What this book wants to do is not only to explain "Ren Ren Ci Hua" with essays, but to put "Ren Ren Ci Hua" in the big coordinates of philosophy, aesthetics and times.
? 1. A high wall disguised as a threshold
? On February 27th, 1954, 1954, Fu Lei wrote to his eldest son, Fu Cong, telling him to take care of himself and prepare for the piano competition. Finally, I don't forget to guide him with the attitude of "helmsman": "Personally, I think Ci Hua on Earth is the best literary criticism in the history of China. Carry forward the spirit, this book is equal to a golden key. If a person has no soul and talks about any theory, he can't be a modern pedant, a contemporary pedant and an stereotyped expert! " Art is always connected, and pianists also need to develop their spiritual soul with the golden key of "Words on Earth". As the saying goes, kung fu is outside the piano and outside all skills. However, this golden key is easy to use: "there are too few words on the earth for young people to understand;" It would be useless to read this book if there were not hundreds of poems and dozens of words in my stomach first. "
Although Fu Lei's words pointed out the reading threshold of thorns on the earth, it was not scary at all. There are more than a hundred poems in my stomach, which is not the simplest thing in the world, but at least it has nothing to do with the word "difficult". After all, middle school students and college students are different from their peers in Fu Lei's time. They can almost easily cross this threshold as long as they have a Chinese class step by step. Therefore, Fu Lei's warning 60 years ago has become a great encouragement today.
? Perhaps for the same reason, The Thorn on the Earth was designated as an extracurricular reading for middle school students today. However, Fu Lei and his followers greatly underestimated the reading threshold of Hua thorn on the earth, or the reading reserve of more than 100 poems. In any case, it should be the easiest to cross all thresholds.
? This is not to say that Wang Guowei was deliberately inscrutable when writing this book, but because "thorns on earth" is a very special theoretical work at the turn of the new era and the turn of China and the West. Its tradition makes it impossible for us to understand it according to the rigorous style of modern academic papers, and its modernity makes it impossible for us to analyze it according to the usual routine of China's classical literary theory. It uses Kant and Schopenhauer's aesthetic system to explain China's classical poetry, but for ordinary readers, Kant and Schopenhauer are two formidable names, not to mention Wang Guowei sometimes uses China's traditional poetic theory to express the rigorous system of western aesthetics. ......
? Therefore, the thorn on earth can be described as a dream of red mansions in the aesthetic field: it is looked up to because of its Excellence; Because of its complexity, too many researchers have devoted themselves to the litigation wave with love-like enthusiasm, thus opening up a variety of interpretation paths. Those who think The Tale of the World is easy to understand are the real layman.
? In order to make it easier for ordinary readers to understand, in this book, I will not only carefully analyze the theoretical background, but also list more poetry examples, and combine the selected works with theoretical speculation, accumulating more than 100 poems. In fact, there are about 250 selected poems in this book.
2. The trap of words
At first glance, The Thorn on the Earth is too suitable for the reading style of today's fast food era: two or three sentences are an independent chapter, just a random reflection of the author's experience. There is neither circular logical speculation nor a grand scale to build a theoretical system, and even language is only one of the most readable in ancient Chinese. However, if we really read "Words on Earth" with a tossing and turning attitude three to five minutes before going to bed, we will unconsciously fall into numerous traps.
? The most harmful trap is some common words, such as "realm".
? "Realm" is the core concept of Tales on Earth, but it has nothing to do with "spiritual cultivation", and it is just a China coat of Schopenhauer's aesthetic system. If Wang Guowei intends to write "The Thorn on Earth" as a theoretical monograph, he will definitely give an accurate explanation of such a crucial concept as "realm" and use this term consistently in the whole text. But he just wrote a note or essay, so he never defined his own special concept, and even regarded the same "realm" as an aesthetic term, sometimes as a daily term, which made readers feel a little uncomfortable. Another example is "ideal", "pure heart", "beautiful", "magnificent", "lofty", "relationship" and "restriction", each of which has its own western background, behind which is a whole set of philosophical and aesthetic systems of Kant and Schopenhauer; Another word like "fun" is a special concept in China's traditional literary theory, which can't be simply regarded as fun.
? In reading, we often encounter such a vocabulary trap: some words are professional terms at first glance, but some professional terms are covered with everyday words, which often makes readers confused. For example, the title of a book is Plant _ Tissue _ Culture, and all three words are common. The translation is Plant Toilet Paper Culture, but it is actually a biological book, and the correct translation is Plant Tissue Culture.
3. Understand the points and lines in big coordinates
Yu Pingbo once praised this word in the preface to the second edition of Shi Shuo Xin Yu, which is true. Wang Guowei has made a plump and thin hair with full accumulation. Readers should at least make a good knowledge reserve, even if they don't "read the words of the world".
