Reporter | Dong Ziqi
Edit | Yellow Moon
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Two years ago, we interviewed Zhang Li, a professor at the School of Literature at Beijing Normal University, on the topic of writers' gender perspectives and women's writing, when she just released a gender survey for a number of contemporary writers. Today, Zhang Li has published a critical monograph on re-reading Chinese modern and contemporary classic novels, "Novel Landscape", which originated from the original classic guide course that Zhang Li has opened for graduate students majoring in Chinese modern and contemporary literature at Beijing Normal University since 2019. In the book, she leads readers to re-read Lu Xun's "Blessings", Yu Dafu's "Past", Shen Congwen's "Xiao Xiao" and "Husband", and Xiao Hong's "Hulan River Biography", she not only tries to put forward new views and angles, but also uses love discourse and women's fate as clues to connect the changes in Chinese novels in the past hundred years.
On the occasion of the publication of the new book, we once again had a conversation with Zhang Li, discussing the significance of re-reading the original classics of modern literature since May Fourth and the changes in love writing in the times. The so-called original canonical introduction is to put the classics into the historical context, return to the literary scene of the time, and at the same time make the texts in the dust of history connect with today's reality. On the one hand, this connection lies in the fact that the selected texts and characters are still relevant to contemporary life, such as Xiang Lin's sister-in-law who has been appreciated and suffered, or a small reunion daughter-in-law who has been transformed by everyone; on the other hand, the writers in the history of literature have also been young writers, and Zhang Li wants to lead today's young writers to see how the young writers of a hundred years ago found their own literary path.
Zhang Li, professor of the College of Literature of Beijing Normal University and doctoral supervisor, is the author of "The Occurrence of Modern Women's Writing in China (1898-1925)", "Novel Landscape", "The Bearer of a Small Fire", "The Voice of All Voices" and so on. He is the chief editor of "Selected Chinese Women's Literature in 2021" and "Life Thoughts". (Photo courtesy of the interviewee) 01 The love of literary and artistic women is a bit like a weather vane of the times
Interface Culture: The article "Nine Kinds of Love" included in "Novel Landscape" mentions many texts that write love, in your opinion, what kind of changes in the love discourse of Chinese novels in the past hundred years?
Zhang Li: In ancient times, if two young people fell in love against their parents' will and fled their families, people would say that they "eloped", and elopement actually meant being unrighteous and sneaky, but the "May Fourth" era was different. Two young people running away from home against their parents' will is a revolutionary act. During the "May Fourth" period, for many young people, love is sacred and noble, and has nothing to do with money, class, or age, and through having this love, young people can confirm their "self". At the time, love and modern life were an isomorphic relationship.
In 1919, Lu Xun published "Caprice 40" under the pseudonym Tang Qian, which first quoted a letter from a young man: "I am a poor Chinese. Love! I don't know what you are. Then he sighed and said, "But in the hands of the devil, there is a place where the light is leaking, and the light cannot be hidden: the Son of Man has awakened; he knows that there should be love among human beings; he knows the sins committed by the old and young people of the past, so he became bitter and opened his mouth to make this cry." From this passage, we can see that love was regarded as a sign of the awakening of the "son of man" in the May Fourth era, and it is also the most basic right in man. The call and yearning for supreme love has become the dream of a generation of young people.
The May Fourth concept of love is a sacred concept of love, after may fourth, the daily concept of love is also very popular, Zhang Jingsheng put forward the "love rule" at that time, believing that love is quantifiable and comparable, and also caused extensive discussion at that time. For 100 years, the sacred love discourse and the daily love discourse have room to exist, of course, today, the quantifiable mate selection criteria seem to prevail, we see that there are LOVE APP or blind date network, to fill out the form, to use big data, in fact, it is about quantifiable external conditions. However, a pair of men and women who look like a good match still don't call. From this point of view, no matter what era, the communication of hearts and minds should be a necessary condition for the discourse of love.
"Novel Landscape"
Zhang Li
People's Literature Publishing House December 2021
Interface Culture: You talk in the book that women learn to fall in love through reading, is this a dangerous reading? For example, after becoming a believer in love, she may be captured?
Zhang Li: Reading is adventurous on the one hand, and it is also pleasant on the other hand, because it allows us to discover new worlds. The section "Reading Produces Love" in the book actually says that young people learn to fall in love by reading novels. For example, in Feng Yuanjun's novel in the May Fourth period, the heroine said that she would think of Lu Di when she kissed, but in fact, she was learning from "The Troubles of Young Werther". In the past, young readers would learn from books about their love experience, go to the beach, go to cafes or go to literary clubs like the people in books to meet their sweethearts, and today's channels should also include film and television dramas, short videos and social media. I think that young people of every era have their own channels for learning to fall in love.
