Contemporary young readers may not know who the gadfly is. Every generation has its own idol.

Like our generation, who hasn't been fascinated by elizabeth barrett browning's love story and her sonnets? Our brothers and sisters, even the previous generation. Who does not know the gadfly?

At that time, the gadfly, like Pavel Colta King, was a model for all young people in China.

At that time, idols were not popular, but they were more admirable than idols now.

They are the motivation, passion and soul of pilgrims.

It is said that in the dry northern wilderness base, a group of pioneers sat around the oil lamp and listened attentively to one of their companions reading The Gadfly, unaware that the north wind was whistling outside.

It is said that in an educated youth tribe, a group of boys and girls took turns to watch the only gadfly they brought to the countryside. They relive, appreciate and expect.

Because the gadfly said, "At that time, we will have a lot of work to do. But we must be patient. These great changes cannot be achieved in one day. "

This belief has become the sunshine in the shadow of that generation and the clear spring in the desert.

What we didn't expect was that Liang Yusheng was so obsessed with the gadfly that he created a gadfly in China.

Speaking of it, The Gadfly is a novel published by British woman writer Li Ai Voynich in 1897, and it has a history of nearly a century today.

The era reflected in The Gadfly is a period of great suffering for the Italian people in the last century. Italy was divided into many small countries under the slavery of Austrian invaders. Italian patriots fought in the storm for the reunification of the motherland and the independence of the nation, and the revolutionary storm swept the peninsula countries on the Adriatic Sea.

The gadfly is a hero emerging in this struggle.

Through the life experience and experience of the gadfly, the work created a young man from a bourgeois family. Under the realistic lessons of darkness, filth, deception and hypocrisy, he betrayed the God and class he believed in, joined the revolution, got involved in the fiery struggle, and was tempered into a revolutionary who struggled for a unified and independent Italy.

Perhaps it is the Gadfly's fortitude and fearlessness, his steely perseverance, his hatred and contempt for the enemy, his firm quality of not being bent by any torture and abuse, and especially his patriotism and childlike innocence that he is willing to sacrifice for the reunification of the motherland that deeply touched Liang Yusheng, so that he even set it under the Seven Sword Tianshan Mountains with the basic plot in The Gadfly.

Anyone who has read the gadfly will feel deja vu as soon as he picks up seven swords and goes down to Tianshan Mountain.

Character comparison

On the premise of fully paying attention to the great differences between the two novels due to different times and nationalities, we should deepen our understanding of one work so as to present some potential aspects of the work under the reference of the other.

When the gadfly first started the revolution, he was naive. He was not clear about the church organization in Italy, and even hoped that his priest would rise up and lead the revolutionaries to fight for the unification of Italy. But his priest is a spy.

One day, he went to the priest to confess and poured out his troubles without reservation-his jealousy and his love.

Then, he was betrayed and thrown into prison with other comrades.

He knew the truth before he got out of prison. Walking out of prison, he admitted to his girlfriend Joan Ma that it was his fault.

Joan Ma found it hard to believe. When she understood, she gave him a hard slap in the face.

This slap turned him from Arthur into a gadfly.

13 years later, he appeared in front of her again, with a terrible scar on his face, a lame leg, a habit of stuttering and a resolute and stubborn look.

He didn't forgive Joan's slap in the face, and let the pain torment her all the time, so that she couldn't get rid of the misfortune of life and mental trauma.

He doesn't want his beloved to be implicated by him, thus putting himself in danger. At this time, he was already a mature professional revolutionary.

He was arrested again and executed. A week later, Joan Ma received his last words.

He explained everything in his letter, including his love for her and his confidence in the revolution.

There is no signature at the end of the letter, only a little poem they sat together to read when they were young:

Whether I'm alive or not,

Or if I die,

I am one,

Happy gadfly!

The Gadfly and Ling Weifeng

The story of the gadfly and Joan Ma is over, and the story of Ling Weifeng and Liu Yufang continues.

Judging from the structure of the plot, Ling Weifeng in Liang Yusheng is suspected of "copying" the gadfly.

Liu Yufang, a childhood friend, slapped him in the face because he trusted a spy in prison, mistakenly thought that he was also an anti-Qing righteous man, and revealed his address to him, so that he was almost caught by the Qing army.

It was ten years before they met again. At that time, Ling Weifeng also had a scar on his face, a wound on his body and an abnormal expression.

It has also been unwilling to be honest with each other, so that regrets and thoughts have been tormenting Liu Yufang.

Ling Weifeng was arrested again and the rescue failed. There is no hope, so he also wrote a letter to Liu Yufang.

More obviously, Liu Yufang's nickname is also "Joan".

As the saying goes, the first person who describes a woman with flowers is a wise man, and the second person who describes a woman with flowers is a fool.

Writing Ling Weifeng in such a similar way does not lack words, but it doesn't mean anything.

