What interesting novels does Annie Baby have?

So far, Annie Baby has published four books: two collections of short stories Farewell to Vian and T.A.; A novel "Flowers on the Other Side"; The latest book, Rose Island, is made in the style of "walking literature" in Taiwan Province and Hongkong, which contains her travels in Vietnam-not a general "trip" to introduce local scenery, but a "journey" focusing on the author's strong subjective consciousness, with excellent photographic pictures in the middle. As a writer welcomed and affirmed by the market (1), Anne Baby should be regarded as the first "brand" writer of romance novels in contemporary Chinese mainland. After Qiong Yao and Yi Shu, our cultural market has finally produced and owned an urban romance novel writer with "China (Mainland) characteristics". However, Annie Baby may not be satisfied with calling her a romantic novelist. In the preface of each of her books, Anne Baby repeatedly emphasized that she was concerned about "soul", "nothingness and despair of human nature" and so on. At this point, Anne Baby's ambition is much bigger than her predecessors. She claims that her writing is to soothe the readers' "soul" and that "the essence of writing is to release human nature" (Annie Baby is not only a columnist in some fashion magazines such as Girlfriend, Huaxi and City Pictorial, but also her novels appear in Harvest, a representative magazine of serious literature in China). It is precisely because of the fuzziness of literary grades (popular writers? Serious writer? Popular content and serious subject matter? Popular theme "pure literature" posture? ), Annie Baby presents some interesting signs of changes in the field of literature and culture during the transitional period.

Annie Baby belongs to a writer whose internet fame turned to the development of paper media. Heroes, regardless of their origins, papers or networks, are likely to produce good literature. We don't need to draw a clear line between paper literature and online literature. After all, they use the same language and share the same social, cultural and ideological assumptions. The extent to which they can break away from convention and provide unique perceptual views on literature is the standard to measure the quality of literature, which is not different with the changes of publishing and communication carriers. On the other hand, we can't help but see the reading habits, aesthetic tastes and value orientation of readers of online literature, that is, "netizens". In the literary sociology constructed by this specific online community, these will be reflected in their quick and immediate bbs response, which will inevitably produce their own literary evaluation standards. More precisely, this standard may not be called "literature". Online postings are mostly free to express their feelings, so it is difficult to ask them to position the literary value of their works in the frame of reference of literary history with the eyes of professional researchers. However, it is from these messy comments that a specific range of trade-offs and cultural atmosphere are taking shape, and the purchasing power of this group of netizens that cannot be ignored has long been taken away by sensitive businesses. Their cultural taste will inevitably affect the production and circulation of cultural products and the adjustment and reorganization of the cultural market. The final result is that they have promoted the formation of new literary and cultural fields as one of the forces. In this new field, the positions occupied by different writers, the cultural resources allocated to them and the symbolic capital they have will inevitably shift, adjust and change. Although Anne Baby declared that "I don't miss the days when I published my works on the Internet, it was just a process and it was over" (4), her fame, her largest readership, the symbolic value she relied on in this new field and the economic benefits she gained from it were all related to netizens, who were another status symbol of petty bourgeoisie when the Internet was expensive (5). Moreover, Anne Baby herself is a member of this group. She is not only a product of petty-bourgeois ideology, but also a participant and builder of this ideology.

"Petty bourgeoisie" has become one of the buzzwords in recent years, but its specific meaning is difficult to explain. It has some concepts of social stratum, but it is not strictly defined by economic income, but more points to the "life" taste, mood and atmosphere of a certain "culture". In this way, the usage between economy and culture is almost the same as that of the "petty bourgeoisie" in the revolutionary era. In the revolutionary era, "petty bourgeoisie" is not only one of the "analyses of various social classes in China" in economic position, but also often used to criticize the personal feelings and consciousness of intellectuals, such as "sentimentality" and "tenderness", which are inconsistent with the requirements of the revolution (6). The mass media of Business Times skillfully inherited and misappropriated this concept with both economic and cultural meanings, and after transformation, processing and subversion in the new context, it became a productive and concentrated core signifier in mass culture. Around this signifier, a series of guidance and instructions on lifestyle such as clothing, food, housing, transportation, industry, entertainment and cultural activities have been determined.