Love is beautiful, but it does not constitute a saving relationship for people. The love narrative constructed by many popular books often tells the story of Prince Charming and Cinderella, and such love imagination is problematic. When women see love as a way to change their destiny, they are actually putting themselves in a position of salvation. The way a woman views love represents whether her mind is mature or not. If we think of men and women as equals, love should be interpersonal relationships. But then again, it seems that many women fantasize about the arrival of Prince Charming when they are young, but men rarely dream about which goddess will come to save him (laughs). I would like to say that the concept of love is constructed for both men and women.
Interface Culture: And different eras have different women reading?
Zhang Li: Different eras also have different reading interests. I discussed the love of literary women in the book, which is a bit like a weather vane of the times. Literary and artistic women are usually the most sensitive group of the times, they read novels and imagine love, they usually choose the elites in the mainstream discourse of the times, such as revolutionaries in the late 1970s, directors or poets in the late 1980s, and foreigners in the 90s... Love looks personal, but in fact it is shaped by the times, and young people in each era will have their own views on love in their own times. But no matter what era, good love makes people rejuvenate themselves, bad love makes people wither, and it is most important not to sanctify love. If a person can't meet love in a lifetime, it doesn't mean that life is incomplete, it doesn't mean that he is unhappy, it's just that he is not lucky enough to meet the right person.
Interface Culture: Is the Relationship between Love and Money a Clue to Interpret the Discourse of Love? You also focused on Wei Wei's "Makeup" in the previous series of lectures hosted by Interface News on "Listening to Cultural Famous Teachers at Home".
Zhang Li: Looking at classical novels, we often see two young people break up because "the door is not right", which is actually the relationship between marriage and money and status. As mentioned earlier, in the words of divine love in the May Fourth period, people believe that love has nothing to do with money. However, people soon realized the problem, so Lu Xun wrote in "Wounded Death" that "love must be attached", he discussed the relationship between economy and love, including the importance of a woman's economic independence.
Poster of the 1981 movie "Wounded Death" (Source: Douban)
Wei Wei's "Makeup" is a 2003 novel, very typical, from this story, we can see the entangled relationship between contemporary women in love and money. The young woman in the novel, Carrie, longs for love, and she also thinks that it is inappropriate to measure love with money, but when a man gives her a gift, she still can't help but go to the store to see the price tag, as a way to estimate whether he loves her or not. This detail is particularly real, it writes the materialization of love deeply; at the same time, the novelist also writes about the calm and soberness of this woman, because she sees that money and love are related, so she has to make a lot of money, achieve financial freedom, and try not to let herself be controlled by money. I like a girl like Carrie, who is sober, brave, can face reality and not daydream about love.
Literature is an important way to help us understand the complexity and cruelty of the world, but it is not responsible for giving answers, but stimulating our thinking. Reading good literature can make our understanding of the world richer and more diverse, and avoid falling into one-way thinking.
02 Shen Congwen's view of gender: whether women can reverse their misfortune
Interface Culture: In writing Shen Congwen, you talked about the importance of the change in the reading position of contemporary readers, what different discoveries did you make when re-reading "Xiao Xiao" and "Husband"?
Zhang Li: Because of the lectures, I re-read one or two Shen Congwen novels almost every year, and I like his language. I also like Zhao Yuan's "On the Ten Schools of Fiction", she believes that Shen Congwen's gender stance is different from the stance of modern literature, and the perspective of the countryside constitutes his writing identity, but also damages his weight as a modern writer. However, it is very strange that the gender view and discrimination against women pointed out by Zhao Yuan did not impress the young me, that is, I was not stimulated by this view at that time.
Recently re-reading "Husband", I am deeply impressed. In the eyes of many researchers, "Husband" is about the revival of human nature, but the human nature here actually refers to the husband's nature, and the reason why the wife in the novel does not do this and does not do that is that she does not want to make her man angry, even if the husband's status in society is already very humble, but the wife who is a boat prostitute has always wanted him to be happy, and all this is at the cost of the woman's humiliation and damage. Shen Congwen tells from the perspective of a husband, honestly conveying the world through the eyes of the countrymen, but even so, it is necessary to see the wife. Of course, Shen Congwen does not completely ignore the existence of women in the novel, and the novel also shows contradictions internally. Good fiction always gives cracks and spaces for interpretation.
