| CHI Li, whose literary creation is inexhaustible, whose literary conception is pioneer and whose artistic aspiration is still exuberant, is a talented and important woman writer. Her novels focus on the life of ordinary people, and for 20 years she has kept on writing one novel after anothe1 and hence the"CHI Li Phenomenon". Among the critiques about her novels, the common problem is about love and marriage, and yet little is mentioned about this problem. Therefore, in this pape1 her novels are analyzed and decoded by using her viewpoint on love and marriage.First of all, CHI Li's ruthless overthrow of ideal love is dealt with in this paper. Love and marriage is a universa1 topic throughout the history of western and eastern countries,and thus the literary classics are those depicting touching love stories. CHI Li's viewpoint on love and marriage is in unity with the traditional culture. In the marriage-first-then-love marital life, love affairs are conducted in the passing of days, for romantic love may have an ending but the days to live seem endless. As a result,"living the days"determines the realistic existence of marital life. Chinese traditional marital view is that moment excitement of sexual activity is looked down upon while lasting and steady feelings of love are emphasized; physiological desire is looked down upon while family responsibility is emphasized; self-indulgence is looked down upon while tolerance and harmony are emphasized between husband and wife. Different regional cultures and background information may affect your understanding of the above view. CHI Li's viewpoint on love and marriage is closely connected with her cultural background, her life experience and the people's quality in her city. CHI Li implicitly persuade people to give up their ideal and be faced with the reality.In CHI Li's novels, either previous or recent novels such as"Conduct No I.0ve Affairs","Forever Running Green Water", Lipstick", all of which are short of ideals, CHI Li interprets love as"conducting no love affairs", which serves both as a refusal and a proclamation—a simple life value is being established. This newly established life value not only means that family trivia and social relationship have destroyed love but also implies that the contemporary ideal value has totally lost.What CHI Li's love novels provide us with are comic and tragic stories in people's world of feelings.For those who fall in love with each other, most of them can maintain a steady marital relationship, though they are not quite satisfied with their marriage quality. Such phenomenon can be found in CHI Li's novels such as"Long Night","Premeditated Murder","Conduct No Love Affairs"and"You Are a River". In particula1 CHI Li proclaims her unchanged viewpoint in"Coming and Going": conducting no love affairs, which serves both as her life philosophy and her ways of writing novels.The disappointing world of love and marriage created by CHI Li in her novels is doubt and refusal to romantic love, and her love novels are full of too many sorrows. In"Conduct No Love Affairs", CHI Li announces the love proclamation for contemporary townspeople. She thinks of love as a kind of imagination that is expressed by means of language, so what she emphasizes in her novels is her viewpoint of"conducting no love affairs", and she shows her understanding and respect to"living-the-jays"marriage life.Compared to other contemporary women writers, CHI Li sets up a lower level of love affairs in her novels, which indicates that the marriage characteristic of Chinese people is"low in quality, high in steadiness". CHI Li once claimed that her literary works would focus on the theme of"exposing imagery love affairs", which can be found in her novel"Forever Running Green Water"; however, it is a pity that in this novel, the so called"romantic Love,, is only created by poets that doesn't exist in current society and for those women who are no longer in their youth, they are not suitable for playing the love games.The characters in CHI Li's novels are all the ordinary people living in China, and in their daily trifles, ideal and romantic love is nothing but a luxury that they cannot reach.Secondly, CHI Li puts forward the viewpoint of"tiresome life", in which life is watery and unromantic just like imagery love affairs. CHI Li's novels are filled with this viewpoint according to some commenters.For her main characters, CHI Li designs a low level of life:"living", that is, living one's life is better than ideal and romance; after long struggle and hardship, the main characters eventually understand the real meaning of marriage. Nevertheless, CHI Li lacks a his cultural perspective to describe the irrationality of love due to her limitation, while in modern literature it is impossible to avoid the irrationality of human beings.CHI Li makes use of her trilogy-"Tiresome Life","Conduct No Love Affairs"and"Birth of the Sun"-to demonstrate her viewpoint. Real marital life is presented in her trilogy: People conform to the main life stream, resist all seductions and seek happiness from sorrows. CHI Li is superior to the contemporary writers in that she carefully depicts. the detailed city life and the townspeople, but the low level of life she sets up