The emergence and popularity of the word "petty bourgeoisie" and related cultural products and cultural phenomena in the mid-1990s indicate that after more than ten years' development, our mass culture has also begun to become "exquisite", which is no longer just the popularity of pornography and violence and tabloid and political snooping, but a more "quality" exquisite mass culture. The development and maturity of this exquisite pop culture is not only led by the pop culture in the developed world, but also inevitably bears the unique imprint of our time and social and cultural development. I said earlier that Annie Baby was the first brand pop writer with China (Mainland) characteristics, and I was not joking. From her, we can observe how ten years of "pure literature", popular culture and social development have nurtured and achieved her.

Most of Anne Baby's novels revolve around the love between urban men and women. However, the reason why I finally positioned it as popular literature is not that it is biased towards the genre of "romance novels". Although this genre is often criticized by mainstream male critics as little love, the choice of theme does not necessarily hinder the Excellence of form and the profundity of theme. A typical example is Zhang Ailing, whose preference for the genre of "romance novels" makes her insist on using this genre framework. However, her clever use of images and skillful skills, as well as her dismantling of the common love between men and women shown in general romance novels, often subvert and surpass this framework and make it reach the level of serious literature. At first glance, Anne Baby's novels seem to have these characteristics. Her writing is fluent and has distinct personal characteristics. The narrative style is Duras-style jumping phrase, and the content of love is not Qiong Yao-style. It often ends with "break up, leave, say goodbye", plus philosophical aphorisms that appear from time to time in the text, such as "a long-term ideal can suddenly disappear one day, for a short moment, for a long time." ; "There is an absolute emptiness around us, and all production and consumption are aimed at disappearing ..." (7) makes the appearance of her novels even full of modernist style. But when I say that the level of literature is vague, one of the meanings is that in the post-modern consumer culture environment, the boundary between popular culture and serious culture is blurred, such as the clever use of popular literature style by serious literature or the "taste" embellished by the secondment of serious culture by popular literature. The modernist style in the appearance of Anne Baby's novels can't hide the lack of its essence. Her novel, Su Like Wei Zhen, another romantic novelist in Taiwan Province, has a heroine who is "eager but unhappy" (8). They live in their own world and can't believe their feelings. They are bound to stage a series of urban love dramas that not only bring pain to the heroine, but also make themselves enjoy it. The hero and heroine start with an encounter (the new element of the encounter scene is the internet, and of course there are bars with indispensable city symbols), and the mutual attraction in temperament (which attracts the chat with "soul mates" through the internet or the observed clothing details, good taste, and the "sexy" indifference of the city) makes the hero and heroine begin to approach, and may have sex, but it may not happen. Because the heroine has a warm and calm quality from the beginning, she is willing to indulge in a period of "returning to the city at night" to warm each other, but she seems to know that this kind of love is unreliable, so she always leaves soberly and resolutely. Ai sighs: "I don't know anyone who can love each other deeply. Maybe he walked around a long distance, and after a lifetime, he still couldn't meet him. " (9) "We are people with no future, constantly looking for and constantly leaving." (10) "Just wait for love once, maybe there will never be anyone. However, this kind of waiting is love itself. " (1 1) "A fallen love has finally disappeared." (12) However, Annie Baby hardly explained where the heroine's personality characteristics and pessimistic attitude towards love came from, and how the environment nurtured and developed her characteristics. Because the characteristics of the heroine are an established fact from the beginning, the city has not formed an organic interaction with it. The urban scene is just a set, and the love in the middle is just a performance of self-abuse, similar to a gorgeous MTT. It provides the consumption of symbols, images, mood and atmosphere, but it has no inspiration for thinking. Basically, it is a self-circulating closed display, not a deep excavation of cocoon peeling and reeling. Annie Baby occasionally gives a vague explanation, such as the heroine's family is not harmonious, her mother is eccentric, and her childhood is unhappy. These established "fates" have become the unavoidable reasons for the heroine's character. In the novel Flowers on the Other Side, Joe and Nansheng, as well as two women with the same personality, enrich the story. Baby Anne didn't specify whether these two people were the same person, but she consciously made them mirror each other. Maybe Nansheng is a film created by Joe, and maybe Joe is a novel written by Nansheng. In this way, through the argument of Nansheng's fate, we can see the alienation of Nansheng or Joe. However, with the death of parents, unfortunately, the family has once again become the driving force of the heroine's life fate, in order to pave the way for Nansheng and Lin Heping to entangle in the gloomy emptiness of "doomed love" and Joe's indifference and cynicism. The heroine's various reactions seem to have been doomed by her "fate" from the beginning, and there is no possibility of growth and redemption afterwards, and there is no bridge or road between the other side of the flower and this shore.

