Female consciousness in Wang Anyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow.

On the restoration of China's traditional narrative from Song of Eternal Sorrow: one is gloomy, the other is bright, one is sad and sentimental, and the other is warm and optimistic; One is a long and slow song, and the other is a short and urgent song ... When we compare Wang Anyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow and Song of Youth, we find the dramatic ancient and stubborn logic of "history" itself, which contains both history and aesthetics. In a sense, the end of youth narrative is the result of great changes in contemporary history itself. Time has changed the fresh color of the revolutionary era, and turned the photos of youth into dim old photos. In fact, the dominant hand in this aesthetic evolution is nothing more than time itself. The length of time not only constitutes history, but also constitutes aesthetics. The unique significance of "long" narrative works is irreplaceable by other styles, and it is also reflected in its pursuit of time-a certain "historical length". When we compare Wang Anyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow with another older song-Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow (even the story of Wang Jiaoluan's centenary song told by an ordinary citizen in Modern Wonders, and the Song of Eternal Sorrow put forward by another citizen), we will find that there are more similarities between them, which is more in line with China people. Wang Anyi yearns for extremely beautiful meaning and essence, and should stretch out another life drama without repetition in the harmony of sad melody and beat, carefully restore and restore an ancient historical narrative mode, and linger in such an ancient and ancient aesthetic experience. Why is there such a cycle? This is very worth studying. Moreover, this contrast still confuses me: Song of Youth is quite "modern" and Song of Eternal Sorrow is quite "traditional", but who is more valuable? Who is closer to "modernity" in essence?

A. The old life of new women: the return to traditional aesthetics "restoration" begins with the choice of life style and survival value of characters. The protagonist in The Song of Eternal Sorrow shows a completely different life choice from that of Lin Daojing-they have chosen two completely opposite roads, new and old, from almost the same starting point. In short, the story of Song of Eternal Sorrow can be summarized as "the old life of a new woman". She completely deviated from a huge "trend" constructed by our previous historical narrative and escaped the storm of modern mainstream social history in China. Corresponding to Lin Daojing's "Revolutionary Zhuang Drama", Wang Qiyao repeated a "secular tragedy", and she repeated a story of "unlucky beauty", an ancient fable about the fate of women. This fate is not only caused by the unpredictable changes in China's modern society, but also the result of Wang Qiyao's "happy life" destroyed by the "revolution" and her personal choice. She stubbornly chose this life according to the value position of an ordinary citizen. This is very interesting. First of all, of course, two writers who lived in completely different times "chose" different lives for the protagonist. According to the political ethics of the revolutionary era, Yang Mo chose a bright way to get involved in the mainstream for her characters. Wang Anyi, on the other hand, is at the end of a century, in an era of material development and spiritual decline, in an era of independent and calm observation of history, and in an era of some kind of reset and integration of history itself, which makes her protagonist choose a road with ancient inertia. Human nature is downward, and Wang Qiyao naturally chose a lazy and comfortable life. First, like all vanity and hedonism city girl, she is eager for fame, love and attention. Even between Mr. Cheng, who really loves her but has a low status, and Director Li, who only intends to leave her in the "outer room" but has a prominent position, she naturally threw herself into the arms of the latter without any scruples. This is "Shanghainese's choice" and the most common and prominent civil society. This is completely consistent with Lin Daojing's refusal to live a rich and imprisoned life. Lin Daojing followed the revolutionary will of "seeking change", while Wang Qiyao chose the ancient logic of "seeking stability".

There is an interesting circumstantial evidence, that is, Su Tong's novel "Wives and Concubines in Groups". Song Lian, the core figure, has almost the same background and life experience as Lin Daojing. Moreover, compared with Lin Daojing, she has a higher education level. She has been in college for a year, and Lin Daojing just graduated from middle school. Supposedly, Song Lian should be a real "woman of the times", but when her father went bankrupt and died, her stepmother pointed out that she could choose between going to school to work and marrying a rich man to "be young", she chose to get married without hesitation-why would such a similar background have such a different choice? This is due to the fact that writers, novelists Su Tong and Yang Mo are in completely different historical logics and situations, and have adopted completely different observation perspectives. Why is there such a different perspective? This is the result of contemporary historical and social changes, and writers have regained the freedom to identify with folk values and ancient logic. Time restores the inherent logic of history, and writers will certainly show such logic in the form of aesthetics.

