For a long time, the evaluation of Wang Zengqi's works has paid too much attention to the meaning of the text, mainly focused on the works, and his thinking is inevitably narrow.
The special period of ten years has just ended. Most writers consciously use literature as a weapon to stick to their social conscience, actively devote themselves to the social practice of maintaining and publicizing the political line of reform and opening up, and take it as their responsibility to advocate and carry forward the spiritual tradition of intellectuals' realistic struggle, which has scarred the rise of literature.
At the same time, China's philosophy circle reevaluated Zhuangzi's thought and became interested in philosophy, metaphysics and Buddhism in Wei and Jin Dynasties. These pursuits of national life consciousness also reflect the potential will of the nation.
The autocracy in the special period of ten years cruelly destroyed the normal social values and cultural order, and the lifestyle of the whole nation suffered a great crisis. Writers and intellectual elites, as spokesmen of national society, began to seek individuality and personality.
It is in this specific historical background that Wang Zengqi created the novel The Commandment. If art is a transitional state of the artist's individual life experience, then we can also say that The Commandment reflects the writer Wang Zengqi's individual experience of life and expresses his inquiry about human life and its meaning.
Wang Zengqi wrote at the end of Empress Dowager Cixi: Write a dream 43 years ago. The seemingly dreamlike memory is actually the reappearance of the writer's artistic experience.
Wang Zengqi showed a quiet and harmonious life in Empress Dowager Cixi, expressing his pursuit of the joy of life.
In the aesthetic kingdom he created, people's life style is secular and spontaneous, full of human fireworks, and at the same time there is a super utilitarian and super moral beauty.
It can be said that the natural and simple folk world in Empress Dowager Cixi is actually the aesthetic expression of Wang Zengqi's natural, free and loving life ideal, which embodies the writer's cultural trend.
This cultural tendency of writers is also an internal motive force of artistic creation. It is this internal driving force that makes Wang Zengqi's literary creation in the new period very different from other writers.
Wang Zengqi was born in a scholarly family in Gaoyou, Jiangsu. His grandfather is very famous, and his father is full of literati atmosphere and simple local customs of his hometown, which are deeply accumulated in his heart. The memory of childhood life is so ingrained.
Wang Zengqi wrote at the end of Empress Dowager Cixi: A dream written 43 years ago.
If so, we can't ignore that it was the eighteenth year that Wang Zengqi lived in his hometown. Childhood memories often contain the deepest and richest real taste of life. In the writer's own view, it is an experience. As an individual's real life experience, the childhood experience of artistic creation transcends the interference of reality and secularity, and is a natural, pure and intuitive grasp of the experience itself, so this kind of experience is closest to human nature, the most authentic and natural, and has the most universal life significance.
Wang Zengqi experienced ups and downs in his adult life, which made the writer look at life with mature and profound eyes and gain insight into the inside story and essence of life. On the other hand, he made the writer look at life with a childlike and strange irrational eye, and fully radiated the poetic brilliance of life.
It can be said that Wang Zengqi examines his world from the perspective of an old man who has experienced many vicissitudes. His anxiety and fear of life are not highlighted in his works like the writers of scar literature, but presented in a harmonious and plain way. The more he presents such a dull, harmonious and peach blossom garden-like life society in his works, the more he shows his inner turbulent tragic consciousness and anxiety about reality.
The rough experience of adulthood greatly suppressed the pastoral harmony, warmth, brightness and beauty stored in the author's early memory. But the writer himself doesn't want to see the cruelty and tragedy of real life, which makes the writer have a missing experience.
As a psychological phenomenon, this kind of missing experience is the experience formed by individuals in their life experiences. In order to overcome this sense of loss and subjectively want to be satisfied, the human body will mobilize various spiritual forces to satisfy itself. Writing, as an artistic creation, is the best way for writers to make up for and eliminate deficiencies.
Wang Zengqi has a heavy sense of absence. He experienced the Cultural Revolution for ten years, which made him feel sad about the reality of his experience. His works "Revenge" and "Down and Out" all express strong life pain.
