Omikim
"Dangerous pleasure" vs. "rare emotion"
- Rereading Uddhav's "The Past"
Wen | Zhang Li
"The Past" is not a well-known work by Uddhav. For most readers, when they think of Yu Dafu's novels, most of them think of "Sinking", "The Drunken Night of spring breeze", and "Chi Guihua", and the titles of these works have become similar to Yu Dafu's name. However, compared with the previous three works, "The Past" is not inferior, and even the artistic expression is more refined, which later researchers have pointed out. [1]
Uddhav (1896-1945)
The Past was written on January 10, 1927, and published on February 1, 1927 in the monthly magazine Creation (Vol. I, No. 6). With only 9,000 words long, the novel is typical of modern China, about the reunion of two middle-aged men and women in a different place. When "I" was called Li Bai, it was a man suffering from "respirator disease", who came to a distant harbor city to recuperate, it was a drizzle and cold late autumn, I thought I could not meet an acquaintance, but I did not expect to hear a woman calling him on the road. Mr. Lee recalls the past. They met in Mindri, Shanghai, the third of four sisters. At that time, he was passionately pursuing the second eldest of the four sisters. The novel writes about Mr. Li's various unbearable relationships with the second elder, and writes about his carnal imagination of the second elder, but the woman ends his non-division of thoughts with a slap. The third elder is a witness to his relationship with the second elder and has a deep affection for Mr. Li, but Mr. Li refuses. Who would have thought of meeting again in a strange place? At this time, the third elder had already married an overseas Chinese, and that overseas Chinese had just passed away. The hero wants to arouse the enthusiasm of the third elder for himself, but she dodges, pushes away, and finally cries and says, "Our period has passed." At the end of the novel, Mr. Li leaves the coastal city alone by boat.
"The Past" does not have the beginning and end of the general short story, nor the dramatic reversal of the fate of the characters, it makes people silent, making people think of "this situation can be remembered, but it was already confused at the time"; thinking of verses such as "The same is the fallen man at the end of the world, why should we have met", and some parts of the novel also make people feel uncomfortable. And it is precisely because of the indescribable pity and offense that this novel is unforgettable to read.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Reading The Past, I have thought many times of what Sontag wrote about Camus's Diary, "Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers satisfy a husband's honorable qualities: reliable, reasonable, generous, decent. Other writers value the gift of their lover, the gift of seduction, not the gift of virtue. [2] Did Uddhav belong to what Sontag called a "husband" or a "lover"? I thought it was the latter. There is a certain "gift of seduction" in Uddhav and his works, which constitutes a certain wonderful attraction to the reader. "The Past" is a work written by Yu Dafu at his best age, with a rich and restrained beauty of emotion, "dangerous pleasure" and "rare emotion" mixed with each other, at the same time, the writer has chosen a lyrical way to express, even in the framework of a hundred years of new literary history, can be called temperamental.
"Dangerous pleasure"
The structure of "The Past" is roughly divided into four parts.
The first part is the first paragraph, "I" and "she" come to eat on the high-rise building facing the sea.
The second part, which recalls how two people came to eat on a tall building, is the longest part of the novel, with 15 pages of the 18-page novel telling stories of the past. It is interspersed with the interactions of the hero and heroine in Shanghai, Suzhou and M Port.
The third part is when the two come to eat on a tall building, and "I" confess and make overtures several times, and forcibly pull her to stay in the hotel next to the restaurant, but, in bed, the woman finally pushes him away. "I" realized that I could not go back to the old days.
In the fourth part, "I" leave the city alone by boat.
"There was a cool breeze in the air, and the leaves flew down like hail flakes, and although it was a small port city in the south, it was also very sad that one night that people could feel the winter evening, and she and I had dinner on a tall building near the sea." [3] This is the first sentence of The Past, and it almost sets a sad and down-to-earth tone. Who are "me" and "she", and why are they sitting on this sea-facing tall building to eat?
In the second part, the narrator begins to reminisce, and when he returns to the scene of "me and her, having dinner on a high-rise building on the seashore", it is already the middle part of page 15, that is, the novel spends five-sixths of the time writing about the "past" before the meal, the big memories are covered with small memories, distant memories and close memories intersect with each other, and at the same time, there is also a crossover of time and space: there is The People's Delhi in Shanghai, the trip to Suzhou, the encounter and conversation in Port M, and so on. It is precisely because of the 15 pages of memories of the "past" that there is a third part where the two cry opposite each other in bed. Overall, the second part is an important part of the novel and an important preparation for the novel's emotions. It seems complicated, but because it is a thought and a person's past memories, it is easy to give people a sense of substitution. About how the two came to eat on the tall building, the novel begins with the scene where "I" and the third elder meet again.