"On the Ten Novels"
Written by Zhao Yuan
Life, Reading, And New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, 2011
Interface culture: When you read Shen Congwen's "Xiao Xiao", you commented that the writer strengthens the naturalized aspect of women, and the social aspect is suppressed.
Zhang Li: In my opinion, the charm of "Xiao Xiao" is that the work magnifies the natural side of Xiao Xiao and suppresses her social side, so the novel is fresh and alive. "Although the mother-in-law was born like a pair of scissors, cutting off all the opportunities that gave Xiao Xiao to grow up violently, the sun and the air in the countryside help people grow up, but it is not torture that can be stopped." How well the metaphor of a mother-in-law like a scissors is, if you completely turn a blind eye to the "scissors of the mother-in-law", it is not a good novel. Shen Congwen in "Xiao Xiao" strives to divert our attention and let us see another possibility of rural air. And I want to see with you that behind the simple folk customs and natural nature of Xiangxi, innocent and cruel things have always existed.
This interpretation is based on a female position, but it is not simply to understand women as victims, nor is it to criticize writers in a binary and antithetical way, I just want to adjust the reading of our time. In my opinion, every woman in the text is not a complete victim, nor is she a person who is born to be tied to her hands, they are all trying to reverse their misfortune. In "Xiao Xiao", Xiao Xiao is rebellious, her biggest resistance is not to agree, the female students are distorted and deformed in the narration of the old grandfather, but Xiao Xiao, as the listener, is not confused, in the novel she has always fantasized that she will one day live like a female student. Even if ignorant and ignorant, Xiao Xiao in the novel tries to break free from that strange talk and get enlightenment and nourishment from that story of hundreds of holes. So, after being seduced into getting pregnant, all she thought was to run away, become a schoolgirl, and live another life. Not being able to leave is her destiny, and wanting to leave is the expression of her subjectivity. In fact, in "Blessings", Xiang lin sister-in-law is also working hard, but it is only because the external force is too strong, and she has no way out.
In the book, I want to reduce the mute women who seem to have no luster in life to women with subjectivity, who have her power, who did what she could do at that time, and her tragedy is that that society did not give her more ways out, and it was the narrowness of the way out that affected her imagination of her future. She is not the obscurant "other."
03 Uddhav's "Funeral": Lover-type Writers Write "Loser's Song"
Interface Culture: "Novel Landscape" also talks about Yu Dafu's "funeral" that makes young people feel very touched, why do young people feel empathy for the "bereavement" of a hundred years ago?
Zhang Li: The reason why Yu Dafu is so popular is that he created the writing of the "Loser's Song" in the new literary history. He created a kind of novel tone of "Loser's Song", which he deliberately pursued. He also said in his creative talk that he knew that there were many sad men and women in the world, and he wrote novels in order to find poor readers in slums and broken temples. This shows that at the time of the initial writing, the young Uddhav had already confirmed who he wanted to write for, and he set his own "ideal reader".
As a contemporary writer, Shen Congwen also analyzed why Yu Dafu swept young readers like a storm, because young readers can recognize themselves from Yu Dafu's works. There is a kind of "youthfulness" in Uddhav's novels. In class, I noticed that young people like "Spring Breeze Drunken Night", the novel is written in a vast city, two young people who are also fallen people in the world, tenant life and daily embarrassment. The hero is lazy, poor, unsuccessful, but also gentle, while the heroine strives to live, full of concern for the lives of others. Although the times are different, people's emotions are common, and the suffering and poor people in Yu Dafu's writing are actually "lovely people". Therefore, even in today's university classroom, there will still be young readers who like Yudaf, and they feel that his protagonist is lost.
Of course, in the book, "Spring Breeze Drunken Night" is only used as a starting point for my discussion, and I am talking more about Yudaf's "Past", which is about the love of middle-aged people, and there is a hidden female subjectivity. In this 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 cry for each other. It is this pursuit that gives the "self" in Yu Dafu's novel a unique temperament, and in my eyes, Yu Dafu is actually a lover-type writer.
"Spring Breeze Drunken Night"
By Uddhav
Writers Press 2019
Interface Culture: What Does Lover-Type Writer Mean?
