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(1) Imagery of Nature
In Eileen Chang's novels, examples of successful and flexible use of imagery of nature abound. These images are all phenomena that people **** to see, in line with the experience of daily life, in line with the prescribed scenarios, however, because she was able to be original in the creation of imagery, the old for the new, so that a large number of seemingly commonplace imagery scattered throughout the course of the story becomes unusual, from a different perspective, from a different aspect, enriches the novel's meaning. At the same time, the theme of the novel and the author's emotions are euphemistically curved out.
The successful use of the "moon" imagery is the most praised among such imagery. Zhang's novels have a wide variety of imagery, colorful, but the "moon" appears most frequently, is the most typical, and is the most distinctive.
The moon is written about many times in The Book of Golden Locks. The novel opens with this paragraph:
"Thirty years ago in Shanghai, a night with the moon ...... we may not have caught up to see the moon thirty years ago. Young people think of the moon thirty years ago should be a copper coin big a red and yellow wet halo, like Duo Yunxuan letterhead fell a teardrop, obsolete and confused. Older people recall the moon of thirty years ago as joyful, bigger, rounder, and whiter than the one in front of them; yet looking back across thirty years of hard work, even the best moon can't help but be a little bleak." ○2
"The moon" is a "reddish-yellow wet halo" is "a teardrop", the novel begins by giving the reader a sad, bleak tone. "Looking back through thirty years of hard work", the moon thirty years ago and thirty years after the moon cross overlap, intentionally creating time on the illusory haze, to create a lonely and bleak bleak mood.
"The moon of thirty years ago has long since sunk, and the people of thirty years ago have died, but the story of thirty years ago is not yet finished - it's not finished",
. It can't be." ○3
Thirty years ago Cao Qixiao has died, thirty years ago the moon has sunk, and only sunk, there is a time to sink, there is a day to float up, and the moon that floats out is still the same thirty years ago moon. The women in the Jiang family compound still interpret the same story under the moon. By extension, what part of the world does not have a moon, what part of the world does not have a variety of, large and small Jiang family compound?
Among the natural imagery that Eileen Chang often used, we can't help but mention the use of "fog" imagery.
In "Fragrant Fragments: The First Incense", the main character Ge Weilong, after deciding to enter Liang's house, walks towards Mrs. Liang's house, and there is this paragraph:
"It was a wet spring evening, and the fog on the hills of Hong Kong was the most famous of all. Leung's white house melted viscously into the white fog only to see the lights swaying in the green glass windows, green and ghostly, one side at a time, like ice cubes in a mint julep. Gradually the ice cubes melted into water - the fog thickened and the lights in the panes disappeared." ○4
Eileen Chang deliberately timed the time when Vai Lung walked into Liang's house at dusk, and everything under the setting sun seemed dreamily unreal. Hidden in the thick white fog, the Liang residence reveals the ambivalence of Vai Lung's ambivalence about her future before she enters the Liang residence. The light in the fog aptly depicts Vai Lung's future life in the Liang Mansion. "The fog thickened and the lights in the window panes disappeared." The fog here should have a reference, pointing to the group of people around Mrs. Leung who exclusively sacrifices the youthful dignity of young girls for the richness and leisure, prosperity and bustle. Wei Long, who has not yet lost herself and has a trace of ideal pursuit of life in her heart, is just like the light, "The fog is thicker, and the light in the window pane has disappeared."
(2) Clothing Imagery
Chang Eileen's love of secular life made her have a special, extraordinary, and persistent interest in indoor objects, such as clothes, closet, and decorations, which is revealed in almost all of her works. Zhang Eileen was originally from an aristocratic family, of course, she could have been exposed to these things since she was a child and was familiar with them, but she would be persistently interested in these things, especially in the detailed depiction of clothing, and took great pains to narrate them in a number of fictional works, so that the clothing was created as a multitude of imagery, so that the imagery of the clothing in her works was varied and splendid and "brilliant and lively! ". In "Dress Code", Eileen Chang complained: "Most women choose their husbands, far less than the choice of hats general concentration, careful consideration. The woman with no more heart speaks of her 'last year's brocade pinafore' with love." ⑤ From this, perhaps, we can catch a glimpse of the original reason for the recurring use of costume imagery in Zhang's work.
