The biggest feature of "Shanghai Style" literature is the cultural model of prosperity and decadence: the strong culture invades the soft and decadent weak culture with masculine aggression, and new life bursts out from the destruction. Reproduction, brilliance and sin intertwined into an inextricable fate. When it comes to the origins of Shanghai-style literature, it seems difficult to get rid of the phenomenon of the two cultures being the same body, which can also be said to be the "flower of evil" phenomenon. But Shanghai is different from the Paris described by Baudelaire. Paris has always been the launching point of world civilization. Its sinful and brilliant flowers are produced within its own body cavity. It has the inherent strong characteristics of capitalist culture. It is both active and active. and single, constituting a radiative behavior that infringes upon others, and in Shanghai, the land of the East, its "flowers of evil" are fermented in the cultural field where local and foreign cultures are mixed together, accepting and Catering, humiliation and joy, brilliance and decadence occur simultaneously in the same cultural model. The local culture suddenly breaks through the traditional suppression and bursts out with the desire to pursue the enjoyment of life. The foreign culture also bursts out with the desire to indulge itself under the strong stimulation of the heterogeneous environment. The so-called Shanghai-style urban literature was created from the combination of these two desires. Unique cultural personality.
Because Shanghai is an open city where Chinese and Western cultures constantly collide, and because the new literature since the May Fourth Movement is basically a European tradition, the protagonists of Shanghai-style novels are mainly closely related to the "West" The bourgeoisie, intellectuals and their consumer circles, while ordinary citizens only appear as negative philistine images in Shanghai-style novels. Zhang Ailing, who became popular in the 1940s, was a female writer who grew up deeply educated in the May Fourth New Literature. However, when she started writing, she consciously got rid of the Westernized accent of the New Literature and consciously looked for her own development possibilities in traditional folk literature. .
Shanghai is a city of immigrants. Many of its cultural phenomena were gradually formed along with immigrant culture. It has no ready-made cultural traditions of its own and can only be a synthesis of various fragmented local folk cultures. . Compared with rural folk culture, it does not appear in a complete form, but is hidden deep in the memories of various urban residents, forming a virtual cultural memory. Therefore, urban folk culture must be individual and fragmented. Zhang Ailing was the first to pick up this broken personal family memory and wrote such Shanghai-style works as "The Story of the Golden Lock" and "Love in a Fallen City". Because Zhang Ailing has always had a vague sense of fear about the advent of modernity, the carpe diem mood of the end of the century and the metaphor of the decline of the ancient family run through all her personal memories. On the one hand, it is the crazy pursuit of material desires, and on the other hand, it is the crazy pursuit of material desires. It is the fleeting fear of pleasure, and it is the inner pain of urban residents in occupied areas who are addicted to "good flowers that don't always bloom". Zhang Ailing elevated it to the spiritual level and gave it a profound expression. Zhang Ailing is neither infatuated nor critical of the decadence of urban modernity. She uses citizen spirit to transcend and dissolve the traditions of the two Shanghai schools, and creates an original aesthetic of Shanghai-style novels with urban folk culture as the main body.
Zhang Ailing has a clear positioning for her writing. In "My Own Article", she said: I found that people who engage in literature have always focused on the high-flying side of life and ignored the stable side of life. In fact, the latter is the foundation of the former. Another example is that they mostly focus on the struggle of life and ignore the harmonious aspect. In fact, people fight for the harmonious side. Emphasizing the soaring side of life, it has a somewhat superhuman temperament. Superman was born in an era. The stable side of life has an eternal meaning. Although this stability is often unsafe and will be destroyed every so often, it is still eternal. It exists in all times. It is the divine nature of man, which can also be said to be the nature of woman. When she said this, she actually meant something, implying criticism of left-wing literature. Because she focuses on expressing the stable and harmonious side of life, she prefers a desolate beauty in her aesthetic style, rather than the heroism or tragedy of struggle and flying. Desolation is a contrasting contrast, green and pink. The sense of form can give people a deeper aftertaste. She said that for this unfinished era, "I think the uneven comparison method is more appropriate" because it is "closer to the truth." Because of this conscious pursuit, Zhang Ailing's works have a different vision and imagination from other writers in expressing modern China. She aims to express the complex features of the old and the new in a transitional era, or an era that is collapsing. Her mixed performance of the old and the new embodies what Meng Yue calls a unique "modern sense". This "modern sense" is first formed by a kind of use of specific images, objects and landscapes that is different from the left wing. expressiveness. Zhang Ailing attaches great importance to the description of the daily life scenes and material circumstances of the task, and these "objects" themselves contain meaning. Meng Yue calls this technique "imagery narrative". Its significance is that meaningful material and spatial forms provide more than "reality" in the "natural" sense: they provide a landscape for the society in transition, making social life forms as "text" improve readability. In Zhang Ailing's novels, there are two types of distinctive spatial images: one is the living place of the characters, and the other is the civilized "region" that refers to each other. Zhang Ailing's characters are distributed and move in several spaces with different meanings, marking different areas of social life in different eras.