Completely different from the opportunities and happiness brought by the "revolution" to Lin Daojing, the social changes in modern China only changed Wang Qiyao's established life trajectory and brought her the bad luck of being reduced to the bottom. Of course, if there is no major political change, Wang Qiyao may end up with a tragic ending of "a young woman with bad life", but such a tragedy is an ancient and eternal tragedy, which may repeat the oldest natural law in China culture. Now, her Mr. Li died in a plane crash because of political upheaval. She also hastily ended her girlhood and outdoor career in Alice Apartment and became an embarrassing refugee in the revolutionary era. When Shanghai ended its last prosperity, Wang Qiyao was destined to be a beauty born in the wrong time. Just like a passer-by who goes to the wrong room or takes the wrong bus, her life is doomed to be spent in the embarrassment of "missing". In the countryside, she met the scholar "Al" and experienced a brief love more like love. However, Wang Qiyao is no longer the "Miss Shanghai" Wang Qiyao of her girlhood. She has been through so much that Al, who is inexperienced, is doomed to be unable to really understand her. They are like passers-by under the eaves of the storm, saying goodbye in a hurry. After that, this once amazing beauty of an era was destined to "live in seclusion" underground. However, this is Shanghai, like the sea among the people. It can still accommodate her. With the meager income of giving people injections, she can live incognito and run her own small underground salon. In this era, she experienced the reunion with Mr. Cheng and the absurd "love" with Kang Mingxun and Sasha, and gave birth to a daughter without a nominal father. Although it was destined to be an embarrassing drama of life, it survived in a low-key "flat", during which there were not many thrilling stories except the chop suey of life, while Mr. Cheng and he left this life in different forms and similar tragedies. This shows that even in the revolutionary era, there is still a potential soft civil society in Shanghai, which constitutes the foundation of the city and the existence of a more lasting folk life. In a sense, it is a contest between "revolutionary political Shanghai" and "ordinary citizens' Shanghai", which constitutes the hand that manipulates Wang Qiyao's fate in the dark and the background of her life. Wang Qiyao's life can be said to be a conflict between individual and history, which doomed her tragedy as a weak woman. But at the same time, it can also be regarded as a lasting contest between civil society and political society. At this level, civil society and its ideology sheltered her and became the ultimate winner in another sense with her. This is the profound historical significance of Song of Eternal Sorrow and the distant pen of Parting Sorrow are in the same place.

To sum up Wang Qiyao's life, we can sum it up in three words, namely, the prosperity of the last days, the underground adherents and the sunset glow. This is not only the basic structure of the novel trilogy, but also the basis of its "sentimental aesthetics". The history and time of modern China are "rolling forward", but Wang Qiyao tries to stop. Her habitual attachment to the old life caused her a tragic conflict disproportionate to the history of modern China. Living in the "past" time makes her life full of long-term hatred of "wrong, wrong, wrong". This is the tragedy that distinguishes her from Lin Daojing's life drama. This is not only a conflict between two personalities, but also a conflict between two cultures and values. "Beauty is unlucky" is an ancient life experience and aesthetics handed down from generation to generation by China. Wang Qiyao repeated this experience and never tried to resist it. Although the content of life has made some progress, the concept and logic of life have not changed. From "Shanghai Bookstore" to "Miss Shanghai", to "Alice Apartment" and then to the death of director Li in an air crash, he experienced great changes in his life at a young age. In fact, it's a bit like the story in Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow: Wang Qiyao's life before she won the title of "Miss Shanghai" was like a girlhood-"Until a child of Yang's family hardly grew up, and no one knew her in an inner room", she turned to a powerful person. Director Li's sudden accident, flying alone, is like saying goodbye to Tang-"The emperor can't save her, but he can only cover his face, and when he turns to look, it is a land of blood and tears", but the original relationship between characters has been reversed; After being forced to live underground to recall the warmth in vain, it was like the yearning of Emperor Tang Ming of Yang Yuhuan for heaven and earth-"He stared at the desolate moon from his temporary palace, and the bell rang in the rain at night, heartbroken". However, this is, after all, the living standard of ordinary citizens, and it is not the same as the luxurious life of imperial families in classical times. Wang Qiyao's experience can make people feel a little pity, but it is not as noble and gorgeous as Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow, which makes people feel sad. One is just an absurd tragedy of ordinary citizens, and the other is a truly classic legend of sadness and romance. The long-term hatred of ordinary citizens can be regarded as a kind of beautiful long-term hatred. Compared with the two, it is inevitable that people have a feeling of "Lao Wang died before he died."

