-"Madame Bovary"
enthusiasm
Susan sontag put Don Quixote and Madame Bovary together, calling him a victim of reading addiction.
The former is that I read too many knight novels, and then I try to turn the deeds of knights into reality; Emma was bewitched by romantic novels and began to pursue romantic love regardless of reality.
Interestingly, Cervantes and Flaubert are more sympathetic and even appreciative of their protagonists when readers criticize their actions.
In A Dream of Red Mansions, Jia Yucun said a seemingly absurd but self-evident sentence to Leng Zixing. He divided the world into 369 categories, one of which is "you can't be a gentleman who is benevolent in the world, and you can't be a big villain in the world." Among tens of millions of people, the spirit of intelligence and wit is above tens of millions, and the absurd and unreasonable state is below tens of millions. "Jia Yucun put Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Liu Ling, and even Bao Dai in this category, and even looked at the trajectory of Don Quixote and Emma.
In other words, is over-reading really the culprit leading to their tragedy? It doesn't seem true.
Cervantes himself is a big fan of chivalrous novels, and Flaubert is also familiar with romantic novels. At present, there are more than 10 million readers seeking to fix the truth in fantasy novel at the starting point. I haven't seen many people who punish evil and promote good like Don Quixote and dazzle the upper-class love like Emma.
Instead, Emma became Emma, not because she was inferior to others, but because she was superior to others in some places-that is, her enthusiasm for life far exceeded others.
Because of this passion, she can't be satisfied with the ordinary and respected town life like her husband, nor can she be confused by common sense without seeking solutions. Smart and sophisticated, ordinary people are as far away as they are; In the face of her husband's loyalty, she can often refute each other in one sentence.
Flaubert described Emma in this way: "Her personality reveals a practical meaning in passion and romance." Emma's ingenuity can often light up life and make her husband cry. However, this is definitely not because of her love for life, nor because of her husband, but because of her boredom with anger.
Emma's anger and boredom, like Don Quixote's paranoia, is an excessive passion, and after reading it, it becomes despair of the ideal life.
Plato said in the Republic that the human soul has three components, one is desire, the other is reason and the third is passion. Emma is a materialist. Here, Rainbow Xifeng, she lives easily in her own hands, but what she longs for is more desire and passion.
In the life of little bourgeois, mediocrity occupied everything, but passion was always absent. Emma felt depressed. Reading broke a gap for depression and opened a window in ordinary life, letting people see the past life outside.
However, Emma didn't stop at "looking". What she is addicted to is not reading itself, but the temporary relief brought by reading and another life pointed by the love story. Because she is a realist, she doesn't regard the windmill as a giant like Don Quixote, and directly begins to think that she is brave in the secular society, so the ideal life picture is further suppressed and brewed into destructive power that may break out at any time.
Here, we can see the subtle difference between Emma and Don Quixote: Emma still believes in the ethics and laws of real life. She is eager to be as knowledgeable and experienced as a man. If she can't, she will pass on this desire to her offspring, so when she learned that she gave birth to a daughter instead of a boy, she almost fainted.
Embraced by passion, Don Quixote has begun to completely ignore the creed of life. Instead of breaking the rules of life, he reshaped his own rules of life-
More directly, Don Quixote's life itself is a kind of creation. Everything he meets and sees is his creative material. He kept ritualizing his behavior and referring to the stories he had read, eager to make the "Sad Knight" immortal like the hero in knight novels.
Of course, as far as the actual situation is concerned, he did it-just in a completely different way.
In addition, the effectiveness of reading addiction does not necessarily lead to Emma-style love tragedy or Don Quixote-style youth absurdity. Reading itself also contains passion.
China people like moral admonition, so there is a saying: "Old people don't read the Three Kingdoms, and young people don't read the Water Margin". If the lack of life experience can be used to explain not reading the Water Margin, it is really hard to justify not reading the Three Kingdoms-if you can still be deceived by books when you live to the damn age, you can't do anything before writing. In the years when sword fairy novels prevailed, it was reported that teenagers were obsessed with reading, so they dropped out of school and went to the mountains to seek immortality. Living is Don Quixote of China.
In the eyes of China people, books are more magical than sword soldiers, cultivate one's morality and cultivate one's character, and they are also responsible for teaching thieves. Opening Angle to uprising, cannot leave three volumes gobbledygook; Sung River will stay in Xuan Nv for nine days. As for Li Shimin, according to the examination, he even lamented that "all heroes in the world have fallen into my trap". China people have been kept in the dark for thousands of years in front of scientific research. Fame is of course one reason, which also shows the magic of reading.
Reading is the passion of possession, practice and fiction.
There is a saying that history begins with truth and ends with falsehood, while myth begins with falsehood and ends with truth.
The so-called fiction is a kind of writing about the world and has its own real meaning. Umberto Eco, the author, said: "Man is born an animal with a fictional story" when talking about the origin of the name of the rose.
Reading not only means participating in the fiction and interpretation of the text, but also accompanied by a process of re-creation. With the help of reading, readers can not only make their hearts beat in another chest, but also participate in a passionate creation. Among modern and contemporary writers, there are many experts in this field, and the field of text expression has not only been broadened on a large scale, but also the style has achieved greater freedom.
