-Lu Xun: The Year of the Sea and Autumn
This is a poem written in the autumn of 1936, which can be regarded as a true portrayal of Lu Xun's later life: the future is bleak and he is exhausted. Facing the vast sea of dust and bleak autumn wind, the author is full of panic, because the stars have set in the west, but still can't hear the crow. It is not difficult for us to understand that the whole poem exudes a strong cold atmosphere, which shows how gloomy Lu Xun's life was in his later years. In fact, the gloomy depression has been accompanied by Lu Xun, which can be traced back to the time when his family fell from a well-off society to a difficult situation in his youth. With a little knowledge of personnel, he endured the indifference and snobbery of Shaoxing people and planted the seeds of feeling the dark side of life in his heart. As he himself said, "When I was young, people regarded me as a prince because of my good family. However, once my family changed, people regarded me as a beggar. I think this is not a society where I live alone. Since then, I have hated this society. " 1 Moreover, whether I went to Nanjing to study in Japan or worked in my hometown to make a living in Beijing after returning home, whether I went south from Beijing to Xiamen and Guangzhou, and then settled in Shanghai from Guangzhou, I fell into the embarrassment of hitting a wall everywhere. Every time he hits a wall, he always takes the road and takes the long way, but he always meets new poor roads and forks, as if the god of fate is always following him, making him feel the disillusionment of the poor road and the dark sorrow, and naturally he falls into the gloom that he can't leave.
This gloomy mood is naturally revealed in Lu Xun's works, especially in his few novels:
It's getting dark, I don't know whether it's day or night. Zhao's dog barked again. (Diary of a Madman)
There was no moon that night, and Wei Zhuang was very quiet in the dark, just like when Emperor Xi lived. (The True Story of Ah Q)
The sky became darker and darker, and it began to snow in the afternoon. Snowflakes are as big as plum blossoms, flying all over the sky, gloomy and busy, making Luzhen a mess. ("Blessing")
The winter days are short and snowy, and the night has enveloped the whole town. People come and go under the lamp, but it's quiet outside the window. Snowflakes fall on the thick snow mattress, which makes people feel more silent. ("Blessing")
There are only stains on the wall outside the window, and dead berries are stuck; This is a leaden sky, white and absolutely brilliant, and light snow is flying again. ("in the dining room")
There is nothing in the dark street except a gray road, so I can see it clearly. The light shone on his feet and he walked in tandem. Sometimes I meet several dogs and don't bark. (medicine)
At this time, Lu Zhenyuan was completely silent. Only that night wants to be tomorrow, but it still runs in this silence; Several other dogs also hid in the dark and whined. (Tomorrow)
Because it was the end of winter, when we got home, the weather was gloomy. The cold wind blows into the cabin, and looking out through the gap, there are several desolate villages in the yellow world, far and near, with no vitality. I can't help feeling sad inside. (hometown)
It has been completely silent since then. At dusk, the long green light shows temples and shrines more clearly, and shines in the yard and the darkness in the fence. (ever-burning lamp)
The wet road surface is unusually clear. Looking up at space, the thick clouds have dispersed, and a full moon is hanging, emitting a cold light. (Lonely man)
One day is a gloomy afternoon, the sun can't struggle out of the clouds, and even the air is a little tired. ("I regret it")
It is not difficult to see that Lu Xun seems to have fixed the background of the story he wants to tell: it is either a dark night or a gloomy winter. The key words are loneliness and darkness, which is full of heavy chill from the inside out, which makes people feel frightened and even shudder. Without exception, these landscape descriptions all point to Shaoxing, the hometown where Lu Xun lived. Describing the scenery of hometown in this way often makes people realize that the end of the month is a dark world, ferocious, ugly, dark and boring. In fact, everyone who has been to Shaoxing knows that Shaoxing, as a water town in the south of the Yangtze River, is famous for its beautiful natural scenery. For example, in Huiji Mountain, the thoughtful and cheerful Ruoye River has no end, the Tongxi River, the Wozhou Mountain, which is dozens of miles away from the summit, and the Wuxie Waterfall, which breaks the Milky Way in thousands of feet, are full of beautiful mountains and rivers and attractive scenery. Moreover, high-density water networks are distributed in fields, around villages and on both sides of farmhouses, as well as fiber roads along the river, fishermen in the river, awning boats on the water and small pavilions on the roadside, all of which are full of poetry and painting. Looking up at the stone arch bridge, overlooking the small bridge and flowing water. How did such a good place of "every village has picture books and poetry materials everywhere" become so ferocious and dark in Lu Xun's works?