B Comparison between the two groups of characters: "Youth" is followed by "Song of Eternal Sorrow"

The significance of "contrast" between Wang Qiyao and Lin Daojing lies not only in their different choices of life path, but also in their different "life lengths", which is very important. In Song of Youth, Lin Daojing's story ends with the maturity of her youth and the arrival of the "revolutionary climax". At the end, the reader is presented with a bright dawn, and no one will doubt her future life and path, because the rhetorical effect of this ending cancels the questioning about "post-youth", and time and victory will continue, but the age of the characters will continue. This is a common rhetorical method in revolutionary narration, and all endings are revolutionary victories, or at least staged victories. Revolutionaries gave speeches from high places, and the people beat gongs and drums to celebrate their victory.

"Youth freeze-frame" also exists in traditional narration, especially in "happy" comedies. However, in most long narratives, there is not only one time element, but two contrasts-Bai Juyi's long stories.

Hate song is such a situation. Yang Yuhuan was given the gift of death in front of Mawei Slope, which is a kind of death. Her youth and beauty were fixed in this tragedy, which left Tang with "looking for blue sky above and yellow earth below, but they could not be found in either place", and also left people with eternal beauty and regret. One time stopped, and the other walked alone, between heaven and earth, between life and death. Only the living have experienced the desolation of being abandoned for the rest of their lives, the pain that life is worse than death, and "the clock and drum will slowly ring the long night, and the river of stars will become sharp in the sky just before dawn" and "the earth will endure, and heaven will endure; One day, both will end, and this endless sorrow will continue forever "-this is the origin of" long hatred "in Song of Eternal Sorrow. The same is true of A Dream of Red Mansions. Imagine if Lin Daiyu really married Jia Baoyu instead of dying in the cardamom years. Many years later, when she is old in Huang Zhi, her increasingly serious tuberculosis and incurable spitting and hemoptysis will sweep away the sadness and "beauty" of her girlhood. If this is the case, a sad song that hurts people will no longer exist.

Classical aesthetics is also related to "youth narration". However, the revolutionary youth aesthetics ignores the separation of the living and the dead. It wants to integrate the death of the forerunner with the life of the later, so that the dead can gain eternal life in the living, so that what it realizes becomes an "immortal" grandeur. However, time will continue, youth will grow old, winners will face failure again, narrative will end, but life will continue. If Yang Mo writes a sequel to Song of Youth, I really don't know what it will be like-Lin Daojing will end his youth, become the head of a department after the victory of the revolution, and then become the object of "anti-rightist", "four clean-ups" and "Cultural Revolution". What will be staged next is undoubtedly a deja vu tragedy ... Obviously, Lin Daojing's background and experience. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, we saw countless such narratives about "scar stories", which also adopted the "broken" narrative of the revolution, that is, the past misfortunes have ended, the beautiful life has "started over", and then the story ends at a happy moment when justice is restored and the people win. The so-called "past" and "future" are constantly broken and repeated in our time course and historical concept. However, if we change the rhetoric of time and connect the two narratives, Song of Youth and Song of Mourning for the Past, the narrative effect will be very different, and the false justice, victory and magnificence brought by separation will be replaced by the absurdity of the complete narrative itself.

The historical rhetoric used in Song of Eternal Sorrow reflects the revival of China's ancient traditional consciousness. It completely shows a person's life, but also shows a complete history, and the scale of this history is Wang Qiyao, which has gone through several times. Wang Anyi wrote about her girlhood full of romantic longing in order to highlight her short and unfortunate marriage life, set off her life in the wrong time and room, set off her boredom and loneliness in her long seclusion, and the absurd "sunset glow" in her later years. Wang Anyi wrote a complete book about a woman's life. She repeated countless old stories. The so-called beauty itself is a mistake, and the beauty of fantasy is an inevitable tragedy. Wang Qiyao's Song of Eternal Sorrow is similar to Yang Yuhuan's Song of Eternal Sorrow, but both of them are full of absurdity and meanness. People will think, what is this? This is the decline of the world and the decline of beauty. Wang Qiyao recorded and wrote the modern history of China and witnessed the side of Shanghai as a citizen city. Her life has completed the writer's understanding of a period of history, and also completed an aesthetics, an aesthetics that really contains traditional charm.

