Chen and the two openly "broke their shoes", which has a very rebellious meaning of not cooperating and doing it.
Faced with the chaotic and absurd reality, Wang Er and Chen Qingyang were dissatisfied on the one hand, and very confused on the other hand. They couldn't think clearly for a moment and a half, and simply didn't think about anything. In this case, they fled into the mountains to live for a while.
When the moral criticism meeting was held vigorously under the mountain and the pigs were planted, Wang Chen and his wife lived as they pleased in the mountains, they planted land in the mountains, made love in the mountains, and disguised themselves as old Dai to go to the market.
As it got dark, the sun gradually turned red. A cloud rose in the sky, miserable white, turning over the belly of countless dead fish and staring at the eyes of countless dead fish. There was a wind on the mountain, blowing down silently. The atmosphere between heaven and earth is full of misery. Chen Qingyang shed a lot of tears. She said it was a shock.
Reading this passage of life in Wang Shanli, the reader may have a feeling of dreaming. Compared with the chaotic situation at that time, this life seemed dreamy, but in fact, it was the most normal farm life. It was as if they were hiding in a utopia, isolated from the chaos outside.
In the mountains, they can think of nothing, and this kind of unrestrained sex frees them from the chaos of reality.
Chen Qingyang said that at that moment she felt like a gift box, opening the package, so she was overjoyed, she finally relieved herself of all her troubles, and she no longer had to think about why she was a broken shoe, what was a broken shoe, and other inexplicable things: why did we come to this place, what did we do.
So sex is the way the two protagonists in the book rebel and escape from reality. Wang Xiaobo expressed the atmosphere of the times by writing bold sex, highlighting the bitterness and depression of young people's thinking.
There is a problem
Wang Er and Chen Qingyang both responded to the call of the state and came to the countryside in order to receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle-class peasants, but they did not expect to be either excluded or framed. Does this ideological transformation make people worse?
The young ones have not yet figured out what this is all about, or why the chaotic reality runs counter to the propaganda slogan, but they can only be involuntarily pushed away by the same incomprehensible people and the chaotic history.
In this absurdity, the good people are framed, the good people are bullied, the ugliness of human nature is revealed, and at the same time, in a frenzy, the needs of the individual, the feelings of the individual are crudely erased, here there is no individual, only the collective.
The most prominent aspect of personal feelings being erased is sex. Most people feel the sexual impulse in the body, but under the general concept of sexual sin, they can only suppress the innate impulse, and satisfy their imagination by criticizing broken shoes to listen to xiaohuangwen or framing others to make up xiaohuangwen.
Most people in sexual repression pretend to be holy, they dare not think or admit it, they have to pervert the voyeurism, for the sake of voyeurism, they do not hesitate to reverse black and white, right and wrong.
Wang Er and Chen Qingyang outside the crowd were wrapped up in the torrent of history while thinking about everything that had happened to them.
The biggest injustice that happened to Chen Qingyang was to be unjustifiably described as a broken shoe, she wanted to be angry at first, but found that it was useless to be angry, and then there was despair, but despair was useless, and she had to think soberly.
Chen Qingyang sat on a chair and listened to the sound of the wind, recalling what had happened in the past, and doubting everything. It was hard for her to believe that she would inexplicably come to this extremely desolate place, and be called a broken shoe for no reason, and then really make a broken shoe. It's unbelievable.
Chen Qingyang was framed as a broken shoe because people did not care about the truth at all, there was no difference between framing a good person and punishing a bad person, and becoming a "broken shoe" was her unconscious resistance to this unfairness, and later engaged in "broken shoes", it was she who had feelings for Wang Er, and it was she who began to experience love.
The injustice that happened to Wang Er was the exclusion and suppression of him by military deputies and locals. When Wang Er was injured by the locals and went up to the mountain for recuperation, the leaders denied the existence of Wang Er and his people in order not to let the reporters from the city know about it. Everyone said that they had never heard of Wang Er, and even Wang Er thought about whether he existed or not.
I also thought about whether I existed in the hut. For example, others say that Chen Qingyang and I broke shoes, which is proof of existence.
……
I sat in the hut and listened to the roar of leaves all over the mountain, and finally reached the realm of forgetting both things and things. I heard a mighty tide of air rushing above me, and it was the time of the surge in my soul. Just as the flowers bloom in the deep mountains, the dragon bamboo shoots peel off the shells and go straight upwards. When the tide recedes I also rest in peace, but when the tide rises, I will dance with pleasure.
