In Wang Xiaobo's works, night is dark, miserable, tense, sinister, looming and boundless, which means darkness, depression, confusion, terror, despair and death. Wang Xiaobo compared the "Cultural Revolution" period to a long night, but the connotation of the image of "night" was still relatively narrow. From the perspective of Wang Xiaobo's life and creation, he endowed "night" with rich and profound meaning. Roaming in the dark, like a grotesque Bruce, is a spiritual novel and an expression of the author's "present" mood when writing. Here, the author expresses his belief that he will never give in under compulsion: "Some people can get happiness from giving in to kimono, but I can't." He said that there is only one life that is desirable, and that is to get lost in exploring the infinite possibilities of novel art. Wang Xiaobo's fear of the night is the fear of a enslaved, boring and uncreative life and the fear of death. How can he transcend death and spend a long cold night? He chose creation and poetic life. Therefore, he called himself a bard and a romantic knight, and used art to fight against cold nights, transcend death, destiny, life and existence. He said: "Good poems describe different things with changeable rhythms, but they all have one thing in common. It has a crystal luster, as if from the stars ... I wish I could write such a poem. I wish I were a star. If I can shine, I don't have to be afraid of the dark. If I am so beautiful, then all my fears can disappear. " (8) Imagine a boy over the age of 17, trying to get rid of the discourse hegemony and language cage at that time in the dim light of night in subtropical areas, and expressing his true feelings with his simplicity and sincerity. What a touching scene. Then, the images corresponding to "night" are "stars", "stars" and "silver starlight", which are the spiritual source of Wang Xiaobo. He longs for stars, looks for stars, dreams of becoming stars, illuminates the darkness and fights against the sun. If Wang Xiaobo's life and creation can be summarized in one sentence, it is: starlight shines at night. Wang Xiaobo really crossed the night sky like a meteor and comet, and his shining light crossed the dark night sky.
Another important existential code of Wang Xiaobo is the image of execution ground in the novel, and the images of decapitation and corpse derived from it. (9) "Night" and "execution ground" are Wang Xiaobo's profound understanding of life and the world he lives in.
The characters in Wang Xiaobo's novels can be divided into two well-defined square teams, namely, the people in the Yang world and the people in the Yin world; Military representatives/educated youth, league knowledge books/students, doctors/patients, police/prisoners, etc. , are playing the game of control/resistance, reform/boycott, chase/escape.
The static and dynamic scenes in Wang Xiaobo's novels are also worthy of attention. When his narrative begins with fighting, chasing and running away, he is free and unrestrained, full of energy and humorous, such as Wang Er going up the mountain, Lao Lu catching Wang Er, fleeing with Hongfu, and Xue Song fighting for marriage. Once a character stays in one place, it is often a depressed, depressed and lifeless world. Correspondingly, the meanings of the two places (Palace, Xuanyangfang, Grey Chang 'an, Luoyang/Fenghuang Village and Road) are opposite.
Taking three novels in the Golden Age as examples, this paper discusses the conflict, confrontation and collision between Yin and Yang.
In the golden age, Wang Er was an educated youth from Beijing who jumped the queue in Yunnan. In his early twenties, he was full of many extravagant hopes and strong youthful agitation, and inevitably had a fierce conflict with the control system headed by local captains and farm army representatives, that is, Yang World. When he confronted the military representative with a shotgun, the conflict reached its climax, which was restraint and resistance, setting and anti-setting, emotional atrophy and passion for life. In this world of the underworld, Wang Er-he's lifestyle and living condition in the primitive mountain forest is an incredible dream. They live a life of self-cultivation far from human beings and civilization. They live wild, free and arbitrary lives, and they make love in nature without scruple. Their spiritual freedom and passion for life have been released and opened to the greatest extent, and a carnival song of life has been played. In this sense, after they went down the mountain, they were besieged by the forces of the Yang world: they accepted the trial and wrote confession materials, but they were ineffective in fighting. However, Wang Erhe dispelled the sacredness, hypocrisy and solemnity with unrestrained spirit and sex and relaxed games, thus declaring their invincibility in this conflict between Yin and Yang.
At the age of 30, Wang Er became a university teacher, but he felt boring and mechanical life was like a kind of torture. In his view, there are two systems in this world, one comes from the necessity of survival and the other comes from existence itself. As far as the former is concerned, it is for the sake of fame and fortune, pretending to be upright and prude against one's will, living a life of performing for others and losing one's own existence; And existence itself has infinite charm, it has no secular utility, it is as natural as grass growing in heat, and the boundary between them is the establishment of yin and yang interface. Wang Er wavered between fame and fortune and the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty, between sincere pursuit and concealment of social true feelings, and between natural life and survival fatigue, and made a painful choice. In normal life, everything in Yang's world is not as ferocious and aggressive as in the abnormal "revolutionary period". It is like the stagnant and invisible air around Wang Er, a "negative person", which is everywhere and difficult to capture. Wang er always has the impulse to fight, but he doesn't know where to point the finger. Therefore, he had no choice but to "wander alone". Is it to survive or to return to existence itself? Before Wang two dead, the novel was still a problem before the end.