There is another set of contrast: this is the contrast between Jiang Lili and Wang Qiyao, another character in Song of Eternal Sorrow. Jiang Lili can be said to be Lin Daojing in Song of Eternal Sorrow, but she continues the fate of Lin Daojing. It can be said that her story "continues" the "omitted" part of Song of Youth. When she was a girl, she experienced exactly the same life as Wang Qiyao. They were thinking about the romantic future and spent the time of "sisterhood" in the boudoir. She even helped Wang Qiyao win the third place of "Miss Shanghai". But this girl, like the "ugly duckling", may be full of admiration for Wang Qiyao's beauty, but she also hides a secret jealousy. She may have been "comparing" with Wang Qiyao: her family background is better than that of Wang Qiyao, and she has a salon for the upper class to come in and out, so she brought Wang Qiyao to her social occasions, so she has a condescending sense of superiority; Moreover, she actually felt some satisfaction in the process of helping Wang Qiyao run for Miss Shanghai, and reached some "balance" with Wang Qiyao's beautiful advantage; However, when Wang Qiyao really became the "Miss San" and was firmly in an advantageous position in the "love triangle" with her and Mr. Cheng (who loved Mr. Cheng), her indescribable jealousy forced her to "revolution"-find another way to compete. Her "left turn" may be due to such a profound psychological reason. It can be said that the "comparison" with Wang Qiyao is a "complex" in her life, which originated from human nature at first, but eventually led to politics.

In this way, when Shanghai, a small "capitalist" city, faced the biggest change in modern China, Jiang Lili embarked on the revolutionary road. Like Lin Daojing and many "petty bourgeoisie" figures, they took part in the revolution because of their personal lives. In Lightning Speed, Jiang Lili became a member of the revolutionary ranks and a "winner" in another sense. In the following life, Jiang Lili gained an indisputable advantage, while Wang Qiyao became an "underground believer". At this time, the "protagonist" of the "youth narrative" was finally replaced by the revolution. If the novel ends here, it is quite similar to the story of Yang Mo's Song of Youth. But narrative can be terminated, but time is not broken. When Jiang Lili continues to live and become a short-lived revolutionary winner, life goes on, and the end is always a new beginning. Not only will tragedy come again, but death will also appear as scheduled in the river of time. Jiang Lili married a revolutionary she didn't like-a cadre in southern Shandong with smelly feet. The freshness and joy of the winner did not last long, and the old and inherent logic of daily life began again. What's more, it seems that "revolutionary Shanghai" will never defeat "Shanghai for ordinary citizens". Revolutionary politics is on the roof of Shanghai, but the daily life of ordinary citizens goes deep into every alley and corner. For Jiang Lili, she agreed that the revolution was only a temporary helpless choice, and that "the original Shanghai" was determined in her bones. The "Shanghai heart" in her bones didn't make her agree with the life of a revolutionary husband from Shandong, and she never got her own happiness. This is not only because compared with the beautiful Wang Qiyao, she is a "Cinderella", not only because the brilliant myth of the revolution will eventually return to the gray daily life, but also because she has never defeated the "old Shanghai" in her heart-although she will claim to be the spokesman for the victory of the new society and the "new Shanghai", she has never found the feeling of being a winner in front of Wang Qiyao, and she will always feel inferior, even in the most difficult period of Wang Qiyao. She spent a gloomy middle age in a depressed life and eventually died of liver cancer. In this way, a Song of Youth became a Song of Death and a Song of Eternal Sorrow. In a sense, Jiang Lili finished the sequel of Lin Daojing, and ended the myth of Song of Youth as time went on.

When discussing the time in the novel, Bakhtin once analyzed an ancient Greek novel, which wrote the story that men and women fell in love at first sight, then experienced twists and turns and finally got married. According to the time of the story, it is obviously quite long. However, "the protagonists at the beginning of the novel all meet at the age suitable for marriage; They are also old enough to get married, so young and beautiful that they get married at the end of the novel. The time when they went through countless adventures is not counted in the novel. Why is there no calculation? Obviously, it is necessary to maintain its "youth narrative" characteristics. This is internally consistent with the "childhood tendency" and youthful atmosphere of ancient Greek culture as a whole. From the historical changes of China's contemporary literature narrative, the Song of Eternal Sorrow and other works can also be regarded as a sign: it marks the end of the narrative mode of "youth-history" and its "evolutionary aesthetics", and the revival of China's traditional narrative mode of "life/death-history" and its "circulation theory" and "sentimental aesthetics". The narrative dominated by "the view of life ontology history" is bound to show its own "closeness", circularity, integrity and tragedy, showing its "long-lasting hatred" essence and the power of tragic aesthetics. The "death" of individual life and the historical cycle based on individual life are the core of China's history and historical aesthetics. In its view, the whole history integrates the historical part, the historical tragedy eliminates the historical comedy, and the longer complete narrative with life as the unit replaces the broken narrative with youth as the unit. This, of course, has a subtle relationship with the context of contemporary culture in China. A century has passed, and an era of "youth" has disappeared. As a result, they collectively ended the original fanaticism and inevitable superficial "youth narrative" and "youth aesthetics" In this regard, Song of Eternal Sorrow is particularly worthy of recognition, because it is not an ordinary novel, but an aesthetic-a work that can constitute an aesthetic example.