Macau at dusk
It was an unexpected adventure, one day in the drizzle of dusk, I walked down the hill from a small hotel on the hill to the west, and wanted to go to the city for dinner. When passing the P Street, which has few pedestrians, the door of a small bungalow facing the street suddenly slowly stepped out of a woman. She was wearing a gray raincoat with an umbrella on top, so I couldn't see her face. About inside the shed door, she had already seen me—because I didn't have an umbrella with me on that day—so I took a few steps in front of her, and she suddenly asked me:
"Is it Mr. Li who is walking in front?" Mr. Lee Bai Shi! ”
As soon as I heard her call me, it seemed to be very familiar, but I couldn't remember which one it was, and I turned my head back as if I touched the electricity, and I saw only a small gray face against the black umbrella. It was already a hazy time, and I could not see the whole organization of her face; but her two large eyes, which flickered violently and came from nowhere, and a cold wind like an electricity shook my spirit a little. [4]
Two men and women who had known each other suddenly met unexpectedly in a different place, one shouting the name of the other, this scene is very graphic. Next, the novel begins to recall the relationship with the third elder. And when recalling the relationship with the third, the novel swings a stroke, using two pages to talk about the relationship between "I" and the second, the "flirting" of the two people, saying that it is a swing, but it is by no means idle, it is a powerful part of the novel, it is an important background for the reader to understand the relationship between "I" and the third, and it is the theme of "The Past", about people in lust, men in lust.
Uddhav "Sinking"
As we know, the protagonists of Uddhav's novels are usually tormented by lust. In "Sinking", the anxiety of nation-state identity is entangled with irrepressible lust, and the novel writes a strong and inextricable erotic suffering of modern people. After the publication of "Sinking", the reputation was mixed, and Later Yu Dafu himself expressed his dissatisfaction with the novel many times, but in any case, this novel was engraved in the history of modern Chinese literature in a harsh way, because it brought a thunderous sense of shock to Chinese literature: "His bold self-exposure, for the hypocrisy of the scholar and doctor hidden in the back armor for thousands of years, is a completely stormy blitzkrieg, which shocks some false Taoists and false talents to the point of madness." Why? It is precisely because of such explicit bluntness that they feel the difficulty of cheating. So Xu Zhimo's 'poets' began to scold. He said: The people of the Creation Society, like the beggars on the street, deliberately inflict some blood and pus erosion wounds on their bodies to attract the sympathy of passers-by. This is mainly an attack on Duff. ”[5]
Beginning with Sinking, Uddhav reinvents the way of writing lust, seeing the lust of his protagonist as a mirror image of the times. As Qian Xing Estate believes, Uddhav "returned to the sick psychology, the sick movements, the desire for sexual satisfaction, and the demonic expression of the youth from the sexual bitterness, completing a miniature picture of the youth's sexual distress." [6] Of course, in such a erotic story, female characters are indispensable. In The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, Li Oufan notes that "Ito Tiger Maru divides the heroines of Yudaf's novels into two categories: the persecutor and the persecuted, the former—the fat, sexy, and entertaining whore—mostly in novels he wrote in Japan; and the latter—the fragile, docile, and poor victims of society—that appear frequently in his novels after his return to China." ”[7]
The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, by Li Oufan, Nova Press
Both types of women—women as "persecutors" and "persecuted" in lust—appear simultaneously in The Past. The second is charming and sexy, and Mr. Li is fascinated by it. "Usually, she always makes fun of me, and in front of everyone, she always likes to recount my insensitive movements and my wrong words as a joke material. But it is also strange to say that she toyed with me like this, despised me, and I not only did not hate her heart, but also thought that I was glorious and happy. [8] In such a erotic relationship, the second eldest is a "giver" who is high above, and she has no scruples about teasing him and degrading him, and he enjoys it.
In case I had disobeyed her orders, she unceremoniously raised her fat hand and slapped me in the face. And I, after being scolded by her, felt an indescribable satisfaction in my heart, and sometimes because I wanted to be subjected to her kind of giving, I deliberately violated her orders and asked her to beat me, or used her long pointed leather shoe foot to kick me in the waist. If I didn't play enough, I deliberately said, "No pain!" inadequate! Kick again! Hit again! She unceremoniously raised her hands or feet to kick and punch. When I was beaten to the point that my cheeks were flushed or my waist was sore, I obeyed her orders softly and obediently, and then I did what she wanted me to do. [9]
This erotic relationship has been analyzed by researchers as a relationship between "abuse" and "abuse" in the erotic sense. In fact, the novel very bluntly writes about "I" to the second sex fantasy: "I have also worn stockings for her, so her fat and tender white feet, with very thin toes and thick heels, often have to be the center of my fantasies." From this pair of feet, I was able to come up with many bizarre dreams. For example, when I was eating, when I saw the pink and white sticky fragrant rice, I would think of her feet. [10] The Past writes about the physiological instinctive impulses in the relationship between men and women, the fluctuations of lust controlled by hormones. Compared with the sexual fantasies and sexual depictions in "Sinking", its erotic imagination has a certain sense of flesh and reality, revealing physical pleasures, and it is clear that "he" and "she" both derive pleasure from such relationships. The second eldest in the novel, although she does not have much ink, she is strong and fresh, and for the hero's courtship in the restaurant, "she actually beat me in the mouth." [11] In the erotic relationship between "I" and the second brother, there is another kind of cruelty, darkness, and brutality.