for the townspeople is no good for improving the spiritual life of the contemporaries. Anyway from her novels"Morning, Miss"and ."Go and Never Return", it is clearly seen that what she lacks is not excellent artistic intelligence or writing skills but a hi$ standard set up for marital life and a second thought on it.Thirdly, by using her novels, CHI H counteracts people's spiritual pursuit. Faced with the complicated real life, CHI Li bases her novels on marital life of the contemporaries, and her novels embody her unique understanding of current love affairs and marriage. Take"You Are a River"for example. The protagonist in this novel whose name is I ala totally counteracts the spiritual and moral pursuits. Meanwhile, CHI Li over-praises the ability to live and living-the-days philosophy in this novel, and thus has a tendency of anti-morality. In her novel,"Lipstick", CHI H explores the life difficulties facing women and expresses her opinions about women's destiny.Starting from her novel"Coming and Going", CHI Li begins her pursuit of vogue, adding more to her viewpoint on love and marriage. Through such novels, the pursuit of spiritual value is counteracted in a new way: submission to rationalism, admission of Epicureanism, and over-emphasis on feminism, all of which lead her novels to mediocrity. Different from"Coming and Going", the novel"Kan Mai Niang"casts a suspicious eye on men together with an analysis of love values and spiritual values.By a reasonable analysis of CHI Li's novels, it is concluded that CHI Li's great popularity is both normal-from the objective view of point, and abnormal-from a rational view of point. In a time of mediocrity it is natural for the mediocre mass to meet with a mediocre writer, but literature and rationality shouldn't be mediocre. It is difficult for CHI Li to shoulder a strong responsibility to history and to have a deep understanding of all Chinese people.CHI Li is also weak in some contemporary values such as irrationality.Considering artistic skills and life experience, CHI Li is neither a"traditional"nor a"modern"writer, and she is only a"current"writer who can detect what is happening currently. As a new realistic writer, CHI Li's importance does not lie in the significant literary theme she creates, but in the fact that she destroys the previous"realism". In Chinese contemporary literary history"neo-realism"is clearly different from the usual"realism". In the usual realism, a writer, if she/he fails to convey the established essence or the main stream, will be regarded as a"naturalist"or"anti-realist", while in neo-realism, the usual realism is overthrown and the writers have more free space to explore life itself. However, the biggest defect in neo-realism is that it can only present the"actual life", but not the"real life".No matter how painstakingly a writer describes life in his/her novels, he/she will find his/her novels lack literary value if he/she has no judgment standard for life values and no aesthetic standard. CHI Li's trilogy was once very popular because those novels catered to the living philosophy of people who lived in the societg, and people accept her novel for the sake of their epistemological understanding not for the sake of aesthetic appreciation.Therefore, her novels cannot arouse people's deep understanding of human nature, and cannot provide people with incomparable enjoyment of beauty.In CHI Li's novels, CHI H painstakingly describes the actual life, but being short of modem intellectuals, rationality suspicious mind, and critical eye, she cannot arouse Chinese people's consciousness on what a '.real,, life is. The city legend created in her novels at the turn of the century can only expose the surface clash in human nature due t9 her lack of the unique understanding of the market economy and the current society itself. As a result, her novels fail to reveal the harsh clash between human being's rationality and irrationality and between desire and reality and she chooses to create bizarre plot and happy scene, and to use too much suspension and contingency to direct people's destiny.In CHI Li's novels, '.humanistic spirit,, is withdrawn from the foreground, and it is very difficult to f1nd the modernism initiated by the May 4th Movement-freedom, democracy reason and human right. The figures in her novels are slavers of the environment, or slavers of mone3 or persons without determination. CHI Li also lacks the critical spirit that a modern intellectual should hold, for she compromises with the fact that life is passive and even slavery.The reasons why CHI Li's novels lack rationality are that the figures in her novels tend to submit to the environment by seeking happiness from bitterness, and that she hasn't got a critical spirit against the environment. So, in her novels, there is only helplessness but no wildness, only failure but no corruption, and only small bitterness but no big tragedy. Small wonder that CHI Li for several times refers to the standard of a good novel as"good for the eyes"in the recent talks about novels writing.In this paper, criticized is CHI Li's over-pursuit of vogue, and questioned is whether she fails to claim intellectuals'standpoint.
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