Love in the Revolutionary Period is a novel about sex and personal growth history. Personal growth is framed in a revolutionary period that obliterates personal existence, but in the utopia set by great men, the sense of being set, permitted and doll is unforgettable, and individual will and collective will are inevitably incompatible. The love between Wang Er, a junior, and a female college student surnamed Se is painful and sad. As two fish that escaped from the net, they were not punished for violating the rules of the game. Their love in the wild Woods and the river can be regarded as a healing for them to escape from the edge of the center of the Yang world. Here, they return to human nature and experience the love between men and women, but the psychological projection of Wang Erxiao's painful experience made him unable to make a difference. Behind the failure of the superficial revolution is the personal psychological frustration brought by the dirty and ugly world. The revolutionary role they played was actually an inhuman fooled doll and clay figurine. Their deformed love, which began in the failure of chewing, can only end in failure, which is a tortuous and obscure personal emotional tragedy in the revolutionary period. When Wang Er grows up, he works as a worker in a street tofu factory. The confrontation and conflict between him and the people in Yang's world, the moral priest and the female league secretary who helped him finally turned into the joy of sleeping on the pillow. The female communist youth league secretary, shouldering the mission of saving the spirit, consciously or unconsciously slipped into the indulgence and sinking of the body, making it a matter of yin and yang. This is a kind of wrong love.
In the Golden Age, the conflict between Yin and Yang is fierce, clear and simple, and there is an atmosphere of confrontation between the two armies. Wang Erhe is a closely combined fighting alliance, and in Love in the Revolutionary Period, this conflict is more subtle and complicated, in the most secret psychological level, in the personal growth history, and also between Wang Er and the female league secretary.
In My Boundaries of Yin and Yang, the protagonist Wang Er chose a unique way of life. He lived alone, lived in the basement for a long time, liked loneliness and darkness, and lived freely with the pleasure of writing novels and translating books. The direct cause of this situation is his impotence, which is actually a cultural metaphor and is caused by the injury of the yang world. He escaped and hid in the underworld. In the eyes of the people in the Yang world, he is a little neurotic and classified as a different kind, but for a long time, he and the people in the Yang world lived a life of mutual interference and peace. Sun Xiao, a female gynecologist, broke this life, which led to the imbalance, conflict and contest between them. On the face of it, Wang Er won a great victory in this contest. Different from the original intention of the female Communist Youth League secretary who treated Wang Er, a young worker, but eventually donated his body, Sun Xiao began to dedicate his body to treat Wang Er's physical impotence, and finally cured his body, pulling Wang Er back to the Yang world, but it also led to his mental impotence. The sexual relationship between two kings and two women contains the motif of salvation. Although their motives, ways and roles are different, they all ended in failure, and the failure of the latter is a spiritual rout, which is the biggest failure in Wang Er's life.
In these three novels, the visualization of the shadow world refers to the transformation from the primitive forest in the wild and the border, to the grove by the river outside the city, and then to the dark and messy basement in the hospital in the city. The wildness and poesy of nature turned from strong to weak, and finally declined to the dusty land where people lived. Wang Er, a feminine person, has shown a trend of degeneration, atrophy and decline all the way, from revelry in his own world, flirting with the Yang world and becoming a member of the Yang world, and the conflict between the Yin and Yang world has also changed from intense tension to desalination and relaxation, until it turned into friendship and handshake. Can this be called a trilogy of Yin and Yang?
Consistent with the spiritual structure of Wang Xiaobo and his novels, the narrative structure of his novels often adopts double lines, multiple lines, parallelism and interweaving, ancient and modern dialogue and echo, documentary and fiction, reality and imagination, present and history, life and this article, forming a wonderful and complex open narrative space in which the narrator can freely enter and return. The future world consists of three narrative sections: describing the "present" real life of the narrator in the future world, recalling the life of his uncle in the history of the last century, and the life in his uncle's biography written by the narrator. The narrative structure of Silver Age is: the real life in the writing company, the university life in memory, the university life in the novel Love between Teachers and Students, the love between teachers and students and the strange desert world. Among them, the plot core and narrative motivation of Silver Age and 20 10 are riddles, and the narrative process of the novels is also a riddle solving process. Future World and 20 15 both adopt the perspective of teenagers, and naughty and sexually aroused teenagers can be regarded as pre-narrators, whose narration has played a role in subverting the grotesque and absurd relationship between characters, ethical relations or ironic world or increasing the banter effect.