Uddhav's erotic writing is often considered "perverted", but what is "perverted" and what is "not perverted" is not so much that he writes about a "perverted" lust as a natural and physiological phenomenon, and the physical pleasure corresponding to this lust. Many people have mentioned the "sexiness" and "flow" in Yu Dafu's novels, but in fact, this is mostly related to his sensitivity to lust and writing. He admired that lust and regarded it as a living energy, and in a way it was the perception of that pleasure and the straightforward presentation of that pleasure that constituted the basic or long-term appeal of Uddhav's novel.
"Suffering Man" Meets "Suffering Man"
According to Duff's diary (February 15, 1927), "Reading at home at night, I received a letter from Zhou Zuoren praising my creation of "Past" this time, he said that my style has changed, "Past" is a masterpiece that can be compared with Dostoieffski and Garsin, describing women, very unique, I really feel ashamed, and I will work hard in the future so that his praise can not be disappointed." [12] Although Zhou Zuoren's evaluation is full of praise, it also points out the uniqueness of "Past", such as the similarity with Dostoevsky, such as the shaping of female figures--the novel does write two female figures with personalities, one is a spicy and deeply fleshy second elder image, and also writes a third elder who gradually emerges in front of the reader from vague to clear.
The relationship between "I" and the second is vividly remembered, and the third is a woman who is ignored by "me" in the first half, and her importance is slowly emerging in the second half. When telling the past story of the second elder, narrating the human world or mentioning the third elder, "the third elder is a bit gloomy, not like a young girl," [13] "So although the third elder is a very depressed, temperamental, usually talking is always yin and yang strange woman, for the things between me and the second elder, sometimes very helpful in pulling us together." Sometimes when I saw the second brother's action of beating me too hard or mocking me too much, I really hit me several times to hold the uneven, very gentle and thoughtful to say words not sad for the second brother. And I, a stupid uncle who doesn't know how ugly, not only does not thank the third elder in my heart, but also thinks that she is eventful and comes out to interfere with the free actions of others. [14] In this passage, there is the affection of the third elder and the ruthlessness of "I". In fact, "I" once directly rejected the third elder:
I remembered the second day of the first lunar month of that year, and the third and I went on a one-night trip to Suzhou. I remembered the night when the two were silently facing each other under the electric light. I remembered the sound of the next morning when she got up and she called me over in her tent to pick up the clothes she had dropped on the ground. However, I finally couldn't forget the second eldest, and for her kind of kindness, not only did not return her one or two, but also did not accept her spare time. The two people finally traveled in vain once, and the feelings finally did not get close, and that afternoon, they hurriedly returned to Shanghai like brothers and sisters. [15]
Every novel actually has its "water" part and "underwater" part. Part of it is the information given directly by the writer, and part of it is the information that is not cited and needs to be imagined by the reader. The water part of "The Past" is the memory of the man, and the underwater part is the emotional encounter of the third elder. If this story had been told by a woman, there would have been a lot of entanglement, pain, and struggle, right? The "on the water" and "underwater" parts are probably also reversed.
In 1932, Hemingway proposed the famous "Iceberg Principle" in Death in the Afternoon, that is, "how to reveal things above the truth only when telling the truth." ”
Of course, even if "The Past" comes from the memory and restoration of the male perspective, you can also see the initiative of the third elder in this relationship, where there is her desire and her desire. In the above passage, when recalling the past, the narrator uses three identical sentences, and the three sentences use three "I remember": "I remember the second day of the first lunar month of that year", "I remember that night", "I remember the next morning up", and the narrator explains the unforgettable memorability of those scenes at such a time node. After being rejected and ignored, how does the third old man feel? The novel does not present or write about her reactions, and at that time she was ignored in his emotional world. And what's so appealing about "The Past" is that, starting with "I Remember", the invisible woman is slowly visible, and she is recognized little by little by the reader/"I" and begins to dominate the direction of the story.
