Writer Zhang Huiwen
Harvest Book Review · 141
Novella "Beauty" (Zhang Huiwen) 2022-2 "Harvest"
In that era when she had just escaped from confinement, He Li, a young girl from a poor background, attracted people's curious eyes because of her amazing beauty. Beauty became her punishment. In a few years, she experienced the death of her brother, the death of her father's serious illness, and the betrayal of her first love boyfriend. When she was physically and mentally exhausted, she and her middle school classmates who returned from another job fell in love and got married, but her husband died in a car accident. Her last love withstood the vicissitudes of fate because of the innocence in her essence. Thirty years later, all those misfortunes and misfortunes have finally left her, just as a disaster has finally subsided with the beautiful passing, settled as another kind of history of this place.
Unreachable happiness
——Commenting on Zhang Huiwen's novella "Beauty"
Dai Yaoqin
"Beauty" is Zhang Huiwen's first novella, and the first of three "county beauty" novels she began to create at the end of 2021. The novel recalls the story left by the beauty He Li to a small city, and what flows through the mouth is the love experience that is both true and false, and the aesthetic enlightenment that can only be understood in the heart. For authors and readers, using words and reading to retain the people in their memories is surging with the joy of discovery, but it is sad to retain the beauty in their memories. The author needs to write about the intervention and reshaping of the fate of ordinary people in the era, but resolutely abandons the narrative strategy of suffering and survival. Zhang Huiwen uses the "he horizon" method to portray the occurrence, development, disappearance and echo of a beauty, and the cleverness of the novel is that "I" is not the only witness of beauty, "beauty" is the consensus of the city, and the memories of the whole city work together to outline He Li's thirty years.
If the "Middle Class Women" series expresses unspeakable emotions, then the "Beauty" series tells about unattainable happiness.
The clues of the novel are concise and clear, following the three timelines of the 1980s, 1990s and the new century, the changes in urban and rural areas and the changes in concepts involved in reform form a narrative field, and He Li responds to various changes with unchanging "beauty". She appears in a flashback with a fluctuating sense of age: wearing a dress and pushing a bicycle from the ward building to the outpatient building, she gives "me" a sensory impact from a different temperament and demeanor. "I believe it was many years before I gradually recognized the special feature of that beauty. It is something as natural as the breath, as if the spring breeze and the soft, autumn water is clear. It is like a kind of light, warm and clear, enveloping people in it. ”
The novel establishes He Li's "sense of axis", on the one hand, using a bright line to state her life course related to four people- her brother, Li Chengguang, Sun Xiangdong and Song Bin, on the other hand, using a dark line to depict her own introduction to different ages in the county. Her brother assists He Li in growing up and allows her to experience the joy of youth outside of following the rules, but her brother's death quickly ends the beauty of her life's only youth. The reason for He Li's psychological growth stemmed from seeing the woman in the back seat of her brother's motorcycle and instantly realizing that her brother would gradually withdraw from his life and that she needed to grow up independently. Li Chengguang appeared at the right time, and his savior aura led He Li into love, but in this side of the world, He Li's beauty could only open to him, but closed to others. The tragedy caused by the difference in status and status is not unexpected, and the former crush Sun Xiangdong becomes the new savior at this time, and he helps He Li completely get rid of the established fate of "Golden House Hidden Jiao". "Beauty" acquires a normal marriage, and although gossip continues to harass the fragile new family, a car accident leaves no room for destroying the happiness in front of them. Entering the new century, Song Bin gave He Li a not too bad ending, and three years of waiting may be able to exchange for the second half of his life.