C. Adhere to folk narrative

From Song of Youth to Song of Eternal Sorrow, it is not only a distant historical road, but also a step away. It is the inevitable result of the mainstream ideology gradually fading out from literature, and it is also the inevitable will of the automatic recovery of historical and folk ideology. The reason why Song of Youth transforms a petty bourgeoisie's personal narrative into the mainstream narrative of revolution is that contemporary intellectuals are forced to seek political legitimacy while "repenting" their own "historical problems". But for the author of Song of Eternal Sorrow, such problems obviously no longer exist. She easily avoided three things: first, let Wang Qiyao choose a pure folk life, which is the inherent need of the characters' own survival; second, the "shelter" function of Shanghai's unique civil society makes her live in the lowest and most primitive civil society-"the core of history"; The second is to let the characters choose the spiritual way to escape from the mainstream social life, so that the huge political life can not leave traces in the minds of the characters. The primitive and deep-rooted folk lifestyle and values enable Wang Qiyao to easily reject and digest the influence of political history on her, which is the biggest difference between her and Lin Daojing. The subtle difference between her miserable and despicable "outer room" life and the life and value chosen by the ancient "God-given grace without disguise, and one day she will be elected to the royal family" is that beauty is only a change from a noble royal family to a humble ordinary citizen. The alleyways in Shanghai have created her "Shanghai Heart", which is the "core" of Song of Eternal Sorrow. It is this heart that enables her to "live at the core of the world." The third avoidance is the most important for the novel-it belongs to the writer Wang Anyi herself. She chose a very personal narrative angle, deliberately explained and avoided the grand historical narrative mode, and restored the characters and events to the end and details of daily life: attending dances, visiting houses, having afternoon tea and talking around the stove at night. Talking about the style of cheongsam, the pattern of dim sum, the smell of coffee, drying the suitcase in the dog days, and grinding glutinous rice ... all these show the characteristics of Song of Eternal Sorrow as a "new historicism" novel, that is, re-establishing an "anti-power narrative mode" in addition to the mainstream historical narrative. This is a modern history of ordinary people in Shanghai and a historical memory of people and individuals. The "new historicism" historical poetics or historical aesthetics expressed by it is both the oldest, the most traditional and the latest. Modern history is reproduced here through her "compilation method" of folk, marginalization, whispering and trivialization.

Associated with this is a kind of "coincidence" (perhaps coincidence), and this private narrative naturally coincides with the vision of "feminism". That is to say, here, the narrative of citizenization and the narrative of feminization have a wonderful coincidence, which makes Song of Eternal Sorrow almost the only-at least not many-feminist new historicism in contemporary China. They * * * keep a distance from the magnificent mainstream history and political situation in the male world. Wang Anyi "betrayed" the compound narrative rule of "enlightenment-revolution" in modern times, but reconstructed the female narrative from another side and constructed another modern female history of China. It can also be said that in Song of Eternal Sorrow, the anti-mainstream folk historical narrative and female narrative are exactly isomorphic. This is just the opposite of Song of Youth, because the inevitable coincidence of "revolutionary narrative" and "male-dominated narrative" just leads her to fall into the male-dominated trap while trying to retain the female narrative and transform it into a revolutionary narrative.

D. From "running away" to "going home", a cycle

Obviously, from Song of Youth to Song of Eternal Sorrow, the pursuit of narrative form by two generations of female writers has just gone through a cycle, a process of "running away" from tradition, "going home" and returning to tradition-of course, this "tradition" refers to the tradition in the sense of narrative prototype. Wang Anyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow is not only closer to Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow, but also closer to the narrative style of Dream of Red Mansions, San Yan Er Pai and China's traditional novels. Of course, this is also the reason why it looks more "revolutionary" than Song of Youth. On the contrary, although Yang Mo is trying to rebel against tradition, compared with Wang Anyi, her "modernity" is even thinner. Obviously, it is not the "revolution" in this novel that supports its charm, but "sex" and some very old things, such as "gifted scholars and beautiful women" and "heroic beauty". Is this an interesting contradiction?

