Chapter 68 Cao Xueqinba

For Cao Xueqin, the past is the future. Rather than saying that he stays at the foot of the West Mountain in Beijing every day, it is better to say that he lives in Suiyuan in Nanjing.From Sui Garden to Jiangnan Dazu Garden.Some scholars have verified that his birthplace is the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou. Dreaming at night, dreaming again in the morning.A writer's daydream has no end. Freud famously said: Art is the sublimation of desire. Nietzsche emphasized: Art is the stimulant of life. Little by little memories of the early years are revived one by one under the nose of the writer, revived in pieces, stirred, suffocated, curled up, and finally become a colorful spectacle, which will last forever for mankind.

This palace built on the old imperial calendar is much inferior to the legendary Three Hundred Li Afang Palace. "When the people of Chu are torched, they pity the scorched earth." However, Chinese art on paper is not afraid of fire, swords and guns, or imperial power, and is not as knowledgeable as the current "shallow reading". It can be asserted: Cao Xueqin only thought clearly about many things in Mourning Hongxuan. "Adding and deleting five times" shows that what is written in the book is not formed at one time.Feelings converge into characters, characters converge into scenes, and characters and scenes are elevated to thoughts and themes.There must have been a lot of smearing and throwing away waste.The writer's "thinking" is a bleak management, with all his heart and soul, striving for perfection, "every word seems to be blood"...

Zhi Yanzhai helped him think, and graciously pointed Zhu Yan for him.The scenes of her life are integrated into Cao Xueqin and inspire the latter's strange imagination.She obviously admires Qin Xi very much, and she often shows her clues in her comments.Sister Feng cried for Qin Keqing, and Zhi commented, "Whose story is better than tears?" When Baoyu greeted Jia She and his wife, she doubted, "Whose story is not messy, good level, good manners?" What Zhiyanzhai saw and heard was obviously far inferior to Cao Xueqin.What is lovely about her is that she is conscious of this distance.Later generations call her Cao Xueqin's confidante, which is not an honor given casually.Whose woman can take this honor?

She can also gain insights into future generations, and is worried that hermits will drag this great work into a shady novel and into the Colosseum of Power.The eyebrow comment on the first page of the Zhiping comment clearly stated: "There is no need to pursue its hidden meaning."It's a pity that what she was worried about appeared during the Qianlong period. Until the Republic of China, the dross remained.Lu Xun said with emotion: "For destiny alone, there are various kinds due to the readers' eyes: Confucians see "Yi", Taoists see obscenity, wits see lingering, revolutionaries see rowing, gossipers see secrets in the palace..."

Rumorist is a word specially coined by Lu Xun for lovers of gossip, and it depicts the faces of the old and new Sophytes. Palace secrets.Secrets of the Qing palace: This prince is so gege, endless.Where are the ancestors of the Han people?Let them be slaves again with endless invitations and endless running legs? "Lin Daiyu's Diary" was popular in the 1920s. Lu Xun said: I read a page of it and felt uncomfortable for a long time. Hu Shi made sure that Cao Xueqin was the author, and he contributed a lot, but he always missed Cao Zhan, thinking that writing about family affairs, Lu Xun didn't take it seriously, and said: "Only special scholars, such as Mr. Hu Shizhi, remember Cao Zhan...never forgetting. In the heart."

Zhu Nanxian pointed out in "Cao Xueqin's Statue Research and Explanation": Qianlong kept admonishing that "riding and archery Mandarin is the foundation of Manchuria and the important task of the tribe." However, Cao Xueqin, as a descendant of the royal coater, was neither good at riding nor archery, nor understood clearly. language. Cao Xueqin disdains the family, the evidence is relatively sufficient.He disdains the Qing palace, and cites another example in the book: Although the concubine Yuan visits relatives, although the party is large, it is shrouded in sorrow from beginning to end. Forced to smile in front of him, tearing up several times, he stopped talking.This time in the novel is full of ink and color, and Zhi Yanzhai will not let it go, commenting again and again.She said in a feminine tone:

"Deli is good at these places. Chasing the soul, lifelike, all in these places. This kind of insight is not found in his books." "You can't finish it, you can't say it first. It doesn't hurt to say it. The most difficult thing to say is what Jia Fei said at this time. Just say it like this, and you can't say it. One word can't be changed, one word can't be added or subtracted." , to the extreme of feeling and reasoning!" Cao Xueqin's contempt for the imperial power, the ironclad evidence is like a mountain. He dared to face the bleak life, dared to face up to the dripping blood.