In Red Roses and White Roses, the day after Zhenbao arrives at Wang Shihong's home, Wang Shihong leaves for Singapore, leaving behind a beautiful woman to take care of Zhenbao. Zhenbao came back from work that day, did not see his brother, but ran into the guest room from the welcome out of the Jiao Rui, the author of the heroine at this time for a detailed depiction of clothing:
"She wore a floor-length robes, is the most fresh and spicy moist green, dipped in what is dyed green. She moved slightly, as if a green stain had been left on the air she had just possessed. The dress seemed to have been made too small, bursting open an inch and a half at the sides, and was lined with green ribbons criss-crossed all the way around, revealing a deep pink petticoat underneath. The overly harsh hue was one that would cause color blindness if one looked at it for too long." ○6
Jiao Rui's floor-length gown, is the most fresh and spicy moist green, "dipped in what is dyed green", just a little move, the air left the green ink so fresh and spicy moist green, not to mention that since childhood in the painting of Eileen Chang, is the ordinary readers will not be difficult to think of that verdant, bright and compelling The leaves of flowers and plants after the rain. And that all the way with a green ribbon cross cross up the deep pink petticoat, naturally became a thousand charming, passionate red roses, and this is with Zhang's quite a red house penmanship of the character named "Jiao Rui" is also implicit. So Wang Jiao Rui in the eyes of Zhenbao, can only be the red rose in his life, a "passionate mistress". The author has skillfully hinted at the fate of the characters through their costumes.
Also, in Eileen Chang's novel "Eighteen Spring", one of the heroines, Man Lu, appeared:
"Wearing a soft satin cheongsam in apple green, which was about 80% new, but there was a black hidden handprint at the waist". ○7
At first glance, I found it rather puzzling how there could be a handprint on the cheongsam. Thinking carefully about Manlu's life as a dancer, I found the author's ingenuity in the imagery of this costume: this handprint is of course the objective of Manlu's career as a dancer to bring her mark, but when Manlu appeared, there was no dancer's hand pressed against her waist, but I could see the hidden black handprint, which can only mean that the handprint is intangible, but it is ubiquitous, and it is the people around the body with the imposition of the Manlu, regardless of whether she is now a dancer or not. Whether she is a dancer now or not, she can only ever be a dancer in the eyes of others, can only ever live in the world, can only ever be the victim, the victim of married life, this point is also confirmed by the later plot development of the novel.
(3) Imagery of Fragile Objects
Taking an overview of the stories in the book of Legend, except for "Love in a Fallen City", almost without exception, there is a poignant and bleak ending of the story, which can't help but remind one of a sentence of Zhang's in "Rumors"; "Nothing can be relied upon in this world, and it will be shattered when pinched. " Mirrors, glass, eyeglasses, precious stones, etc., are all glittering and dazzling, but they are all brittle and fragile, just like the marriage relationship between a man and a woman, and even the whole world of life. Therefore, in Eileen Chang's novels, she often saw many thin, brittle, fragile and glittering items. Such as eyeglasses, glass, white magnets, gemstones, etc., of which the most praised should be the use of mirror imagery.
