Eileen Chang's works are both elegant and vulgar, traditional and modernized. Combine specific works to talk about the knowledge and understanding of the distinctive artistic originality of Eileen Cha

Eileen Chang's works are both elegant and vulgar, traditional and modernized. Combine specific works to talk about the knowledge and understanding of the distinctive artistic originality of Eileen Chang's novels. For those of us who have crossed paths with Eileen Chang, we can only recognize her through the essays she left behind. In her essays, she is clear and direct, while her novels are more subtle and convoluted. In the end, to recognize Eileen Chang is to recognize her novels, because for us, only novels are the meaning of Eileen Chang. Therefore, the result of recognizing Eileen Chang is to seize her from the novels, and then return them to the novels. Let's look at Eileen Chang's prose first. What I see in them is a secular Eileen Chang. She had a passionate liking for everyday life, and the details of everyday life in the present. In "Notes on Apartment Life," she says, "I like to listen to the sounds of the city." The city, crowded with people and things, she pays close attention to. The worker who runs the elevator and builds a small air furnace on the back patio to cook something for dinner; the servant who listens to the foot of the wall and translates conversations on people's telephones into Spanish to pass on to the little proprietor; the smell of beef soup simmering in anyone's house. Such hot popularity was her favorite. In another essay, "The Road to the Eye," she writes about street scenes that are also warm and cold: the smell of boiled pumpkin and the bright orange-red color that gives her the feeling of "warming up the old, warming up the poor"; on cold mornings, someone builds a small fireplace on the sidewalk, which is choking, but "I like to walk through the smoke"; a green-coated mailman who carries conversations over the phone in Spanish to the little proprietor; the smell of beef soup simmering in someone's house, which she likes. "I like to walk through that smoke"; a green-coated letter carrier who carries his old mother on his bicycle and touches her; someone who puts a little red light on the wheel of his bicycle - invisible in our time. When she was a child, someone tied colored floss on a wheel, which meant about the same thing---she viewed it attentively, and praised it as "flowing beautifully." In Talking of Paintings, she looks at Cézanne's Madonna Holding the Corpse of Christ, and is amazed that the Madonna is the most ordinary woman, poor, doing a little sewing by the piece, gray hearted, gray hair", and notices that the Madonna is not holding Christ, but, "with her back turned, is busy at something and that the Virgin was not holding Christ, but was "busy with something with her back turned", and that it was "another big, strong, butcher-like man" who was holding Christ. And Christ? did not remind her of any man in the world, "all he had was patterned beauty," and so he missed her interest. It was such details of life as were familiar to her, in her ****temporal, intimate sense of it, that she liked. There is a sturdy livelihood in such details, and some exuberance with lowered expectations. Eileen Chang's interest in worldly life was different from Su Qing's. Hulan Cheng was right in his assessment of Su Qing, a Ningbo man, when he said that most Ningbo people live their lives with a sense of excitement, but lack of reminiscence, a genuine interest in the world. Zhang Eileen, however, was not. Her love of the present was motivated by her fear of life, and her view of the world was one of emptiness. In "Notes on Apartment Life," she describes a series of daily scenes with great interest, and suddenly summarizes, "Long is the ordeal, short is life." So, this short life, it is better to put it in the short-sighted pleasure, pinch the end, because the beginning and the end of the two paragraphs are connected with the "long trials and tribulations". Only looking at a little enjoyment under the nose, do people have confidence. From this point of view, Eileen Chang is rich in sensuality and hedonism, which saves her while she appreciates the emptiness of life. In The Road to Eyes, she writes that she went to the street to buy groceries and encountered a blockade and had to stay on the street beyond the blockade. One of the maids tried to break through the line, calling out, "It's late! Let me go back to cooking!" Then, "the crowd all laughed." This is in line with Eileen Chang's outlook on life, where the clock is ticking to get home to cook dinner despite the catastrophe. In the case of the unconscious maid, it was a positive thing, but in the case of Eileen Chang, it was a negative thing. She is more aware than the maid of the meaning of "blockade" and the disasters of the times. But she is not a realist, who can face the reality on the facts. She does not look into the specific causes of the facts, but only generalizes that life is a misfortune, that it goes downhill without