Yu's prose has always been favored by readers and praised by many critics. Yu's cultural prose is devoted to the shaping of culture. His prose has a unique cultural vision, and uses its unique perspective to express the context and charm of culture. I also boldly created a new cultural prose combining "meaning" and "thinking", and sought the cultural significance and the true meaning of life of China through mountains and rivers. Explore the great connotation of China culture and the personality composition of China literati. Therefore, the theme is very prominent in his prose, always shining with the author's unique ideological light, and the author also shows the sensational characteristics of his prose in accurate and popular language. This paper attempts to make some personal analysis of his prose from the cultural point of view.
Yu, a native of Yuyao, Zhejiang, is a contemporary scholar and essayist. He was awarded the title of "National Outstanding Contribution Expert" and shocked the literary world with his first collection of essays "Cultural Journey". Since then, the banner of "scholar prose" (or "cultural prose") has been played. His works are quiet and have cultural connotations, so they are loved by readers. Rainy Day and Pavilion is an essay written by Mr. Yu.
First, the stormy cultural perspective
The Rain Pavilion is the only essay on China's book collection culture in Mr. Yu's cultural journey. It is not a simple prose about mountains and rivers, nor a lyrical prose, but a prose about recognizing the context and significance of a cultural phenomenon. The book Cultural Journey focuses on the theme of China culture. He looked at mountains and rivers from a cultural perspective and wrote the following articles. From a unique angle, Mr. Yu uses the spotlight of culture to express the context and charm of culture.
Yu said in the preface of "Cultural Journey": "I found that the places I particularly want to go are always those places where ancient cultures and literati left deep footprints, which shows that the landscape in my heart is not completely natural, but a human landscape. I pay more attention to the China culture attached to the landscape, which is also the prose feature of A Cultural Journey.
So, what is culture? What is culture? Culture is a big concept, which refers to all material wealth and spiritual wealth created in the historical development of human society, especially social ideology. In other words, everything is human culture; There are catering culture, architectural culture, tourism culture and so on. Moreover, different nationalities also have their own culture. The same culture will be different among different nationalities and countries. Our Chinese nation has a history of 5,000 years of civilization, and the characters have been recorded and handed down, forming two cultures. One is the content of the characters, which is history; One is to record the way, process and changes of history and spread it out. [2] The spread of China's history depends on books, so the history of book collection is tantamount to book collection culture, but many of us may never think and observe from the perspective of book collection culture. After reading Mr. Yu's Stormy Days, we can notice that there is such a field in China culture, and so on.
It can be said that "Tianyi Pavilion" is a very important library in the collection history of China. It is a distinctive library, which embodies the basic characteristics of book collection and circulation in China feudal society. The story of Tianyi Pavilion, its ups and downs, is almost a condensed history of China's book collection. Therefore, the author also named the article "Tianyi Pavilion". Tianyi Pavilion is located in Zhejiang.
Since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the cultural atmosphere in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces has been very strong, which may also have a lot to do with the economic, cultural and artistic relocation of the Central Plains after the Southern Song Dynasty moved its capital to Hangzhou. Under the guidance of the feudal society's law of "learning to be excellent is to be an official", children in cities and villages have become accustomed to reading. In such a piece of land, there is a library like Tianyi Pavilion, and everything seems so natural.
Second, the cultural meaning of "stormy days"
The stormy Sky Pavilion traces the sad collection history of Sky Pavilion and praises the valuable cultural conscience of Fan Qin and his descendants. The title decorated the Sky Pavilion with "Storm", which laid the tone of the full text, structured the materials of the full text and hinted at the main idea of the full text.
The beginning of the stormy pavilion was a cold natural storm. "The water in the yard is too deep to waste, and the shoe system has already flooded. The only way is to simply take off your shoes, roll up your trouser legs and wade in. Originally, the whole body was already chilly by the wind and rain, and the barefoot water immediately chilled. In this way, Pei Minghai and I embraced each other, one foot high and one foot low. This is a symbol and a symbol. Storms like a Pavilion conveys a strong message of historical and cultural storms: about its name, about its majesty, about its hard collection, and about its tragic inheritance. ...
