On Zhang Ailing's Love

Love, which was marked as "1April 944" by the author at the end of the article, was published in the same month of the same year, in the magazine 10, volume 13. When writing, Zhang Ailing was only 23 years old. The full text is more than 320 words. This short story is the shortest one in Zhang Ailing's prose and a very short one in the history of modern literature. At first glance, the content of this work is only the life perception of the "first love" of boys and girls. However, if we carefully contact Zhang Ailing's This One, we can find that love describes the author's loss of confidence in his first love; Is it going in or out? Deep down, she made a "beautiful and desolate gesture" to herself. Readers who are familiar with Zhang Ailing know that in early February of 1944, the charming traitor Hu Lancheng asked Su Qing for Zhang Ailing's address to visit her. She knew it was Hu Lancheng, but she didn't see it. Hu had to slip a piece of paper under the door with his address and name on it. Every other day, Zhang Ailing took the initiative to visit Hu and listen to Hu Lancheng. She sat for five hours, obviously attracted by his talent and grace. The next day, Hu visited Zhang again. In this way, you come and go, one is "amazing" and the other is "eager for talent", love at first sight. This is about two months from early February to early April, and it has not yet developed into the stage of cohabitation. But from the aspect of Zhang Ailing, on the one hand, she feels happy and warm, on the other hand, she warmly welcomes and cherishes this love with reservations. She gave Hu a photo that she was most satisfied with. On the back of the photo, she wrote the following words in her own hand: "Seeing him, she became very low, as low as dust, but her heart was happy and flowers blossomed in the dust." On the other hand, for Zhang Ailing, who lost her father's love and maternal love because of her parents' divorce, she has always felt lost and embraced loneliness and loneliness. In the face of Hu Lancheng, I think love is too sudden and incredible, and she clearly knows that Hu Lancheng has a wife, a dissolute nature, and a man who has no home to return. Therefore, she is sentimental, always with a gloomy and desolate feeling in her heart, expressing hesitation, joy and worry about this sudden love, and even giving up. She wrote a note to Hu Lancheng, telling him not to visit her again. She also said that she didn't want to give up and wrote to Hu Hu: "I thought you could come and go with me in the future." From this, she expressed her recognition of this embarrassing love, and also helplessly foresaw the short and lost ending of this love. As she said in "Talking about Women" here: "... men are cruel, falling in love is very dangerous, and getting married is also very dangerous, because marriage is the grave of love ..." From the above description, we can draw the conclusion that the psychological mechanism or inspiration for writing "Love" is the complex emotions of hope and despair intertwined by Zhang Ailing when she was in love with Hu Lancheng for two months. As Susan Langer said in Emotion and Form, "A work of art is often the self-expression of emotion, which is the symbol of the artist's inner state."

The content described in Love is very simple. One spring night, a beautiful girl of fifteen or sixteen met the boy across the hall by chance. Because they are neighbors, they naturally "meet", but I think they often meet, "but they never say hello." This time, the girl stood at the back door of her house, "wearing a moon-white shirt" and "holding a peach tree". Obviously, she is waiting for the young man to appear. Sure enough, the young man came out of his door, approached her and whispered to her, "Oh, are you here, too?" Then they looked at each other in silence. "Stand for a while and leave." From the young man's point of view, he also specially came to see the girl and said hello. As you can imagine, it is precisely because of the long silence of two young hearts that this seemingly accidental but inevitable encounter occurred. Therefore, this night's meeting can be regarded as a tacit "date" between girls and young people; It's a moment of life when two young hearts collide and spark love. The first love of two young people "ended like this". However, in Zhang Ailing's works, the value of this simple and ordinary story will never end. Taking the tragic life of the heroine as a contrast and foil, the author emphasizes the significance of this past to her life. This girl, born in the old society, was abducted by her relatives and became a concubine, and resold again and again. She has been humiliated, bullied and enslaved all her life, and has no dignity, personality and status, not to mention her spiritual freedom and happy love life as a woman. Therefore, when she is "old", she will never forget the night of her first love, but it was the only love and being loved in her life. She not only remembers it, but also tells it to others. Although it was a short encounter, it was a beautiful and warm "moment" in her gloomy and desolate life, and it was a "moment" when she had personality, dignity and love rights. Therefore, for her, this past is an unforgettable memory of "love" and "being loved".

After examining all the significance and value of that night to that woman, the author didn't finish her final thought, but the ending was the most exquisite stroke of this work.

Meet the person you want to meet in thousands of years. In the boundless wilderness of time, you just happened to catch up, neither earlier nor later. There is nothing else to say, but gently ask, "Oh, are you there?"