Higuchi, a famous contemporary Japanese literary critic, compared the difference between "scenery" and "landscape of historic sites" in his book The Origin of Modern Japanese Literature. In his view, "scenery" refers to "scenery that people have not seen before, or have no courage to see", which is equivalent to Kant's "sublime", and it is different from the purposeful natural beauty found in objects through imagination, such as "places of interest". From this perspective, the "scenery" proposed by Tanggu pedestrians refers to a purposeful pleasure that requires subjective initiative. This kind of "scenery" is closely related to the lonely inner state, that is, "the scenery is not discovered by people who care about the so-called outside world, but by' inner people' who turn their backs on the outside world" .3. In other words, scenery can only be found in' inner people' who don't care about the external things around them. There is no doubt that the "inner person" here refers to the thinker who starts from the inside, that is, the person who pays attention to self-feeling and self-awareness. Of course, "the discovery of scenery" is a way to criticize the origin of modern Japanese literature in order to reverse/rewrite the usual history of Japanese literature. If the theoretical weapon of "the discovery of scenery" is excluded, we can find that there are many similarities between the "scenery" proposed by pedestrians in Tang Gu and the scenery in Lu Xun's novels. First of all, the scenery written by Lu Xun is not a "scenic spot"; Secondly, the scenery written by Lu Xun is also the result of some fundamental inversion; Also, these landscapes written by Lu Xun used to exist as facts, but no one saw them. In this way, it is easy for us to understand why Lu Xun only described the desolate and cold scenery of Vietnam and ignored the beautiful and pleasant side. Because in the final analysis, when creating these novels, Lu Xun was an "inner person", starting from his own feelings and deviating from the daily and empirical facts, so the scenery he discovered not only existed externally, but also had an internal inversion. "This reversal and the fact that the landscape is liberated from the image and exists as a' pure landscape' occur at the same time, which is also something of the same nature." 5.
So we can't simply measure the scenery description in Lu Xun's novels by whether it is true or not, for example, whether it conforms to the scenery of all parts of the country at that time? As "signifiers", these landscapes constantly show something in the author's heart, but what is shown here is not the author's inner side, but the meaning it reveals has become a symbol of the author's inner heart in a certain sense. Internality is different from simple self-awareness/feeling, and it also involves many transcendental things, such as concept internalization and cultural influence. For Lu Xun, one of his internal manifestations-cultural influence is undoubtedly multifaceted, western, eastern, China, modern and traditional. In these numerous cultural pools, the influence and penetration of China traditional culture on Lu Xun is unparalleled. Among them, especially the regional culture-Yue culture has a greater influence on him.
As we know, the Chinese nation is a big social family formed by the fusion of ancient nationalities such as Huaxia, Nanman, Dongyi, Beidi and Xirong. Due to the vast territory, different ecological environment, different language customs and other reasons, in the long history, China's traditional culture naturally presents regional differences. In other words, the traditional culture of China is due to the existence of many cultural types in this area. Mainly speaking, the Yellow River basin is Han culture, the upper reaches of the Yangtze River are Shu culture, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River are Chu culture, and the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and Zhejiang and Fujian regions are Yue culture. A large number of historical data prove that the Yue culture is a unique cultural form created and developed by the ancient Yue people living in the eastern coast of China, and Hemudu culture is a typical representative of the ancient Yue culture. On the material level, Yue culture is characterized by rice farming, pottery carving, bronze swords, sericulture and shipbuilding, while on the spiritual level, it is characterized by tattooing, stumbling, separation of wives and children, believing in ghosts and gods, loving obscenity and being brave. This kind of culture with primitive religious color is quite different from that of the Central Plains. Later, due to war, disaster and ethnic integration, Vietnamese culture with complete cultural system gradually declined and gradually merged with Confucian culture in the Central Plains. However, various cultural elements that constitute the Yue cultural system have been passed down to varying degrees in the vast territory of Yue. Therefore, the vast cross-border areas are eclectic and have more complex cultural characteristics than the Central Plains. Due to the intervention of primitive religious factors, the feudal ethics and ethics belonging to the Confucian cultural circle are more harsh and inhuman than those in the Central Plains. For example, customs such as "being brave and never dying" and "believing in ghosts and worshipping again" make the Yue people believe in the existence of "yin and yang", so they especially believe in the concepts of "immortality of the soul" and "reincarnation of fate". This concept, combined with the concept of "cannibalism" of feudal ethics, made the Yue people more numb to the evil nature of feudal ethics, because "the immortal soul" made them not care about the death of this world, and instead pinned their hopes on the afterlife, which naturally diluted the killing behavior of ethics. For example, Confucian ethics and the popularity of "three publics and five standards" in this area are more intense than anywhere else, because the concepts of "golden mean", "loyalty and filial piety" and "chastity" have great conflicts with the aggressive and wild character of Vietnamese people. However, once the Vietnamese accepted these norms, they practiced them more thoroughly than anywhere else. These are undoubtedly the more backward aspects of Vietnamese culture compared with China's traditional culture.
