◎ Black Selection Ming
It is said that Zhang Ailing had three hatreds in her life: one hated the spiny anchovies, the second hated the begonias without fragrance, and the third hated the red chamber without success. Nowadays, some netizens have added a sentence: four hate "First Incense" casting.
This is a joke with the film version of director Xu Anhua, but it is not actually a joke, at least in the scene I watched, I sometimes heard someone eating and laughing, which made people think that they were watching a comedy.
Well, it's better to be a comedy, but there's a problem with the audience seeing the male and female actors as laughingstocks. Actors are certainly a problem, especially the heroine, almost every performance of her makes people slowly play one question mark after another, coupled with the entire film to reduce the heroine to a "love brain", it makes everything more funny. But to stop there is a mask that is more worthy of discussion. Shouldn't the director, the screenwriter, and even the original author be responsible for this?
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Let's start with the original author in peace—
Zhang Ailing's third hatred, the Dream of the Red Chamber, was unsuccessful, enough to see her love for "Dream of the Red Chamber", as well as private Shu, and even she wrote a "Nightmare of the Red Chamber" to compensate for this hatred. Her pen can often see the shadow of "Dream of the Red Chamber", whether it is characters, language, or structure. "The First Burning Incense of Agarwood Crumbs" can be seen everywhere. Wang Anyi would not know that Zhang Ailing is fond of this, she has retained this feature in the script as much as possible, perhaps considering the acceptance of the audience today, her lines may be too blunt.
"Unsuccessful" naturally means questioning the existing ending, and whoeverse sequel it is, the problem lies here. If Dream of the Red Chamber is one of China's greatest works of literature, it is mainly because it reminds the dreamer, "You are dreaming"—the depth that the fusion of Buddhist and Taoist thought brings to it. What should we do when we encounter a tiger chasing us in a dream? Of course, it is to recognize that one is dreaming, that is, to be aware of one's own "ignorance." However, our usual practice is to kill the tiger. The ending of the existing Dream of the Red Chamber makes people feel that the "bad breath" is actually because the dream has not yet been "enlightened". So, what about Zhang Ailing herself?
Unfortunately, Zhang Ailing's "Nightmare of the Red Chamber" is not much different from the perspective of most red scholars, and her focus is still on examining evidence, indexing, and as a novelist's sensitivity to writing skills. We in no way deny Zhang Ailing's superb writing skills and her "cleverness" in writing. This is also the main reason why Fu Lei, who was demanding at that time, called the 24-year-old Zhang Ailing "the most beautiful harvest in the literary world", and modern writers are unsurpassed in this regard. But another aspect is debatable, that is, many readers, including researchers, regard Zhang Ailing as a master of describing human nature, and the writer himself seems to be quite comfortable with this, and has moved forward in what she believes to be the depth of humanity.
Zhang Ailing's popularity is closely related to the supreme (and most important) status that Professor Xia Zhiqing has given her in the history of modern Chinese literature. We may see Xia Zhiqing's approach as a kind of rebuttal to the proliferation of Enlightenment discourse in a certain historical period, but his "list of canonized gods" is also suspicious and overcorrected.
One question worth discussing is whether Zhang Ailing wrote about the depth of human nature?
Of course, the depth of human nature encompasses many levels. The in-depth discussion does not refer to Zhang Ailing's writing about deformed love affairs, writing about the darkness, distortion and viciousness of human nature, which is not a problem, but if you want to regard it as a writer with such a high status in the literary world, it needs to be examined in detail and put forward higher requirements for her.
It is not that describing misfortune, pain, evil, and darkness directly leads to the depth of writing. Perhaps from a certain point of view, we can say that our existence is tragic, because everywhere there are denials and accusations of life, and this denial is universal. Everything has its finiteness, its contingency, and the possibility of destruction. Literature often provides us with this inner experience of destruction, but the first-class writer experiences the tension between the human will and this destruction, and understands this tension through writing, trying to overcome and transcend the limitations of human nature.
From Dostoevsky to Kafka, the first-class masters all bring us transcendence, and in this transcendence includes a potential reader, which we can call a spiritual ascension movement, otherwise it will only be a narcissistic sinking and degeneration. As Jaspers points out, the difference between tragedy and suffering, destruction, and evil lies in the state of cognition (inquiring rather than receiving, accusing rather than crying), and in whether the relationship between truth and destruction is close.
As a high-achieving student at the University of Hong Kong, Zhang Ailing's involvement in world literature can be said to be extensive, but she is probably the British writer Maugham who has taken the most. Interestingly, Maugham's work is now often recreated into chicken soup in various concentrations, and is active on social media by "golden sentences" and "poisonous tongues". However, although Maugham is also suspected of playing with playful and mean words, human nature is always beyond his writing, such as the "Veil" that Chinese readers are familiar with, if the heroine does not have any self-transcendence of the cognition of "love" in the end, then this is just an ordinary family ethics and moral story. A catastrophe (an epidemic) inadvertently promotes this transcendence. We can compare Zhang Ailing's acclaimed "Love in the City", a disaster (war) to achieve the love of Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan (which also has the shadow of "Gone with the Wind"), but it is more like Bai Liusu bound to a long-term meal ticket, and her plunge (escape from the "original family") has no meaning to overcome and transcend, but to achieve her expectations for herself (to obtain a stable life through marriage).
