On January 21, 2022, the famous writer Zhang Jie died of illness in the United States at the age of 85.
At the age of 77, Zhang Jie held her solo oil painting exhibition at the Beijing Museum of Modern Literature. This was her first oil painting exhibition in Beijing, but she said it was her "farewell performance" – "Zhang Jie said goodbye!" Also in this exhibition, Zhang Jie mentioned in her speech on the spot: "The last thing I want to say is that I have found a lawyer to make a will. Inside my will, I wrote: No memorial service after my death, no commemorative articles, no articles that remember me, and no memorials to me. ”
Zhang Jie solo oil painting exhibition, Zhang Jie (left) and Tie Ning.
Zhang Jie is undoubtedly an important female writer in contemporary China and one of the most talked about writers of the 1980s. Her creative vitality is exuberant, and she has been working tirelessly for decades since she first appeared in the literary world in 1978 with an article "Children from the Forest" in the tide of "scar literature". She is the author of more than 10 novels such as "Heavy Wings", "Only One Sun", "No Words", novels, essays, essay collections "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", "Ark", "Emerald", "Zhang Jie's Anthology" (4 volumes), "Selected Chinese Contemporary Writers", "International Literary Award Winners' Self-Selected Library", "The Person Who Hurt Me the Most In the World Went", etc., travelogue literary collections "Travels Abroad", "A Chinese Woman in Europe" and so on.
Although the 77-year-old Zhang Jie once said freely that everyone should not commemorate her, the news of her death still caused great shock in the literary circle and literary lovers.
In an interview with The Paper, Zhang Li, a professor at the College of Letters of Beijing Normal University, recalled: "On February 5th, on the wall of a friend's house, I saw an oil painting by Zhang Jie, a white rose, and we talked about Zhang Jie's influence on Chinese literature in that painting, and also talked about her still having edges and angles in her later years, and her words were not worn down by the years, and she was a respectable writer. At that time, none of us knew that she had passed away. Hearing the news of her death today, I immediately thought of the "Farewell to This" that she wrote that year, in fact, the writer has already said goodbye in her own way. ”
Speaking of Zhang Jie's literary path, Zhang Li said: "In my eyes, Zhang Jie is an outstanding writer in the history of contemporary Chinese literature, she has made pioneering contributions to the development of contemporary literature and Chinese women's literature, and the strong female consciousness and feminine spirit in her works have profoundly influenced generations of people, and her works have become milestones in the history of Chinese women's literature. I think the best memorial to Zhang Jie is to read her works, she is in her "Love is Unforgettable", "Heavy Wings", but also in her "Ark", "Wordless", "Knowing In". ”
Critic Rao Xiang wrote in retrospect of Zhang Jie's creation: Among female writers in the new era, the large span and style of Zhang Jie's works are an indisputable fact, so it is difficult to summarize it in a few words. ...... On the one hand, she was one of the first writers to establish herself in the literary world of the "new era", and won several national literary awards until the mid-1980s. In 1978, in 1979 and 1983, he won the National Outstanding Short Story Award three times, and "Emerald" and "Heavy Wings" won the National Outstanding Novella Award and the Mao Dun Literature Award respectively. For a long time, she was the only contemporary writer to win national awards for short, novella and novella. Considering that this kind of award is a recognition of works that conform to the mainstream ideology, then Zhang Jie should undoubtedly be regarded as a fairly mainstream writer.
But on the other hand, Zhang Jie almost came all the way with controversy, "Love, is not forgotten", "Ark", "Heavy Wings" (the first version) have caused fierce controversy. As Xie Mian pointed out at the time, "She is not heretical, but it is a challenge." With her sensitivity and courage, Zhang Jie is testing (or challenging) mainstream literary (political) norms and the boundaries of gender norms. In the late 1980s, Zhang Jie's creative momentum was greatly slowed down, her influence gradually weakened, and she was somewhat ignored and forgotten. Of course, this is related to the change of literary trends, but it is also related to Zhang Jie's increasing initiative to distance herself from the central discourse and the mainstream discourse.
