An enclave of one man
Zhou Jieru's novel collection is all featuring women, who are scattered in the metropolis, hanging on to each other, and there is no one to rely on except herself, even her husband, children and girlfriends are unreliable. This sense of loneliness in the crowd of people seems to be the situation of modernity described by Benjamin, but people are different. Benjamin's lonely people, as wanderers who consume objects of time, produce poetry in the confrontation and entanglement with the city, becoming a symbol of poetic imagination, quite a bit of the temperament of the hero of the end; while Zhou Jieru's lonely subject is the squeezed big city civilian, they lack heroic temperament and poetic feelings, only a little more ninja endowment - a person is waiting, chasing and following, no matter how tired he is, he can live. For example, Ah Zhen in "Jordan", struggling on the streets of Jordan in Hong Kong for the livelihood of her children, enduring her husband's cheating, enduring heavy housework, enduring economic pressure, enduring the hypocrisy of teachers and grandmothers, waiting for the opportunity of divorce, waiting for the opportunity of her husband to be hospitalized, waiting for everything to pass, her relief and happiness is that she will not be like the old lady who showed the streets. And another Azhen in "Marriage And Flying", a mainland sister with a doctorate degree, has had children for decades, but after her daughter studied abroad, she did not even live in the house, her husband asked her to return to the mainland, she had to live in a rice noodle shop, as an ordinary waiter. Ah Zhen can not escape, can not sublimate the urban life, although it is lucky to live, but surviving is not the dissipation of life, the urban life of the dissipated state, is the irony of the road of personal struggle, only want to live well women, always in the enclave of survival.
As a collection of novels with clear spatial identity, "Beautiful Court" presents us with countless landmarks of huge cities - Jordan, Beautiful Court, Yantian Zi, Bubagan Restaurant, Brooklyn Zoo, District 51, Laguna, Lovet, etc., whether it is street blocks, tourist attractions, or hospitals, restaurants, buses, taxis and parking lots, have become enclaves that envelop or squeeze the main body, and they present not only the alienation of "being in and not belonging", but also the dilemma of urban people's self-identity. In the narrative of the novel, the "I" or "she" who insists on individuality, in order to adapt to the environment, acts and words are always adjusting and pretending, and the inner turmoil remains superficially indifferent. This kind of incongruity between the inside and the outside just shows that the urban space, as a mirror image of the self-identity of urban people, the relationship between it and the subject is a dual relationship of both dependence and hatred, which is in the real situation, but it is difficult to make the specific individual have a sense of identity.
In brooklyn Zoo, the last novel in Hong Kong, Zhou Jieru also writes about the influence of urban enclaves that cannot enter personal life but exist conceptually. In this novel, the taxi driver and the passenger "I" talk about their thin American experiences in the car, and when it comes to the Brooklyn Zoo, which neither of them has visited, the two are vague and deeply in love. The Brooklyn Zoo symbolizes urban enclaves that are difficult for urban civilians to reach, but it has a powerful seductive force for them, entering the depths of their urban experience — the level of constructing their own identity.
In Zhou Jieru's novel, in addition to presenting the enclave nature of urban reality space, it also strengthens the enclave of a virtual state, that is, marriage. In the Hong Kong-style marriage of the novel collection, women cannot have a foothold even if they have children, and Ah Zhen Ah Fang Ah May, after marriage, did not win a house of their own and were displaced. But as a female writer, Zhou Jieru has a unique reflection on the impact of marriage on women, and after she does not hesitate to destroy the myths about urban love and marriage, she emphasizes that the will to survive itself is enough to promote hope and the future. For example, Ami in "Beauty Court", after the end of the happy family life, she hid in the cake shop as a small clerk who could be fired at any time, she spied on the life of the rich wife's petty bourgeoisie, but also found the triviality and boredom in the parasitic life, and finally understood that it was the only possibility to earn a better future for herself. The most interesting thing about this article is not Ami's consideration of the future, but her positioning of past encounters, in Ami's view, the sisters' previous urban encounters are meaningful because "I have seen better, I will think so." Thoughts? "Be yourself, not attached to all people", like sister Ali, first for her boyfriend, then for her father, and finally for her own business. But it is proposed that people who have seen the world will have a real sense of self, which is probably the unique meaning of the metropolis that Zhou Jieru discovered. In a sense, she was right. Just like in the fairy tale "Alice in Wonderland", the girl Alice is just sleepwalking in Wonderland, but after waking up, she has self-awareness and becomes a different female subject. The only hope that the metropolis, as an enclave, is also that the experience of seeing a passer-by that does not have can make the subject form a magical power - the power of rebirth after the disaster.