Zhang Li: The lover-type writer is a concept I took from Sontag. As Sontag puts it, "It is well known that women are able to tolerate some of the qualities of their lovers—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, cruelty—in exchange for stimulation and the fullness of intense emotions, which they do not agree with when they appear in their husbands." 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. ”
People who have read Yudaf's novels have a hard time attributing the writer's "me" to "husband" because he does not give people a sense of security. He is mean, humble, willful, narcissistic, and most of the time he is a single man, an amorous man, a man who pursues women without being able to do so. He had the talent of what Sontag called a lover.
Of course, having said that, 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. But why do today's readers still feel cute and amiable when they read Yudaf's classic works? I think that Yu Dafu has found a kind of "measure" belonging to literature in his representative works, and once the boundaries and dimensions of an art are grasped, the sincere, wandering and lovely "self" will shine in his pen.
04 "Real female storyteller" Xiao Hong: both lighting up the dark and becoming a road sign
Interface Culture: Do you think Xiao Hong has made the voice of a female storyteller, and the voice of female narration did not exist before?
Zhang Li: In the May Fourth era, the narrative voice of modern women has already appeared, but it does not mean that writing with female identity and female voice will definitely write classic works, nor does it mean that because it is written by women, it is well written. When we look at the early female writers, Bing Xin and other female writers of the same period, the grammar is actually not coherent, and there are even sick sentences, I think the reason is that as early female writers, they are learning and groping. If she does not write like Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, how should a female writer express her own literary voice and build her literary grammar?
Ding Ling's "Diary of Ms. Sha Fei" is a work that establishes the grammar of modern women's literature, which not only shows the independent temperament of modern women, but also shows the grammatical expression that belongs to Ding Ling. As soon as Sophie appeared as a mature woman, she recognized herself in the interaction between men and women. In contrast, Xiao Hong's "The Legend of Hulan River" has a lyricism, she tells it in a girl's voice, and there is a sense of vicissitudes of childishness. "The flowers bloomed, as if the flowers had woken up. The bird flew, as if the bird had gone to heaven. The bug barked, as if the bug were talking. Everything came alive. "How nice is that. Unlike Ding Ling, Xiao Hong understands the world in the relationship between man and nature, man and society. Xiao Hong is good at using short sentences, plain as words, neat and symmetrical, almost not turning, but directly exposed. Take out a paragraph of her words, you know that it was written by Xiao Hong, and the rhythm of the language is very unique. When the writer finds this grammar that belongs to her, she also expresses her understanding of many issues, which is both naïve and cruel. In "The Legend of Hulan River", she combined the voices of girls and dying people to create her own female voice and grammar, which is groundbreaking and her contribution to modern Chinese women's literature.
The Legend of Hulan River
Xiao Hong
Jiangxi People's Publishing House, 2019
Regarding the contribution of women's writing, I generally discuss it from two aspects. The first is whether this writer has lit up the dark place and written something that we have never noticed before, but the more important contribution is to become a literary road sign itself, to become the same road sign as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Lao She. Xiao Hong is a writer who can both light up the darkness and become a road signpost, and most of her thirty-one years old life has been writing about her hometown. It's the woman who burned her whole life to write, Chinese expressed in her maturity, beauty, and deep meaning, and in that sense, I think she's a true female storyteller.
Interface Culture: Why is it important to discuss the writer's perspective when analyzing a work?
Zhang Li: The work done by "Novel Landscape" is to re-read classic works, and there have been many ways to read them before, and how we read and how we read them today is what I thought when I wrote. By re-reading the works of these classic writers in the history of literature, we look for ways to read novels of our time.
The point of choosing a writing perspective is actually to discuss where and how the writer stands and how to see. In the original guide class, one-half of the master's students who attended the class were young writers, so it was necessary to discuss why writers wrote this way. For example, shen congwen and Xiao Hong's way of writing about their hometown is very different - Shen Congwen has been living in Xiangxi when he was a teenager, so many of his works are from the perspective of a countryman; although Xiao Hong has also lived in the countryside, she has not been exposed to real rural life, as a little girl, she did not really enter that rural space at that time, and could only tell in the way of hearsay, so she chose the limited perspective of a girl. I think this is the writer's "promoting strengths and avoiding weaknesses", and it is this perspective that makes "The Legend of Hulan River" unique.
The original guide is actually hoping to return to the historical scene with young people to interpret the text. Of course, writers or works cannot be deified, and these works cannot be analyzed as flawless things, and the writers at that time were living people, writers who were constantly exploring, and they finally found their own way through practice and trial and error.