The emotional singing of philosophy is often the poetic saturation point of an essay. The author thinks about the "story" of "love" from two aspects of space and time. As far as space is concerned, you will meet thousands of people who passed by Qian Qian, but the person you want to "meet" is accidental; As far as time is concerned, you will happen to catch up with a love affair that belongs to you, let the two sides meet and know each other on the long road of life, and have a "date" of "Are you there?" Obviously, Zhang Ailing is here for metaphysical meditation on the first love of life. She believes that the first love in life is unique and accidental; It is only short-lived and accidental, and it is often lost; Only by accident will it become a treasure of lifelong memory; Only its brevity will last forever; "Love" will be eternal and beautiful only if it is short and desolate.

Zhang Ailing's philosophical singing makes this essay a lyric poem that integrates philosophy and poetry, and it is also the last finishing touch that makes readers' hearts thump and ponder. Through the author's contrast and contrast, the creation and rendering of depressing atmosphere, especially the final philosophical contact and sublimation, the original ordinary life details about men's and women's night parties have completely reached the realm of condensation and generalization of poetry, and the life details of men's and women's meeting have been rendered into lyrical and freehand theme images of poetry. The author's uncontrollable "touching" and "sublimation" make readers suddenly realize that the original subject image and its connotation are endowed with special and self-lyrical significance and become a "meaningful form"; In other words, she skillfully expressed her "Hu Lancheng complex", turned the "details" of non-ego into metaphors of self, and completed the role replacement from object (telling other people's affairs) to subject (expressing herself). The general idea is actually Zhang Ailing's self-thinking, and that kind of philosophical feeling can and should be regarded as a response to Hu Lancheng's recognition of "love". To put it bluntly, Zhang Ailing is taking advantage of the topic here, saying that others are actually writing about themselves.

Readers can't help asking: Why did Zhang Ailing, 23, have such a profound and mysterious argument? In view of her first love experience with Hu Lancheng, mixed feelings and uncertain future, and the embarrassing situation that she wanted to have a home but fell in love with a man who didn't want to marry her, after painful thinking, she decided to cherish the short and beautiful "encounter" on the road of life. Her later marriage and love life proved that the philosophy she sang for became her own drama. 1944 During the summer and autumn, after she privately agreed to live with Hu Lancheng for life, Hu married Zhou Xunde without telling her every two months. 1Feb. 946, Hu fled to Hangzhou to live with the village woman Fan Xiumei. Since then, the relationship between Zhang and Hu has broken down, and this short-lived relationship between them has also broken down angrily. However, when she was in love with Hu Lancheng, some of Zhang Ailing's articles clarified her special views on sex. She said in her article: "Although cohabitation is not as solemn as the relationship between husband and wife, it is more responsible than high-level flirting and more human than whoring." He also said: "The status of secluded women is always lower than that of men, but most of them have strong vitality ... that is the charm of healthy women." In Talking about Women, she criticized China women's cowardice and lack of gender defects that dominate their own destiny, saying: "Women were conquered and became slaves in a patriarchal society because their physical strength was inferior to that of men. But men's physical strength is not as good as wolves, tigers and leopards. Why didn't they give in to animals in the process of natural selection? It can be seen that it is impossible to blame others. " These expositions show Zhang Ailing's open and radical sexual concept: men and women must be equal, women must be equal to men, and women must strive for their self-esteem and freedom. Even cohabitation is in line with women's self-esteem and human freedom. These viewpoints prove that Zhang Ailing's philosophical singing in The End of Love is not a whim and groundless, but has its realistic ideological basis. The painful experience of first love with Hu Lancheng, supported by her personal special view of sexual love, strengthened her choice and acceptance of Hu Lancheng. She clearly knows that her love with Hu is an adventure and will go to the grave, but she is determined to love, take risks and go to dance school, because she feels that even if she "really loves" once in her life, it is not in vain and rare. Knowing that you will despair and lose, you will take a "risk" with hope. After the fall of the 1940s, Zhang Ailing lived on the "island" of Shanghai. Due to the depression of the times and the loss of love in her family, she enclosed herself in a lonely spiritual "island". She needs to go out of the "island" too much to seek the comfort of love and the real life that dares to love and hate. "People live in an era, but this era is like a shadow, which makes people feel abandoned. In order to prove my existence and master some real and basic things ... "("My Articles ") This passage can be regarded as a true description of Zhang Ailing's thoughts and attitude towards life.

When we find the spiritual code to interpret the essay "Love", it is not difficult to understand why this essay is titled "Love". When we interpret love by psychoanalysis, it is clear that love vividly shows the author's spiritual self when he first meets her. In this respect, love is a prose poem written by Zhang Ailing, which shows her heart. She wants to "prove her existence" to the readers. In that "sinking" era, on the beach immersed in colonial culture, she had no choice but to choose desolate secular life and desolate secular marriage and love.