The second part of the sentence "Yes, it is just a library, but it has actually become an extremely difficult and sad cultural miracle" can be interpreted as the author's overall impression of Tianyi Pavilion, which is the author's general sentence describing the historical changes of Tianyi Pavilion. This sentence tells the true face of the word "wind and rain", which refers to the historical and cultural vicissitudes in the passage of time. So I wrote it all the way with such a mood. The author concludes: "Tianyi Pavilion ... exists as a cause and symbol of classical culture, which reminds people of the arduous course of China culture preservation and dissemination, and how sad and sacred an ancient nation's thirst for culture is." The words at the end make the reappearance of Tianyi Pavilion a broader image of "ancient national culture", from which readers can feel it.
The theme expression of prose is different from argumentative writing. It needs images to contain and make it artistic. Need rich content to enrich it and make it have thickness and depth of field; It also needs the flexible expression of beautiful language to make it flexible and textured. As a cultural scholar in charge of drama, Yu's prose expression is very individual. In the face of historical traces, the author's statement is not a dry history, but a vivid tragicomedy of characters. It is not an intellectual judgment in textbooks, but a modern feeling of observing human feelings and humanity. Therefore, as the author's preface says: "The earth is silent, and as long as one or two shrewd literati stand up, its cultural connotation sealed in the distance will rush out with a bang."
How did the "sealed cultural connotation" pour out? Let's read Mr. Yu's statement about the historical and cultural storm of Tianyi Pavilion.
In this part, the author turns the story into an ongoing drama in the language that dramatists are best at, uses scholars' rich cultural knowledge reserves, borrows relevant events, and comments on seemingly ongoing historical events with thinkers' most precious insights.
After expounding the personality traits needed for cultural inheritance, Fan Qin, the "source figure" of Tianyi Pavilion, appeared.
Fan Qin, a 27-year-old scholar, began to be an official all over the country. "Every time he goes to be an official, he always pays great attention to collecting local ... records of various local chronicles, political books, memoirs and calendar scholars. Poems carved by officials from all over the Ming Dynasty easily disappeared, and he also searched a lot. Fan Qin plays books in his spare time, but in fact he has made the collection of books the first priority in his life, and he has become an amateur as an official. It has become a necessary means for him to collect books. " You can feel the narrative here, which has a strong flavor of telling stories on the spot. Then, the author simply designs it into a possible scene. "One day on a business trip, there may be a big case to be tried, there may be a corrupt official impeached, maybe ... but he knows that the weight of all this together is not as good as the thin blue cloth baggage handed over by the officers at night, and he collected a few rolls there according to his meaning. Merging lines is also necessary. He turned the page carefully louder than gongs and shouts. " Here, we can feel that the author's introduction to Fan Qin is quite different from the introduction of historical figures in general articles: he uses "modern continuous tense" to describe the history of "past perfect tense", which makes people feel very dramatic on the spot. Therefore, Fan Qin is "lighter than ordinary people and heavier than ordinary people."
Later, the author changed the subject, and naturally included the topic of "cultural conscience with sound personality" that he had paid attention to in recent years, and then took Fan Qin's anecdotes such as "contradicting royalty" and "Yan Song didn't dare to harm" as evidence. If "modern continuous tense" is Yu's first stroke, then timely intervention in the described events to comment is Yu's second stroke.
Prose "scattered" needs to be slowed down. As a scholar, facing a historical figure, many similar and related events will naturally come to mind. When writing Fan Qin, the author compares Fan Qin with Feng Fang, a famous calligrapher and collector at that time, and compares him with Fan Dache, the nephew of Fan Qin. Bo Yin and Lian Ping are Mr. Yu's third strokes. As a result, this result makes the article full of beauty. From the theme, it highlights "Fan Qin's willpower beyond spirit, hobby and talent, and therefore beyond time". Fan Qin came to the end of his life, and the author's narrative also moved to the descendants of Tianyi Pavilion.
