The sound of horseshoes, lonely and melancholy, falls on the silent street from far to near, like little white flowers. I
Stand still. An old black carriage, empty, passed me slowly. Doubt with dusk, scattered its shadow all the way, and then disappeared from near to far.
The more desolate the street is. Twilight droops and closes gently, as if falling from the wings of silver ash.
In my heart. I shrugged proudly and let out a sad sigh at my feet.
A row of orderly palace walls stands tall. Many times, I asked it with my eyes, and it answered me with a question:
-Hunter at dusk, what are you looking for?
The beast is looking for a strong man's sword, the beautiful bird is looking for a birdcage, and the heart of youth is looking for it.
Poisonous eyes. What about me?
I used to have some yellow happiness with sadness, just like the breeze in my dream on March night, time and time again.
Gone with the wind When I woke up, I saw the first drop of morning dew with pure love falling silently on the ground. I had some lonely times, under the dark window, by the fire in the long night, I closed the door, but they escaped. Can I forget melancholy as easily as I forget happiness?
The pavilion on the top of the mountain is more round because of the low color sky, and it is higher in the lush forest.
Get the melancholy of looking up from it. In the distant past, when I had a kind and quiet companion hovering at the foot of this mountain, I inadvertently promised to choose a sunny morning to climb that mountain. But then it was inadvertently abandoned. This quiet street, since it has no gentle steps, has become more desolate. I am disappointed and resentful, so that the pavilion always hides undiscovered happiness and dares not climb the road of my sweet imagination alone.
[Abstract] He Qifang created a lonely soul in the prose "Dusk", looking for an unfathomable future and happiness. With dusk as the dream background, he outlined the virtual scene with exquisite and ingenious lyric language. However, there is only one person in the dream from beginning to end, and his monologue is just an incomprehensible dream.
[Keywords:] He Qifang; Twilight; Loneliness; Looking for; sleep-talking
He Qifang's prose collection "Painting Dreams" is only a thin booklet with more than 80 pages, while this "Dusk" is less than 600 words. He once said in a letter: "The article Twilight is a milestone. Before that, I was a person full of childish sadness, lonely happiness and distant fantasies. After that, I felt deep loneliness, great depression, contradiction between reality and fantasy, and poor life, but I couldn't find a definite conclusion. " [1] These remarks are the starting point and destination of reading this article.
Twilight was written in the early summer of 1933. At this time, He Qifang, 2 1 year-old, was still studying philosophy at Peking University. But he gradually found that boring philosophy was not his interest, and he was more concerned about the colorful world outside the classroom. In this dream-loving season, He Qifang faithfully recorded every dream and every scene in the dream, and Dusk became a beautiful and melancholy smoke cloud on the fan.
A bleak dream
Dusk is an eternal symbol of freehand brushwork, and it is the darling of poets and essayists at home and abroad. Li Shangyin's "The setting sun is infinitely beautiful and buried in the coming night" makes many people hesitate, while Li Qingzhao's "After dusk, there is a faint fragrance and sleeves" makes people feel a little carefree. Ji Xianlin's Twilight is like a poem, a song and a fairy tale. Like the melodious flute from the moon building, there is a crane ringing in the sky; Like Shao wine aged for decades; I like everything that is too beautiful to say ",just" a light dream on a spring night "; The dusk in Isababy's eyes is a farewell elegy, and that "the bright moon shines on the mountain road and the weeping at the bottom of the flowing spring" indicates a dream performance.
In Twilight by He Qifang, the dream opens ahead of time and the background is mysterious dusk. His dream consists of some special images: first, he heard the sound of Dada's horseshoes ringing in the evening street, breaking the emptiness and loneliness; Then, "an old black carriage" appeared in his sight, but he was just a passerby, and "Xu Xu" passed by him; He stood in front of "an orderly palace wall", which he hoped was the object of his conversation. However, they can only communicate with their eyes; In his dream, he recalled the "dew of pure love" and the "fire" under the "dark window"; The pavilion on the top of the mountain also aroused my disgust under the reflection of colorful clouds all over the sky. In the poem Footsteps, He Qifang described it like this: "The wind is blowing in the evening/the strings are still trembling/like the fallen leaves of poplars floating in the suburbs under the eaves." Although there is no gorgeous sunset glow and pleasant cicada singing, we can really feel the changes brought by the evening; However, in this article, our feelings are hazy and illusory, because it is the dusk in the dream, and the author's emotions are infected by the dusk. These emotions are conveyed to the immediate scene, and everything becomes a symbol of decline and a first-person narrator.