The novel "Beauty" is like a poet's movie, Zhang Huiwen converges on every moment of tension, and controls all the nodes of the outbreak of grief. In the flow of time, there is such a beautiful person who goes with the flow, is pushed into one love after another, and has been passively opposing the unknown fate. Dreams and desires disappear silently, and the destructiveness of life is not in taking turns to plunder violently, but in destroying happiness just when you are not prepared. Director Tarkovsky is only interested in the inner circle of the characters, "My focus is on people, and there is a universe in the human heart, and if you want to express the meaning of thought and life, you don't need to build a framework with events as a clue." (Andrey Tarkovsky: Time for Carving, translated by Zhang Xiaodong, South China Sea Publishing Company, 2016, p. 219.) Zhang Huiwen's method of portraying "beauty" is often to show the consumption of years, there is no fierce struggle and great opening and closing of sorrow and joy, and women endure suffering in many constraints such as family, society, and concepts. We can more intuitively perceive similar female emotions from Femu films and Antonioni films. The jade pattern of "Spring in a Small Town", strolling through the city head, living alone in the old house, Zhang Zhichen's arrival activates her dormant heart, but responsibility and morality eventually drag her back to Li Yan's side. Claudia and Sandro come together after Anna's disappearance, which is a mutual redemption between the two from their emptiness, but Claudia can accept Sandro's betrayal because what she is really tired of is not life, but herself. The three works use the combination of external scenes and inner worlds to create examples of cold beauty: depressed, tired, spoiled, He Li will hang a shallow smile at the corner of her mouth, which implies that she has stronger resilience in life, she can face all misfortunes and forgive all injustices.
In his essay "The Dream of the Youth at the Bottom", Loncière uses Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" as a case study, discussing that the energy of the modern novel is used in two genres, one is prose poetry, "it removes action in order to expand the presentation of feelings, condenses the whole world into subtle scenes", and the other is a certain type of novel, "it writes the actions of the characters very simple, so that they can suddenly realize the immutable nature of daily life, and then let them go to the end of confusion, or suffer in monotonous repetition". (Rancière: On Aesthetics, translated by Zhao Zilong, The Commercial Press, 2019 edition, p. 69.) ）
Many reviews have found commonalities between Zhang Huiwen's novels and Chekhov's works, in fact, she inherited and developed the "first type of novel" style, including Flaubert, Maupassant, Chekhov, Naipaul, Oz... Simple stories, complex moods, and stereotyped life that consumes life. So, what is the theme that Zhang Huiwen gave to the "Beauty Series"? I think it is from the daily transcription of inner memories and emotions of beauty. With the help of the story of "beauty", she mobilizes the reader's trickle-down memories of beautiful people or things. "These things have deeply touched us, and as we grow, their beautiful echoes even extend into middle age." In this way, she belongs to each of us and seems to have become another kind of history of the place. The novella is Zhang Huiwen's new practice, she still continues to use a minimalist narrative, revealing the ups and downs of fate and emotions, from the expected tribulations, showing how the "beauty" can get through, how to forget, and how to quietly repair the collapse of the soul. He Li will pay absolute trust and trust in the three relationships, and there is no calculated interference between lovers, and she will always treat feelings purely and sincerely. Therefore, all kinds of women's independence and women's struggle, if placed on a county beauty, it will seem inappropriate, she did not manage beauty, but content with life, and strive for a precious love. The novel's uniqueness is also established.
The times, the county town, and the beauties, the people of time and place who would have inspired a strong drama, but they have become the world, and the author presents He Li to digest the layers of suffering inward. From this level of analysis, the novel shows a difference from the film, it will use words to internalize or symbolize complex emotions, while the lens language chooses to externalize or materialize it. Li Chengguang is undoubtedly the male figure with the strongest tension in the novel, and his pursuit, abandonment and search for He Li are all wrapped in his selfishness. The interaction with He Li in the three periods was aimed at personal emotional needs. However, Li Chengguang's motivation to take the initiative to rescue Song Bin is immediately three-dimensional, and at this moment, he tries his best to protect (He Li and Song Bin's children) due to the loss of his former casualness (his and He Li's children), and the compensatory behavior invisibly breaks through the boundary of "self-interest" /"altruism", and the child really pulls out his regret for the lost love. This plot design is a sublimation of the novel, mixed with bitter warmth from the text.