? One of Wang Guowei's great contributions to aesthetics is to analyze and explain China literature with western philosophy and aesthetics. Therefore, in order to understand the thorns on the earth, we must first understand Wang Guowei's western background. On the other hand, this "Human Thorn" is not an argument made out of nothing, but a "dialogue record", which has always been aimed at the ci style of his time and integrated with the ci world at that time. Overcorrection is inevitable, so if you don't want to understand some of Wang Guowei's views literally, you should do more homework and know who his opponents are.
For example, we cannot understand a point or a line segment in isolation. Only by seeing the coordinates of this point or line segment can we correctly understand its meaning. This is exactly what I want to do in this book: sort out Wang Guowei's academic background, sort out the literary background of the Qing Dynasty, and accurately mark "Human Thorn" in the big coordinate formed by the intersection of these two axes. I very much hope that readers can get a strategic perspective and a comprehensive experience from this big coordinate, so that many difficulties of thorns on the earth are self-evident. This is also my own consistent reading method, and I think this method can be applied everywhere.
? Readers with a more serious reading attitude may wish to start with the appendix "Talking about the background of words and phrases on the earth". Although I will explain a lot of background knowledge points with coordinate significance in the article, in order to increase the fluency of the text, I still put some contents, especially those that are too theoretical, in the appendix to solve them.
4. Big mistakes and small facts
? There is another difficulty in reading thorns on the earth, that is, many viewpoints of western philosophy and aesthetics often go against common sense, especially that of China people. For example, "beauty is objective, and there will be no such thing as' each flower goes into each eye'", Kant said; Schopenhauer said, "Rationality is not the basis of science, but intuition is". ......
If these opinions come from the mouth of unknown mice and are published in a buzzing forum, no matter how rigorous the argumentation process is, they will only be attacked by groups, so that critics can enjoy a carnival of IQ and academic self-esteem. Of course, learning is just like earning a salary. Later, some profound opinions of the sages who dared to despise the world did lose their foothold today, but even those downright fallacies once flourished in the history of thought and became an indispensable cornerstone in the process of civilization. In other words, even if some viewpoints are wrong, they are still big mistakes, and big mistakes are often more worthy of our attention than small truths.
Almost all the quotations in the critical works of "The Tales of the World" were passed over, which did not insult the readers' knowledge at that time. However, after all, times have changed. Today, the readers of Tales on Earth are no longer literati wearing robes and mandarin jackets in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, so it is necessary to make a detailed interpretation of the quotations in the book.
Generally speaking, the focus of poetry interpretation is nothing more than the background of the times, the life of characters and the interpretation of words. But since Tales on Earth is an aesthetic book, my interpretation of poetry will correspondingly highlight one of the poetic techniques: which poem is good, which poem is bad, why it is good, or why it is not good, all make sense.
There are two bad traditions in China's literary criticism: one is to explain the mystery with mystery, and the other is to explain the mystery with incomprehension: the former likes to say things that are too big to be justified, and the language to be explained needs to be explained more than the object to be explained; The latter overemphasizes the subjectivity of aesthetics, saying why a poem is good because "I feel good" and why it is good because "I got the message but couldn't say it".
? So I am happy to quote Zhu Guangqian's point of view: "If you haven't decided what beauty is, you have no reason to say that this painting is more beautiful than that one;" If you don't understand the essence of art, you have no reason to say that this work is art and that work is not. Of course, there are many people in the world who criticize literature and art without learning aesthetics, but they are just like sailors who say astronomy and nurses who say medicine, all of which are based on rough experience and have no strict and systematic academic foundation. Dare not ignore the careless experience, but dare to say it is not enough, and sometimes it will be delayed. "
If Mr. Zhu sees today's book fair, he will be amazed at how many books "sailors say astronomy and nurses say medicine" are popular. If nothing else, the authors who can best meet the reading interests of laymen are often laymen like these readers. Therefore, when fallacies and heresies become our common sense because of the proliferation, we naturally cultivate a fairly strong immunity to all insights.
Fortunately or unfortunately, a major function of literary theory is to clearly state the so-called unspeakable. Of course, not everyone is willing to do this, and not everyone is in favor of it. Some people even think that feeling confused and hazy is the best. There's nothing wrong with that. "Zen guest meet, just make a ring. How many people can know this? " . I respect unfathomable distribution, but I am a reasonable person.
Finally, in 2009, I made a comment on "Words on Earth". At that time, due to the limitation of space, I only explained the first 23 of all the 64 articles in Cihua. Today, I finally have a chance to continue to be a perfect match, and I have revised the 2009 edition to a great extent. After all, after a few years, I have many new ideas.
? Su Ying
2065438+May 2004