The author appeared as a walker, but it was only a sleepwalking, with no fixed direction and destination, and settled his loneliness while walking. His "standing still" shows that he is unwilling to be lonely and eager for the sound of hooves to bring him some kind of surprise, but the car is "empty"; He is "proud" because he is looking forward to the next meeting with friends or strangers, but the "sad sigh" at his feet proves his sadness; He "woke up" from an old dream and saw disillusionment. What he didn't realize was that he would "wake up" again and be disappointed again. He designed an imaginary dialogue for himself under the disguise of the palace wall, but he couldn't answer this question: "Hunter at dusk, what are you looking for?" He is just a vagrant, and the long journey is just a way to escape from hiding. Even so, he still stubbornly moved forward.
Second, a sober monologue
There is only one narrator of the dream, and everyone has his own unique experience. "Every soul is a world without windows. And the lovely soul is a stubborn monologue "[2]. Although there is a strong sentimental atmosphere in the article, the reading experience of Twilight is not just moaning and giving up on yourself. The author inadvertently wrote a theme of depression and struggle. Although this struggle seems to be so overreaching and insignificant, it is a kind of courage for him to try to erase those unpleasant memories by "searching" to draw a blueprint about love and career.
In After Dreams, He Qifang wrote: "I would like to be a wanderer, running endlessly and falling to my death halfway. It was a toss-up, and there was no gentle review. ..... Maybe loneliness has made me worse. But it taught me how to think. " Many poets are unyielding: Gu Cheng uses "black eyes" to "look for the light", Haizi lies in front of the railroad tracks singing "Facing the sea, spring blossoms", and his forefinger writes "Believe in the future" on the desolate land with "Frost vine" ... However, they are fragile and their young dreams are easily shattered. 1933, the people of Chinese mainland were in dire straits, but He Qifang buried himself in the ivory tower of art, confined himself to a small world, and insisted on a liberal creative way. But in fact, his creation can not be separated from the environment of the times: in the prose "Dusk", the clear tone of his early poems has disappeared, replaced by a kind of juvenile maturity.
As for the theme of Dusk, Mr. Ye Gongjue said that it "clearly and profoundly expresses the loneliness and sadness of young people after their lovelorn love" [③]. In fact, such a dreamer can have many interpretations of the reasons for his sadness, but there is only one result in seeking relief-the lonely person returns to melancholy. The agreement with the former "companion" was finally abandoned, and the "gentle steps" disappeared in the "silent street". He can only collect elusive sweetness and get back on the road.
Third, poetic interpretation.
"The first thing that attracted me to write was poetry. I have been writing poems for many years, and I have written many bad poems. It was not until the third year of college that I suddenly found my failure, like a river in the wrong direction, and I couldn't find the sea. ..... So I feel that after I am lonely, lazy and secretly absurd, although I can't continue to write poems and make huge works, I should sit down quietly, attentively and slowly like a self-conscious craftsman and carve some small utensils. So I started writing things without lines. " This passage was said by He Qifang in the preface to Miscellaneous Notes on the Return of the Native. As a representative of early prose creation, Painting Dreams is obviously influenced by poetry in style, and can even be said to be another continuation of poetry.
Dusk is a naive and sad song of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It is subjective and lyrical. It "alienated from the public theme, focused on the inner world of self, and used romantic artistic brushstrokes to reconcile the various arts of the late Tang and Five Dynasties, the modern west and modern China into a Leng Yan color, and carefully depicted the sadness and daydreams of its youth" [4]. If Zhou Zuoren's essays create a peaceful and diluted style of writing, then He Qifang's early essays establish the authenticity of "lyric prose", as he himself said: "I try to create an emotional atmosphere in a few words: sometimes I tell a short story that can arouse a lot of imagination, and sometimes it is accompanied by a wave of thoughtful emotions. Just as I was fascinated when I wrote poetry before, I pursued pure softness and pure beauty. " I would like to prove with my meager strength that every essay should be created independently, not an amplification of an unfinished novel or a short poem [5].
