Analysis of Citizen Image in Lao She

The Image of Citizens in Lao She

Lao She is a writer who has made important contributions to China's contemporary literature. He has become a well-known "People's Artist" with his unique creative themes and artistic style, and the most important thing is that he is good at depicting the daily life of ordinary citizens through simple descriptions, and with the help of ordinary and trivial details of life, he expresses the great power and richness of the inner life itself. The characters portrayed in Lao She's writing are those that we can see in our daily life at any time and any place, and they interpret tragedy or comedy in the midst of plainness, giving people enlightenment and artistic enjoyment.

Lao She, a Manchu, was born in 1899 in Beijing to a poor citizen. His father was a guard in the Manchu imperial city, and the family of seven lived in poverty on his father's meager income. 1900, when the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded Beijing, his father was killed in action, and from then on the family's heavy burden of life fell on his mother's shoulders, who was barely able to make ends meet by sewing and washing clothes for people and working as a servant in an elementary school, when Lao She was less than two years old. It can be said that it was this encounter that influenced his life's creative path.

Laoshe lived in the lower class of working people, the suffering of the lower class of laborers, he empathized; their aspirations, he experienced the deepest. He was not only familiar with their faces and smiles, but also understood their life "mentality". As a member of the suffering masses, he endured the physical and mental torture of this miserable life, and this inhuman and unfair reality aroused his sympathy for those who were humiliated and damaged and his revolt against the upper class. He could only take up the pen in his hand to express the injustice in his heart and speak the voice of the toiling masses.

After graduating from the Beijing Normal School at the age of nineteen, he lived for a long time in the circle of intellectuals, from the principal of an elementary school to the headmaster of a secondary school, to a university professor and a famous writer. But the spiritual and emotional connection he established with the lower class workers was not interrupted by his growing status. On the contrary, because of the improvement of his ideological understanding and the growth of his experience, he saw the lower class society more clearly and understood it more y, and his strokes penetrated deeper into the lower class society to voice the injustice on behalf of those who had been humiliated.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 became a major turning point in the development of Lao She's thinking. Suffering from the persecution of imperialism and the oppression of feudal forces, once exposed to the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal calls, buried in his heart of the seeds of resistance will immediately sprout, growth. He said, "Anti-feudalism makes me realize the dignity of man, who should not be a slave of rituals and teachings; anti-imperialism makes me feel the dignity of Chinese people, who should not be a foreign slave any more." ①These two realizations became the basis of Lao She's long-term basic thoughts and feelings, as well as the basic guiding ideology and starting point of his creative work.

In 1925, Lao She began his formal creative work, when he was teaching at the Oriental Institute of the University of London. During the five years he spent in London, he wrote three novels, "The Philosophy of Old Zhang", "Zhao Ziyi" and "Two Horses", which were all about the lives of the general public, their encounters, dreams, struggles and mutual conflicts. Through the lives of these citizens, the works reflect the real face of Chinese society after the Xinhai Revolution and in the 1920s: although the feudal imperial system has been overthrown, the contradictions existing in Chinese society have not been solved, and China has not yet been liberated from the forces of feudalism and imperialism. Lao She unveiled a corner of the urban underclass that he was most familiar with, allowing people to see for themselves the gory realities of life.

Lao She returned to China in 1930, where he worked as a literary educator at Qilu University in Jinan and Shandong University, but still used his summer and winter vacations to write his novel Daming Lake (which was published in the Commercial Press when it was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1928), and to write his first novel, Daming Lake (which was published in the Commercial Press when it was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1928). (which was destroyed by the fire of January 28th when the manuscript was being printed in the Commercial Press), The Cat City, The Biography of Niu Tianci, and Camel Xiangzi; and short stories such as Black and White Li and Microgods. If all his works in the twenties had a tragic color, most of his works in the thirties were written in tragedy. In his works of the thirties, he dissected Chinese society more y, dissected the hearts and minds of all kinds of citizen characters, and dissected the defects of our national spirit in the times and the root causes of these defects. ②