One third of Lu Xun's life was spent in Vietnam, which was also his childhood and adolescence. Childhood and adolescence are critical periods for the formation of a person's personality, character and temperament. Therefore, in the process of growing up, Lu Xun inevitably accepted the comprehensive influence of Yue culture, which has both positive and negative aspects. Many commentators have talked about the influence of Yue culture on Lu Xun's creation, mainly focusing on the profound influence of Yue culture as an excellent cultural tradition on Lu Xun's personality, spiritual temperament and way of thinking. For example, Chen Yue pointed out in On Lu Xun's Yue Cultural Background that Lu Xun's "hard" and "tough" character and sincere and critical way of thinking benefited from the profound Yue cultural tradition. He said: "Yue culture has a long, thick and excellent tradition, which is the soil for Lu Xun to take root, sprout and grow. Lu Xun obtained cultural genes from the "mother" of regional culture and sucked the initial "milk", which laid the foundation for his future robust "development". However, it should be pointed out that it is undoubtedly one-sided, at least not comprehensive, to discuss only the excellent side (positive side) of Vietnamese culture. In fact, the backward side (negative side) of Vietnamese culture has a deeper influence on Lu Xun. Mr. Lu Xun once said in "Scream and Preface": "Has anyone fallen into poverty from a well-off family? I think that in this way, I can probably see the true face of the world; I want to go to K school, as if I want to take a different road, escape from different places and seek different people. "The true face of the world here is so ferocious and dirty that it exposes those decadent and backward factors in Vietnamese culture. If Lu Xun is not among them, how can he see so deeply?
The stereotype of feudal barbarism formed by the combination of Yue culture and feudal ethics has a direct effect on Lu Xun and has a great influence. Take Lu Xun's marriage and love as an example. 1906, he returned from Japan on the orders of his mother and married Zhu An, whom he had never met before. He tasted the bitter wine brought by the old-fashioned marriage and lived an abstinence life that suppressed human nature for nearly 20 years. Until 1925, he fell in love with Xu Guangping, who was nearly 20 years younger than him, and was still in contradiction. As Wang Xiaoming analyzed in Life Can't Face to Face: A Biography of Lu Xun, "In a sense, Lu Xun and Xu Guangping fell in love and finally lived together in Shanghai and established a new family, which was the most glorious move in his life. It is in this matter that he fully demonstrated the tenacious strength of the will to life, the firm courage to betray traditional ethics and morality, and the personality style of a modern man who pursues personal freedom. But it is also in this matter that his deep weakness and inferiority, his subconscious recognition of traditional morality, and his deep-rooted distrust of society and human nature are particularly striking. Once a person believes in love, he is no longer a nihilist. If Lu Xun can open a gap, he should be able to break out of the ghostly encirclement. If so, his cohabitation with Xu Guangping shows that he is a great victory for his own destiny. However, he has to go through so many hesitations and choices on the way out of the tight encirclement. Will this make him finally strive for happiness, and will he unconsciously change his taste? Love between men and women is a basic pleasure of human beings. If it takes such a long life and such a deep pain to get it, can it still be said to be a kind of enjoyment? Happiness bought with too much pain is not happiness in itself, and may even become the backbone of the three debts. Therefore, when I think of the scene where Mr. Lu Xun forced Xu to share the same room, the joy generated by their cohabitation soon dissipated. Lu Xun won the victory, but it was this victory that announced that he would rarely have a real victory. " It can be seen that the negative part of Yue culture closely surrounds Lu Xun, even when he realizes the backwardness, ignorance and triteness of tradition and feels the "cannibalism" essence of feudal ethics, he can't get rid of it. This bound his pace and courage to a certain extent, making him inevitably fall into a more lonely and lonely experience, making him suspicious and pessimistic.