In the case of a thin story (neither Qiong Yao's ups and downs nor Yi Shu's ups and downs), Annie Baby still attracts a large number of readers, which cannot but be attributed to her skill in creating novel words. She successfully constructed a calling identity among characters, narrators, authors and readers, that is, a mirror image calling each other from all directions. There is a considerable degree of emotional projection and recognition between the narrator-author and the characters in Anne Baby's novels, and the author is by no means superior to the characters (13). This is also one of the keys to the success of romance novels. Different from popular novels imagined by critics who criticize popular culture, the author only fools ordinary readers with some sensational stories. In fact, a successful writer of popular novels is quite sincere to the characters in his works. If the narrator-the author and the characters don't have quite the same emotional and value orientation, readers can easily feel that he has been fooled. Qiong Yao's belief in vigorous love is consistent with the belief of middle-class women in Yi Shu. On the other hand, Zhang Ailing created a narrator roaming from various angles in her quasi-romantic novels to provide an ironic voice. More specifically, the sense of identity created by Anne Baby's discourse level includes two aspects: one is the grasp of spiritual feelings. She sensitively captures a kind of mood and mentality of urban white-collar workers, a kind of fatigue, drift, insecurity and indifference. These emotions can be successfully distributed through scattered narrative flow and philosophical discussion, and Anne Baby attributed the origin of these emotions to fate or the sweetness and fragility of human nature and soul. Obviously, Anne Baby's explanation of this emotion is quite non-ideological. There may be two reasons for her explanation: one is to adopt the strategy that mass culture can't see or "can't see" social problems; It is also possible that she was influenced by the thoughts of the 1980s, and literature always looked for answers from "humanity" without examining how this humanity was cultivated and developed in the social environment. As she said, what she did was to "appease". Readers may not get to the bottom of the story when reading novels. Immersed in the emotional atmosphere aroused by the novel, they regard Anne Baby as "caring for me", thus releasing narcissism and self-pity again and again in the sadness aroused by Anne Baby's stylized novels. Second, the identity politics built by a large number of consumer codes. In Anne Baby's novels, there are many seemingly casual descriptions of "taste", which are composed of clothes, espresso, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Paganini, European art movies and so on. The snobbery revealed by the identity politics constructed by this taste can be traced back at least to Yi Shu, the ancestor who entered the mainland market in the mid-1980s and had a great influence on many contemporary female writers of popular novels. Compared with the women in Qiong Yao's time, the middle-class women in Yi Shu's novels seem to have improved a lot. They no longer just regard love as the first priority for women to prove their existence. They are financially independent and have their own businesses. However, under close reading, these novels are still only modern copies of perfect appearance. No matter how educated and knowledgeable a woman is, she still needs a handsome and tasteful man with a good economic foundation. Their eyes will never be marginalized by "professionals", and their strong sense of identity makes it difficult for them to find the other half that meets their ideal standards, so they often sigh with rare love. This kind of lamentation is deeply hierarchical. In capturing and capturing the "flavor", Anne Baby inherited Yi Shu's "torch vision", which is a snob to put it bluntly. To put it bluntly, she and some "petty bourgeoisie" among her readers are quite snobbish, but they may not realize it consciously.

To some extent, Annie Baby is especially like the product of weird peace between Chen Ran in 1980s and 1990s and consumer culture in 1990s. On the one hand, it is the nihility and despair of the modernists' metaphysical concern for the individual, on the other hand, it is the envy and enjoyment of the so-called "elegant" material, taste and emotional appeal, as well as the "nothingness" and indefatigability of mumbling here. The vast social reality, the living conditions of different groups and the civil rights struggle between them no longer enter the author's field of vision. This is also the status quo of literature. When the social reality is evacuated, literature seems to swing between the two, either escaping into empty metaphysics or indulging in Zhang Ailing's pleasure in material details.