From Song of Youth in 1950s to Song of Eternal Sorrow in 1990s, from Lin Daojing, the mainstream spiritual idol of a generation of young people, to Wang Qiyao, the spokesman of urbanites, we found another change in the narrative nature of contemporary literature: the mainstream power discourse and grand historical narrative, which contained and implied intellectual discourse and narrative, gradually gave way to folk discourse and folk narrative under the observation and transformation of intellectuals. This change is not a case, but an overall trend, which must be emphasized.

The two novels also constitute an interesting contrast in the choice tendency of discourse patterns. The discourse features of Song of Youth can be divided into two parts. The first part is narrated by the petty bourgeoisie. After Lu Jiachuan appeared, he gradually transformed into political discourse. After Jiang Hua appeared, it completely turned into a boring political narrative. Even Jiang Hua's courtship of Lin Daojing is expressed by the ridiculous words "Can we go further than the homosexual relationship?" It uses political discourse to wrap and tell the stories and scenes of "private life", covering the original enlightenment narrative mode of intellectuals' willingness and reluctance, with the aim of trying to retain the potential advantages of intellectuals' narrative and establish the realistic legitimacy of their "revolutionary narrative", which is of course quite "difficult". We can easily see that Yang Mo is in a dilemma. She is cautious and sincere. From this work, we can also see how the new literary tradition since the May 4th Movement and the enlightenment knowledge discourse on which it was written are consciously or unconsciously "squeezed" into the political discourse step by step, which is an unspeakable tragedy in the Song of Youth Heroes.

In contrast, Song of Eternal Sorrow, although it "restores" China's traditional historical and aesthetic concepts, just strengthens and implies the "intellectual discourse" in the narrative process of the novel, making it mutually beneficial and complementary in the "cooperation" with folk discourse. The scenes of citizens' life and the rambling dialect narration did not obscure the intellectuals' feelings contained in Song of Eternal Sorrow as a "new historicism" novel. She practiced the idea of reviving the edge of history, restoring folk history and "returning history to the people". Respecting rather than distorting, modifying and whitewashing history is the humanistic connotation contained in the new historicism narrative of contemporary novels-"the core of history" will not be easily modified after all, and Shanghai has returned to its original appearance. Of course, this natural representation is not heaven, but it is rich and true, which is the representation of the root of life and history. What are "Shanghai culture" and "Shanghai writing"? Wang Qiyao's life, her life, has explained this problem. She explained the cultural conflicts and changes in Shanghai, a modern city in China, and metaphorically showed the rich historical, cultural and life implications of ordinary Shanghai, colonial Shanghai, revolutionary Shanghai and Shanghai in the era of returning to the market and materialism. This is Wang Anyi's contribution. Another commendable thing about Song of Eternal Sorrow is that it achieves a creative "spirit" between the rhetoric of time in China's traditional novels and the handling of China's contemporary history, and it has the height that a contemporary excellent writer should have, that is, the "modern transformation" of traditional historical aesthetics. This is manifested in the fact that Wang Qiyao not only continued her girlhood, but also continued her "interrupted tragedy" when history resumed its ancient and unchanging logic and Shanghai ended its revolutionary era and became a model consumption city again. It was in this era that she died. Shanghai's materialism, market and consumption did not make Wang Qiyao live a comfortable and happy old age. Instead, she really staged an absurd tragedy that she should have staged. Wang Anyi is not a simple writer. She let Wang Qiyao die in the disaster brought by gold bars and in the farce of boring ordinary citizens, which not only implied the proposition of humanistic criticism of intellectuals, but also achieved an ancient aesthetic charm in the "modern" context: this is an eternal tragedy, just. Obviously, what we need is not a simple repair, but a creative extension.

There are many comparable angles between Song of Youth and Song of Eternal Sorrow, especially in the narrative aesthetics of novels, which is related to many important and key issues in Chinese and foreign novel traditions. My analysis above only tries to arouse a kind of thinking in the sense of "God", leaving too many theoretical omissions. As two different types of model essays in two eras, their respective significance in comparison transcends themselves. I look forward to different views and deeper academic exposition on this issue.