This leads to the conflict between the two views, so what should such a "strange style" do on this issue? This paper aims to sort out The Journey to the West's narrative style, and then hopes to have a new understanding of the relationship between "popular literature" and "literati novels" in Ming and Qing novels, especially the style of strange books and the narrative evolution.
First, the narrative mode in The Journey to the West.
To understand the above problems, we must first understand what The Journey to the West's narrative mode looks like. From the perspective of academic research, the study of The Journey to the West's narrative mode in the classical literature circle was relatively weak in the past. This paper mainly analyzes it from the perspectives of individual myth, legend and stylized narrative mode.
The first is the narrative mode of personality myth. When we read The Journey to the West's classic novel, we can easily see it. As a fairy tale, the narrative style of fairy tales was basically completely abandoned in previous times. The author first locates the fate of the image in the novel by means of verse or with the help of others. For example, for the first time, the text begins with discussion, and then the stone monkey is born. The method of combining narration and discussion is adopted: "The monkey walks and jumps in the mountains, eats vegetation, drinks spring water, picks mountain flowers, looks for trees and fruits, keeps company with wolves and insects, takes tigers and leopards as a group, takes roe as a friend, takes macaques as relatives, stays under the cliff and goes to the peak cave." It' s really "the mountain has no children, and the cold does not know the year." It can be seen that in such a statement, the tone of the narrator is very obvious. When writing about monkey activities from an external perspective, it is still accompanied by the intervention of the narrator. "A group of monkeys played for a while, but went to the mountain stream to take a bath. Seeing the rushing water, it's really rolling. As the old saying goes: "Birds have bird words, and beasts have animal words. All the monkeys said, "I don't know where this water comes from." We are very busy today, so we will sneak up the canyon to see where it comes from. Let's go and play! "The ancient cloud is obviously the narrator's explanation, and the narrator's intervention is its outstanding feature. Another example is the second round of comments: the founder said, "This is an extraordinary way: to seize the nature of heaven and earth and invade the mystery of the sun and the moon: after Dan Cheng, ghosts and gods are not allowed." Although your life span is very long, 500 years later, when lightning strikes you, you need to be clear-headed and avoid in advance. If you can't hide, you will live long; I can't escape, so I am desperate. In another 500 years, the fire will kill you. This fire is not a skyfire, nor is it a mortal fire. This is called yin fire. It burns under its own cave, straight through the mud palace, the five internal organs are reduced to ashes, the limbs are decayed, and the Millennium asceticism is turned into nothingness ... "This paragraph elaborates the disasters suffered by the Monkey King one by one, and repeatedly proposes to avoid them, thus teaching him seventy-two changes. The key of this narrative perspective is that the narrator expresses the author's personal thoughts and feelings, likes and dislikes, praises and criticisms in various ways such as discussion and explanation. Therefore, we can guess that the author's creative materials may be obtained through folk oral, and then with the help of his own processing and creation, with the help of others' tone, he tells us the story in the article.
However, from the eighth chapter of the text, "I made Buddhist scriptures to preach bliss, and Guanyin was ordered to go to Chang 'an" to the following chapters, the narrative focus, narrative mode and narrative structure have all changed, and this part of the narrative mode is legendary here. The difference between the content of this part and the narrative mode of the previous chapters is that he abandoned the so-called brand-new perspective and used the third-person narrative to create stories. The main feature of this narrative mode is that the text content looks like a biography in historical writing on the surface, but its narrative mode is very different from historical biography. The narrative center of historical biography generally narrates the main characters from the front, and the narrative level is single as a whole. Legends are generally not written from the front of the narrator, but take the minor characters closely related to the narrator as the viewpoint role, put the narrator in the background of the story, and use the local limited narrative of the viewpoint characters to describe the character. This feature of the text can be seen in the appendix and later chapters.
