For a writer's cognition, in order to better understand her works, we need to know her life, so as to better understand the humanistic ideas to be conveyed in her works.
China literature in the 20th century, inherited from19th century and started from 2 10/0th century, closely linked with social life, echoed the mood of the times, actively explored and innovated. With its own ups and downs, it has written a brilliant page in the colorful movement of China for 5 thousand years.
Ding Ling is a special existence in the history of China literature in the 20th century. At that time, "a bomb was dropped on the dead literary world." She is a figure deeply involved in the turbulent social and historical vortex of China's literary world. Her ups and downs are closely intertwined with the changes of the times, and her bumpy fate is a typical abbreviation of the fate of modern intellectual women in China.
It is undoubtedly a feasible way to understand Ding Ling's representative works and read them in combination with her life. Ding Ling (1904—— 1986) was born in Linli, Hunan. Mother Yu (1878- 1953) has a profound influence on Ding Ling's growth path. She is a persevering, strong, hardworking and open-minded woman. With orphans and young girls, she overcame economic difficulties under the pressure of social customs and went to girls' normal schools in Changde and Changsha to learn new knowledge. After graduation, she has been engaged in education for a long time, becoming a self-reliant professional woman and setting an example for her children with her own behavior.
Ding Ling said: "The struggle of my mother's life is the best education for me." The life experiences of Ding Ling and her mother reflect the historical continuity of the growth of modern intellectual women in China. 19 19 studied in the preparatory course of Taoyuan Hunan Second Women's Normal School. Later, he transferred to Changsha and was educated and edified by progressive teachers.
At the beginning of 1922, Ding Ling, who was under the age of 18, went to Shanghai as a female teacher with Wang Jianhong, a classmate from Taoyuan, and studied in a civilian girls' school founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Da, and then entered the Chinese Department of Shanghai University. Some famous new cultural figures and producers such as Li Da, Qu Qiubai, Chen Wangdao, Shen Yanbing and Tian Han have all taught in these schools.
1924, Ding Ling met a young poet Hu Yepin in the ancient capital Beijing (1903— 193 1). Ding Ling said, "Because of my background, education and life experience, we can see that our thoughts, personalities and feelings are different, but he is brave, enthusiastic and persistent.
/kloc-in the autumn of 0/925, Ding Ling and Hu Yepin got married in Beijing. In Hu Yepin's poems, there are many poems describing their sweet and romantic love, but the poverty of life and the ideological situation of nowhere to go always cast a shadow over them.
Ding Ling once described the thought at that time: Ding Ling later described it like this: "My thought at that time was very chaotic, with extreme rebellious feelings, and I was blindly inclined to social revolution. However, due to the fantasy of the petty bourgeoisie, I alienated the revolutionary ranks and walked into lonely resentment, struggle and pain." ..... Formally, I am safe and quiet, or just like the lover or wife of a passionate poet, but mentally, I am extremely miserable. I can't find friends except novels. So I wrote a novel, and my novel had to be full of contempt for society and the tenacious struggle of my lonely soul. "
Mao Dun, who appeared in Novel Monthly as a novelist in the same year as Ding Ling, should include his intuitive feelings in his later evaluation. Mao Dun said that when Ding Ling's first novel was published, her name was "unfamiliar in the literary world, but the author's talent was immediately recognized. Then her second short story, Diary of Ms. Sha Fei, was published in Novel Monthly, which made people more deeply realize that when Ms. Xie Bingxin was silent, a new female writer appeared in the literary world with a new attitude.
Ding Ling's "new attitude" is different from the popular revolutionary romantic writing at that time. Her novels in this period did not belong to the "revolutionary literature" in the brewing period of the left-wing alliance, but actually continued the "new women" story of the May 4th literature. However, the first novel Monk is not about the "father-son conflict" between the traditional conservative family and the young people who are eager for a new life, but about the young intellectual women leaving the family.