It seems that if a general knows in advance that he can definitely win, even the exact number of casualties on both sides can be predicted, then he must be tired of war.

Another example is the chess player. If he knew he would win or lose, he would give up the game at once.

The same is true of reading novels. If we feel that the way of thinking and behavior of the characters in the book are familiar when reading, then the taste of this book will be greatly reduced.

When reading a novel, readers are most interested in pursuing some changeable and even unpredictable hearts, which will lead you to get lost in many continuous situations and explore step by step until the winding path is quiet and beautiful, and then you will forget.

Obviously, Ling Weifeng's personality and behavior can hardly satisfy our desires.

Like the gadfly, he is so selfless, so strong, so fearless and admirable in treating the cause they have devoted themselves to; But their treatment of love is morally deficient.

Love and goodness are not twin brothers or conjoined sisters.

What the Gadfly and Ling Weifeng did to their lovers almost disintegrated the love faith we established as children.

Even a hero has unbearable lightness in life, and his heart will become as thin as a needle tip at a certain moment.

Just because of a slap in the face, it affects or even changes the life of the woman you love.

The gadfly's attitude towards Qiongma has always been very disapproving, but it is still a kind of hidden torture, and it is a kind of naked play abuse to treat the gypsy woman Ida Lenny. Lenny really loved him, but he regarded her as a plaything to satisfy his momentary lust, and he also created a set of theories to defend his behavior. This is a kind of human personality defect, even the behavior of some abnormal people.

Even as a revolutionary, the gadfly still has some defects that ordinary people have, such as paranoia about emotional problems, but he is not perfect. Perhaps the author consciously shows different aspects of human nature, because everyone will have their own shadow. This "human flavor" makes the gadfly described by Voynich more authentic.

Ling Weifeng is, after all, a knight in China. China's traditional consciousness has always been from heaven to man. He defined man as a kind of social and moral existence from the level of "Tao", requiring people to participate in the earth and devote themselves to completing an ideal personality. However, it is entirely possible for Liang Yusheng to be influenced by another concept of "Qi" to explain life from a natural perspective, such as "Qingming Lingxiu, the meaning of heaven and earth, and the benevolent grasp it; Cruel and perverse, the evil of heaven and earth, the capture of the wicked, etc. , to distinguish between the benevolent gentleman or the wicked.

Ling Weifeng has been shaped like this. He will still win as a hero.

However, how to calculate Liu Yufang's pain and whether Han Zhibang's sacrifice is worth it? Judging from our growing rational knowledge and accumulated life experience, it is impossible for Ling Weifeng to pay such high "interest" just for one breath. He can be said to have made both hearts miserable, and life is worse than death.

Therefore, Han Zhibang would rather sacrifice his life for justice, on the one hand, because he is a chivalrous man and it is his bounden duty to fight against power; On the other hand, can he rule out his decision not to continue to "play" this love triangle game?

Seeing this, we are all carrying a heart. The gadfly died after all, but Han Zhibang died in Ling Weifeng. If Ling Weifeng and Liu Yufang can really get back together, so what?

Fortunately-God bless, Liang Yusheng didn't follow Voynich to the dark. He separated Ling Weifeng from others with "Tao is heartless and people have feelings" and "strong feelings make things fade", so that the moral gap of Ling Weifeng did not widen further.

This gives us a little aftertaste.

But Liang Yusheng's ultimate goal is to beautify his "chivalrous image"-Ling Weifeng must also be the hero in his works.

So I will still be by the Qiantang River, listening to the waves lapping on the shore, thinking, "I wish I had the faith like the tide, but it's a pity that the water in Qiantang River can't wash away the blood shed by Brother Han."

Ling Weifeng will only explain to Yi Zhu Lan as the elder taught the younger generation: "When you stick to the rules, you will feel sorry for each other. When you get wet, you will forget each other in the rivers and lakes." In other words, we should see a wider world, instead of nourishing each other with each other's spittle like two loaches trapped in a dry pond.

Among the popular songs that young people like most today, there is a song called "As long as you live better than me", which shows that the times are really moving forward. They may be very dissatisfied with the love disputes between Ling Weifeng, Liu Yufang and Han Zhibang.

Their experience shows one side of love: only when love abandons the positive qualities such as kindness and justice more deeply and becomes a pure emotional relationship can the uniqueness and great power of love itself be fully displayed. Love is love, nothing else.

The love between Yang, Na Lanminghui and Duo Duo also confirms this point.

But love is not only this expression, even "as long as you live better than me" is just another expression.

Anna karenin once said, "If there were a thousand people in the world, I think there would be a thousand kinds of love."

Liang Yusheng's way of strengthening China gadfly's love is a bit excessive. Fortunately, he also made a remedy, although it was not enough.