In this way, the dramatic scene of inheritance division appeared.
This is an ancient story described in Modern Time: "Fan Qin lived to be eighty years old and finally came to the end of his life. He called his eldest son and his second daughter-in-law (the second son has died) to arrange the inheritance. When the old man died, he posed a problem to future generations. He divided the inheritance into two parts, one is twelve thousand pieces of silver, and the other is books on the first floor for two rooms to choose from. "
Then, the author's "modern emotion" came into being. The brushwork is to examine and discuss historical events with modern concepts.
"I firmly believe that the elderly have been thinking about this method of inheritance division for decades. In fact, this is a difficult problem he gave himself: either some future generations will take on the arduous cause of looking forward to books without hesitation, or they will only let it disappear with their own lives! He deliberately made the will unreasonable and made the party determined to inherit the letter of expectation completely unprofitable. Because he knows that at this time, as long as there is a trace of adulteration, after several generations, the false ingredients will multiply and he will repeat the mistakes of other expected writers. "
So the legend of "money to marry and study" was staged. Even the author himself "thinks it can be a literary work".
Indeed, Fan Qin's book collection in those days may have originated from his independent preference for life and his rational cultural consciousness. However, the book collection behavior of the descendants of Tianyi Pavilion requires a little "willpower", that is, a deep understanding or piety of the predecessors' legacy and harsh preservation rules. In addition, the purpose of collecting books is to spread civilization, but to spread civilization requires such cold rules. The so-called "bitterness" and "sadness" mentioned above.
However, what best reflects the overall cultural taste and personality taste of Fan Qin's descendants is that "Fan's offices unanimously agreed that Mr. Huang Zongxi should go upstairs to study". The author is deeply touched here, "With choice and judgment, the personality of a huge book family shines." Later, the author wrote in a language with a strong sense of camera, "Mr. Huang Zongxi's long cloth shoes have quietly climbed upstairs." Bronze locks were opened one by one. ...
Tianyi Pavilion finally came to modern China. Autumn wind and autumn rain filled the ancient library with wind and rain. The fifth part of the article describes the bad luck of the library: the patronage of thieves, the corruption of booksellers, the destruction of war and chaos ... The scene described by the author is still so emotional: "Sneaking into the library silently during the day, stealing books at night, eating only the dates you brought, and there are water boats on the river outside the east wall. Lenovo Bo quoted an extremely depressing remark: "Miss Qian looked up sadly at the floor that she had been unable to climb. Mr. Huang Zongxi stepped on the floor carefully, leaving only a lot of jujube stones spit out by thieves. "
Extreme depression turned into meditation. As a result, Mr. Yu's expression of "Tianyi Pavilion Historical and Cultural Storm" came to an end. The article enters the sixth part-conclusion. Through the author's discussion, the specific image of Tianyi Pavilion has been promoted to a symbol of "classical cultural undertakings", and all kinds of bumps and problems encountered in its construction and inheritance are also bumps and problems in the process of "ancient culture"
Third,' Stormy Pavilion' creative features
(1) The theme is outstanding.
The full text is closely related to the theme, the content is carefully arranged and the examples are selected; In contrast, the discussion is clear-cut, simple and progressive, and echoes before and after; Band six, without general efforts, band one, two, five and six are all lightly written; Three or four colors. No matter from the length, tone and examples, the author's strength is concentrated in the third and fourth parts. At the same time, although the other parts are lightly written, they are also organic parts and cannot be ignored.
(2) The article always shines with the author's unique thought.