It is precisely because of this frustration in real life that the writer's strong desire is not satisfied and is in a state of serious lack, which makes the writer often turn the image formed by desire into a physical object, which has become an artistic experience of childhood experience in Wang Zengqi's works.
As a primitive desire, childhood experience can not be satisfied and suppressed, and writers form self-anxiety. In order to escape from anxiety, we have to find alternative or compensatory satisfaction, and writers can only be sublimated in their own artistic creation. Freud said:
The poetic world created by Wang Zengqi's Taking the Ring is the most beautiful life of his sense of loss in real life, and it is also the illusion of his sense of loss in real life. Minghai and Xiaoying, including other monks and locals, are not bound by clear rules, and their human nature is simple. Although he is an ordinary person, he is not sophisticated and smooth, not malicious and hypocritical, and people are full of simple and natural love.
We can say that Wang Zengqi's pain and frustration in reality have been alleviated from his childhood experience. He believes that human nature should return to freedom and harmony, and society should return to an ideal and beautiful state. As Wang Zengqi once said: "My emotional sustenance is closely related to the current social and political background."
The writer's lack experience is not only the experience of his own lack state, but also his own lack experience will often be transformed into a more common lack experience. Because of their own lack, they further feel the lack of society and human beings. In other words, writers should transcend their own shortcomings, and then they can and should feel the whole society, nation and a general lack.
Always keep a sober and insight into the times and social development trends that ordinary people lack. They have a keen feeling and reaction to their own times, and they think about the fate of the whole era and the whole nation through their own introspection. Schiller attributed the emergence of art to the emergence of "aesthetic kingdom".
The writer finally wants to establish an "aesthetic kingdom" through his own artistic practice.
In the "aesthetic kingdom", people get rid of the bondage of all social relations and the compulsion of all physical and moral forces; In the secular "ethical kingdom", man confronts with legal power and moral power, and his will is suppressed and his humanity is destroyed.
The life in the discipline is a world where one does not need to be responsible for others or escape from society, but opens the door to life.
In Wang Zengqi's creation, childhood memory has become the internal motive force for him to create this novel and complete his artistic experience. This rich experience also greatly activated Wang Zengqi's creative energy. Obviously, Wang Zengqi wants to use these works to express his views on society and life. From the perspective of artistic aesthetics, this is actually emphasizing the social function of art.
Because art can't change the world, but it helps to change the consciousness and inner drive of men and women who can change the world.
The original love between Minghai and Xiaoying in the novel does not have shocking and exciting power, but it will make people tremble for a long time in their hearts. The artistic practice of precepts realizes the final completion of human personality in a personal way.
It reflects that the author is looking for a sense of return because of his sense of self-absence, and Wang Zengqi has turned from a lack experience to a refuge experience. Refuge experience is a sacred realm that writers should reach in the process of finding spiritual home.
After ending a meaningless life, regain the sense of fullness, comfort and happiness of the meaning of life.
This kind of refuge experience can only be found after being weathered, so that the writer can return to his spiritual home.
Wang Zengqi's refuge experience shows his refuge in childhood. Judging from Wang Zengqi's creative process, his childhood refuge is active. He once said:
This belief drives him to consciously pursue the ideal society and ideal personality in his artistic life. From the perspective of personality, his consciousness is oriented to the inner subjective world. This subjective world has a strong connection with the writer's own childhood experience and early experience.
In fact, any artistic experience has its original deep invisible prototype. As far as Wang Zengqi is concerned, the deepest and farthest embodiment of this prototype is the "Taigu" of Taoism, and the most recent is his childhood. From this, we can say that Wang Zengqi's creation is an active refuge for childhood.
This also makes Wang Zengqi's creation have a positive impact, which not only enriches the development of contemporary literature, but also has a high aesthetic significance and social education significance.
As far as the writer himself is concerned, he has returned to the spiritual home of individuals and human beings, and his mind has a sense of belonging, realizing his sense of social responsibility and realistic morality.
Through this psychological interpretation, we can more clearly understand the value of Wang Zengqi's The Commandment as an alternative in the history of contemporary literature.