Moreover, Monk did not ask questions abstractly, but described the situation that Monk was still hesitant and had no way out after entering the modern city, which showed the repression, distortion and remolding of this young woman's naive personality by urban capitalist life.
Monk obviously expanded the theme of "What happened after Nora left" in the May 4th literature. Of course, from the narrative aspect of the novel, whether it is the structural arrangement or the change of perspective, Monk still reveals the traces of hard birth, but when it comes to Ms. Sha Fei's diary, it has changed by leaps and bounds. Because this novel adopts the narrative mode of female inner monologue, it can effectively use the female perspective to more fully show the inner anxiety of modern women.
The power relationship between social class and gender described in Monk is condensed into Sha Fei's inner world in this novel and expressed in the form of inverted sentences.
The strong decadent color of the novel typically reflects the spiritual crisis of "new women" during the ebb tide of the May 4th Movement, and also echoes the hesitation mentality that permeated the whole society after the failure of the Great Revolution, which naturally caused widespread discussion.
After Diary of Ms. Sha Fei, Ding Ling's novels still focus on wandering and depressed intellectual women. By the time the novella Hu Wei was published on 1930, her creation had changed.
In this novel, the protagonist becomes a revolutionary. After falling in love with Hu Wei, a professional revolutionary, Li Jia, who is arrogant, plunged Hu Wei into love madness and brought trouble to Hu Wei. Finally, for the sake of the "iron law of another life concept" he accepted, she had to make up her mind to leave angel lee, and angel lee cheered up after crying and wanted to "do something good".
Ding Ling's contact and association with party member in her early years made the novel's description of the characters' temperament and life scenes quite vivid and touching, but as far as the design of the whole plot is concerned, it is true that "she fell into the bare trap of love and revolution", as the writer himself summed up later.
The following "1993. In the spring of 2008, Shanghai (Part I and Part II) was still confined to Hu Wei's story mode, and women's self-consciousness explored in Sha Fei period was considered in the context of "revolution", while Ding Ling's analysis at this time was relatively simple: whether to give up personal love for "revolution" or "run with the public" for changing herself, we must choose between the two. However, it should be pointed out that there is no doubt that the introduction of elements such as "revolution" and "mass", which belonged to radical social consciousness at that time, changed Ding Ling's writing mode and added new content and new development possibilities to Ding Ling's novels.
In May, 1930, Ding Ling and Hu Yepin joined the League of Chinese Left-wing Writers. 193 1 After Hu Yepin was killed in February, Ding Ling became the editor-in-chief of Beidou, the mouthpiece of the left-wing alliance, and took an active part in the left-wing literary movement. It can be said that the radical consciousness of pursuing social and political changes has promoted Ding Ling's passion for creating avant-garde literature. In her works such as Water (193 1) and Ben (1933) during this period, the theme of peasant resistance struggle was selected, and the "collective action" of group characters was outlined by "new description method".
These works, different from Ding Ling's previous novels, are vigorous and bold, but the emptiness brought by the grand narrative is also obvious. As far as narrative maturity is concerned, Ding Ling's novel Mother is a work worthy of attention. According to the screenwriter, the novel was originally planned to be 300,000 words, and it is planned to be written from the end of the Qing Dynasty. "After the Revolution of 1911, the Revolution of 1927, and even the recent rural land turmoil", it was interrupted by the ban on the publication of daily newspapers and the arrest of Ding Ling, but the completed part can be written independently.
Mother describes the story of a woman who lives in a big feudal family. After her husband died and her family was ruined, she rose up and took her children to a new girls' school to pursue a new lifestyle. The novel describes the daily life of a big family and a new school slowly, while the social events from the late Qing Dynasty to the Revolution of 1911 are looming among these ordinary scenes, and the foreground and background are intertwined, which shows the writer's ability to grasp and calmly express the relationship between the changes of the great times and the fate of characters.