"Are you Mr. Li Baishi?" This is the first time that the third elder appears in the novel and takes the initiative to say hello. In particular, it is the third elder who recognizes "me" first. This implicitly shows that the initiator of the whole story is not "me" but the third elder, and then "I" also recognizes her. When "I" asked her why she was here, she had a clear sense of herself. "The previous life is destined to be a person who suffers hardships, such as a water weed, floating around, always unable to take root, my coming here, saying strange is also strange, saying that it should also be." 」 [16] She told him that she had followed a fat overseas Chinese who had come here, and that just a few days earlier, the man had died. The third elder came to Mr. Li's residence the next day. This time, the narrator leads the reader to look at her seriously:
Her attire was different from before. Inside a sesame tweed women's coat, a white filigree scarf was revealed, which was worn in a semi-Western style eight-point short jacket, and the skirt was a long black satin skirt. A pale yellow silk female hat, deeply covered on the forehead, under the rolled edge of the hat, is the charming pair of big eyes, the pupils are very dark, always staring at what kind of big eyes. Originally, it was a rectangular face, but because the hat was deeply covered in the eyes, it looked like it had a little round taste. Two or three years later, she had carved her two lines that dragged diagonally from the corner of her nose to the corner of her mouth. The pale face thought that it was the reason why it was hard to play cards last night. Originally a medium-sized body that was not fat or thin, it was probably my own body that was shortened, and it seemed to be a little taller than before. She stood with me on her back in front of the window. [17]
It's an emotional gaze, a man looking at a woman with curiosity. This time, she brought him freshness and amazement, so much so that he found that she had become "taller", "probably my own body is shortened". In the novel, the status of men and women gradually changes. In the meeting dialogue, the woman took the initiative to mention that she lost by playing mahjong with Mr. Li last night, "Almost lost my life!" [18] It was a "pun" that Mr. Lee apparently understood. From here, the relationship between men and women in the novel begins to reverse, which is a kind of "one after another"--the old three who were previously pure objects and objects of desire have changed from vague to clear, from insignificant to important, and the reader, together with Mr. Li, must re-examine her and recognize her.
After a period of conversation, the hero looked at the heroine again: "I lit a cigarette, sat down across from her, peeked at her, and her mysterious smile was no longer visible." The sinking eyes, the deep lines at the corners of her mouth, and the paleness of her cheeks completely painted her as a widowed woman. [19] This is seen from near and far, and then begins to write that their feelings gradually harmonize, so that the protagonist has an impulse, "At that time I really couldn't bear it anymore, so on the afternoon of that day, I didn't let her go back, and I made sure that she went to dinner with me." ”[20]
Charlotte, Macau Street View
Coming to the restaurant for dinner, it is two-thirds of the novel. A closer look reveals that the novel mentions electricity in a woman's eyes twice, and the second time, it uses the word "glowing" to describe it. At this time the two people became more and more familiar, and "I" was also attracted to her. But as soon as "I" tried to get close to her, she ran away. Again, when "I" wanted to hold her, "she stood up as if she had woken up in a dream and pushed me hard." [21] – Women struggle to emerge from the past, and when they eat, they seem to think of the "past" again.
"It's a little cold today!" I opened my mouth and said to her.
"Do you feel cold too?"
"How come I don't feel cold?"
"I thought you were colder than the weather."
"Old Three!"
“…………”
"How was the night in Suzhou that year compared to today?"
"I want to ask you to come!"
"Old three! That's my bad, it's me, my bad. ”
“…………”[22]
It's a conversation between middle-aged men and women with old feelings. The woman asked rhetorically, "Do you feel cold too?" "I thought you were colder than the weather." "I want to ask you to come!" She didn't say what emotional trauma she had suffered, but the complaints were all in this tone. The man later begged her to come to the hotel, almost by force. The air in the room also added to the cold, and she still got dressed, separated by a quilt, and lay there facing the bed. I pounced a few times, always overturned by her, and finally the last time she cried, crying and intermittently saying"
"Mr. Lee! our...... Our business has long been... It's long gone. That year, if only that year... You can...... You can love me as much as you do now, then I... I also...... No...... You won't eat this kind of bitterness. I...... I...... You know... I...... I...... For two or three years...! At this point, she swallowed even harder, covered her head with the bed, and simply cried bitterly. [23]
The rejection and crying in bed is the climax of the novel, and it is also the real face of two people, facing their own past, facing the common past of two people,—— when it was a year of innocence, and now they have gone through the wind and frost and suffered a lot. "If only you could be like you are now, you know..." The intermittent crying was full of a woman's pain and pain. The weeping old third made "I" re-examine her: "I think about her life, think about her current state, think about her plot for me in the past, and think more about my own fallen half of my life, and I am also touched by her weeping, although I can't shed tears, but my heart is also full of pain and sadness." [24] From the third elder at this moment, "I" recognized the similarity between myself and the third elder, the same unsatisfactory love, the same fall of the end of the world, and the same sorrow in life.