Life is a gorgeous robe crawling with lice – a witty phrase that seems moving, but it raises the question: If this is still a robe, that is to say, the function of a dress still exists, will you still wear it? Or, make it a louse-free dress? But Zhang Ailing's protagonist often chooses to live in symbiosis with lice, and with an attitude of appreciation and playfulness and indulgence in it. Of course, the author is by no means the same as the protagonist, and the life choices made by the author himself are completely different.
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Ge Weilong (the protagonist of the first incense sticks) said, "I am willing to degenerate", and when he saw the women standing on the street, he said, "I am actually the same as them, except that they are forced, I am voluntary." As if this was a question of "what will happen to Nala after she ran away," Zhang Ailing gave the answer that the "dark power" and the temptation of money quickly engulfed the girls. Perhaps, these girls stem from her own observation of the declining feudal legacy of the old and young families, and their capital is the flesh of youth and the "decent family lineage" of the past. Zhang Ailing has a special kind of success style of anxiety, not only "become famous early", but also tell the girls, "Are you very young?" You'll get old soon."
Does Ge Weilong have no other choice? Of course not, she could teach in a church school (of course she would have to be bullied by foreign nuns) and go back to Shanghai, but she said, "I can't go back." This is what Zhang Ailing calls a bird crucified on a gorgeous screen, voluntarily crucified and unwilling to "descend" to another class and live. Of course, writing such a protagonist is not a problem, and the peculiar thing is that the spiritual sinking of such a protagonist is often accompanied by a playfulness, an aesthetic, an addiction, as if the more degenerate the happier.
It should be noted that Zhang Ailing's such writing is different from the "decadent school" in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, the spiritual direction of the "decadent school" is a kind of resistance, and the resistance itself has the characteristics of transcendence, and the spiritual direction of this kind of protagonist in Zhang's novel is the opposite, and this strange aesthetic spiritual direction is a one-way falling movement. But beyond the mood of indulgence and decadence, inside is a closed, silent, deep black hole that sucks away people's vitality.
When not writing about the old and the young in the fallen feudal heritage, Zhang Ailing's cleverness can release a lot of intelligence, she is especially suitable for being a film screenwriter who writes about the lives of men and women in the city, absolutely sweeping thousands of troops, Japanese and Korean female screenwriters are not at all. For example, "Long Live the Wife", written by her and directed by Sang Arc, and several films written in Hong Kong after her "Nandu", are quite impressive, and with her talent, her real "transparency" is reflected in the description of life in the city. Those works are truly gratifying, steaming with the heat of human fireworks, including civic writings such as Red Roses and White Roses. We should probably note that Zhang Ailing rarely writes about children, and even if she does, it is an attitude of an aunt who hates children—it is difficult for an aunt to arouse her own love, even maternal love cannot flow, and of course it is more difficult to understand the meaning of higher-level love. Zhang Ailing seems to have a deep-rooted, near-paranoid resistance to the "sublime", but this rejection not only blocks out dubious words and slogans, but also blocks out a deeper understanding of love, which leads to the pure worldliness of her perception of love. This is very limited for a canonized writer, which also leads to the narrowness of her "love".
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The protagonists in Zhang Ailing's novels often equate love with male and female love, or directly equate love with matter. In fact, this is the manifestation of lack of love, that is, the lack of love. The depiction of the plot and the tirelessness of the love scene also stems from this lack. This lack has had a huge impact on Chinese readers, especially female readers. Somehow Zhang Ailing's heroine always needs the superficial and narrow illusion of "in fact, he still loves me", which is the so-called "ignorance", which is nothing more than a strong possessiveness and self-grasping. Didn't Wang Jiazhi in "The Color Ring" die of this "ignorance"? Because of this alone, we cannot admit that Wang Jiazhi has its true archetype, because it is a humiliation of the victim.
At the end of the "First Incense" film, when Ge Weilong begged Georgie Qiao for the three words "I love you", the latter was silent, and the movie theater sounded a snicker. Driven by ignorance, courtship cannot be achieved, and it will turn into resentment, from resentment to hatred, from hatred to abuse, which is not the sadism-abuse of the Marquis of Sade with philosophical dialectical overtones, but the viciousness transformed by resentment caused by desire and dissatisfaction, pure evil. Zhang Ailing has no shortage of such abuses, but it seems that this psychology and scene are quite attractive, immersing and defending them. It's like Pushkin wrote in Egyptian Night that Cleopatra liked to prick a golden needle into a slave girl's breast simply because she liked to get a pleasure in the slave girl's miserable cries, which was the pleasure of sexual abuse. What is the "aesthetic" here? It's just ugly, but there will still be people who are obsessed with Cleopatra, there will always be such people...
What is the "beauty" of Mrs. Liang in "The First Incense"? She uses teenage girls to seduce small fresh meat and sleep with herself, but her greater pleasure comes from psychological abuse of this girl who is dozens of years younger than herself, proving her sexual charm (the film is not clearly expressed in the novel). For this, she needs more teenage girls to satisfy her own pleasure. The film paints Mrs. Liang with "sympathy of understanding", as if she should take revenge because she was suppressed because of her previous small volts. In fact, this is just a false and clumsy parade of blind people. Falsehood and weakness are accused of being profound, stemming from the absence, rejection, and dissolution of true "solemnity."