The Journey to the West's text narrative mode has changed again since the thirteenth cycle, and the narrative mode at this stage can be called stylized narrative mode. As we know, The Journey to the West's eighty-one difficulties are actually composed of more than forty short stories, only one of which is broken down into several difficulties. If you read carefully, it is not difficult to find that the narrative structure of dozens of stories in The Journey to the West is very similar, just like the inherent mode of western travel notes, the stories are arranged into a circular narrative mode of being killed-getting out of danger-continuing to take pictures. In this narrative mode, in order to avoid repeated aesthetic fatigue, the text mainly adopts circular narrative, bedding, symmetrical narrative and other plot processing methods in the creation process. First of all, the specific way to add circular narrative to linear narrative is to always add a chapter with related theme but relatively independent structure before the plot of two or three chapters in length. The most typical example of this aspect in the novel is the return from chapter 53 to chapter 55. These three times actually told three stories: one was that Tang Priest and his disciples got pregnant by drinking the mother river by mistake; Second, Queen Xiliang wants to recruit Tang Yan as her husband; Third, the scorpion essence that poisoned the enemy mountain forced Tang Priest to get married. The three stories are independent chapters, which constitute three difficulties in learning from the scriptures, but they are mutually causal in plot and can be regarded as a whole in structure. This arrangement was obviously influenced by the novels of Song and Yuan Dynasties. This structural arrangement is very similar throughout the text. For example, Tang Priest was in distress several times in chapters 13 and 14, and returned to chapter 3 1 from chapter 27. The novel even uses three chapters to connect several stories together, such as "Tang Sanzang in the three plays of the corpse demon", "Three monks meet in the black pine forest" and "Pig Bajie inspires the Monkey King", because Bai deceived Tang Sanzang three times, which led to the Monkey King. Without the protection of the Monkey King, Tang Sanzang was abducted by monsters in the black pine forest; In order to save Tang Priest, Pig Bajie naturally inspired the Monkey King. The plots are interlocking and mutually causal. The other is that the symmetrical narrative structure is reflected in many places in the text. For example, an obvious performance is the author's handling of time festivals on the way to learn from the scriptures. For example, in the novel, 14 the Monkey King was taken in in the "cold winter", 19 Tang Priest was killed in the "hot summer" in Huang Fengling, and the 23rd time was in the golden autumn. The plot arrangement of this whole series happens to be within a cycle of four seasons. It is not difficult to see that there is a certain correspondence between the cold and hot feelings of this season and the development of the plot. For example, the Monkey King was filmed in the cold winter, which means that the journey to learn from the scriptures is extremely difficult, and autumn is just the harvest season. The author just perfectly combines the success of the formal establishment of the Buddhist scripture team with autumn. In addition to this seasonal arrangement, the author uses this symmetrical narrative in many places in the article, so I won't list them here.
The above article briefly combs the narrative mode used by The Journey to the West in the process of creation, with a view to providing a theoretical support for the following discussion.
Second, the narrative evolution of "popular literature"
The so-called "popular literature" means that under the influence of the New Culture Movement, a group of people represented by Hu Shi, Lu Xun and Zheng Zhenduo began to study China's classical novels from a new angle, and finally their research results formed a statement, that is, the so-called "popular literature theory". For example, Lu Xun saw the fact that China's classical novels were "loved by the people". On this issue, Hu Shi also believes that both the Water Margin and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms come from the people. In other words, Hu Shi and others think that the works of Water Margin are written by a group rather than by the author alone. So what is the collective here? Broadly speaking, the story of Water Margin is the crystallization of "Liangshan Story" from the early Southern Song Dynasty to the middle Ming Dynasty. After collecting and sorting out the data of this period, the author processed and created, whether it was legends or historical books. Without years of story accumulation, the author can't finish such a large work alone. Another example is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms written by Luo Guanzhong, but this does not mean that this magnificent masterpiece was completely completed by one person. From the Song Dynasty to the early Qing Dynasty, countless romanticists have been sorting it out, so this is a masterpiece. Zheng Zhenduo thinks that the source of novels in Ming and Qing Dynasties is actually folk literature, which is the so-called "talking about history" in Song Dynasty. Yang Yi, a contemporary scholar, also believes that the appearance of the four fantastic books has brought a new edge to the history of China's novels, but these four fantastic books definitely do not belong to a dynasty in the Ming Dynasty. Obviously, this "theory of popular literature" has not been recognized by most people, but has been going on for decades. This theory has become the mainstream explanation generally accepted by literary critics.
Professor Pu Andi made an investigation on the spread of strange book style. In his view, the scale, price and format of this strange book style at that time can fully show that they are works of art specially for a few people, and they are definitely not popular literature appreciated by ordinary people. He also believes that storytelling and Quyi actually served the latter. In my opinion, his view can only show that there were indeed a few people in the upper class who liked to study these strange book styles at that time, but can't show whether the creation of these novels conformed to the "popular literature theory" or "literati novels". Here, we might as well know the background of The Journey to the West's book and see if we can get some enlightenment.