According to the statistics of Mr. Crystal, a Taiwanese scholar, in the article Hongluan Jubilee alone, the imagery of mirrors appeared seven times, eyeglasses five times, glass nine times, and white magnets three times. In her novels, not only the noble lady Bai Liusu likes to feel sorry for herself in front of the mirror, but also the maid A Xiao in
A Xiao's Sad Autumn
puts a small mirror with broken corners on the pink wall at the edge of the door, and from time to time, she "looks into the mirror and pastes flowers in yellow". This is true for women as well as men. Zhenbao in "Red Rose and White Rose" encountered his abandoned lover Jiao Rui a few years ago on the bus, but also in the small mirror next to the driver's side, saw his own face gradually shaking up, and tears were flowing downward. ○9 And then headed back toward the kitchen.In one of Eileen Chang's later works, The Lust Ring, she intersperses mirrors, glass windows, glass doors, glass boxes, gemstones, diamond rings, and other shiny and fragile objects. In the private room of a jewelry store, at the crucial moment when Mr. Yi is about to be booby-trapped, he prepares to buy a pink diamond ring for his heroine, Wang Jiazhi:
"The large mirror leaning against the wall root shone on her feet, stepping among the peonies. It's the market in the square nightmare that unintentionally uncovers exotic treasures. She wore the pink diamond ring on her hand side to side, and compared to her rose-red nail polish, it was really no more than a slight red, and not too big, but the light was extremely adequate, bright and sparkling, alien-star-like, and red in a mysterious sort of way." ○10
It is at this crucial point that Wang Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is really in love with Mr. Yi, and although it is the first time she feels a sense of affection for the man, she is clearly a little hesitant when Mr. Yi is willing to buy her the pink diamond ring that he never even bought for his wife. However, the careful reader will guess from the words "a large mirror leaning against the wall" and "extremely bald and shiny" that the relationship is utterly delusional and sinister. In the end, Wang Jiazhi believed in the illusory feelings and gave up her reasoning, letting Mr. Yi go. However, on the very same day, she was captured and executed by Mr. Yi's men.
The Artistic Implications of Imagery
(1) Imagery and the Author's Experience
The use of imagery is intrinsically related to the instantaneous feelings and intuition of Eileen Chang's life experience, as well as to her childhood memories and subconsciousness, etc. With her unique life experience and emotional experience, as well as her above-average insight and comprehension, Eileen Chang was extremely skillful and skillful in the use of this technique. By virtue of her unique life experience and emotional experience, as well as her more than ordinary keen insight and understanding, Zhang Eiling's use of this artistic technique seems extremely skillful and skillful, with a distinct originality, from which we can still get a glimpse of the little bits and pieces of Zhang Eiling's life experience.
Chang Eileen was born into a prestigious family, but by the time she was born, it was already the Republican era, and the era of the Zhang family's prominence had already passed, with all the splendor and bustle of the past becoming a thing of the past in her parents' memories. At the same time, her parents' unfortunate marriage and eventual breakup caused Eileen Chang to prematurely appreciate the dark and hopeless side of life. Everyone knows that Eileen Chang wrote the most and the best about the moon, but her initial strong feeling about the moon was felt when she was imprisoned in an empty room after being beaten by her father, who had married her stepmother, and threatened to kill her with a pistol, which she reveals in the essay "Whispers":
"My father threatened to kill me with a pistol. I was temporarily imprisoned in an empty room, and this house in which I had been born suddenly became rusty, like the moonlight, with green and white stucco walls appearing out of black shadows, one-sided and epileptic."
"Beverley Nichols has a poem about the half-brightness of the madman: 'In your heart sleeps the moonlight light,' and I read it and think of the blue moonlight on the floorboards of our house, the quiet killing machine. ○11
That year, Zhang Eileen was seventeen years old, a young girl in her flowering season was beaten by her own father, secluded, and more or less mixed with a little stepmother encouraging her father's meaning in the beginning, undoubtedly for Zhang Eileen is a kind of bone-deep experience. This claustrophobic life is six months, during which Zhang Eileen also suffered from severe dysentery, "almost died", and every night lying on the sick bed, and her companion, there is only the moon in the sky. Under those conditions, the moon was cold, lonely, helpless and desolate for Eileen Chang.
In the novel "The Book of Golden Locks", when Changbai was ordered by Qixiao to smoke opium with her all night long, and left his wife Zhishou, who was tortured by Qixiao to death, alone in bed, waiting to die, Zhang Eileen gave Zhishou her own special feelings about the moon:
"The moon is better than any other day tonight, a full moon, and no one in the world can see the moon. A full moon, cloudless, like a white sun in a pitch-black sky ......"
"Outside the window is still the same perverse bright moon that makes one sweat - a pitch-black sky A burning small, white sun ......"