In addition, as a branch of China's traditional culture, Yue culture is eclectic and self-contained, and the values and principles of treating people formed by its combination with Confucian culture left a deep impression on Lu Xun, which led to Lu Xun being a traditional scholar at heart. Wang Xiaoming once profoundly pointed out: "Seeing that he stubbornly refused to taste the bitter wine of pessimism, he either replaced it with idealism or diluted it with nihilism; Seeing that he relies so much on spiritual values outside his body, he is always looking for collective social and political ideals as his basis for survival; Seeing that he pays so much attention to practicality, he values almost everything, and there are few interests and wishes beyond reality; Seeing that he was so afraid of being a bystander and marginal person in society, once he found himself squeezed into the bystander's seat, he unconsciously wanted to return to the center-I really understood how profound his literati feelings were. He is actually a scholar in his bones, and he is a blood descendant of Confucius and Zhuangzi. " Needless to say, it is this traditional literati temperament that eliminates Lu Xun's "brave and good at fighting" as a Vietnamese, so that he can't be the "commander in chief of the Chinese army" who is not afraid of his predecessors, but can only be a vanguard. However, the weather vane is not the forerunner after all, and the sound of shouting can only be used to comfort the loneliness of predecessors and break the loneliness they face. Yu-sheng Lin, an American scholar, keenly felt in the book The Crisis of China Consciousness: "The characteristics of Lu Xun's consciousness present a profound and unresolved conflict: on the one hand, he has a comprehensive anti-traditional thought, but on the other hand, he is committed to some traditional values of China from the standpoint of knowledge and morality." Therefore, he further pointed out: "The conflict of Lu Xun's consciousness does not lie in the two categories of emotion and thought. In other words, out of rational consideration and moral concern, Lu Xun completely rejected the China tradition and found that some elements in China's traditional culture and morality were meaningful. " 10, a profound sense of contradiction, naturally led to Lu Xun's incomplete struggle with fate, and finally deepened his pessimism and despair. The most obvious example is that, despite his fierce anti-traditional stance and even advising young people not to read China's books, he is still immersed in the tradition of China culture. "Two rooms are more than one pawn, and the halberd is alone." Since all this can't be got rid of, the spiritual instinct of China traditional literati-from pessimism to nihilism-naturally became the best way for Lu Xun to get rid of his mental pain and plunged him into the abyss of nihilism.
Therefore, the influence of Yue culture on Lu Xun is profound, especially negative. They piled up on Lu Xun, leaving him in a gloomy and painful state of mind. Pessimism, despair, doubting everything and nihilism have actually become the intrinsic elements of Lu Xun. Therefore, we believe that in Lu Xun's novels, there are bleak scenery descriptions everywhere, which is a symbol of his gloom and pessimism. This "discovery of scenery" is an inevitable manifestation of his inner nature.
Precautions:
1 Xue suizhi, editor-in-chief: historical materials of Lu Xun's life (fourth series), Tianjin People's Publishing House, 1983, p. 359.
2 (Japan) The Origin of Modern Japanese Literature: A Preface to China (translated by Zhao Jinghua), Life, Reading and New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company, 2003, p. 1 page.
3 (Japan) Higuchi's Origin of Modern Japanese Literature (translated by Zhao Jinghua), Life, Reading and New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company, 2003, p. 52.
4 (Japan) Higuchi's The Origin of Modern Japanese Literature (translated by Zhao Jinghua), Life, Reading and New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company, 2003, p. 15.
5 (Japan) Higuchi's Origin of Modern Japanese Literature (translated by Zhao Jinghua), Life, Reading and Knowledge Joint Publishing Company, 2003, p. 53.
It must be pointed out that under the influence of Confucius, the religious concept of the Han nationality in the Central Plains is relatively weak. Even after Buddhism was introduced to China, many people still believed in Buddhism on the surface, but they still held the attitude of "offering sacrifices to the gods as if they were near" (the Eighth Amendment of The Analects of Confucius) and "keeping away from ghosts and gods" (The Analects of Confucius is a perpetual career).
7 "On Lu Xun's Yue Cultural Background", published in Lu Xun Research Monthly, No.6, 2000.
8 Wang Xiaoming's Life Without Face to Face: A Biography of Lu Xun, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1993, p. 13 1- 132.
9 Wang Xiaoming's Life Without Face to Face: A Biography of Lu Xun, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1993, pp. 239-240.
10 (USA) Yu-sheng Lin's Crisis of China Consciousness: Fierce Anti-traditionalism during the May 4th Movement, Guizhou People's Publishing House, 1988, p. 93.