Omikim
As mentioned earlier, the water part of "Past" is the emotional encounter of the man, the underwater part is the third oldest, the latter is a story that has not been told, and the novel also gives the key information, the reason why she married, is the eldest sister and the eldest brother-in-law sent the affection, in the overseas Chinese family is not easy to survive, and the man died. When the third elder first recognized Mr. Li, he also said that he was old, and she had also seen his news in the newspaper. The third is no longer the third old, and Mr. Li is no longer the Mr. Li of that year. ——Mr. Li is a person who suffers from zero, why is the third elder not?
Encounters are not acquaintances, and neither are encounters. It is easy to meet and meet, but it takes time, it takes equality, it needs to look up. The interaction between Mr. Li and the third elder is the process of gradually recognizing each other, and it is also the process of Mr. Li slowly looking at the third elder:
I waited for a long time before she turned her head and raised a pair of tearful eyes, as if to pity me and look at me as if she were resentful of me. When I got this tearful glimpse of her, I didn't know how I had a more grateful thought in my heart than when the death row prisoner was pardoned. She still turned her head back, and I lay down outside her bed. After lying down, although neither of them slept, my heart was very comfortable and silently lay down until dawn. [25]
Can a newly widowed woman, a single man, in a distant coastal city, renew an old relationship? Lust has a shelf life, and love has its end. Emotions that have been sealed are not something that can be recovered if they want to be chased back. When the tears were facing each other, both people already knew that they could never go back. She is not an animal of emotion, an animal of desire, she is more calm and sober than Mr. Li. When reunited with Mr. Li, the third elder experienced recognition, recall, restraint, rejection, crying, dodging again and again, pushing away again and again, and saying no again and again. This rejection is not willfulness, but a deliberate "confession", from which we see a woman who is suffering and hurt by love, a woman who wants to go back to the past but can never go back.
"The Past" writes about the pain of a woman after experiencing vicissitudes, and writes about the helplessness of middle-aged men and women, which is to want to love and "can't be sought" in the face of time. Because of the refusal, the third elder gained subjectivity in the novel. So, in the face of this woman, the man began to reflect:
She cried for more than half an hour, and I sat silently on the bed for more than half an hour, feeling that her tears had washed away my evil thoughts, and I didn't think of anything in my heart. After sitting still for a few more minutes, I heard her crying, which had stopped, and then I leaned over again and said to her sincerely:
"Old three! Tonight, it's me again, I can't afford you, I misunderstand your true intentions. Indeed, our time has passed. What I asked of you tonight is indeed very despicable. Please spare me, oh, please spare me, I will never do such a despicable thing again, oh, please spare me! Please stick your head out; turn around, say to me, say spare me! Let us forget everything that has gone before, and please forget this kind of despicable thing about me tonight. Oh, old man! ”[26]
At this moment, when "I" face the third elder, the intolerable lust is no longer "pleasure" but "evil thought", it is despicable and a person's "prison". Dangerous, purely physiological pleasures disappear, because they are rejected by the third elder, so that it is possible to obtain a kind of cleaning, a kind of freedom. It was also at this moment that "I" felt the pain of the third elder and developed empathy with her.
"Rare emotion"
The Past writes about a kind of physical lust, but also about how a person who is dominated by lust breaks free little by little; the novel writes about the natural rise of lust, but also about the extinguishing and demise of lust. In "The Past", Mr. Li is later attracted to the third elder, but it is not the same as the real pleasure that the second brother poses for him. Facing the second eldest, he listened to the physiological instincts, and in the face of the third elder, he began to say no to that kind of lust in the physiological sense. In fact, in the relationship with the third elder, the protagonist's spirit and flesh have a real conflict. Although Mr. Li longs to possess the third elder, it is more of a recovery of past emotions than a physical attraction (Mr. Li's feelings for the third elder, the protagonist also self-analyzes that it is the cause of the disease). When xu Zidong analyzed "The Past", he mentioned that Li Baishi had an exploration of the split soul of the dual personality in the courtship scene of the second and third elders, and the charm of this novel is also as he said, the writer "subtly grasps the relationship between lust and pain, but does not let the pen in his hand be dominated by lust." ”[27]
"Yu Dafu's New Theory", by Xu Zidong, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Uddhav's novels often have a theme: "Identifying the Self" or "Recognizing the Self." In "Sinking", because of seeing the Japanese woman and the self in the eyes of women, "I" re-recognize the self and the nation-state identity of the self; in "The Drunken Night of the Spring Breeze", it is also recognized, and in the interaction with Chen Ermei, especially when she advises "I", "I" recognize the inadequacy of the self; the same is true of "Chi Guihua", when seeing the healthy and vital lotus, the unbearableness of "I" is healed again... "Past" also writes a man's re-identification of a woman. At first he did not care about her, completely ignored her, and after many years he thought that she was the object of his love, and finally recognized that she was his "kind", a suffering person, a frustrated person. In the above works, the hero of Yu Dafu's writing always has a woman in front of him who makes him have an epiphany, and most of the time, her relationship with "I" is often "the same disease".