Before Wu Cheng'en wrote about The Journey to the West, the story of Tang Xuanzang's learning from the scriptures had been widely circulated among the people. Tang Xuanzang's learning from the scriptures is a real event in history. Emperor Taizong spent three years in Zhenguan. In order to seek the true meaning of Buddhist scriptures, monk Xuanzang went to Tianzhu to learn Buddhist scriptures, which was very difficult and eventually succeeded. Later, according to his oral journey to the West, his disciples compiled a "Tale of the Western Regions of Datang", which described the hardships and exotic customs on the way to learn from the scriptures. Later, two other disciples wrote a biography of Master Sanzang Keats in the Tang Dynasty. Because the story of learning from the scriptures is legendary in itself and deliberately rendered by Buddhist disciples, the story of learning from the scriptures in the Tang Dynasty has begun to spread widely among the people. In the Northern Song Dynasty, there were walkers with sticks in Xuanzang murals in Yulin Cave, Dunhuang. The Journey to the West's comments appeared in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and the content of the story gradually began to move away from the historical Buddhist scriptures. Not only did the Monkey King replace the Tang Priest as the first hero, but also the Sand Monk and Pig Bajie joined the Buddhist scriptures, which began to evolve from personal legends to fairy tales. Wu Cheng'en made a formal arrangement and processing of these folk stories, thus creating the work of The Journey to the West. What we can see is that Wu Cheng'en's own situation can be reflected in the work itself. What Wu Cheng'en's ancestors did was nothing more than a primary school official in charge of educating and teaching young students and scholars, and a mediocre official beyond the Nine Grades, which was equivalent to the Monkey King's humble "finish". In the end, Wu Cheng'en's road to being an official is actually the same as Sun's being tricked into going to heaven to finish his work. These experiences made him disheartened about the real world, and he devoted himself to novel creation, which led to what we see today and his most successful novel, namely The Journey to the West. Therefore, we can know that the appearance of Journey to the West is not only the creation of Wu Cheng'en, but also the result of assembling a large number of folk stories, mixed with various feelings about his personal situation and social environment at that time. As we know, this just reflects the integration of "popular literature theory" and "literati novel".
Narrative Evolution of "Literati Novels"
The above article has briefly introduced the narrative evolution of popular novels centered on The Journey to the West, so let's take a look at the narrative evolution of literati novels.
As we know, the vernacular popular novels in Ming and Qing Dynasties were developed under the direct influence of the scripts in Song and Yuan Dynasties. Before the script of Song and Yuan Dynasties, the main form of novels was classical Chinese novels, and the main achievement was classical Chinese novels. After the script, popular novels developed unprecedentedly, and the main achievement was popular novels. Pu Andi thinks that this style is completely different from the popular vernacular books of Song and Yuan Dynasties in essence. It was a great representative of literati's exquisite culture at that time, and also a shadow cast by the development of ideological history in the art garden between Ming and Qing Dynasties. It inherits the historical records, and it can be said that it has developed China's narrative style to a fictional peak. In his view, this "strange style" has a set of fixed and mature stylistic conventions, which clearly reflects the readers' literary accomplishment and interest in the aesthetic techniques and ideological demands expressed in the story, which we can already see through the narrative mode in The Journey to the West mentioned earlier. If the author does not have a certain literary accomplishment and interest, it is difficult to express it incisively and vividly from the structure, rhetoric and ideological connotation of the story. This is also easy to see from the illustrations, beginning and end structure and narrative tone of these literary works at that time, which is very different from the traditional storytelling in the market.
Professor Pu Andi raised his own question in the book, where is the source of China's narrative literature? On this issue, he also expounded his own views. He thinks that China's narrative literature can be traced back to Shangshu, at least better than Zuozhuan. However, from the fictional narrative style, the oldest novels in China we see today are probably the Six Dynasties, and then spread to the Song and Yuan Dynasties from the Tang Dynasty, and one of them developed along the line of literati novels. Therefore, we know that Pu Andi believes that China's narrative literature originated from Shangshu, Zuozhuan and Strange Tales of the Six Dynasties in the pre-Qin period. It can be seen that China's narrative literature has a very close relationship with history. In ancient China, there was no distinction between literature and history. Books like Zuo Zhuan and Historical Records are both historical records and literary narratives. Zhang Xuecheng in Chen Bing Notes. It can even be said that China's narrative literature developed in the form of history. After a long period of development, with the historical turmoil of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties, and Song and Yuan Dynasties, it was not until the emergence of strange calligraphy in Ming and Qing Dynasties that it reappeared. Therefore, a novel with a unique style like The Journey to the West is also developed from the narrative structure of ancient China literature and history. As mentioned above, the story of Xuanzang learning from the scriptures did exist in the Tang Dynasty. Later, this story was interpreted by many parties and finally handled by Wu Cheng'en. Isn't this exactly what Zhang Xuecheng said in "Chen Bing Notes": "Three points of fact, seven points of fiction"?
