Wang Weilian’s Your Eyes： Cultural Logic and Aesthetic Approach of Modern Love

Original Tian Keyu Jiangfei Literature Newspaper

your sight

Your eyes

Recently, the writer Wang Weilian’s latest novella Your Eyes was published by Huacheng Publishing House. The novel tells the love story between A Liang, a late maturing man, and Azi, a persevering intellectual woman, bad karma. The authors Tian Keyu and Jiang Fei wrote that Wang Weilian weaved aesthetic concepts into the cultural logic of characters and plots, which added extra cultural purport to the article and made his own creation an effective practice of "New South Writing".

Tian Keyu Jiang Fei/Wen

Wang Weilian’s latest novella Your Eyes tells the story of love between A Liang, a late maturing man, and Azi, a persevering intellectual woman, bad karma. In addition to the theme of love, the author supplemented by prose narrative and philosophical poems, taking into account the exhibition of Hakka and Yi folk culture, deepening the connotation of the text. While expressing distinctive local style, the aesthetic concept is woven into the cultural logic of characters and plots, which adds extra cultural purport to the article and makes its own creation an effective practice of "New South Writing".

Compared with the coherence and completeness of the plot, Your Eyes focuses more on the outline of the cultural scene. The author never misses any opportunity to integrate the history, culture and customs of Hakka and Yi families and Henggang area in Shenzhen into the text, and constantly refines the time and space coordinates of the story development and endows it with cultural identity, so that more cultural elements can participate in the interpretation of the character and plot development. For example, the career choice and spiritual belief of A Liang’s father, who has a tradition of farming and studying, are more consistent with the Chinese cultural tradition of "loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, courtesy, wisdom and faith" and "self-cultivation, family management and world peace". The massiness of culture has also led to their actions being harmonious, heavy, conservative and even slow. As a descendant of Hakkas, A Liang, though inspired by the "Reform and Opening-up" policy, deliberately made a second change, but in the early stage, he still had to indulge in fantasy, lacked real action, and fell into evasion and value negation in limited change and infinite disappointment. As the "savior" of A Liang’s life, Azi represents the Jia family, the creator of water civilization full of freedom and enterprising spirit. Her flexibility, wisdom and resolute action are like a glimpse of flowing water, injecting kinetic energy into A Liang’s life. However, the unfortunate experience of the Yi family echoes the miserable life of Azi-this seems to be the author’s deliberate arrangement. Compared with the folk culture with the same characteristics of marine civilization, such as Minnan, the tenacious "Yi family" identity can participate in the setting of characters more organically.

As a result, A Liang and Azi seem to be the epitome of the fate of two cultures, and their fate trajectories have distinct cultural logic. A Liang’s aging, stagnation and rising, and Azi’s youth, tenacity and fighting alone represent the different cultural personalities of Hakka and Yi families. In the deeper, it points to the metaphor of the ancient Central Plains civilization and the emerging marine civilization. The author unifies history and individuals at the cultural level, and thinks about two kinds of life dilemmas and their breakthrough ways through a love story. The key to love lies in whether the two sides can be allowed to participate in each other’s family affairs-the two sides who love each other need to realize real partner identity and empathy through this step. Such a plot setting reflects the author’s recognition of the value of China’s traditional "family-oriented" and related ethical concepts, and reveals it as a universal cultural and psychological truth regardless of region and ethnic group, thus opening up the gap between the so-called "southern writing" and "northern writing", and making the growth story of "ethnic group integration" between Azi and A Liang have more extensive and far-reaching enlightenment significance in contemporary cultural propositions.

Wang Weilian

But the cultural thinking in Your Eyes does not stop there. For the author, "love" is just a form, but it refers to the blending of cultures by the sweet combination between new people. What is more important is actually the form and content of life being constantly activated in the process of blending. In Your Eyes, the author gives the text a strong lyrical meaning with prose narration. For example, a large number of memories with A Liang and Azi as the first person, direct quotations from A Liang’s diary, etc., all explain or construct the past and future of life based on personal experience rather than common words in the historical context. The detailed description is carried out by the way of breaking into the spiritual world of the characters, so as to integrate the subtle changes of emotions into the development of the plot. This way of writing releases a very important aesthetic signal, that is, the author is trying to restore the emphasis on personal experience and advocate individual expression in the digital age, so that life can return to a state of "cascading surge" in the sharpening of feelings and rich experience. In the novel, A Liang’s first change is to quit online games, and break up with "Li Ying Xia", trying to be sensitive and creative in tasting her slow response to the real world, and finally reaching a deep reconciliation with history and reality, realizing her self-growth and capturing her lover’s heart. This is a process in which "empirical reality" is constantly produced. In this process, A Liang broke the homogenization life between himself and other sellers in the "International Glasses City", fully released the kinetic energy of life, and then formed a personal aesthetic system with practice and experience as the core.And highlight the new aesthetic advocacy.