One type of space is extremely closed, such as "inner rooms", mansions, back gardens, upstairs, bedrooms, etc. This is a space of a traditional society, closed, depressed, and decadent. In contrast are apartments and streets. "Notes on Apartment Life" says that an apartment is "the most ideal place to escape from the world" and is a very important material basis for privacy and self-awareness. It plays a sheltering role for individuals. The street is another daily space image that Zhang Ailing likes. The street is an open space, filled with all kinds of daily life. It is always full of vitality. It is a place where people gather and communicate. Its noise and noise itself are like a microcosm of the world and life. In "The Road Is Eyes" and "Chinese Days and Nights", we can see that it is the streets that provide conditions for the balance between individuals and groups, and between self and others. In the description of these two different types of spaces, Zhang Ailing presents a regional space in which "traditional" and "modern" factors are unevenly distributed - a landscape of social life that is half-new but not old.
Therefore, in Zhang Ailing's writings, "modernity" is implemented in the daily lives of ordinary men and women. It is a transformation that is dirty, even a little humiliating and embarrassing, rather than those Trendy symbols on the surface. In this regard, she is very different from the New Sensationists. The New Sensationists always love to write about dance halls, racetracks, cafes, cinemas, skyscrapers, cars and other fashionable symbols, as if only writing about these can express China's "modernity". Zhang Ailing's brilliance lies in her seeing the true face of China's unique modernity, which is an ambiguous mixture of old and new.
Zhang Ailing named her first collection of novels "Legend", but her novels are only about "mortals", "birth, old age, illness and death" and "little things between men and women". "The stable side of life", in other words, such things are completely unsurprising. Of course, we can say that "strange" comes from the different perspectives of reference. In "The First Incense", colonial Hong Kong is a fantasy place for Ge Weilong who came from Shanghai, and the "Golden Lock" describes In fact, it is a common phenomenon in traditional families. In the past, it was nothing surprising, but from the perspective of modern people, it is legendary. However, we can also say that it contains some of Zhang Ailing’s unique insights into reality and life. In Zhang Ailing's view, the era she lives in is really a troubled time, and there is a certain disconnect between real life and people's experience and knowledge, so people will "feel that everything in daily life is a little wrong, wrong to a terrifying degree." "An awkward dissonance is discovered at the same time" between "ancient memories" and reality, so that people have "a strange feeling about the reality around them." In other words, trivial matters between men and women, which should have been ordinary life, have turned into legends in a troubled time. It is not "strange" but "strange". What is reflected here is the disease of an era. There is a certain sense of sadness in the naming of legends. For ordinary men and women, they do not want to become characters in legends. They just want to break free from oppression and restraint and change their living conditions. However, this kind of effort will be performed in a troubled world. A legendary drama will allow them to experience fantasy and disaster, and finally move towards an ordinary life. Although this ordinary life has the joy of earthly life, it is a bit empty after all, just as Bai Liusu feels: "In In this turbulent world, money, real estate, and everything in the world are all unreliable. The only thing that can be relied on is the tone in her voice and the person sleeping next to her." In other words, what is in front of you is the only thing modern people can rely on. This is really sad.
Zhang Ailing's novels use "jaggedness" and "desolation" as a sense of form, and are based on the stable side of life, opening up a world that left-wing literary practice and ordinary "metropolitan style" writers have never penetrated. The field of writing: that is, the various forms that an unfinished "modernity" has brought to China's daily life, as well as the general Chinese society that continues in this era. This is the value of her creations.
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