The theme of this novel is "Mother". Of course, the novelist, as the second generation representative female writer of the May 4th New Literature, can trace back to the hard struggle of the previous generation of women and has historical continuity.
1September, 936, Ding Ling was kidnapped by Kuomintang agents.
With the help of the Central Party Organization, she fled Nanjing and went to northern Shaanxi. She changed from a famous writer in a big city to a literary worker in the red base area.
Ding Ling's behavior has a strong appeal to intellectuals and young people, and is welcomed by Mao Zedong and other China leaders. In the liberated areas, Ding Ling's life and writing style have undergone major changes.
1937 After the July 7th Incident, Ding Ling led the Field Service Corps to the front line of the Anti-Japanese War. Her writing was mostly battlefield communication, essays, propaganda and performance scripts, and miscellaneous notes of the Service Corps. And more work, such as marching, speaking and performing. , cannot be saved in text. During this period, Ding Ling was writing "behavior literature" with practical work, which could not be included in the history of written literature.
However, this life experience is of extraordinary significance to Ding Ling's literary writing, prompting her to think about the position and identity of writers in the new life and explore new writing methods. From 1939 to 194 1, Ding Ling mainly studied and worked in Yan 'an, which gave her time to turn her life and thinking to literature. This is the harvest season of Ding Ling's literary writing during the Anti-Japanese War, during which several short stories were published.
Among them, When I was in Xiacun (194 1) touched an important and sensitive theme, because it chose a woman who was forced to be a comfort woman by the Japanese invaders as the protagonist. The novel pushes the discrimination and slander suffered by Zhen Zhen after returning to his hometown to the foreground, depicts the multiple insults suffered by women in the new situation of national war, and continues and deepens the theme of "national criticism" in the May 4th new literature from a special perspective.
It should also be noted that the stories of "Xiacun" and "Zhen Zhen" are presented through the experience of "I", and it should be meaningful to set the identity of "I" as the first-person narrator in the novel.
If we relate to the works of the leftist era and compare the feelings of "I" in Shimura, we can see that Ding Ling's thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and the public has shifted from poetic imagination to paying attention to its grim reality.
In this context, the competition in hospitals (194 1, later renamed in hospitals) is more intense. This novel describes a young doctor, Lu Ping, who is assigned to a newly-built hospital. She witnessed the dirty environment, lax and overstaffed working conditions, which destroyed her "happy ideal". She tried to change the habits here with her work, and criticized the work of the hospital with several colleagues. As a result, she was not understood by the hospital leaders, but caused a lot of gossip about her private life. Even the hospitalized "patients are cold to her and say she is romantic"
This novel was once criticized for exposing the "dark side" of the revolutionary base areas and expressing the theme of "anti-collectivism". After the 1980s, the conflict between Luping and the environment was interpreted as the opposition between "modern scientific and cultural requirements associated with a high sense of revolutionary responsibility" and backward "feudal habits of small producers", which was highly praised by literary historians.
However, another clue in In the Hospital, that is, the change of "self" consciousness of Luping intellectuals, is also worthy of attention. The novel not only describes the conflict between Lu Ping and the environment, but also describes her adjustment to the relationship between herself and the environment. She studied medicine according to her father's wishes, not out of her own will, but in the revolutionary base area, bound by the iron hoop of "the needs of the party" in this messy hospital. She can't "ignore this hoop", but "clear her mind and welcome the coming life with a pleasant tone".
In a country with a generally backward culture and education, intellectuals were surrounded by soldiers and peasants during the war years when the nation was in danger. How can they not only participate in the practice of social reform, but also maintain the subjective personality of "self" and realize "being tempered without being dissolved"? Although the novel ends with a positive statement, the writer actually puts forward a question in combination with the overall plot of the novel.
