Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi — Even When Selling Calligraphy, Must You Be So Red-Light-District About It?
2006/6/20 21:59:02
In a market economy, there is always an eager rush of commerce. Any tradeable trade is without exception eagerly rushed into becoming a red-light-district-ified industry. Therefore, the sentence "even when selling calligraphy, must you be so red-light-district about it!" does admittedly run somewhat counter to the sensibilities of a market economy. But when "Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi" is prepended to this sentence, even if there is no reason to be reasoned, there is sentiment to be sentimented.
Although all vernacular Chinese writing since the May Fourth Movement has been quintessential literary garbage, Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi, within that milieu, are in any case notable figures. And within the circle, whether garbage or not, once one has historically become a figure within the circle, one naturally becomes historically figured. Therefore, at least when writing the history of twentieth-century vernacular Chinese, Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi will also get their moment of being historicized. However, as the saying goes, "even at the top of a hundred-foot pole, one must still advance" — has the history that Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi have already made really reached the top of a hundred-foot pole? As for how the history that has not yet been historicized will turn out, that obviously cannot be answered by selling a few characters in a very in-circle, very red-light-district manner.
Of course, in an era when even punctuation marks can be traded in a very RMB-ified manner, there is no need to waste words over anyone's commerce. But regardless of who it is, since you've already gone and sold in a very red-light-district manner, at the very least you should be professional about it. This, even for the consumers of the red-light-district industry, is a not-very-special demand. The texts that Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi recently sold for the sake of football obviously fail to meet even this not-very-special demand of red-light-district consumers. How pitiful that these two old men's organ-like shriveled prose laughably smears itself with the so-called trendiness of countless commercial calculations. How sad that football has been so un-football-ly footballed!
From this, one cannot help but propose: after the World Cup frenzy, the media should seriously go into the red-light-district industry and arrange some handsome male writers in a properly red-light-district fashion. At least by the next World Cup, even if we can only continue reading organ-like ugly prose, as long as it is prose gushing from handsome male organs, it can at least be consumed in a very red-light-district manner. The RMB-ified shriveled writing and thinking of old men is not as good as the RMB-ified heated postures and bodies of handsome men — this is probably the only conclusion worth concluding from the World Cup writings of Jia Pingwa, Chen Zhongshi, and others.