Wang Er was thinking and feeling, which was also a proof of his existence.
No one is more confused about the question of "existence" than the people of Wang Er's time. For natural people, it is very simple to answer whether you exist or not, you are breathing, indicating that you exist as a living being. But for social people, your existence often needs to rely on others to prove their social connection to you.
It's not that you want to eat, you want to love, you want to become a cloud in the sky, and you can prove that you exist. If others say that you have erased your social existence, how can you determine your natural existence as a living thing? If most people turn black and white upside down and want to frame you for no reason, how can you prove your innocence?
Sex is like a clue that runs through the confusion and thinking of Wang Chen and Chen. Writing sex, on the one hand, is probably to prove the facts of personal existence through sex, and on the other hand, it is through sex to express the two people's thinking on right and wrong and the meaning of their own existence.
Desire and individuality
In the days of King II, sex was sinful, and what was more sinful than sex was man's desires. It's okay to break shoes, and admitting that you like to break shoes is the worst crime.
Chen Qingyang had a moral yardstick in his heart. In Chen Qingyang's view, she has always been innocent, because she does not like to break shoes, she only does this for the sake of her friends' righteousness, for the sake of great friendship.
When Wang Er first invited Chen Qingyang to have sex, she refused, and scolded Wang Er for not having a face. But later, When Wang Er said that she wanted to make friends with Chen Qingyang seriously, she agreed— for the sake of great friendship. Since then, the two have called making love "Dun Great Friendship".
But when Chen Qingyang fell in love with Wang Er, she felt her own desire, she felt that she wanted to do that thing, so she felt guilty.
Chen Qingyang said that her true sins were on the Qingping Mountain. In that instant she fell in love with me, and that could never be changed.
When Wang Chen and the two men blatantly "broke their shoes," they always asked the two to write explanation materials, and from time to time they were pulled to a criticism and fighting meeting, because they seemed to have just taken a crooked road for a while, educated, and saved. But when Chen Qingyang admitted that he was in love with Wang Er, he let them go, because he was completely helpless at this time.
"Doing this is very different from liking it. The former should be on a struggle trip, and the latter should be cut apart with a thousand knives. But no one had the right to split our five horses apart, so they had to let us go. ”
This description seems strange today. Now, most of us think that sex without love is inferior, and that sex produced by love is pure, and that the desires that come with love are natural. In Wang Er's time, the two happened to be reversed.
In such a context, people are secretive about people's desires and feelings. So that Wang Er has no concept of love at all, Chen Qingyang has never experienced love although he has been married, and he has fallen in love with Wang Er after realizing it, but he does not admit it, and he feels ashamed after admitting it.
Therefore, when Wang Er and Chen Qingyang ended in this crazy era, the organization asked Wang Chen and Chen to marry, saying that the impact of not marrying was not good, and the result was that the two got married in the morning and divorced in the afternoon. It wasn't until many years later that Chen Qingyang told Wang Er about her love.
Sexual desire is one of many desires, and human sexual desire contains complex human emotions and embodies the basic aspects of human nature. To deny desire is actually to deny human nature, but also to deny individuality. Denying these objectively existing basic needs, individual life choices and personal happiness are basically impossible to talk about. Wavelet writing, I want to express probably this point.
What is the Golden Age?
The title of the book is "The Golden Age", what exactly is the Golden Age?
At the beginning, the protagonist Wang Er said: "I was twenty-one years old that day, in the golden age of my life. I have a lot of extravagant hopes. I want to love, I want to eat, and I want to turn into a half-light and half-dark cloud in the sky in an instant. ”
At that time, Wang Er was working as a zhiqing in the countryside of Yunnan, and he had just turned twenty-one that day and was herding cattle by the river. At this time, he was young and strong, and his heart was full of hope.
Wang Er's golden age undoubtedly refers to the best time of his life, those shining days in his life.
However, Wang Er's situation at that time was actually very bad, he was doing farm work in the remote countryside, he was ostracized everywhere, and later he was shown to the public and criticized for "moral corruption".
His golden age was actually in the gray age of history, when many people gave up on themselves in absurdity and committed suicide in struggle, and the big historical background determined that Wang Er did not suffer less in his golden age.
But why does such a gray era make Wang Er nostalgic and make countless readers fascinated?
Chief Writer: Achu
Editing: Such as Mu Shu list
Image: Internet intrusion and deletion