The so-called "pity for the same disease", Yu Dafu spent a lot of ink on the spiritual loneliness, humility, wandering and helplessness of writing, such as the poverty of Chen Ermei and the embarrassment of the third elder, all of which were recognized by "I" and personally felt. This is reminiscent of Lu Xun's work. The deep diaphragm between people in Lu Xun's pen does not pose a real problem between the hero and heroine of Yu Dafu. In any case, Uddhav's "I" will recognize from "her" the part that is close to his heart, or that with "she" as a mirror, he can always recognize his own humility and inferiority, and then obtain a kind of spiritual cleansing. In Uddhav's novel, "he" does not constitute the savior of "her", "she" is not his salvation object, in fact, neither of them can complete the salvation and enlightenment of the other, all they can do is recognize each other and shed tears for each other.
The most interesting part of the theme of Yu Dafu's work is that it is not to write "sex" but to write "love", for this writer, the important thing is not to recognize the deceased, to recognize the lover, but to recognize the same kind; what is important is to meet the suffering person as a suffering person, and to meet the frustrated person as a frustrated person. Therefore, "The Past" is certainly about the emotions of middle-aged people, the extinction of the lust of men and women, and more importantly, it is to build a "literary community" related to the poor.
In "Past", when the hero first recognizes the object of his love, it is only a carnal relationship, a physiological pleasure, and at the end of the novel, "I" crosses the lust and condenses into a rare "brother-sister love" emotion with her. And such a leap is not through self-restraint, but is rejected by the third elder and obtained after introspection. In other words, the difference between "Past" and "Spring Breeze Drunken Night" and "Chi Guihua" is that the hero and heroine have their own personalities at the same time, and at first, the third elder is eager to be with Mr. Li, and after meeting again, she rejects him. Through this novel, Uddhav completes a kind of writing from the "dangerous pleasure" to the identification of "rare emotions", that is, from the story of personal lust to the completion of an imagination of a literary emotional community.
"Spring Breeze Drunken Night", by Yu Dafu, Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House
"In my own case, I know that there are many sad men and women in the world. These few novels of mine only want to find poor readers in slums and broken temples. [28] This is Uddhav's creation, which means that when he first wrote, the young Uddhav had already confirmed who he was going to write for and set himself as his "ideal reader". As a contemporary writer, Shen Congwen also analyzed the reasons why Yu Dafu swept young readers like a storm: "What Yu Dafu raised in his works is an important issue at present. 'Fame, money, women, take the form of an alliance, attack me, a lonely person...", this sentence softens the young man's heart. ...... Is this the sadness of the author alone? No, it's not the author, it's the reader. Most readers, the honest heart is agitated for this. Most readers, by Yudaf's works, know their own faces and environment. ” [29]
In a sense, Uddhav pioneered the writing of the "Loser's Song" in the new literary history, which invented a novel tone of the Loser's Song. Standing on the side of the frustrated and the loser, he rewrote the lives of the suffering, the lives of the poor, and then turned those who suffered, those poor people, into "lovely people" who crossed the era. Even in today's university classroom, there are still many young readers who like Yu Dafu, and young readers often feel that his protagonist is somewhat "lost" and very kind. This has an important relationship with his writing position and the setting of the ideal reader.
Writer as a lover type with "the gift of seduction"
Uddhav likes to write "I" and likes to expose himself. He constructed a strong and impactful self in the history of modern literature by interplaying fictional genres (novels, essays, poems) with non-fiction genres (diaries, letterheads). He spoke of the unbearableness of "I", the humility of "I" and the poverty of "I", and the melancholy of "I", and he recounted his irrepressible lust and impulse to face women, which is usually the part that people do not want to write on paper, but he expressed it bluntly and unabashedly. But in reality, what the writer is doing is a reset of the landscape—what is usually "not beautiful" in the pen of others becomes a kind of "beauty" in his pen; usually those that "cannot be made public" become here a kind of "open and frank expression".
Manuscript of "She's a Weak Woman"
To understand Uddhav, on the one hand, is to understand what kind of image Uddhav's self is, and on the other hand, how Uddhav constructs the "I." He completes the construction of the self in a lyrical way. Just as "The Past" uses a very unique lyrical approach in constructing the "I" trapped by love in the modern sense, in this work, all scenery is love language, and every word has a strong lyrical atmosphere.