The citizen class in China, as far as its members are concerned, mainly includes small property owners, small traders, individual laborers, urban poor, jobless vagrants, housewives, and small and medium-sized intellectuals. Because most of China's modern cities (except for the southeast coast of this ports of communication), most of them are formed on the placenta of the long-term historical development of feudal society, and thus have a strong traditional culture of feudalism. After the Opium War, with the massive dumping of Western capital and commodities and the rapid invasion of Western concepts and lifestyles, in the conflict, confrontation and infiltration of the two cultures, the modern urban society, especially in the coastal ports of the economic structure and cultural concepts have undergone mutations, with obvious semi-feudal and semi-colonial colors. Therefore, it is very difficult for the small business owners and traders among the Chinese citizens to become the predecessors of modern capitalism as in Europe; and the self-employed laborers and the urban poor are also different from the proletariat. In addition, China's new democratic revolution was centered in the countryside and took the form of encircling the city from the countryside, so the citizen class seldom felt the revolutionary atmosphere of vigorous and upward movement, and was less influenced by new ideas and culture, so their awakening was also slow. All these have caused the backwardness, conservatism, weakness, compromise and other weaknesses in the character of the citizens. These weaknesses, portrayed by Lao She in the character of the citizens, are embodied, and he also made some revelation, criticism and ridicule, Lao She on their aesthetic care is not from the abstract understanding and theoretical concepts, but from the actual experience of the life of the citizen class.

Lao She's characterization of the citizens is rich and varied, only a work of "The Four Together", including teachers, principals, merchants, car drivers, scaffolders, drivers, doctors, opera singers, comedians, drummers, necks, shavers, graveyard guards, police patrols, hooligans, prostitutes, traitors, spies, and so on, 40 to 50 categories, constituting a huge kingdom of the citizens. His characters do not have too strong "foreign" flavor, such as Zhang Tianyi's works of the Bao's father and son as burning with the desire to climb up the ladder, and his characters are not all "vulgar" flavor, such as Ye Shengtao's Mr. Pan, as a life of survival. On the one hand, his image of the public by etiquette, family customs, the ancient discipline of the binding, love face, manners, modest and easy-going, old-fashioned, on the other hand, by the influence of the chaotic times and the old-fashioned mediocre, poor and happy with their lives, nodding their heads, smooth and mingled with the world. It can be said that in Lao She's character of the citizens have both the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, and mediocrity; both concentrated in our nation for thousands of years of various traits, but also live to highlight the personality of our nation's times.

Different images of citizens reflect Lao She's analysis and judgment of the different aspects of traditional Chinese culture, and under his pen there are several different images such as "old-school image of the citizens", "new-school image of the citizens", and "image of the grassroots". In his writing, there are several different series of characters, such as "Old School Citizen", "New School Citizen" and "Underclass Citizen".

"Old School Citizen Image", i.e., those who still retain the traditional virtues of Eastern feudalism, meek, kind, polite, but also extremely conservative and selfish, conformist "children of old China". This is one of the most successful and infectious series of Lao She's citizens. Though they are city dwellers, they are still the people of rural China, loaded with the heavy burden of feudal and patriarchal ideology. They can be regarded as the representatives of the whole Chinese ancient culture, or the "representatives" of this generous but conservative, sincere but numb middle-of-the-road character. Therefore, they are also old-school citizens.

As early as 1929, in the novel "Two Horses" written in England, Lao She portrayed a superstitious, middle-of-the-road, sloppy, lazy, lackey-like character Ma Zeren. He "not only never used his brain in his life, but his eyes never once stared at a thing for three minutes." His philosophy of life is "at least alive", as for what is alive? As for what to live for, he did not think about anything other than being an official, marrying his wife, and having children. Such a character is very reminiscent of Lu Xun's AQ, except that AQ is an orphan living in the feudal and backward Chinese countryside, while Lao Ma is a wealthy Chinese who has inherited a legacy in the British Empire. In fact, the fact that he is portrayed in a foreign country highlights the absurdity of this "national character" under the contrast between Chinese and Western cultures.