1942, Mao Zedong published "Speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art", which gave a conclusive explanation. Ding Ling followed the spirit of the speech and agreed with the discussion on the transformation of intellectuals. According to her understanding, the most important way to reform is to join the workers and peasants' life: "To change yourself and get rid of all the old emotional consciousness, you must be tempered in the long-term mass struggle life. We must be able to integrate our feelings into the public's joys and sorrows in order to understand and reflect the public's joys and sorrows. This is not just to change our views, but to change our emotions and change the whole person. "
Logically speaking, Ding Ling seems to clear her mind, but once she enters the reality of life and writing, the problem becomes complicated, which is particularly obvious in the writing process of The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River.
The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River is a novel written by Ding Ling based on her life experience in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei land reform movement after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War.
In the past, people used to regard this novel as a work "reflecting the land reform movement", which is of course possible in terms of theme characteristics, but this generalization only shows the "turning over" side of the peasant class from the political and economic aspects. In fact, this novel also shows the obstacles of traditional patriarchal thoughts and habits to this change and the spiritual growth of farmers in the process of breaking these obstacles.
Ding Ling once said: "When I was writing, I revolved around a central idea-the idea of farmers changing the weather. "It is this kind of thinking that determines the materials and determines the characters." Indeed, as the writer said, in the novel, showing the historical changes of rural politics and economy and showing the changes of farmers' ideology are two closely related and parallel clues. Although the clue of the former is more obvious, it shows that farmers constantly overcome "changing ideas" and establish their own spiritual subjectivity, which is the internal driving force for the development of the plot and characters in the novel.
As a result, the novel is not good at tense plot changes, and the event progresses slowly, so that it accounts for one-third of the space before the scene of direct struggle between farmers and landlords appears. The lack of drama in external actions is to strengthen the fierceness of inner conflicts, and all this is the result of the writer's intention to express the theme of ideological change.
In the first chapter of the novel, Gu Yong drives a rubber-tyred car back to the village and brings back the news of land reform, which is meaningful in itself. As written in the novel, the important content of land reform is to divide farmers into several classes and determine their attitudes according to their class identity. The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River begins with a "middle figure" with ambiguous class status. From his perspective and psychology, the prelude to this great change, and the setting of a character, Heini, who has an uncle relationship with Gui, the landlord, and is madly in love with Cheng Ren, the chairman of the peasant association, consciously or unconsciously expressed doubts about the practice of dividing people into black and white poles. However, she described the situation and mentality of these "middle figures" with sympathetic strokes, and felt the land reform with the help of these figures' views to a certain extent, which undoubtedly made it possible to explore the depth of "humanity" in this more complicated stormy class struggle movement.
1948 After the first draft of "The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River" was written, it was handed over to the relevant leaders of the literary and art circles and received a cold reception. Later, because of Mao Zedong's concern, the manuscript was handed over to Hu Qiaomu, Ai Siqi, Chen Boda and others for review, and received positive opinions and suggestions for revision. Before publication, the author made some modifications and adjustments, such as changing Heini from the daughter of Qian Wen to a niece.
In the early days of the founding of New China, as an important representative of the new people's literature and art, Ding Ling was active in the domestic and foreign literary circles, and successively held leadership positions such as editor-in-chief of Literary Newspaper, editor-in-chief of People's Literature, vice-chairman of Chinese Writers Association, and party secretary. She is one of the founders of the new China literary system. Due to the busy work, there are not many published works.
1955, especially 1957, due to the increasingly serious "left" errors, Ding Ling was classified as the main member of the "anti-party clique" and was criticized by politics. 1958, Ding Ling was sent to work in the Great Northern Wilderness and the Cultural Revolution.
Ding Ling who came back is still full of great creative enthusiasm. While writing the sequels "The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River" and "On a Cold Day", she published a considerable number of essays, essays and literary comments, among which "Cowshed Sketch", "Comrade Qu Qiubai I Know" and "Du Wanxiang" are all representative works of literature in the new period.
Source: Selected Works of Ding Ling