The language of He Qifang's early prose is suspected of carving, but the emotion is real. A short essay often takes two or three days to polish, which shows that his attitude towards art is meticulous and he is an out-and-out perfectionist. In this song "Dusk", the author uses a lot of rhetorical devices, especially the metaphor at the beginning, which makes many people full of praise: "The sound of hooves, loneliness and melancholy from far and near, falls on the silent street like a small white flower." In fact, this sentence contains a double metaphor: first, compare the sound of horseshoes to sparse raindrops, and then compare raindrops to small flowers, which are slender and without traces. His student Zhou Zhonghou called it "dynamic beauty" [6]. Another example is parallelism: "the beast looks for the sword of the strong man, the beautiful bird looks for the birdcage, and the unruly heart of youth looks for the poisonous eye", which is novel and full of rhythm. Synaesthesia and questioning are also common techniques in He Qifang's poems, such as: "Twilight droops and closes softly, like falling from the wings of silver ash, and some casual tiredness is in my heart". "Carelessness" is a subjective feeling, but it has become a visible thing, and it is just right here: it seems that "carelessness" is just something born for no reason, and it has nothing to do with "me".
A vivid and strong sense of color makes some of He Qifang's poems more vivid, such as his description of "joy": "Tell me, what color is joy? /Like a pigeon's feather wings? The parrot's red mouth? " But in Dusk, many colors are also used, but they are changed into cool colors: white flowers, black carriages, silver-gray wings, yellow joy and colorful sky, which highlights the specific emotional carrier of dusk.
Like a lost child looking for light in the dark. In the end, he only found his own vague shadow. He Qifang's Painting Dreams is "just some toys made by a lonely child" [7]. He said that "that stone" was the starting point of his intention to write prose, so before that, he had been trying unconsciously and had been "painting dreams". However, it is difficult for us to see those broken and messy "dreams" in later published prose collections, such as Deliberate Collection, Miscellanies of Returning Home, Spark Collection and Sequel of Spark Collection. He Qifang gradually matured and embarked on the road of revolution.
Mr. Liu Xiwei's evaluation of He Qifang in Reading Dreams at least represents some people's views: "He lacks Mr. Bian's modernity and Mr. Li Guangtian's simplicity, but his temperament is purer, more poetic and closer to1the beginning of the 9th century. It is this poet's temperament that makes us often fall into passionate dreams when reading his prose. We will forget that he is a conscious artist. " [⑧]
[1] See He Qifang: A Letter to Mr. Ai Qing-Talking about Drawing Dreams and My Road, Selected Essays of He Qifang, Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986, p. 209.
[2] See He Qifang: Monolingual, Selected Essays of He Qifang, Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986, p. 37.
[3] See Duke Ye: On the Evolution of He Qifang's Prose Style, Collected Works of He Qifang's Studies, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986, p. 566.
[4] See Tao: He Qifang's Cultural Choice and Creative Tendency, Literary Review, 2003, 02.
[5] See-Miscellaneous Notes on the Return of the Native (1986 Edition)
[6] See Zhou Zhonghou: "Smoke on the Fan-Comment on" Painting Dreams ","Painting Dreams with Tears of Blood and the Soul of Passionate Poetry-A Study of He Qifang's Creation ",Culture and Art Publishing House, 1992, p. 1 135.
[7] See He Qifang: 1986, page 140.
[8] See Liu Xiwei: Dream of Reading Paintings, Collected Works of He Qifang, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986, p. 592.
Brief introduction of He Qifang: He Qifang (1912-1977), male, was born in Wanxian, Sichuan (now Wanzhou, Chongqing), an old-fashioned family. Modern famous essayist, poet and literary critic. He used to be the director of the Institute of Literature of China Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Literature of China Academy of Social Sciences) and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences. From 65438 to 0935, he graduated from the Philosophy Department of Peking University, taught all over the country, founded publications and published a large number of poems and political articles, expressing great indignation at the passive anti-Japanese war of the Kuomintang. His early works include Hanyuan Collection, Night Song, Prophecy, Night Song and Sun Song, which are deeply loved by readers. He also wrote Autumn, and now he has been selected as a textbook for middle schools.