In 2005, Zhang Jie won the Mao Dun Literature Award again for her three-volume novel "No Words", but it was quite intriguing. Such a "confessional" style work, which expresses an accidental, fatalistic view of history and a tragic life experience, especially the third book on the power struggle of political groups, is almost a rebellion against "Heavy Wings". After 20 years, the fact that both works have won the Mao Dun Literature Prize reflects a certain loosening of the criteria for awards on the one hand, and also reflects the change of dominant ideology on the other hand. After "Wordless", Zhang Jie successively published the short stories "The Dust of roses", "Listening to the Comet Gliding Silently", "Four Smoke Pipes" and the long novel "Zhi Zai", completely away from the mainstream literary world, transcending the survival of "here and now" and writing exotic stories.
Zhang Jie's paintings
Zhang Zhiqing, deputy director of the National Library, also remembered: Very sad! Having read almost all of her works, I like the novella "The Child from the Forest" the most. As this article says: "Love cannot be forgotten", Zhang Jie's works and demeanor have long existed in the hearts of her readers. mourn!
Ji Yaya, deputy editor of October magazine, said that the first work zhang jie he read was "Emerald", "At that time, I was still very young, and I didn't read for a long time, because my mother was a literary youth, and the "Novel Monthly" that our family subscribed to published "Emerald", which was a particularly profound work in my childhood reading memory. This is actually a mermaid-like story about love and sacrifice, a particularly idealistic and sacrificial love story. As "Emerald" said, "Endless love", love is the motif of her life. Her idealistic love takes on the charming anti-secular flavor of the 1980s. Her narrative of love was part of the ideals of the 1980s Enlightenment, through which people understood and defined love. In her later years, she used Wordless to deconstruct the myths of love and history in the 1980s. ”
Ji Yaya believes that this theme of "love and sacrifice" also runs through Zhang Jie's later works, in the story of "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", women are particularly strong, but also have a highly idealistic spiritual purity, and through sacrifice to complete the transformation from ordinary love to great love, and rise to the transformation of life, career, and national level. Later, zhang jie's painful introspection of women in her writing and the spirit of highly idealizing love itself also transformed into a rebellion against secular life, and she actively reflected on marriage and the relationship between men and women in the secular world, including how to view intellectual women in this society. She has a famous work called "The Ark", this novel is written about three divorced single women, so this work will probably be read today as an anorexic narrative. ”
Ji Yaya summed up the transformation of emotional concepts in Zhang Jie's writing: "The fantasy about the ideal man in "Love Cannot Be Forgotten", "Heavy Wings", and even "Emerald" is the fantasy of an ideal man given to him by the times, the kind of male image that is revolutionary or reformed, or the kind of male image that is worried about the country and the people, full of the WTO entry spirit of the previous generation of intellectuals, begins to disillusion in "Ark", and the beginning of male disillusionment is also the beginning of the emergence of women's self-identity and subject consciousness. When this man begins to picture, perhaps women's self-identity and self-realization begin to appear in what women call female subject consciousness, Zhang Jie will not bend or pander, and her text also shows a particularly sharp and uncompromising side. Until the later "Wordless", not only love, but everything about the historical revolution, all that was once given a pure idealistic color, will go disillusioned, so it is very tragic. ”
Placing Zhang Jie in a group of idealists in the 1980s, zhang jie understands that in the 1980s, some ideals fell on love, some may fall on history, some fell on the narrative of human nature, everyone will experience a different degree of grief, and by the 1990s, people's mental state began to appear another way of reconciliation with the world.
"Then I would also like to say that it is not enough to talk about Zhang Jie from the perspective of emotional view, her "Heavy Wings" of that year is full of the vigorous spirit of that generation of intellectuals, which is beyond the self-consciousness of female intellectuals and about the spirit of the whole nation. So she is not a female writer in the sense of private writing, she has been calling for an idealistic man and then doing something to change humanity together, that generation of writers is indeed very different from the writers of the later flow of daily life, she needs an ideal man, while being able to understand and respect her personality equally, and she does not allow this man to be a little imperfect, this should be the tragedy of some people who are too intelligent and sensitive. Ji Yaya said.