Zhang Huiwen's early works, such as "Guliuguanhe", once focused on the township market as an important factor in regional ecology, and in subsequent creations, she focused less on the local landscape and concentrated on the environmental shaping of a certain moment. In the "Beauty Series", she needs to fully restore the times and create an immersive reading experience, so accurately reproducing the details of the place has become a key path to construct the situation and situation. "Beauty" creates space based on three main streets, in the love story of He Li and Li Chengguang, taking the county center - the state-run hotel as the starting point, and positioning the yellow canvas greenhouse, the state-run halal canteen, the fertilizer factory, the department store, the people's cinema, the county cultural center, the store department, the people's auditorium, the organ compound, and the county seat in the 1980s. Power has become a sharp weapon to influence fate, dominating He Li's family changes and life twists. In the 1990s, the change in the form of the street market revealed the change of concepts: the new hair salon opened by Wenzhou people, the songs of Hong Kong and Taiwan singers, the closed state-run hotels and state-run department stores, the newly built "Qinglonggang Commercial Street", the declining cinema, the hot video hall, the latest Hong Kong films screened for 24 hours, the emerging discotheque, reconstructing the material contours of the county town, but also reflecting its spiritual pursuit, capital began to override power, and ordinary people Sun Xiangdong gained the opportunity to get close to the beauty. In 2000, karaoke, VCD machines, large-screen color TVs, speakers dominated entertainment, while the "demolition fever" spread from the urban area to the suburbs, the four directions of east, west, south and north were expanding, a large number of land was auctioned to real estate developers, and Song Bin rose and fell. The great changes in space have blurred the boundaries between urban and rural areas, between the center and the edge, and He Li is still the focus of the county, and the fence where new ideas stand still leaves the core position of "beauty" for it.
"Beauty" shows Zhang Huiwen's new thinking, the previous works of women's psychological depiction of the boredom and tiredness of life, that is, I have discussed the "modern disease", such as "Summer in dreams", "Lost and Regained", "Journey", "Drunkenness", "Twilight", "Good Night", "Yesterday", and "Beauty Series" women, they can accept loneliness and resolve loneliness, which is not a kind of female independent practice? At the time of the third misfortune, He Li angrily wanted to fight with it and tear it apart, but when she "woke up exhausted, she saw the gray morning light shining into the hall, the morning breath was cold, fresh, and thick, and someone in the hall began to talk and move, knowing that the new day was coming again." Calm requires more courage, psychological maturity is an important indicator of growth, and in the end "she got on the bus and made up a ticket to go home."
Teresa Teresa's song "You are in my heart" is the title of the entire novel. Brother, Li Chengguang, Sun Xiangdong, and Song Bin all have He Li in their hearts, and He Li also has them in her heart, and readers will also remember He Li and trace the people in their memories, just as "all the old times seem to pass through her in an instant, and also through my body." (End)
Author of this article:
Yaoqin Dai, Ph.D. in Literature, Nanjing University, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Dalian University of Technology.
"Harvest" micro-store announcement
Recently, due to the fluctuation of the epidemic, it is impossible to ship in time, and the express delivery in many places is blocked halfway, including the damage to the publication due to the backlog of express delivery, and the journal feels very sorry that the damaged publications will be reissued. However, due to the changeable situation, the current courier company cannot give a specific time limit for resuming normal express delivery services. If your magazine encounters such a situation, we hope for understanding. We will maintain close contact with courier companies and issue publications as soon as the courier returns to normal.
2022-2 Harvest Catalogue
Novel
Xuan Papaya Villa / Su Yi Gua
novelette
Beauty /Zhang Huiwen
Half-baked man / Wang Zhanhei
short story
I thought I was human/Ding Xiaoning
Kennel/Chan each
Shadow Womb / Li Hao
A sea of dust drops
Eat meat/Wang Binbin
Fiction class
What literature gives us/Yu Hua
Mountains and rivers fall asleep
Gu Dao/Wang Jianbing
Bright stars
Yu Xiang: She recognizes the direction of the Destiny Wind Banner / Xiao Hai
Uchiha New Work/Uchiha
"Harvest" WeChat public account
harvest1957