"In the moonlight there was no blood at all in her feet - green, green, purple, the color of a cold gone corpse. She wanted to die, she wanted to die, and she was afraid of the moonlight, and she was afraid to turn on the light." ○12
The moon here shows all the vicissitudes of fate that one can do nothing about and is still reluctant, resisting but useless. The moon before Chi Shou's death, with its madness and mystery, and the horror that makes one's hair stand on end, is a reenactment of Eileen Chang's childhood memories of being beaten and imprisoned by her father.
The mirror left a lifelong and unforgettable mark on Eileen's childhood, as did the moon. In her essay Children's Words Without Harm, written in 1944, Eileen truly recorded the trembling of her heart in front of the mirror, which she herself did not understand. In the mirror, she saw her own inner grief and fear, which was at a time when her father had married her stepmother and her younger brother was not yet young enough to understand, and when she could hardly protect herself, much less shelter her brother:
"At the dinner table, over a small matter, my father hit him in the mouth. I was greatly shaken, and held my rice bowl over my face, tears streaming down my face. My stepmother laughed and said, 'Huh, why are you crying? It's not like you're saying look, he didn't cry, but you did!' I dropped the bowl and rushed to the bathroom next door, bolted the door and sobbed silently. I stood in front of the mirror, looking at my own buttoned-up face, watching the tears gush down my face like a close-up in a movie." ○13
Crying in front of the mirror, Eileen saw her own loneliness and helplessness, exposing the deep damage her parents' unfortunate marriage had inflicted on her soul. She and her beloved brother had lost their mother's care, and the siblings, who were born and raised in the city, had become thorns in the side of others, and had to watch out for the temperamental behavior of their father and stepmother. Thinking of this, Zhang Eileen can not help but tears, and these usually easy not to reveal the inner activities of the mirror in the reflection to be presented, so that when writing a novel, will intentionally or unintentionally with the help of mirrors to show the characters under the psychological performance, or foreshadow the fate of the characters.
In the novel "Love in a Fallen City", after the divorce, temporarily living in her mother's home, Bai Liusu was a pair of poor brother and sister-in-law, after the white, to the mother complained, and was coldly treated, in a lonely situation, Zhang Eileen wrote Bai Liusu in front of the mirror to look at her own self-pitying paragraph:
"Liusu suddenly screamed, cover their eyes, stumbled upstairs to climb," said Zhang Eileen. Crawling upstairs,...... up the stairs to her own house, she turned on the light, flung herself on the dressing mirror, scrutinizing herself. Fortunately, she wasn't too old." ○14
This episode, and the above Zhang Eileen saw her younger brother was beaten, sad tears, and by the stepmother robbed, and therefore rushed into the bathroom, in front of the mirror big tears and how similar, the same scene, familiar with Zhang Eileen readers can easily feel Zhang Eileen's early childhood experience in the projection of Bai Liushu.
(2) Imagery and Character's Fate
"As far as imagery is concerned, Eileen Chang's is denser, with an unknown number of passages of descriptions that are vivid and colorful without diminishing their bleak or eerie atmosphere". ○15 But the creation of Eileen Chang's imagery is not a "six dynasties of parallelism", nor is it an optional flourish, but most of them appear in the key moments of the characters' destinies, and the use of imagery is closely related to the development of the characters' destinies. In "Jasmine Fragrance Pieces", Yan Ziyi left Feng Bilu when he was young and went abroad in anger. When he returned to China, Bilu had already married Nie Jiechen. Regarding her life after marriage, the author borrowed her son's imagination and interpreted this wonderful paragraph:
"She is not a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, will still fly out. She was a bird embroidered on a screen - a white bird in a cloud of gold on a screen of rich purple satin. As the years went by, the feathers darkened, molded, gave way to insects, and died still on the screen." ○16
"The bird in the cage", still has life, there will be a day to fly out. But the bird embroidered on the screen can only be viewed and savored. Here, Zhang Eileen on the tragic fate of Feng Bilu made a metaphorical artistic summary, it can also be understood as Zhang Eileen for the whole era of women's destiny of the symbol, can be extended to people in the world with no escape from the fate of the symbol, "This is not so much an imagery of flight and escape, rather than an imagery of death and imprisonment ". ○17