Milorad Pavi's Hazare Dictionary is fictional in the form of lexicography, and with the help of the simultaneous publication of Yin and Yang Shi, the publication of the work is made into a news event. Nabokov's Dim Fire is a combination of poetry and criticism. The author not only completed an excellent heroic poem, but also launched a paranoid criticism around this poem, which frequently mentioned the creator's life. Moreover, the complicated relationship between the creator and the critic, especially the suspicious psychological state of the latter, makes the text imply a murder like a detective novel.
Through these excellent texts, as well as the tribute and lifelong texts around us, we can see that the passion for reading and the passion for creation are more closely intertwined, and those knowledgeable creators themselves often become readers.
In Borges' words, this situation is best described: heaven should be like a library.
human feelings
No matter what Flaubert himself thinks, Madame Bovary is regarded as a model of naturalistic literature. If we make an inaccurate comparison with China's classical literature, the naturalistic Madame Bovary will be very similar to the love story Jin Ping Mei.
Both novels involve an old and often new topic: infidelity.
Emma's determination, affection and masculinity are similar to those of Pan Jinlian. Charles is vulgar, obscene, kind and cowardly, and is widely respected by the town, but it is still not enough to cover up the smell of his "golden tongue". In the face of such a partner, no matter Emma or Pan Jinlian, they will accumulate resentment because of their long-term and unprovoked passion-
When the heroine meets a romantic veteran (Ximen Qing/Rudolph), as Flaubert said: Even on the balcony of the house, once the sewer is blocked, the rain will gather into small lakes. Just when she thinks she is safe, she suddenly sees a crack on the wall.
If Pan Jinlian was unwilling from the beginning, she lamented that "a piece of mutton fell into the dog's mouth". Emma witnessed the affair of the upper class after her trip to Bersars and began to be unwilling to the status quo.
In this respect, reading romance novels only makes her overestimate love, which may not really impress her in life. Bersars's experience is not the same. Elegant nobles and ladies put triangular love letters in their lovers' hats, so that she could see the love in the book at close range and then put it into practice eagerly. At this time, there is no difference between Leon and Rudolf. What Emma needs is an unpleasant object to vent her feelings, just like Don Quixote needs a lady to submit, even if the imaginary Dulcinea is just a country milkmaid.
Emma's longing for her lover is mixed with endless imagination, just like "a bonfire left by travelers in the snow on the Russian prairie" (Flaubert). Even when the object she yearns for comes to her eyes, this yearning will not be so strong, but will appear insignificant.
As Gu Cheng said in his poem: I think/when you look at the clouds, you are close/when you look at me, you are far away.
Pan Jinlian tried to seek imaginary comfort from Song Wu and Ximen Qing, and Emma also had her own Leon and Rudolph.
Leon fell in love for the first time and unconsciously put one foot on the crossbar of Emma's seat. When Ximen Qing asked for "glory", he also robbed Miss Pan of three inches of golden lotus. Emma once gave Rudolph a lock of hair, and Ximen Qing successfully cheated Pan Jinlian of a lock of hair. ...
All these ways of cheating, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, have also shown an interesting consistency. Of course, based on different moral admonitions, Xiao Xiaosheng and Flaubert in Lanling also gave different descriptions of infidelity. The love affair between men and women in Jin Ping Mei is ghostly, and Ximen Qing's lewd death is full of fatalism from the beginning because it violates ethics. Madame Bovary is different. Emma's tragedy stems from her uncontrollable passion for life, while Flaubert's description of derailment is quite tolerant and subtle:
"When the sun shone on the silver-plated old car lights, I leaned out a bare hand from the yellow curtain and threw a piece of paper out of the window. A piece of paper floated like a white butterfly in the wind and landed in a alfalfa field full of purple flowers in the distance. 」
Just as people say that reading Jin Ping Mei requires compassion, the author's humanitarianism often permeates Madame Bovary. At the agricultural exhibition that decided Emma and Rudolph's fate, a poor employee, Kadelina Leroux, worked hard for 54 years and won a silver medal and 25 francs. The sharp contrast between giving and receiving is the helplessness of life. The winner's own timidity and stupidity make Emma's image much higher. The author has no intention of tasting the pros and cons of life. However, if Emma's passion is unfortunate, then the vulgarity and boredom of ordinary life are not worse.
In contrast to Emma's fate, the experience of Charles's mother, Madame Bovary Sr, suggests another possibility of passionate life: Charles's father, Monsieur Bovary Sr, looks like a man at first glance, and the spurs on his boots rattle. At first glance, he captured the heart of the old Madame Bovary and the dowry of sixty thousand francs-
What happened afterwards? It's just another kind of bitterness that eventually leads to mediocrity.
No matter how you choose, the road you have no choice seems to be the most suitable. It exists in imagination, so it can contain endless passion, imagination, fiction and creation.
Perhaps, as Zhang Ailing said: After marrying a red rose, over time, the red one becomes mosquito blood on the wall, and the white one is still "the bright line at the foot of my bed"; Marry a white rose, and over time, white is the first dress.
The rice grain is sticky, but the red one is Zhu Shazhi's heart.
Because this is not about reality but imagination, and life is often not at the foot but in the distance.