reason, and that the individual can do nothing about it. As she writes at the end of "A Book of Changes," a small child, in a small food court, full of garbage after the closing of the stalls, rode his bicycle, spread the handlebars, and swept past very nimbly. So she wrote, "The loveliest moment in life is when you let go of the handlebars, isn't it?" It was in this light swipe that she had a little adventure, but in the end, it was safe, so she was a little pleased with herself. This is such a little bit of skillful maneuvering. Zhang Ailing like to like, in fact, do not believe in their significance, otherwise, she is Ningbo Su Qing. Otherwise, she would not be so greedy to seize the touchable and sensible in life. She has to find the touchable warmth and coolness of the earth even in the Everlasting Palace where the corpses and bones of thousands of years are far away. In I See Su Qing, writing about Yang Guifei's falling out with Emperor Tang Minghuang and expelling her to her mother's house is "simply a story in the 'Honbu News'". She doesn't like the violin because it's too abstract, while the sound of the huqin is much more realistic, "far away, still back on earth." This is in the prose, by herself directly confessed out of Zhang Eileen, in the novel, Zhang Eileen is hidden behind the curtain. About only once, did not hide well, revealed the real body. It is in "Love in a Fallen City", Bai Liusu has just arrived in Hong Kong, and Fan Liuyuan's relationship is in a stalemate, and the dark bottom of the force. They share two guest rooms in the Repulse Bay Hotel, at night Fan Liu Yuan will call into the room of Bai Liusu, to her read the "Poetry": "death and life, with the son of a happy, hold hands, and the son of old age", underneath there is also a large piece of explanation. But it was like Eileen Chang was talking, not Fan Liu Yuan. In Eileen Chang's novels, there are few characters who are so self-conscious of the vastness of life and have poetic feelings, Eileen Chang never put herself into the novel, playing a role. She never put herself into the novel to play a role, because even she herself is nothingness, not suitable for the material and object of secular novels. Those who play roles in her novels are mostly people in the world - citizens. The most mundane character is feared to be Shanghai. There are some in Hong Kong, but they are more exaggerated, more like the stage of the secular world, a dramatized secular world. The First Fragrance of Incense Crumbs" and "The Second Fragrance of Incense Crumbs" are two stories that are a bit more bizarre. The stories that take place in Shanghai have a more mundane flavor. The daughters of the family in "Flowers Fade" are, I think, the most authentic Shanghai ladies. The father was a frivolous and irresponsible man, about like the third young master in The Golden Lock, but the wife was not as virtuous as the third young lady's wife, incompetent and tasteless. I thought that the white rose in "Red Rose and White Rose", Smokey Oriole, was her when she was old. The daughters knew that they could rely on no one but themselves, to draw nourishment from society and earn a good living. Eileen Chang wrote: "Misses can not afford to wear silk new-style shirts, cloth lab coats and too cumbersome, simply wear a hollow cotton robe gowns, after a few months, take it off and stuffed in a box, the next year, mold, and make a new one." Moden inside the crude, spirited core, withstand the toss. Sisters are many, but also become a small society, turning on each other, some of the weak and the strong. Like Chuan Sheung so honest, soft, with a few feelings, fate is not good. She was born with consumption, which also has some mournful sentiment, but this sentiment is delayed by the disease, little by little eroded away. The fiancé who studied medicine naturally knew the end, but counted on patience, two years before another person. Then, the family even counted the money to buy medicine, and eating two apples a day became the family's talking point. Finally, she wanted to have a sentimental end, suicide, but could not buy sleeping pills. She had to take a ride on a yellow bus, eat a western-style meal and watch a movie. That's about all the fun a Shanghai lady has in her spare time, and she's going to enjoy it one last time. It was quite a sentimental scene, but the sentiment was corroded again by the procrastination of the sick period. Chuan Sheung also made two more pairs of embroidered shoes and one pair of leather shoes, and after trying the shoes on one foot, she said in the long run, "This kind of leather looks very firm, and can always be worn for two or three years." Three weeks later, she squarely thanked the world. This is a person in the world, death is forced in front of the eyes, the world has already given up on her, but she is still foolish to pay attention to some small things, not self-consciously struggle. Eileen Chang's novels, people, really very vulgar, Fu Lei has criticized its "vulgarity", not to say too much. Just like what I said, she actually does