It should be noted that in Your Eyes, the author’s prediction of the development prospect of the "glasses" industry and the structure of the "glasses designer" profession also reflect this aesthetic point of view. Since Hawke Harmo and Adorno defined "cultural industry" for the first time in Dialectics of Enlightenment in the 1940s, the development format of cultural industry has changed greatly. In the novel, the author turned his attention to glasses from "production" to "design", from "technical" to "cultural", and made it a "business industry engaged in cultural production and providing cultural services", which also changed his identity from "seller" to "glasses designer". At the same time, the glasses produced at this time are no longer mass-produced, standardized, standardized and industrialized, but cultural products full of personal experience and even with the meaning of "orphan". By directly quoting design notes, the author reproduces the feelings and philosophies behind each pair of glasses, thus endowing them with unique cultural attributes. In the era of pursuing economic benefits, it is often necessary to "short-circuit sensibility and intelligence", but "Your Eyes" restores the slide between them by introducing the perspective of designers. It can be seen that the aesthetic concept cited by the author not only attaches importance to "personal experience", but also has a certain anti-consumerism color. Perhaps this is why the author did not write about the direct conversion between glasses designed by A Liang and economic benefits until the end of the article. But it is worth mentioning that,In the author’s conception, there is no contradiction between this "anti-consumerism" concept and the benefit prospect of glasses designers. The novel once wrote that the design exhibition of the creative industry "environmental glasses" sponsored by Azi attracted great attention and "quickly generated commercial value". In fact, this provides a guarantee for the "survival" of "cultural industry" in the consumption era, and maintains the feasibility of the author’s aesthetic approach in designing the development prospect of cultural industry in plot logic.

However, both the emphasis on experience, the adjustment of the relationship between sensibility and intelligence, and the integration of cultural logic in the characters mentioned above are actually based on the author’s respect and emphasis on "people". In this article, no matter what kind of development "glasses" will achieve, they will always serve as a tool for people to interact with the world and play the role of "rewarding the eyes of the world". The purpose of glasses design is to make it organically participate in the construction of the social attribute of "people" and modify the eyes of "people" so as to better reflect "people". Therefore, although the story is told around "glasses" throughout the article, the topic is still "your eyes" and "you" means everyone. This sense of "human" presence actually runs through the interest of the full text-even including the production of the story.

The origin of the love story between A Liang and Azi is a "tie" attraction. It happened between A Liang’s glasses and Azi’s glasses, and it was love at first sight. This is a bit like "Crush" in English, showing a psychological state of "falling in love quickly". It is a kind of stimulation, but it is different from the sensory attraction of acousto-optic images, but a spiritual impact, which is not used to in modern society. From this point of view, it is different from the conventional, mechanical "stimulus-response" mechanism related to conventions and domestication-it requires a directional basic construction of the inner self-whether it is the protagonist or the reader. At the same time, because "Crush" itself is blind, it is accompanied by fantasy, so it is often short-lived and needs to be maintained with something stronger, which is still a requirement for "people" in essence.

Therefore, although this is not a novel modern love story, the author has really injected a lot of cultural thinking and humanistic care and set a threshold for understanding it. Compared with Wang Weilian’s avant-garde works in the past, the theme and techniques of Your Eyes are relatively traditional. Does this mean that the writer’s style has changed, or perhaps this issue is not so important, because Your Eyes continues the realistic concern for "people" as always, and hits the pain point of the current culture, which is the inevitable result of the continuous extension and deepening of the writer’s thoughts.

Original title: Wang Weilian’s Your Eyes: Cultural Logic and Aesthetic Approach of Modern Love | New Criticism