Loneliness in the hustle and bustle, Tao Ran in loneliness.
-Read Ye Shengtao's Diaphragm
allow
As an early work of Ye Shengtao, Diaphragm is different from his later works. As we all know, as one of the founders of the Literature Research Association, Ye Shengtao's novels have a strong color of "for life". Let's take a look at several of his famous works, such as Ni Huanzhi, Mr. Pan in Trouble, Fighting Three to Five, and Rice, all of which show strong concern for society. Like Lu Xun, Shen Yanbing and Wang Tongzhao, Ye Shengtao regards literature as a real job. Mr. Lu Xun said in How I Write Novels, "When it comes to why I want to write novels, I still hold the' enlightenment' more than ten years ago, thinking that it must be' for life' and I want to improve this life." In the mind of the founder of the Cultural Research Association, literature should have its practical function, and should never be used as a pastime to serve the leisure class. Describing life and improving life have become the top priority of creation, so Ye Shengtao paid great attention to social problems and was absorbed into the creative team of early "social problem novels" and became "the most mature and representative one". [1] Literature has become a gun and sword in their hands and a way for them to pay attention to their lives. He is good at describing the people, citizens and intellectuals in the hot water of the lower class, liberating women, striving for their status and power as "people", transforming national character and education.
However, the diaphragm is different. Just like Lu Xun, he struggled with literature all his life. In addition to a lot of shouting and argumentative essays, in addition to talking about the past and the present, in addition to the profound stories, he also had weeds. The incomprehensible rhetoric and images, illogical grammatical sentences and elusive thought fragments in Weeds are all incomprehensible to readers. However, the author doesn't seem to care about the reader's judgment and acceptance. He just writes casually. Diaphragm is to Ye Shengtao what weeds are to Lu Xun. They are all "monologues", crossing the society, crossing the characters, crossing their own obvious style, retreating into the secret heart, asking for no response, singing or being known. They just want to simply record their tangled thoughts, let them drip from the pen and stay on the paper as memories they once had.
When reading Diaphragm, we can't see how far the situation it describes is from us, except for the words of "recording a film", "your son" and "bowing". On the contrary, it seems that we can easily enter the writer's heart and deeply understand his mood and feelings he wants to express. The same feeling between us and him has not disappeared because of the long creative era. Because of similar empathic distress and confusion, we have also been entangled in each of us. The feeling of the diaphragm is connected with us, which is the deep reason why it can still impress readers after more than 80 years. The article is not long, almost all of it is narrated by the narrator. Only in the generalization of the environment, three scenes are simply outlined to support the framework of the short story. As for the specific plot wave, there is no beginning, no connection, and no side details. The author's self-report at the beginning laid the tone and theme of the whole article. So this is a novel that doesn't look like a novel and can be classified as prose. Because if the three scenes in the article are roughly taken out or replaced, and the characters and dialogues involved are taken out, the theme and tone of the article will not be affected at all, and it will still be established, but it will become a veritable prose, which is too far from the novel genre. Such an eccentric novel is rare not only in the 1920s, but also in the whole modern literature.
The three scenes intercepted by the author are "meeting"-relatives' study, "drinking"-friends' dining room, "leisure gathering"-noisy teahouse, and three basic social relationships are extracted from the complex social network system: one is the blood relationship that one cannot control and choose, the other is the familiar relationship that can take care of each other in life, and the third is the stranger relationship that has nothing to do with each other. The three kinds of relationships are given by God's will, and they are optional, so it is hard to call them relationships. They can contain almost all communications in the world. Although they have their own different expressions and shades, they can't be absolutely compared, but they give the narrator an unusually similar feeling, that is, the diaphragm. How did you meet? It's just that you have to answer me as scheduled. Polite greetings are stylized but can't be omitted. Find some irrelevant questions to cover up the embarrassment and fill the silence, but the speaker just said, as if he had done his duty of discharging his responsibility, so he didn't concentrate on listening to the respondent's response, turned a deaf ear, and the respondent was indifferent. Communication is blocked in embarrassment, just like a river with a dam built in the middle, and the waves only hover in their own small range. What about the banquet? Raising a glass and chatting with people you don't know, even if you push a cup for a change, is just a kind of insincere entertainment, so each has his own heart and is insincere. In crowded and noisy public places, we say hello to each other, talk loudly, and look like close friendship, but in fact we care about each other. No one will be found, and no one will be surprised by more. Laughter, slander, humor and alienation are like a vast fog, engulfing everyone in the middle, and everyone is tired of being warm. The three scenes can be summed up as the ubiquitous diaphragm and the ubiquitous loneliness, which is really unbearable.
Author: Qi Shui He Feng 2007-7-7 2 1:40 Reply to this speech
2 Paper: Comment on Ye Shengtao's Diaphragm
Only when facing the nature, the lifeless scenery and the narrow space with only self can people be free. "I feel bored. Although I am in a crowded restaurant, I am just lonely. I think of the wind and sound in the river during the day, how refreshing. If I escape from this dining room now and go back to my boat, listening to the refreshing tone, I would like to be so lonely. " Undoubtedly, the author compares two kinds of loneliness. First, there is no one around to talk to, only lonely self. First, no one can really communicate with the wedding or everyone. Weighing the two kinds of loneliness, the author would rather go back to the former than worry about the embarrassment of the latter. This can't help but remind people of a poem from Gu Cheng-far and near.
You/look at me/at the clouds//I think/you look at me far away/you look at the clouds very close.