From the very beginning, the novel sets the atmosphere of sadness and evening. And then the whole novel wanders in a decadent beauty, and the protagonists meet almost always at dusk and night, which is a decadent beauty that belongs to the wilderness of time, which is often fleeting and difficult to pursue. In fact, this feeling also appears many times in the novel, "a sense of decay, a sense of beauty that allows people to settle down and sink in the middle of unconsciousness, can be felt in any corner of this port city." [31] The lights of the shops on both sides shone brightly, reflecting some feelings of loneliness. [32] When writing about the silence of the two men, there is a classic scene in the novel: "The sun is setting, and in the corner of the room, the shadow crawls out." The twilight half of the sky seen outside the south window was still tinged with a hint of purple. A gray-black floating cloud like old cotton quietly pressed against the window. The sound of the wind whimpered through the glass window, and the two sat silently in this dark world, feeling that everything other than us had died. In this silent, evening, dark sea of sorrow, I don't know how long I have been immersed, and suddenly the electric lights shine like lightning strikes. [33] It is the scenery that is seen and the scenery that is written, but the inside is full of the narrator's exclamations, lamenting time, lamenting the past, lamenting the world, lamenting fate, these exclamations are scattered between the lines of the novel like dots of starlight. Although it seems to be scattered in thoughts, because of the narrator's "sentient" connection, the novel has a unique sense of seriousness and solemnity.
The subjective, rich lyricism gives the novel a charming tone, and the novel writes about the pain felt by the self in a way that is written in a scenic way, outlining the accidental, impermanent, and inseparable emotions that belong to the flesh, which reflects the life and death of the emotions between the characters. In particular, mention the end of the novel, which is a parting in the drift:
Omikim
On this night, there was a crescent moon on the sea, and I was smoking in a cabin with many people from the Southern Province who did not understand. The wind and waves outside the cabin were very loud, and everyone only calculated the speed of the ship's voyage under the electric lights, and the moment it reached Port H. [34]
The characters are walking, time is walking, and it never stops. "I" is so ordinary and humble, sunk among strangers who do not speak, "I" am not higher than the world, nor above others, but simply placed in the midst of the crowd. This is reminiscent of the ending of "A Night into the Spring Breeze," the ending of the classic that is constantly quoted, containing an imagination of the world and time: "The people in the slums have slept quietly." In a row of western-style buildings on Deng Tuo Road in Rixinli opposite, there are also a few lit up with red and green electric lights, where they play Lala Yijia. Two crisp singing, with a mournful tone, came from the cold air of the silent night to my eardrums, which were probably the singing of the russian drifting maidens, selling money there. The sky was covered with thin gray clouds, covering it like a decaying corpse. A little or two stars can also be seen in the broken clouds, but near the stars, the dark sky seems to have infinite sorrow hidden. [35] This is the picture of the poor "me" and the poor "we" together, and the novelist thus completes the imagination of the literary community of the poor and the poor together, and thus reaffirms the "literary me": a reader in a lonely night, a voyeur, a person who is troubled by lust and desires self-cleaning, a person who loves others passionately but cannot do so, a traveler who encounters a miserable rain and adrift... This "I" is not perfect, but it is amiable.
It is still necessary to repeat the opening part of Sontag's classification of "husband" or "lover". It is difficult for anyone who has read Yudaf's novels to attribute the writer's "I" to "husband" because he does not give people a sense of security. He is mean, humble, willful, narcissistic, and he has the gift of a lover whom Sontag calls. In fact, in Uddhav's work, we can hardly find the role of "husband", most of the time, he is a single man, an amorous man, a man who pursues women without being able to. The character traits expressed in Uddhav's work are so consistent with the image of the lover in the modern sense that "it is well known that women are able to endure some of the qualities of the lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, cruelty—in exchange for stimulation and the fullness of strong emotions, and when these qualities appear in the husband, they do not agree." Similarly, the reader can tolerate a writer's incomprehensible, entangled, painful truths, lies, and bad grammar—as long as they can be compensated for, that is, the writer can make them experience rare emotions and dangerous feelings. ”[36]
Have readers derived "rare emotions" and "dangerous pleasures" from Uddhav's works in the past hundred years, felt an offense and stimulus related to sensuality, and the shock that accompanied immorality? It is this "immorality" and the reading empathy that brings the reader to the reader that makes Uddhav a Uddhav and is known for writing about the emotional and dangerous experiences of adventure.
Of course, even if Yu Dafu shocked the literary world with a kind of adventurous writing, there will be a hesitation when we associate "immorality" with Yu Dafu's writing - although many of the "I" behaviors in the novel are regarded as "low-level fun" by some people, he has always been ashamed of his immorality, repented, and tried to get rid of "low-level taste", which reminds people of Guo Moruo's evaluation at that time: "Many people think that Duff is a bit 'decadent', but it is actually Pi Xiang's opinion." I remember that it was Li Chuli who said something like this: 'Duff is a simulated Decadent Tang sect, an essential Puritan'. This statement best expresses Duff's reality. ”[37]
In the spring of 1926, Guo Moruo and the Creation Society took a group photo in Guangzhou, starting from left as Wang Duqing, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, and Cheng Fangwu.