The "pure literature" in the 1980s and 1990s and the popular culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan raised the petty bourgeoisie at the same time, which is the composition of their cultural pedigree. On the other hand, the reason why Xiaozi's novels and Anny Baby's novels have * * * sounds is that they do have some similarities in emotion in real situations, but this emotion is by no means fate, but a very realistic cultural situation in third world cities. It's a character cultivated in the working environment similar to China's "enclave". These urban white-collar workers go in and out of air-conditioned rooms every day and bear heavy work pressure. On the one hand, they must strive to gain a foothold in the highly competitive workplace and rise to a higher position. In this case, fatigue and anxiety are inevitable. On the other hand, compared with ordinary workers, a more comfortable office environment and higher salary will make these people feel more or less superior. More importantly, the psychological and customary closeness and attachment to the western "advanced" and "civilized" worlds cultivated in the environment of "keeping pace with the world" is often accompanied by contempt and alienation from the native land or the third world. The crux of the problem is that this "global" is intertwined with countless "local" and leaves the "enclave" within eight hours. The overwhelming reality is mixed and nameless. On the Tianya Voice Forum, there is a post called "The Heart of a Shanghai White-collar" (14). A Shanghai white-collar worker named "Numbness fever" expressed his long-standing depression: he always felt that he was excellent, and he was indeed excellent. A key middle school-a famous university-a multinational company (with a monthly salary of more than 8,000), myself and friends. I was deeply shocked to find life in the "other world" (a temporary worker in a factory was ill, but refused to go to see it just to save medical expenses for his son. A little boy was beaten by his father when he was eating meat at home, and a pot of meat was cooked for him at home before he died of terminal illness). When I returned to Shanghai, I "discovered" that there was another side to Shanghai: a factory worker who was willing to get a $6 car sticker every month to pick up vegetables at the vegetable market. A part-time worker who earns ten dollars for two hours without stopping ... The author later found that he had been cut off from the real face of society by the invisible division of modern society (15): "If I only stay in a beautiful office building and commute every day, I will go to disco in my spare time and go to the club on Maoming South Road to find some excitement. Going to the Peace Hotel for a party and going shopping in Paris in spring will not feel depressed. I can only be complacent and feel good about myself. Think I'm the best in this country. But I saw it, and I believe I didn't see more. So I can't be complacent. " The Shanghai white-collar worker raised the question of "publicity" through personal experience: "How do most people live in this country? What are their ideas? Don't they deserve to be understood? As a part of this country's knowledge, shouldn't it be an obligation to know them? So if you don't know the true face of a country, can you do something for it just by shouting democracy? " .

Shanghai "petty bourgeoisie" expressed its confusion and reflection on life. Obviously it implies the simplification of my classification and analysis of petty bourgeoisie. In fact, this is a young, educated, thoughtful and vocal class. They will have their own life feelings and judgments, and may also have a beneficial and good impact on future social development. However, influenced by the evolution of aesthetic individualism to life individualism in recent 20 years and the resulting political apathy, and the guidance and shaping of the ideal life mode by emerging consumerism, some of them have paid more and more attention to the acquisition of personal "noble" life, and no longer care about the connection and sympathy between people and between individuals and groups that "individuals" inevitably contain. Once individuals become self-expanding individuals, it is difficult to imagine how true love comes from them, because true love is obtained in the communication and integration between people, and the basis of this integration must be to go beyond the individual in the atomic sense and point to people. In a sense, this also explains why the love in Anne Baby's works always ends in "broken", because the love of two individualists ends in the fable of porcupine: in order to keep warm, they get together, but the sharp thorns that protect themselves immediately separate them. There can be physical and emotional attraction between them, but there will be no real trust and help, because all this can't be obtained in individualism and must be based on infinite and extensive contacts between people. Only in the overall response can isolated individuals find the meaning of existence through the connection of love, otherwise, the proposition of "nothingness" will be repeated in Anne Baby's novels, which will always haunt those who want to love but don't believe in love and can't get love.

As she said, the rise of Anne Baby is "by no means a fluke". Relying on the internet, she has gained a position in the current literary world with her fluent writing style and urban love theme writing. Compared with China writers in the 20th century, Anne Baby in the 2nd/kloc-0th century obviously has more reason to be proud: because she is not politics, but "readers' choice". The route of China writers entering the "literary world" has changed. Now not only is politics crowding out writers, but the market also provides opportunities for "fair competition" to win. However, does being recognized by the market mean that he or she is an unquestionable good writer? From the appearance and best-selling of Anne Baby, we can really see the general improvement of the new generation of cultural and educational standards. The first point is the ability to create and appreciate exquisite words and personal styles, and the second point is the extensive absorption of world cultural information, such as Duras, Haruki Murakami, Paganini, and European art films enjoyed by Anne Baby and her readers. However, above the cultural taste of the middle class, does literature also have some characteristics that cannot be ignored: not only comfort, but also anger, pain and heartfelt cries? ! Compassion for the little people, yearning and calling for the real moment of freedom, liberation and happiness? ! In this new literary field, what choices will growing or successful China writers make?