Xueqin and Mengruan couldn't understand it better. The Dream of Red Mansions is by no means an old dream of wealth and honor. The most outstanding novelist in China has big ambitions.How can the four words of prosperity and wealth lock him in?How can a few broken things in the palace be displayed under the giant pen!In the blood of Cao Xueqin, there are Zhuangzi, Cao Zhi, Ruan Juan, Tao Qian, Du Fu, Li He, Su Shi, Li Qingzhao... Great writers always look at their predecessors and recognize the sages. Writing about human nature, praising women, presenting the portraits of all beings in the end of feudal times, and showing the beginning of democratic thought.Cao Xueqin broke the "gene chain" of the patriarchal society and belonged to the mainstream inheritance of Chinese culture.

That's about it, but it's still surprising.Over the past two hundred years, it can be described as endless surprises.Was such a great work really written by Cao Xueqin alone?He understands elegance and vulgarity in almost all aspects, no wonder Duncheng calls him a genius.Ghost genius, genius, nothing more than saying that the mystery of the formation of this peerless treasure is still hidden from us.Cao Xueqin only lived to be forty years old, and even if the date of birth was pushed forward according to some clues, it would probably not be forty-five years old.He has to experience, read, think, mutate, write, build a majestic palace with exquisite details, and demonstrate the whole process of the collapse of the palace.There is no second example of such a big dream in the world.

Ordinarily, the space for communication among the ancients was limited, but Cao Xueqin saw so thoroughly the details of so many people's lives.What is the reason?Perhaps, on the contrary, it was the "slow growth" ancient times, where individuals lived more deeply and felt more deeply.Breadth is determined by depth.People today feel that time is fast, like three to five years in a flash.Why?Because the days are repeated; survival is divided into several large pieces by calculating thinking.I doubt the ancients felt time that way.Live deeply, so care about details, "have" details, there are a lot of fuzzy areas in life, it is impossible to step into clarity in one step, and see through this and that at a glance.The ancients did not count minutes and seconds, but seemed to live in every second; they could not enter the clouds for a moment, but they could see thousands of miles horizontally and thousands of years vertically.In my impression of the 1970s, time was still relatively slow, but in the 1990s, time suddenly accelerated.Sometimes, I really feel that a year is a day... It is not difficult for today's writers and artists to travel all over the world, but who is Cao Xueqin or Tolstoy?

