In the pure sense of urban literature, Zhang Ailing is the elevation of modern urban literature in China, and Wang Anyi is a master who inherits the tradition of Zhang Ailing's urban literature in a contemporary urban way.
Their creative themes and styles are indeed similar, but their value standpoint, outlook on life and world outlook are fundamentally different. It is this difference that makes novels that can also be handed down from generation to generation present different realms when describing the tragedies of small people.
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Zhang Ailing is one of the most urban-conscious modern writers in China. She claims to be a secular person. In her works, Shanghai in 1930s and 1940s was a deformed product of cultural exchange between old and new.
In an era of apathy and constant wars, the characters in Zhang Ailing's novels pursue money almost to an abnormal degree in order to obtain the conditions for material survival.
They take the instinct of self-protection to the extreme. In order to protect their poor interests, everyone treats everyone around them coldly, even coldly. Even the closest mother and daughter, husband and wife are full of cold and hostile eyes.
This is the case with people in Zhang Ailing's novels. Their selfishness and nothingness are the result of the urgency of survival in troubled times and the loss of life. This also constitutes the overall characteristics of Zhang Ailing's novels: the struggle for survival in troubled times and the fission of human nature.
Therefore, Zhang Ailing's novels endow life with a lingering "desolate" life tone and hedonism.
Her novels are secular, universal and profound in human nature, and have the feeling of being close to reality. But she completely dispelled poetry and romance, and replaced it with a real enjoyment and an addiction to affordable street life.
When I first read her novels, my heart cooled little by little while enjoying the fun of life. I couldn't see the hope of life, the power of spiritual improvement, the feeling of compassion, and there were many negative things and few positive things, so I couldn't surpass the world.
Wang Anyi also started from the secular Shanghai, but wrote another kind of Shanghai. Unlike Zhang Ailing, she is more of an observer and pursuer in Shanghai.
Life experience and life experience contributed to the establishment of her Shanghai city consciousness, but also affected the purity and integrity of her Shanghai city consciousness.
However, the daily life in Wang Anyi's novels is carried out at different times in the same or different spatial background, which is not available in Zhang Ailing's static narrative time.
In Zhang Ailing's daily life, there is only now, no past and no future. It is hedonistic and is used by her to dispel her sense of nothingness and despair about life.
Wang Anyi's novels look at Shanghai from two angles: one is that Wang Qiyao, good women and grandmothers appreciate, enjoy and show off the exquisiteness and elegance of earthly life with pride; First, foreign "comrades" hold the attitude of being attracted and examined to the exquisite and elegant life of Wang Qiyao and good women. They don't reject the exquisite and elegant life presented to them, and sometimes they accept it gladly, but they always feel petty and unpretentious.
Zhang Ailing has the first vision, but Zhang Ailing does not have Wang Anyi's second vision. This second vision is not only the natural result of Wang Anyi's unique view of history and culture, but also the inevitable result of her standpoint of intellectuals' humanistic values, which is completely different from that of Zhang Ailing. This kind of examination beyond daily life makes her works poetic and divine.
This makes Wang Anyi not only have extraordinary patience, interest and preference for the delicate concern of secular life and the subtle emotions that follow, but also sincerely appreciate the heroic color shown in the realistic struggle for ordinary life, which makes her works shrouded in a warm light of human hope and forms a warm emotional tone of her works.
In Wang Anyi's rational description of Shanghai and novel narration, her "understanding" of Shanghai and Shanghainese is deeper than that of Zhang Ailing in history, more metaphysical in philosophy, and therefore more atmospheric.
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When Zhang Ailing writes about secular and everyday Shanghai, she naturally pours her pen and ink into ordinary people. These little people are going to places where there is no light.
Most of the characters in Zhang Ailing's novels are half a beat behind their time. They are the old and young in the declining old family or the petty bourgeoisie in the ordinary citizen class.
No one in Zhang Ailing's novels overcomes fate. Both Xu Xiaohan in Heart Sutra and Tong Zhenbao in Red Rose and White Rose want to be the masters around them, but the development of the story proves that they can't control the situation at all, and their self-confidence has hit a wall in the face of reality.
These people who have come out of the old culture all hope to find a secure new life, but the extreme pursuit of material desires and the philosophy of life based on self-interest lead to all the final efforts in vain.
"They are not heroes, they are the vast load of this era. Because they are not thorough, but they are real. They are not tragic, only sad. "
These "sons and daughters of old China" in her works live in the crevice of the times. They can't go back to the past, but they don't want to accept the reality with their original mentality to adapt to the new order of modern society, so they have no choice but to be swept away by the huge waves.