In "Scraps of Sinking Fragrance The First Incense", Vai Lung feels cheated by Qiao Qi Qiao and gambles to go back to Shanghai. She went to buy a boat ticket back to Shanghai, on the way back to her aunt's house, but unexpectedly met a torrential downpour:
"As she walked, Vai Lung wrung out her cheongsam, and when it was strung dry, it was again the same as the one she had fished out of the water. ......"○18
This episode graphically brings out Vyron's futile resistance. At this time the Wei Long, is standing in the destiny of the fork in the road for her, can choose the road is not much: one is to be a convent of elementary school teachers, "not much fun"; two is to go to the community to look for things to do, "do not see the way out of the way", the rest of the road, on the "Naturally it would be better to get married." Veron's constant wringing of the cheongsam shows that her efforts are in vain, and she can only end up working as a "marriage clerk". Although Joki-Jo does not really love her, she ends up going with him for the sake of survival. This seemingly happy ending also explains to a certain extent Eileen Chang's shocking statement: "Marriage is a long-term prostitution". However, through this shocking statement, readers should be able to see Zhang Eileen's skepticism and mockery of the traditional value system, as well as her almost cruel dissection of human nature.
Returning to The Book of Golden Locks, the night before Chang An had to painfully give up her studies at the whim of her mother:
"She fished out a harmonica from under her pillow, half-squatted, half-sat on the floor, and secretly blew on it. Hesitantly, the tiny tune of 'Long, Long, Ago' curled and rippled through the sprawling night." ○19
Later, Chang An had to dissolve her marriage to the man she had fallen in love with, Tong Shifang, because of her mother's obstruction from it, at which point:
"Chang An languidly heard the sound of the harmonica, and sluggishly blew out Long,Long,Ago'- 'Tell me that story, the one that was my favorite in days gone by. A long time ago, a long time ago ...... 'This is now, a turn of the eye also changed a long time ago, everything is finished. Changan was possessed, and went to the harmonica-player--to herself." ○20
The two occurrences of the harmonica sound "Long, Long, Ago" overlap, each accompanied by a self-sacrifice on Chang'an's part, and each sacrifice is enough to change Chang'an's fate. Chang-An's obsessive pursuit of this melody is a meaningful symbolic image, symbolizing what Chang-An deserves, the status and image of a woman. In the sound of this music, Chang An longs for the emergence of her mother in the true sense of the word. The recurring melody of "Long, Long, Ago" tells the reader unmistakably that this is an "elegy of love", a matchstick in the hands of the little girl who sells matches.
(2) The visual beauty of imagery
There is a passage in "The Book of Golden Locks" in which Qixiao, depressed after sending her brother and sister-in-law out, turns back to see her husband, who is sleeping motionless on the bed....... Next, Eileen interpreted an extremely classic imagery that skillfully blends the techniques of movie montage:
"The wind is coming through the window. "The wind came in through the window, and the long mirror of carved and lacquered iambic pentameter hanging across the street was blown and shaken, knocking against the wall. Qixiao pressed down on the mirror with both hands. The mirror reflects the bamboo curtains and a gold and green landscape screen still swinging back and forth in the wind,
Looking at it for a long time, there is a feeling of seasickness. When she fixed her eyes again, the bamboo curtain had faded, the gold and green landscape had been replaced by a portrait of her husband's remains, and the person in the mirror had aged ten years." ○29
The imagery depicted in this paragraph, if placed in Zhang's movie play, I believe Zhang Eileen herself would have trouble recognizing it. The camera moves from the long mirror, which is shaken by the wind, to the bamboo curtains and landscape screen strips reflected in the mirror, then the camera slowly fogs up, and when it is pushed closer, the bamboo curtains in the mirror have faded, and the gold and green landscape is replaced by the remains of Qixiao's husband. Between such a halo and a look, the world of man has been a decade of vicissitudes.
Can refer to /liuguochen8899/blog/item/02feb33ee88e06fe828b1381.html