Fourthly, the narrative evolution between "popular literature" and "literati novels"
In the above article, we have spent a long time analyzing the historical evolution process of "popular literature" and "literati novel", and then we will look at the transformation process between these two theories from the perspective of Pusher theory.
From the above, we can draw a conclusion that the formation of a literary work generally has two factors, one is the author's creation and the other is the material of the story. Judging from the process of writing books, fantastic books like The Journey to the West are collective creations accumulated by generations. In the long history, the story related to each work has been handed down from generation to generation by many storytellers, artists and literati, constantly enriching it, developing it, transforming it and perfecting it, making it evolve from a simple story to an increasingly magical and complex story, and then from a simple character description to a vivid and vivid story. However, in the18th century, a large number of literati with high literacy like Wu Cheng'en participated in the creation of popular novels, which can be said to have brought earth-shaking changes to previous popular novels. These changes are mainly reflected in the change of creative concept from enthusiastic attention to social reality to the description of personal feelings and social life, the most obvious of which is the change of narrative style. This change not only reflects the creative idea, but also is closely related to the center of gravity of the novel to a great extent. These popular literature full of inner spirit have become what Professor Andrew H. Plaks called "literati novels". The works of this period have a very distinctive feature, that is, in the process of creation, the characters are not portrayed in the historical background, but the history is fictitious to serve the heroes. This is the difference between literati novels and pure historical stories. For example, before The Journey to the West's creation was processed and created in Wu Cheng'en, the story was told and spread under a historical background. Although The Journey to the West, who was finally created, was also created on the basis of Xuanzang's learning from the scriptures, we can see that this historical background was highly fictional by the author, and he integrated into his own life situation and put his own life feelings in the story. I gave my talents and knowledge to these completely fictional characters in the story, hoping that my ideals that I could not realize in reality would be put into practice by the literati and heroes in the novel in the virtual world. This is also the biggest embodiment of the transformation from "popular literature" to "literati novel" that I want to talk about in this article, that is, the story begins to change from the public's thoughts to the expression of personal feelings.
Therefore, we can draw a conclusion that "popular literature" and "literati novels" not only have a process of evolution, but also have a process of narrative evolution between them, which we can call a process from vulgarity to elegance. However, I think that when commenting on these two theories, there is no question of "who is vulgar and who is elegant", but the development of its own laws in the process of literary works creation.
A distinct view of "popular literature theory" is that strange works originated from the people and developed on the basis of "history" in the Song Dynasty. In fact, it is not ugly, revealing the external reasons for the development of literature. Let's take a look at the theory of literati novels put forward by Professor Pu Andi, so as to find out the important role of ancient talented people in the development of rare books. He made us realize that the creativity of writers or literati is the key factor in the formation of literary works, so that the value of literati, which has long been obscured by popular literary theory, can be recognized again. It is not difficult to see that the views expressed by Professor Pu Andi in the book are actually the revelation of the development law of narrative literature itself.
But the biggest problem between them now is that the two sides have different views on themselves, which leads to different understanding. "Popular Literature Theory" holds that the style of strange books is mainly inherited from the art of storytelling in Song and Yuan Dynasties, and it is a masterpiece based on the collective creation of generations of folk artists, but this view just ignores the importance of literati value. Just like the creation of The Journey to the West's novels, if it is completely explained by "popular literature theory", the important role played by the author Wu Cheng'en in the creation of this work will be ignored. China literati, represented by Hu Shi, Lu Xun and Zheng Zhenduo, overemphasized the influence of oral literature in Song and Yuan Dynasties, but neglected the subjective initiative of literati in the formation of literary works. Pu Andi, on the other hand, overemphasized that the writing style of strange books was created by a special kind of literati at that time, thus ignoring that the writing style of strange books absorbed nutrition from oral materials in their respective folk pop cultures. Even though we think that the author's post-processing is very important, it is not feasible without the accumulation of these piled materials.
Knowing this, it is much clearer for us to discuss the narrative evolution of "popular literature" and "literati novels"
Therefore, there has always been a fierce comparison between "popular literature theory" and "literati novel theory" in academic circles. In my opinion, this actually doesn't realize the real difference between the two. Judging from the narrative of The Journey to the West's works, any statement is relatively correct, because it is constantly changing in the whole process of narrative development. So only the whole narrative evolution can be seen clearly.