The most striking character in "Divorce" is Zhang, who not only reflects some of the essential characteristics of our nation through his civic characterization, but also reflects the ills of the whole society through his connection with the dark old social customs and the corrupt bureaucracy. Brother Cheung is a contented and resigned citizen who sticks to the rules. He is careful to preserve his well-off life and is afraid that everything will change. His principle of dealing with people is: "Whenever you are sifted through a small sieve, you will never go to the extremes; going to the extremes will make your life out of balance, and you will have to fall flat on your face." Brother Zhang did not like to fall on his face. "His clothes, hat, gloves, pipe, and cane were all in the style and fashion that the Moderns had used for more than half a year, and the Stubborns would have to ponder over for three or two months more before they dared to use them." ④ No matter what he said to any one, he did not utter a single hurtful word, for it seemed to him to be a breach of propriety to curse a man. In the end, his son was arrested on suspicion of being a "****-producer," and he could only lament in despair, "Who have I offended? Who have I offended?" The head of the Finance Office's General Affairs Section could be considered the microscope and balance of his life circle. He had a set of life experiences equivalent to a daily encyclopedia, which was regarded as the crystallization of common sense by his colleagues and friends. He knew everything and was well liked everywhere he went, so he sighed to himself, "I have the talent of a prime minister, but not the life of a prime minister". Through this series of typical episodes, what the writer reveals is that Zhang's intelligence is not a great wisdom, but an instinct in the character of the citizens in order to safeguard their own self-interests, so that they can survive as peacefully as possible in the cracks, and it is a mediocre cleverness.

The old master of the Qi family in The Fourth Generation is also a typical citizen of Beijing's old-school, in whom the essence of the city's ancient culture is concentrated. He timidly avoids politics and all disputes, and even when the Japanese invasion army occupied Beiping, he thought that as long as he prepared three months' worth of food and salted vegetables and blocked the door of his own courtyard, he could turn his life around. Soon to be a slave, he is still thinking about his birthday, "No matter how chaotic the world, we can not forget the manners of the people of Beiping!" Although he is also a commoner, but the heart is always not forget to put people strictly divided into the inferiority and superiority of the noble and lowly, loyal and true in accordance with the ancestral rituals and customs of the work, everywhere to pay attention to the decency and ostentation. He practiced the philosophy of "harmony makes money" and was kind to the point of being submissive. He came to raid the plainclothes smile, bow, and kindly receive "instructions"; he was very sympathetic to his neighbor Qian Mo-yin by the Japanese abuse of the encounter, but for fear of being involved in their own and do not dare to visit this old friend. His character is characterized by cowardice, constraint, and peace, which is the author's most familiar type of character, and is a continuation of the type of Mr. Ma and Mr. Zhang.

What Lao She hints at in these people is a profound multiple sadness, that the obstacles to social progress do not come from the moral failings or bad qualities of individuals, but from a habit that pervades and permeates the whole society and the national fabric. On the contrary, the quality of every individual in this cultural atmosphere is beyond reproach. Whether it is Ma Zeren and Brother Zhang, or Old Man Qi or Auntie Zhao, most of them are sincere and loyal or warm and righteous. The fact that they themselves are "conformists" molded by such concepts without realizing it is already a kind of double sadness, but when they also use such concepts to mold others (such as Zhang Daogao), to humiliate the national character (Ma Zeren) and to wither the national economy, this constitutes a triple sadness. ⑤ Through this series of images, Lao She expresses the idea that in order to cure the national ills, there must be a cultural and psychological revolution in addition to political and economic changes, and it must be accomplished in the heart of every Chinese.

"New school image of citizens" as a whole is not as rich as the old school, but there are many successful images, which can be divided into three categories. The first category is Lao She's ideal "national model". Although Lao She devoted himself to criticizing the inferiority of the people, he did not forget the construction of an ideal personality. After accepting part of the Western culture, Lao She saw that the British culture was much more advanced than the Chinese culture, and naturally planted his ideal of personality in the Western concepts that he recognized. He believed that "it is the highest ideal for a Chinese to be a national like an Englishman." He molded young people like Li Jingchun and Li Zirong with reference to the British nationals. Li Jingchun had knowledge, ideals, patriotic fervor, and the spirit to die for his country. In times of emergency, he tries to wake up the nation by assassinating the warlord. Li Zirong can be described as a follower of Li Jingchun's beliefs and the actual successor of his legacy. He is a modern youth armed with modern British scientific knowledge, democratic ideals and independent spirit, with the excellent qualities that modern youth should have: independence, pragmatism, truth-seeking, dedication, patriotism, beautiful ideals and down-to-earth actions. All of these ideal characters are chivalrous in their actions to rid the poor people of evils and get a grand ending in the form of a reunion. Behind these images lies the backdrop of "Confucianism and chivalry". On the one hand, they are all intellectuals, with a strong Confucian mentality of "worrying about the times and hurting the world" and a "scholar" consciousness of "inner holiness and outer unity". On the other hand, most of their interventions in society to solve problems were "chivalrous" - swordsman-style assassination and self-sacrifice. If "to keep the family in order, to rule the country and to pacify the world" is the traditional political ideal of the Chinese literati, then "to do one's utmost and to die only after one's death" is precisely the psychological pattern of their dedication to fulfill their own personalities. (6) Lao She's appreciation of chivalrous heroes in his "childhood and adolescence" aesthetic constituted such a "view of loyalty and righteousness" in his civic culture. The characters he portrayed also reflected his ideal of life, and also reflected Lao She's sincere and naive side, and his lack of real profundity in criticizing the reality.