Floating City Sand Painting
The aesthetics of urban writing have the potential to diversify, from oil-painting realism to ukiyo-e-like lyricism. In my opinion, Zhou Jieru's urban writing cannot be directly connected with the above two aesthetics, and it is closer to the aesthetic fashion of the newly emerged type of painting, sand painting. The characteristics of sand painting are different from the traditional art that pursues eternity and depth, and the texture of the flow of sand creates a flowing reality, a process of light and final result and heavy aesthetic presentation, and its beauty takes into account the wonder and sorrow of all things that are not easy to gather but are fleeting. "Beautiful Pavilion" is rooted in the aesthetics of life in which individuals get along with the city, and presents the changes of urban life and the dispersion of people's hearts with personalized artistic techniques, which is to record the hearts of the floating city with the aesthetic fashion of sand painting.
Sand painting presentation, refusing to be serious and heavy, must pursue lightness. From the perspective of technique, Zhou Jieru's novel collection has a universal light humor, presenting the lightness of the city with a sense of fluid beauty. Mild humor should come from the black humor of modernism, but the laughter points of Zhou Jieru's novels are difficult to settle in the ideological irony mechanism, but are at the intersection of boredom, absurdity and irony, and the face is blurred. For example, the joke about "Di Zi" in "Yantian Zi" is intended to satirize the Xingang people who have forgotten the way to come, but the narrator's "I" attitude of not thinking about it weakens the intensity of reflection. The ridicule of the Brooklyn Zoo in "Brooklyn Zoo" and the slight mockery of hospitals, buses and passengers in "Wasp Crawling on the Arm" all create bitterness and heaviness in the distance of the spectator, do not reach the depths of the characters' hearts, deliberately reject the emotional rendering that may cause deep resonance, and finally present only the urban human landscape in the mirror.
Sand painting relies on sand painters to show the layout of the picture one by one, forming a relatively single mobile narrative, which is very similar to the narrative mode of Zhou Jieru's novel collection. Novels often use the character "I" or "she" as a single narrator, relying on the dense monologues or dialogues of the characters to advance the narrative, greatly compressing the background and environmental description, and strengthening the traces of emotional and psychological flow, this narrative mode perfectly conveys the impression of perceptual urban life, but also avoids the possibility of embedding the individual in the historical situation to be tortured, highlighting the floating and empty subject image.
Sand painting aesthetic expression, but also the source of the unique reading experience of Zhou Jieru's novel, from the perspective of readability, this novel collection has neither a thrilling story setting, nor a clear and complete character image, it is difficult to give the public readers an interesting impression; but the breathless dense dialogue and almost meaningless discourse repetition in the novel, the simple character relationship and complex psychological dimension and other paradoxical aesthetic forms exist, and form the unique aesthetic style of Zhou Jieru's novel - cold incense, if a glimpse of the shock, Zhou Jieru's novels are like window models in high-end shopping malls, extremely seductive but difficult to approach, and readers who are not very attentive may despise their artistic efforts because of the simplicity of their story and background factors. However, if you read it carefully, you can appreciate that this seemingly fashionable but arrogant novel aesthetic corresponds to the essence of sand painting in a flashy modern city. In this sense, Zhou Jieru is the best recorder of the current urban human landscape.
If the time and space writing embodies the unique urban cognition and aesthetic ideas of Zhou Jieru's novels, those specific artistic techniques, such as constructing the spiritual core of mild humor in dramatic dialogues, attaching importance to the rendering techniques of situational atmosphere and psychological reality, and compressing and simplifying the plot and background, etc. reflect Zhou Jieru's absorption and transcendence of the modern novel tradition, in addition to the literary techniques and ideas of Camus, Hemingway and others have a profound impact on her, the current Hong Kong literary and artistic thought emphasizes the main body. The influence of the trend of novel creation that emphasizes emotional catharsis cannot be ignored. But what is more worthy of attention is that as a loyal observer of the current urban human nature, Zhou Jieru's floating city sand paintings appropriately present the survival dilemma and identity crisis of some urban people, gently but without losing strength, forming an aesthetic effect of urban displacement with recognizability. Although from a larger perspective, the writing of urban humanity is boundless, for any creator, it faces a great challenge.