In a sense, morality is a hidden "measure" in Uddhav's work, measuring the part of his mind that makes a human being—in Uddhav, the voyeuristic, masochistic, unable to restrain his carnal desires is "I", and the restrained person who eventually forms a brother-sister love with the heroine is also "I", who strives to unite the two "I"; or that the low-level "I" has been working to wash out a more perfect, more advanced, uncontrolled "me". To this end, the writer constantly examines and washes himself in a confessional, confessional way to make himself more "decent." And it is this humble, shameful, self-condemning, and constant desire for self-cleaning temperament that makes the "self" in Yu Dafu's novels a unique image of modern people, and thus a valuable asset of modern literature.
In particular, there is no shortage of "lover type" writers in the genealogy of writers since modern times, and as far as this type of writing is concerned, it is not particularly praiseworthy. The kind of writing that has been indulging in the self often reminds people of a kind of "pampering", "willfulness" and "narcissism", and although the reader feels a momentary freshness, it will eventually be disgusted. But why do today's readers still feel cute and amiable when they read Yudaf's classic works? I thought that Uddhav had found a "measure" that belonged to literature, between morality and immorality, between the noble and the ordinary, between the hero and the mortal, he found a way to make the "self" a "self", and once the boundaries and dimensions of an art were grasped, the sincere, wandering and lovely "self" shone in his pen. In other words, because Uddhav controls indulgence and restraint, the individuality and publicity of self-emotion, just right, the "rare emotions" expressed in the Past constitute "rare" and "dangerous pleasures" constitute "pleasures."
November 17, 2020—January 17, 2021
/Notes/
[1] Xu Zidong mentioned the significance of "The Past" in "The New Theory of Yu Dafu" and Bai Xianyong when he won the Yu Dafu Novel Award.
[2] [36] Susan Sontag, Camus's Diary, Against Interpretation (translated by Cheng Wei), Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2003, p. 60.
[3] [4] [8] [9] [10] [11] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [31] [32] [33] [34] Yu Dafu: The Past, The Complete Works of Yu Dafu, Vol. II (edited by Wu Xiuming), Zhejiang University Press, 2007, pp. 1, 2, 6, 6-7, 7, 8-9, 5, 9, 10, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 16, 16, 17, 16, 16, 16, 16, 16, 2, 5, 14, 17, 17.18.
[5] [37] Guo Moruo, "On Yu Dafu", People Magazine, No. 3, 1946.
[6] Qian Xing Estate: "Yu Dafu", "Yu Dafu" (Edited by Zou Xiao), Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 1987 photocopy edition, p. 8.
[7] [Japanese] Ito Toramaru: "Women in the Works of Yu Dafu", "Thought and Literature in Modern China", edited by the Chinese Literature Research Office of the Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, Daan Shoten, 1967, pp. 310-311; reprinted from Li Oufan: The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, translated by Wang Hongzhi et al., Nova Publishing House, 2005, p. 119.
[12] Yu Dafu: The Diary of a Poor Winter, The Complete Works of Yu Dafu, Vol. V (edited by Wu Xiuming), Zhejiang University Press, 2007, p. 103.
[27] Xu Zidong: The New Treatise of Yu Dafu (Revised Edition), Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 1985, p. 298.
[28] Yu Dafu: "The Self-Introduction of the "Ziluo Collection", The Complete Works of Yu Dafu, Vol. 10 (edited by Wu Xiuming), Zhejiang University Press, 2007, p. 69.
[29] Shen Congwen: On Yu Dafu, On Yu Dafu (edited by Zou Xiao), Photocopied Edition of Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 1987, pp. 35-36.
[30] In fact, the theme of "identification" in Uddhav's novels is not ultimately to recognize others but to shape themselves. The ultimate purpose of his novels is not to tell the stories of others, but to finally complete the construction of the self by telling the stories of me and others. Just as after hearing the cry of the third elder, he did not know a new her but a new clean "me", and washed out a new purified "me" from her tears. In a sense, from "Sinking" to "Past" and "Chi Guihua", Yu Dafu has completed a path of purification of personal lust through writing. Or, in this writer's case, writing is a "self" wash again and again.
[35] Yu Dafu: "The Drunken Night of Spring Breeze", The Complete Works of Yu Dafu, Vol. 1 (edited by Wu Xiuming), Zhejiang University Press, 2007, p. 288.
-END-
(This article is excerpted from Zhang Li's "Novel Landscape", People's Literature Publishing House, December 2021 edition)
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