The second category is the image of "transitional people" that Mr. Lao She lashed out with tears, such as Old Li in Divorce and Qi Ruixuan in Four Together. They are all intellectuals who have been baptized by the new wave of thinking, and they are looking forward to the future intellectually, but emotionally they are still trapped in the past and can hardly extricate themselves. The image of Lao Li can be interpreted as a supplement to the image of Zhang Daogao, who is a sophisticated and delicate thinker, who earns his living by his own strength, who never asks questions about other people's affairs, who pursues a mysterious "poetry", who longs for "even to see it, a woman who has not yet been practically taught to be bad, who is as passionate as a poem, as pleasant as some music, as chaste and pure as some music, and as happy as some music, and who is as pure as some music, and who is as chaste as some music. He hates the hustle and bustle and boredom of the middle class of Zhang and the others, and thinks that he is superior because he has an "aristocratic spirit" in his soul; he also wants to find some excitement in the gray life, even if he has to be a tragic figure... ...But in the final analysis, Lao Li is Lao Li after all, and although he is not a lowly man of the world, he does not even have the courage to get a divorce. Qi Ruixuan has received a modern education, with some modern consciousness, but he is, after all, the eldest grandson of the Qi family nurtured by the Beijing culture, so when the national enemy invaded the family, the hometown fell to the critical juncture, he was caught in the dilemma of loyalty or filial piety conflict. Although he finally "found his place in the war", from the history of this patriotic petit-bourgeois intellectual's character development from melancholy to struggle, we can clearly see our nation's "national weaknesses" and the historical process of transformation of these weaknesses in the midst of social change. We can clearly see the "national weaknesses" of our nation and the historical process of these weaknesses being transformed in the social change. These characters are somewhat similar to Gao Jueshen in Bajin's "Home", who appeared in Lao She's writing as "transitional people" full of emotional conflicts, and whose historical background is the difficult transition of Chinese civil society from tradition to modernity, so they have the rich connotation of a specific era.

The third type of characters are the "foreign" and "new" scoundrels, who grew up in the feudal patriarchal, small production social soil, but also contaminated with many Western bad habits, and centralized Western dregs in one. Zhang Tianzhen in Divorce is one such character: tall, thin-waisted, long-legged, and wearing a suit. She loves to watch dancing, pretends to have ideals, looks in the mirror with a frown on her face, and eats mandarin oranges all day long. Goes to Dongan Market with skates and sleeps in a sweatshirt. He reads three tabloids a day, doesn't know about national affairs, but memorizes the advertisements of the cinema. All in all, this is a trendy but shallow character. Qi Ruifeng in "The Fourth Generation" is also one of these mocked "foreign youths", but what is even more shameful is that his foreign flavor has a traitor's taste in it. Originally, he was just a boring man who wanted to enjoy himself, but after the fall of Peking, he couldn't bear the torment of a miserable life and willingly acted as a small accomplice who didn't even look at the enemy. These characters are obsessed with the "new", the pursuit of "foreign-style" life and the loss of personality. Lao She in their merciless mockery of the world, these "fake foreign devils" is the most dangerous enemy of our reform.