Love is the most beautiful emotion between men and women, but in most of Zhang Ailing's novels, there is no aesthetic feeling. Even the men and women in her novels make a living by courtship, regard love as an investment, and hope to maximize their own interests while ignoring the interests of others.
Zhang Ailing subverts the best things in life, which is a sense of desolation and sadness in troubled times. Zhang Ailing is anti-hero and anti-romantic.
On the other hand, the spiritual changes and life experiences of the characters in Wang Anyi's novels are brought about by the changes in Shanghai, and also expressed through the secular side of their lives.
In Wang Anyi's works, ordinary little people are not mediocre, but have a heroic heart in their bones, an ideal in life and persistence in realizing their ideals.
Yu Cheng in Corner B, Wen Wen in Junior High School Students of the 69th Session, Ouyang in Passing by, Coal Furnace Reformer in the Attic, Zhang Daling in Chapter 30 of Running Water, as well as Mei Tou and Fu Ping, are either not satisfied with the mediocre life, or are distressed and struggling in the daily mediocre life.
Their distress and struggle, unlike the material conditions that "mortals" in Zhang Ailing's novels need to survive, are more mental anxiety, and their inner world is full of experience, enjoyment and resistance to loneliness.
Whether it is Jin Guxiang's daughter in Love on a Barren Mountain, Minnie in Minnie, A San in I Love Bill or Wang Qiyao in Song of Eternal Sorrow, they are reckless and even full of sacrifices for love. They are all fateful characters in the novel, and this fate is shrouded in Wang Anyi's rationality.
These women's struggle against life is uncompromising and unyielding to fate, full of vitality and tragic.
This is tragic and different from Zhang Ailing's "desolation". The former is positive and hopeful, while the latter is nihilistic and desperate.
Although the love in Wang Anyi's works ended in tragedy like Zhang Ailing, Wang Anyi is not pessimistic. The women in her novels have persistent pursuit of love, which is more spiritual, but this pursuit failed because of men's retreat or abandonment.
03
In her old marriage, Zhang Ailing suffered from the disharmony between her parents' interests and feelings, even the mental trauma and loneliness caused by hostility, homelessness and lack of maternal love.
Her own marriage also brought her wordless pain. The great changes of the times made her husband leave her, and her infatuation did not make the marriage complete.
Her thoughts are always in the crisis of the destruction of the times, and more destruction is coming. She is full of nothingness, despair and desperate pain for everything in the world.
The tragedies written by Zhang Ailing are more tragedies of the times. These tragedies are not the result of man's struggle with fate, but the fate's arbitrary mercy on man.
Ge, Cao, Ni and Shi Junhe in her works are all tragedies in the continuation of time and the changes of the times, showing her helplessness and pessimism about the time that can never be overcome, as well as her own smallness and powerlessness.
Therefore, the tragic influence of traditional values on people's fate and the decline of ancient families and traditional moral concepts in troubled times have become the tragic themes of Zhang Ailing's novels.
However, the tragic consciousness in Wang Anyi's novels is not only related to the times. Although the characters in her novels have gone through different times or different historical periods, they are all carefree and have no survival crisis.
Their fate is also at the mercy of the times, and it is also turbulent because of the changes of the times and political situation. However, they don't have the nihility and fear of the city citizens in the face of the great changes of the times described by Zhang Ailing. Most of them accept that the changes of the world and the times have given them another fate.
The tragic consciousness in Wang Anyi's works comes from her concern for human destiny, which is strongly fatalistic.
On the one hand, she reveals the controllability and unknowns of human destiny, and at the same time shows us the possibility of grasping destiny, the warm understanding between people, and the subjective efforts made by people out of respect for themselves, which may change the doomed situation and make us face destiny hopefully.
Wang Anyi's exploration of the tragic fate of characters is more about people's own limitations, and has a sense of introspection. Therefore, Wang Anyi is more universal than Zhang Ailing in discussing the causes of tragic fate of characters.
Both Zhang Ailing and Wang Anyi wrote about secular Shanghai, but the secular daily life is hedonistic in Zhang Ailing's novels and has a sense of history in Wang Anyi's novels.
Both Zhang Ailing and Wang Anyi wrote about the complexity and richness of human nature. Zhang Ailing points to the nothingness of life and anti-hero, while Wang Anyi writes about the warmth and hope of human nature. Little people also have heroes.
The fate of the characters in their novels all ended in tragedy. The tragic consciousness of Zhang Ailing's novels comes from troubled times and her nothingness and despair of human nature and life. The tragic consciousness of Wang Anyi's novels comes from her positive and rational care for the fate of characters who indulge in daily life.
Writing little people is also a tragic fate, but because of the different world views of writers, the spiritual realm and connotation of characters have completely different dimensions.