not believe that these mundane things have much redemptive significance, so she brought a mean sneer. And she involuntarily wants to hide in the touchable mundane things, so her eyesight can only be so narrow and forced. Isn't it boring to see Mr. Mee, Phoenix, and Mrs. Yang at the mahjong table in "Love"? The group of ladies in The Glazed Tile is also boring. In Hong Luan Jubilee, if it weren't for Yu Qing's eagerness and reluctance to say goodbye to the court, the whole story would be boring. Here, on the other hand, it is Eileen Chang's emptiness that saves the world from mediocrity and gives these boring lives a bleak background. These selfish and blind stupidities take on a serious nature approaching tragedy. For example, Cao Qixiao in The Book of Golden Locks is always striving for her ugly and tough goals, her means are lowly, her heart is extremely dark, and the little goal she strives for is also trivial. When her struggle becomes more and more hopeless, she takes revenge on the world. However, her world is small, only her relatives. And so, it is her loved ones who are the ones on whom she exacts her vengeance. As she kills her own hope, she kills the hope of those around her. Life sinks into darkness in this way, and this darkness is so deep that the coarse Cao Qixiao is also flooded with some sentimental feelings, thinking of the fruitlessness and unworthiness of her struggle: if she had chosen a coarse man of the same class as her, "after a long time, and after giving birth to a child, the man would be more or less sincere to her." However, in Eileen Chang's writing, this is also thirty years ago, even Cao Qixiao's remorse has died. What is left in the end of such a positive life as Cao Qixiao's? The dead have passed away, and nothingness covers all desires. And Zhang Eileen's love of secular life, for this pale view of life as a specific, realistic, vivid footnotes, this lament will have a cause and effect, a beginning and an end, a story, a human form. So, here, Zhang Eileen's nothingness and pragmatic, mutual care, fit, aid, creating her best novel. Love in a Fallen City is also one of her best novels. Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan, a present-day man and woman, are thrown together by fate like a roll of the dice and made into a couple. This is one of the few happy endings in Eileen Chang's stories. As the text says, "There are legends everywhere, but they don't see such happy endings." But that is also unfathomable, coincidentally, the world is still, even more incomprehensible. The world is still, even more incomprehensible. Here, Zhang Eileen also made a reasonable footnote for this pale. Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan in their own desire to drive, roundabout, probing, want to escape, but did not expect the world changed, the survival of the plan for the top, suddenly cherished a little bit of comfort in front of the eyes, it gives a blind sense of security. Here, Zhang Eileen is the closest to her characters, the story is still one of the most comprehensive of her outlook on life, which contains a slightly compromising gesture towards the emptiness of life, which is in line with Zhang Eileen's thinking. Because of too close, revealing the real body, the characters slightly run away, as said before, in the moonlit night, Fan Liuyuan's sigh of relief. Thanks to Bai Liusu saying, "I don't understand this," it brought things back into the scene. Just like that, Zhang Eileen's worldliness is made artistic by the illumination of that nothingness. When she writes about Su Qing and wants to talk to her about "the feeling of being born", she imagines that Su Qing's look is: "I don't know what you are talking about! It's probably art, isn't it?" Su Qing is not "artistic"; there is no background behind her worldliness. Here, we can see that Eileen Chang's outlook on life is walking on two extremes, one end is the concrete and tangible in the present moment, and the other end is the nothingness of life. In between, there is actually a long process of idealization and striving for reality. Eileen Chang is like a child riding a bicycle on the dirty ground of a vegetable market, "relaxing the handrail, swaying, and skimming lightly." This "skimming" is naturally easy. When she looks into the emptiness of life, she retracts into the mundane world, and finally lets go of the broader and deeper implications of life. Jumping from a detailed depiction of the mundane world directly into a pale conclusion is easier in the end. Thus, it is easy to fall back into vulgarity and boredom. Therefore, I respect the realism of Lu Xun more, because he is from the reality of the steps, solidly, so he has a foothold towards the nothingness, but also have the courage. Like the "passer-by", he keeps walking forward, not knowing where he is going or what lies ahead. The child said it was flowers, the old man said it was a grave, but he still want to go forward to see a clear, with the child to wrap his wound pieces of cloth, the goodwill of the world, towards the unknown front.