"The image of the grassroots citizens" is one of the most numerous and familiar series in Lao She's works, and it occupies a prominent position in Lao She's series of citizens. Camel Xiangzi" is a masterpiece of the tragic fate of the urban poor, which successfully and truly reflects the life of the people at the bottom of the city in old China, revealing how a bankrupt farmer is civicized and categorized as a social hooligan proletarian, as well as the tragedy of the destruction of the spirit experienced in the process. Xiangzi came from the countryside to the city to make a living, he bought a car as his life goal, fantasizing that his own labor in exchange for a stable life, however, the dark social reality makes his ideal can never be realized. With great sympathy, Lao She depicts the oppression and persecution of warlords and bureaucratic rule on him again and again, which makes him finally degenerate into an unemployed hobo who emits the rotten smell from his body to his soul. At the same time, the writer also reveals and criticizes his own inherent defects. He is out of place, selfish, dead set on making money, and not allowed to be buddies, which determines his loneliness and vulnerability, and ultimately completely succumbs to fate. Lao She chose them as the main characters instead of the general wimps with two intentions: one is that people generally believe that they are the basic factors constituting the civil society; on the other hand, it is their fiasco in the struggle for food and clothing that profoundly suggests that there is no hope for the society and the small producers' "personal struggle" is not a path to be taken. Of course, with the change of Lao She's worldview, his characters are no longer all "desperate" characters, but rather, they are the enlightened ones who grow up in the difficult times. In "The Fourth Generation", the author not only praises the traditional virtues of these "lowly people", but also honors their righteousness and martyrdom, such as the cart driver Xiao Cui who refused to pull a cart for the traitors, and the shaver Sun Qi who denounced the traitors when he was buried alive, and further writes about them joining the anti-Japanese ranks, such as Cheng Changshun's enlightenment, and the shed maker Liu Shi Shi's departure, etc. Among them, there is also a category of "desperate" characters, which are the "lowly ones", but those who grow up in the difficult times. In this there is also a category is the "shrew class" of tigress and "whore class" of the female tragedy such as Little Fuzi, especially in the "crescent moon" in the mother and daughter of two generations of the story of prostitution. In fact, Lao She, not only with his pen in the writing of these lower-class people's suffering, but also to pursue the root of these poor characters life and life.

In Lao She's works, we can often see that there are three kinds of forces cruelly destroying the Chinese people, especially the lower class laborers: one is the imperialist invasion and oppression, resulting in a kind of national spirit and the national psychology of the disease; the second is the Chinese thousands of years of accumulation of inherited feudalism, which imprisons people's wisdom and mobility; the third is the current darkness of the system for the majority of people from the material life to the spiritual life of the damage caused. Thirdly, the damage caused by the current dark system to the people from material life to spiritual life. The Chinese nation is a great ancient nation with glorious traditions, and her culture has radiated brilliant colors in the history of mankind. However, the three forces have caused serious traumas to our national spirit and national psychology, so that this ancient nation of ours can not be relieved. Therefore, Lao She has always taken the transformation of the national spirit as a major subject of his creative work from the beginning of his first full-length novel.

The image of the citizens in Lao She's novels has a value that cannot be ignored, and this article deals with only a part of it, and there are still many other issues that we should think about. Even so, I think from the above analysis can be realized: the reason why Lao She's works are y rooted in people's hearts and go to the world, and his works in the shape of those distinctive image of the public has a great relationship. If the realism achievement of Lu Xun's works is that he drew the soul of the people with his touching strokes, then the realism achievement of Lao She's works is that he "introduced the destiny of the urban underclass, which is not very familiar to the people, and the urban poor, which is often neglected by the people, into the field of art and succeeded in it! " (7)

References:

1. <<Collected Writings of Lao She>>People's Literature Publishing House

2. <<Overview of the Study of Lao She>>Tianjin Educational Publishing House

3. <<Lao She and the Idea of Chinese Culture>>Xue Lin Publishing House by Song Yong Yi

4.<<Research Materials on Contemporary Chinese Literature>>(Lao She Monographs)

5.<<<Collected Research Papers on Lao She>> Shandong People's Publishing House, 1983 edition

Note:

①See "The May 4 What "May Fourth" Gave Me"

②See Meng Guanglai, "A Preliminary Exploration of the Study of Lao She in the Thirties"

③See Wu Xiaomei, "The Gray Tragedy of the Gray Characters in the Civil Society"

④See Lao Zhang's Philosophy"

⑤See Lao She and the Concepts of Chinese Culture"

⑥Same as above

⑦See Fan Jun, "Theory of <Camel Xiangzi>'s Relevance"