Liang Yushengtan

Liang Yusheng on> "Creation and>

About half a month ago, I received a letter from a reader signed "Liu Qing". He is a middle school student and has no extra money to buy books. I finished reading a single book "Seven Swords Down the Tianshan Mountains" in the bookstore. He is very enthusiastic. After reading it, he wrote to me and gave me a lot of advice.

I'm glad to have a reader like him. When I was in middle school, I often went to the bookstore to "steal money", and many famous books stood like this. He was afraid that I would laugh at him. In fact, on the contrary, I even led him into a homonym! When the third episode of Seven Swords is published, I will definitely give him a copy.

Of course, I am even more grateful for his advice. He saw that Ling Weifeng (a main character in Seven Swords) was the incarnation of the gadfly, so he was worried that Ling Weifeng would die heroically like the gadfly.

He put forward many reasons why Ling Weifeng should not die, and hoped that I would tell him the ending of Ling Weifeng in advance.

I like the book The Gadfly very much, which is the first work of British woman writer Voynich and her most successful work. It is about the activities of Italian patriots in the last century and depicts a very strong hero.

At that time, I was finishing the biography of the grass-headed dragon and snake and was planning to write my third martial arts novel. I was deeply moved by the chivalry of the gadfly, and suddenly an idea came to me: Why not write about the gadfly in China? It is very common to absorb the influence of foreign literature and use or simulate the plot and structure of a famous work in other creations. Pushkin, known as the "father of Russian poetry", imitates Byron and Shakespeare in many works. Taking China writers as an example, it is well known that Cao Yu's Thunderstorm was deeply influenced by Greek tragedy. Lin Tong, the hero of the playwright Yuan Jun (that is, Zhang Junxiang)' s A Teacher for a Thousand Years, is written by imitating the image of Chips in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (also translated as a Teacher for a Thousand Years). His other play, The Story of a Mountain City, has the same opening plot as the female writer Garn Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

In absorbing the influence of foreign literature, the most important thing to pay attention to is that it cannot be simply "transplanted". China and foreign countries have different national conditions, and their social life and characters' thoughts are very different. Therefore, when using some of their plots, you still have to "create" yourself, otherwise it will become "neither donkey nor horse".

When I wrote Seven Swords Down the Tianshan Mountains, I thought deeply about this problem, so although I used some plots of the gadfly, I was completely different from the gadfly in characterization and story development. Whether Ling Weifeng will die is unpredictable. Predictably, his ending will never be the same as that of the gadfly. ) The reason why the gadfly is exciting is that there are many "conflicts" in the gadfly. Brandes, a literary critic, famously said, "Without conflict, there is no tragedy." I think this sentence can also be quoted in literary creation. This kind of "conflict" is either a conflict of political beliefs or a conflict of love and ideals, because these irreconcilable conflicts have led to soul-stirring tragedies.

In The Gadfly, the gadfly is the illegitimate child of a priest who is politically opposed to him. On the one hand, this includes the conflict of faith, on the other hand, it also includes the conflict of ethics. In addition, there are complex contradictions between the gadfly and his lover Qiongma, including political misunderstanding, jealousy of love, the intervention of gypsy women and the other of Qiongma. It is precisely because there are so many "conflicts" concentrated on the gadfly that this tragedy is particularly stressful.

However, it is impossible to simply "transplant" the plot of the gadfly. To give the simplest example, in western countries, religious power and political power can not only "rival each other", but also "religious power" often overrides "imperial power", so the priest in The Gadfly has such great power. If you put it in China, it's impossible. In China, the power of religion cannot surpass that of politics.

The seven swords split the gadfly in two. Ling Weifeng and Yi Julan are both the shadows of the gadfly. In Ling Weifeng's body, the contradiction between the gadfly and Qiongma is shown, while in Yi's body, the conflict between the gadfly and the priest is shown. However, when dealing with the contradiction between Iraq and Wang Hao, the tragedy of Duoduo and Wang Hao and Iraq's love for his dead father were added, which made the plot more complicated. (In The Gadfly, the gadfly's mother is very light and has no influence on the gadfly, but Yang is completely different from Yi. ) But just for the gadfly in the Seven Swords, I hope more readers will give me valuable advice.

However, it is precisely because the gadfly in Seven Swords is split in two that the power of tragic conflict is weakened, which is a shortcoming of Seven Swords. In addition, the image of Liu Yufang is far less prominent than that of Joan Ma. Joan Ma in The Gadfly is the soul of a revolutionary group in Italy in the19th century. She is very mature politically. In China in the 17th century (the Seven Swords era), such a woman could not have appeared.

The new path of martial arts novels is still being explored. The acceptance of the influence of the seven swords on western literature is only a new attempt, and it is more likely to be a failed attempt. However, the growth of new things is not easy, just like a child, it takes a "naive" stage to "mature". At this stage of exploration, people's opinions are especially needed, just like the support of children's dignitaries; Therefore, I hope more readers will give their valuable opinions.

(19561October)