Cao Xueqin likes to watch operas, read and listen to books.Opera and bookstore culture expanded his experience.Losing credit for writing novels, but as a writer transcends identity, it doesn't matter if you lose credit.Cao Xueqin is a model who transcends identity.He is both arrogant and easy-going, and he doesn't distinguish between high and low when talking about friends, and he doesn't care about three religions.He is good at borrowing power from all directions in life, very similar to Su Dongpo: he can accompany the Jade Emperor at the top, and beggars in the farmyard at the bottom.It has always been a paradigm for writers to transcend identities and cross all social strata. The improvement of productivity, the popularity of printing, and the prosperity and development of civil society provide a historical opportunity for the novel.For the sake of ruling, the imperial court banned watching, but the emperor and his concubine were watching quietly.The folk cultural phenomenon derived from the characters in the Red Chamber has been banned repeatedly.For example, during the Qianlong period, when young ladies traveled by car, there were pictures of Daiyu burying flowers and Shi Xiangyun's Drunken Sleeping Peony Yin hanging on the curtain.The Baqi dandy, on the other hand, regards himself as Xue Pan and Jia Lian, or plays pictures of Boss Liu chewing and Jia Rui hugging and wanting to be cold and suffering from shit, which is full of jokes. Bookstore culture requires writers to search for strange things.This is also the true face of Chinese novels, Tang and Song legends, which were passed down to the Ming and Qing Dynasties.A hundred singles and eight generals, put them in the bookstore, deduce and talk about them, you can't finish talking in a lifetime.Thus, the details of life came to the fore.The more typical one is Suzhou Pingtan, which is constantly put down, swung open, and extraneous.It is difficult to estimate how many scenes of city life in the Song Dynasty are depicted in a novel such as.This provides more possibilities for novel creation.Corresponding to the structure of the daily life of the big family, the legendary color in the bookstore culture is abandoned.It starts from the characters, from the feeling, and the details come second. What's even more strange is that a large number of its scenes have the taste and color of dreams.Like the scene of "the poisonous sun is underground" outside the Yihong courtyard mentioned above.Hazy, implicit, ambiguous, and challenging to interpret are the advantages of Chinese, and Tang poetry and Song poetry are at their peak.Cao Xueqin is a great poet. He is a poem in itself, followed by an epic.The word epic, which places poetry after history, is easy to cause confusion.For example, the interpretation and research of Du Fu.Poetry is the essence of human civilization. Balzac's "Human Comedy" is more appropriate to call the epic of French society in the nineteenth century.This is also its shortcoming: too realistic.No wonder a master of stream-of-consciousness novels like Woolf criticizes Balzac mercilessly, while admiring Proust, who blends impression and reality. Various modern painting schools in Europe and the United States also put a seal on realism from different directions, and completely sent pure realism into the history of art. Moloya wrote in the preface of "Reminiscence of the Past": "Like Degas or Monet painted masterpieces with ugly women, Proust's subject can be an old cook, a musty smell...he Say to us: Look carefully, all the secrets of the world lie beneath these simple forms." Hawkes, the famous English translator, once said: This classic is like a modern novel. However, many current Chinese novels place more emphasis on storylines than insight into existence. One thing is one thing, one face is another face. The vernacular is used throughout the novel, which is the logical result of the novel's correspondence with daily life.To say that she "uses the vernacular" is not accurate enough to reveal her state of integration with life.Rather, Cao Xueqin originally thought in the vernacular, blending elegance and vulgarity, Beijing Mandarin and Wu Nong's soft language mixed together.Experts and scholars have provided a lot of evidence, and they have also argued with each other, and then reached a consensus: the Chinese language is a model of the harmony of the northern and southern language families.At that time, Beijing was the ancient capital of the Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and Beijingers envied the wealth and culture of the south.Mr. Deng Yunxiang pointed out: "The rulers of the Qing Dynasty started from the bitter cold place outside the Guan... They are very envious of the customs and customs of Jiangsu and Hangzhou in the south of the Yangtze River. Speaking of the southern style... Even speaking, I think the southern dialect sounds good, so there is a saying that "Wu Nong's Jingyu is as beautiful as a kite", which means that people from Jiangnan speak Beijing dialect like a yellow warbler, and it sounds better than Beijingers who speak Beijing dialect. " Perhaps it can be said this way: the cultures of the north and the south converge in Cao Gong's works. Cao Gong was writing in Beijing, and his memory was directed to the south.He opened up the elegant and popular, covering the north and the south.His vernacular is more fluent than that of the "May 4th Movement" period.What kind of big problem does this imply? Now, there is a Grand View Garden in Beijing, and there is also a Grand View Garden in Shanghai.Two Grand View Gardens with different styles combine into a cultural metaphor.A masterpiece of an architectural artist, a reminder to writers. On the ideological level, let me talk about a few thoughts. The Qing Dynasty respected Cheng Zhu Neo Confucianism, Kangxi Yongzheng Qianlong, and Zhu Xi was named "one of the ten philosophers".When it comes to Neo-Confucianism, everyone will think of "preserving the principles of heaven and destroying human desires", "the sky does not change, and the Tao does not change".Dai Zhen, a thinker in the mid-Qing Dynasty, used the theory of human feelings and human desires to oppose the principles of heaven, just like the Seven Sages of the Wei and Jin Bamboo Groves, who opposed ethics with "unfilial piety" and profligacy. Both of them said no to the tricks played by feudal rulers.Playing tricks means: let the ethics and morality of society always obey the orders of imperial power, clan power, and the ideology of the ruler.The Jia family has a strict hierarchy and moral control everywhere, not only torturing slaves and maidservants, even the masters are not spared.It can be seen that once morality is rigid, it will inevitably affect all aspects, and it will eat people at a critical moment. The nature of morality still needs careful consideration. Cao Xueqin's thinking is similar to that of Dai Zhen, but he values ​​love and lust, and even called Jia Baoyu "the world's most prostitute in ancient and modern times" in the words of Jing Huan Xiangu, which he realized from his own dream of the Red Chamber.The concept or theme of the work, because it flows back to the daily feeling, so there is no rigidity or preaching.The flow of consciousness in the book seems to be on the edge of the "stream of consciousness", but it stops at the edge and takes care of the readers.At the beginning of the novel, there is also a talk about "obscenity", which seems to be a big discovery.It is estimated that Xueqin's original manuscript contained more "sexual" things, which were crossed out by Zhi Yanzhai after consideration.