This is also the reason why his prose dares to be called "cultural prose". For example, the day after the author visited Tianyi Pavilion, it was the day after the typhoon and rainstorm. There was a piece of Wang Yang in the hospital, so he had to wade barefoot ... The author immediately linked it with the difficulty for scholars to go upstairs to study in history, and imagined it as an ugly ceremony under the auspices of the Emperor of Heaven, forcing scholars to worship in a pious way in contemporary times. Similar to writing casually, it is actually. Expressed reverence and respect for Tianyi Pavilion (in fact, for culture). Another example is the Qian case, which reveals a new cultural proposition from the perspective of women's desire for culture in feudal society. For another example, when evaluating and introducing Fan Qin, he observed and discussed from the perspective of "sound personality" to reveal the reasons for Fan Qin's success. Why Fan Qin?
There is also an interview with Gan Long's suicide note, and the author's personal and unique ideas are flashing about whether Tianyi Pavilion is a catastrophe. [5]
(3) The language is accurate, popular and full of emotion.
His language style is between literary language and theoretical language. It is not as romantic as literary language, and there is no defect of vague theoretical language. It is not as spiritual and logical as theoretical language; Not as boring as theoretical language. It is a language style that appeals to both refined and popular tastes and has strong adaptability. There are also sensational paragraphs in the writing when necessary.
The Cultural Significance of Yu Prose
(1) Academic, cultural and ideological essays.
Yu's prose is different from leisure prose. Some people call it "an academic, cultural and ideological essay". Great prose is not trivial. Leisure prose can also be good prose, but not everyone wants to write it. We should have cultural literacy, historical knowledge, open modern consciousness, deep understanding of the nation, traditional culture and intellectuals and a sense of hardship, as well as writing skills.
(2) Popularize historical and cultural topics.
Yu's prose has another meaning, that is, to popularize difficult historical and cultural topics, which is to build a bridge between the public and culture. Therefore, it is not only a matter of style, but also a matter of popular ideas and the significance of cultural popularization. [7] Yu's prose is a market miracle of today's cultural books. Under the general situation that all academic and cultural monographs are unsalable and lose money, Yu's prose is a version. Become one of the best sellers. Yu's prose can sell well, and pirated books can flock to it, which shows that there are many readers. The reader's choice also shows his success, which shows that it is meaningful at this point. In the last100th day of the 20th century, Hong Kong Phoenix Satellite TV specially invited it to travel tens of thousands of miles to inspect the most important cradles of human civilization. Go all the way, write all the way. The article is called Diary of Autumn Rain-A Thousand-Year Journey. Later, this article was published in Beijing Evening News in serial form. The originality of this group of articles in "Journey to the Millennium" obviously originated from "Journey to Culture", but one is a domestic tour and the other is an international tour. Yu Xiansheng's lecture trip rushed out of the country and went to the world. This trip is farther and wider.
(3) Debate and criticism
The criticism of Mr. Yu's prose is also quite active, and the debate is also quite fierce, which has formed a hot spot in the cultural and academic circles that can be called residual phenomenon. In particular, there is a book called "Top Ten Writers' Criticism Book", which collects negative opinions on popular 10 writers. Among them, the one that criticized Yu was called Wandering in the Literary World with Cultural Lipstick and advertised as "a riot and rebellion against the current China literature". Pull the classic writers who have gained improper fame down from the altar. " So the criticism inside is very sharp. There is also a book called Criticism of Residual Phenomena, which collects all articles that comment on residual prose. Both books have it. The main purpose of this book is to provide readers with a cultural memorandum on the phenomenon of1after the 1990s.
Argument and criticism are normal and necessary. Yu's prose is not perfect, and some articles may still have some serious injuries. To raise prose creation to a new level, it is necessary to make a normal and positive evaluation. Moreover, in the period of social transformation with diversified competition, it is also necessary for various cultural choices and cultural concepts to collide, blend and run in. Debate is conducive to the overall maturity and prosperity of cultural undertakings. Yu's prose can cause such controversy, and its significance is far-reaching.