In a sense, Gu Cheng's poems can be regarded as a simplified poetic annotation of the diaphragm, and also as a more emotionally compressed abridgement. They can explain each other and confirm each other. They all describe the distant distance between people and refer to the distance between people and things. The closeness between people and clouds satirizes the alienation between people. People can't wander among the same kind, and they can't feel each other. What a terrible situation! It can be said that being born as a human being is a kind of sorrow. It goes far beyond the loneliness in the ordinary sense, beyond the loneliness recited in ancient poetry. Feng Yansi, a poet in the Southern Tang Dynasty, famously said, "A single bridge is full of sleeves, and a crescent moon returns to Lin Ping." The Lonely Man Standing under the Moon is vividly depicted. The forest is full of clothes, no relatives to talk to, no friends to laugh, and the new moon is ignorant. Whether you stay or not, it just hangs forever, maintaining a thoughtful posture and work and rest, and does not understand the loneliness and depression of travelers. This is an involuntary fascinating scene. But compared with the three scenes in the diaphragm, it is somewhat poetic and carefree. After all, when you are alone, no one bothers you and you don't need to insinuate each other. The loneliness of the ancients has become an elegance and intoxication in the minds of today's people. The loneliness that the ancients wanted to get rid of has become the freedom that today's people deliberately pursue, which is really like an awkward joke in reincarnation.
The Diaphragm describes the absurd situation and a helpless way of existence of human beings in daily life, which is similar to Kafka's novel The Hungry Artist. Facing all kinds of food artists, there is no desire to chew. In the flood and encirclement of food, he couldn't find anything to eat, and his stomach cramped and he was on the verge of destruction. Similarly, the diaphragm is a helpless situation that people can't get rid of. Although we are in the bustling crowd, we don't know each other, care about each other, care about each other, and it is meaningless to each other. Others, like themselves in others' eyes, just become an insignificant, monotonous and empty action symbol. Man is such a lonely and helpless animal isolated from himself. This sense of alienation that is close at hand but far away is frightening. People have to face troubles and difficulties and avoid contact with groups. Is it not a desperate situation in a desperate situation, a struggle in a struggle?
So it reminds people of Sartre and his famous saying "Others are hell". As long as we are naked in the eyes of others, we will keep pretending and performing, disguising life as a ball. Sartre's The Wall vividly describes such a life. Although the three young people gathered in hell don't have to worry about their livelihood, they harass and hate each other. Everyone has become an obstacle to others, and they are exhausted under each other's peeping, questioning, guessing, supervising and watching. Life is worse than death, so that they collapse in despair, even though they are dead. Diaphragm and wall have the same philosophical connotation. Although they use different languages and expressions, they all describe the embarrassment of human existence. Diaphragm is a wall between people, and the wall built by people for self-defense has become an insurmountable diaphragm. People become obstacles, encumbrances or dangerous goods to each other in the world. Everyone is on guard against danger, but they have a high degree of tacit understanding in keeping each other's distance, and consciously and voluntarily deepen and lengthen the original gap.
Ye Shengtao, Gu Cheng and Sartre, three writers and poets whose backgrounds and cultural characteristics are very different from those of other writers and poets, found themselves lamenting the eternal barriers in the world. As local writers, avant-garde poets in the 1980s and famous western philosophers in the 20th century, they express their feelings in different forms, but their feelings are strikingly similar. The narrator in Diaphragm is troubled by those boring and meaningless exchanges, those "music-saving" dialogues and exchanges, and the embarrassing situation that he can't get rid of. In the memories with my relatives, "I am like drifting on an uninhabited island. I am like being caught in a lonely and eternal disaster. The feeling of loneliness and hesitation is more than pain, which permeates every cell of my heart and makes me confused and confused. At the home of a visiting friend, "I think they have their own worries. Why do they want to hide it and talk exclusively with music storage films? "This is unsolvable." "I have no other hope, I just hope that time will go quickly and get through these two points." In the crowded teahouse, "I want to explore the reason why they gather here every day, but I can't get it." Do they want to know anyone? No, because I didn't see two people talking heartily there. Do they want to discuss anything? No, because I listen to their conversation, I don't need to distinguish right from wrong, I don't need any answers, and nothing is their result. "This is an insurmountable gap between heart and heart. People, like hedgehogs, want to snuggle up to each other for warmth in winter, but the upside-down thorns make it difficult for them to get close to each other, and they can only be in a state of being at arm's length, and their depressing mood can never be changed.
Sartre once borrowed a legend from ancient Greek mythology and compared people's "gaze" to the eyes of the ancient Greek monster Medusa. Medusa's eyes are considered to be magical and horrible strange eyes. Its eyes can turn people into stones and make them die. Everyone wants to escape from others' medusa-like gaze, and it is only safe to escape from this dangerous staring area. Escape is both active and forced, that is, unilateral and two-way. Ye Shengtao's Diaphragm interprets Sartre's philosophy with oriental perception. On the issue of individuals and others, everyone wants to treat others as things and things, and at the same time wants to get rid of the status of being treated as things by others, which makes people feel depressed, so people have to be in a tense and even conflicting relationship. "Others are my hell", and each of us lives under the noses of others and is in a subordinate position. This is the profound meaning that Diaphragm wants to express.
As a realist writer in the1920s and an intellectual whose aim is to involve literature in life, Ye Shengtao's Diaphragm is an unexpected gain. There are no annoying social problems, no sadness of the bottom people, no forceful attack and criticism of blood for ink, but it is a slow and lasting hidden pain. Not to show anything, not to educate anyone, just to record my feelings. This is the writer's true and literary achievement, and it has touched readers with its strong vitality in the original ecology. Through the text, we can understand the author 80 years ago, the breathless emptiness and bone marrow loneliness 80 years ago, and we are not shocked by it. Perhaps, loneliness in the noise and Tao Ran in loneliness is a mystery that human beings can never solve!