Chapter 35 Section Four Tragic Beauty——The Aesthetic Keynote of Contemporary Family Novels

As mentioned above, contemporary family novels penetrate the entanglement of family, blood relationship, and destiny, and use flexible and changeable artistic techniques to shelve various and colorful themes like a symphony, and describe the characters of various nationalities who integrate spirit and desire image.In its unique reconstruction of an imaginary relationship between the individual and society, history and reality, it has shown great writing achievements, and has contributed a large number of fine works with both the power of the times and the depth of art to the literary world.When we explore these texts at a deeper level, we can feel the unique and charming aesthetic tone it presents.These aesthetic tones cover almost all the categories of aesthetic forms involved in the history of aesthetics, among which the sublime and the tragic are the most prominent.The author intends to briefly sort out its tragic color and its manifestations, in order to grasp the inner aesthetic rhythm and tragic beauty of a contemporary family novel.

In modern Chinese aesthetics and art theory, the concept of the sublime, like typical, tragedy, comedy, realism, romanticism, etc., originated from the humanistic thought and aesthetic system established in the Western Renaissance.In Western aesthetics, the sublime has its specific meaning.Since the ancient Roman scholar Langganus called the sublime "the echo of the great mind" in his article "On the Sublime" in the third century AD and proposed it as a universal and eternal rhetorical style, it has been discussed by aestheticians for more than a thousand years. We continue to discuss and find that in the aesthetic theories of the British empiricist philosopher Burke and the famous German philosophers Kant and Hegel in the eighteenth century, they are finally regarded as an aesthetic category corresponding to the general "beauty".Wang Chaowen pointed out in his book "Introduction to Aesthetics": "Beauty, as a general form of beauty, focuses on the state of unity, balance, and harmony between the object and the subject through contradictions and oppositions in practice. The sublime is different. The huge power shows more the state of conflict and opposition between the subject and the object at this stage, and in this conflict of opposites, it shows the historical inevitability of the unity of the object and the subject.” [13] In contemporary family novels Among the ethnic groups, some works show typical lofty aesthetic connotations.Representative texts are "Red Flag Spectrum", "Red Sorghum", etc. "Red Flag Spectrum" shows the great power of the working people as the main body through the conflict between Zhu Laozhong and Feng Laolan.With "the great spirit of being brave, tenacious, indomitable, and daring to sacrifice, they took the times and the revolution as their responsibility, and finally defeated the dark society, broke the feudal rule, and became the masters of the country." "Red Sorghum" through "My Grandpa" The love story between "My Grandma" and "My Grandma" in civil society, full of personal passion and strong desire, shows the inner conflict between folk rationality and feudal ethics, and shows the impact of "human" and "human nature" as the subject on the environment and external conditions. The struggle of ideas presents the ultimate victory of the subject.My grandfather, my uncle, my third aunt, and He Ye in the film also unswervingly fought, struggled, and sacrificed for their ideals in a turbulent society, and staged scenes of embarrassing life scenes.In these works, readers feel the extremely strong passion for life, the extremely high life consciousness, and a kind of shocking and lofty power.

The essence of tragedy lies in "destroying the valuable things in life for people to see." (Lu Xun's words) As an aesthetic form and a huge appealing thought and emotion displayed by a work of art, it can bring readers deep feelings. The desolation and deep sorrow make people experience a strong sense of tragic beauty.From the perspective of practical ontology, it can be divided into tragedy of fate, tragedy of hero, tragedy of character and tragedy of daily life. bitter.Contemporary family novels are obviously works of art with tragedy of fate as the main aesthetic choice.The reasons why tragic consciousness appears so strongly in contemporary family novels are as follows: First, it is the infiltration of the general tone of Chinese literature in the twentieth century.As a nation plagued by disasters, the Chinese nation has been shrouded in heavy "modern anxiety" throughout the 20th century, so its literature itself presents a general tone of desolation, heaviness, and vicissitudes.The classics of many family novels that have appeared before basically exude this kind of tragic aesthetic charm.For example, the suffocating smell of decay conveyed; the helpless grief and indignation of troubled times contained; the trembling national sorrow created;As a factor of twentieth-century literature, contemporary family novels also follow this general tone, painting their own aesthetic objects with a heavy tragic color.Secondly, it is dictated by the survival reality faced by human beings.An indisputable fact is that human beings have never achieved true physical and mental freedom since their birth.Marx pointed out: "As an objective and perceptual existence, man is a passive existence." [14] No matter which century the arrow of the times points to, human beings must bear the double torture and troubles from the body and the spirit.Literary works have the greatest purpose of expressing human survival, so naturally they must poetically express the various tribulations and trials that human beings must face.As a result, contemporary family novels have extremely rich and true expressions of the survival experience of the whole human being and the deep spiritual feelings.Third, the end-of-the-century feelings that contemporary writers are full of.There is no denying that the golden age of contemporary family fiction was the 90s.Many texts that appeared in this period showed the writers' strong sense of loss of homeland and deep nostalgia for their homeland.This is because, after entering the 1990s, along with the advancement of the market economy and the tide of commodities, the intellectuals who were once grandiose and fierce were shelved to the edge of the times. With their brains, they can't quickly find the path of self-salvation except for being at a loss around the surroundings. The pain of "Paradise Lost" can only make them put their depressed and sad feelings into words, especially into history and family, so, Then there are the tortuous and gentle tender stories and the strong and lingering tragic aesthetic style of contemporary family novels.Fourth, literature returns from the spirit to the body.As we all know, since the 1990s, Chinese literature has shown a clear turn from metaphysical to metaphysical.Flesh or body has received unprecedented attention and description. At the same time, literature has also achieved a substantial transformation from the sublime to the secular.The impact of this transformation on contemporary family novels is that many writers start from the actual bearer of human pain—the human body to show the rich and colorful and different levels of human pain experience.Then step up to think about the ultimate meaning of human beings.The impact brought by this new landscape in the literary structure is that contemporary family novels start from the fate of small characters to panorama show the predicament that people face in the development and the tragic life caused by the inescapable pain.From a macro perspective, the tragic meaning of contemporary family novels is subtly and strongly transmitted to readers through the following creative dimensions:

Mr. Zhu Guangqian, a famous esthetician, pointed out: "Tragedies mainly show the suffering of the protagonist. Usually, what gives ordinary people a strong sense of pleasure is mainly the 'suffering' aspect of this tragedy." [15] Contemporary family novels inherit this A tragic feature, which powerfully and profoundly reveals the unpredictable survival crisis and heart-wrenching suffering of human beings.Representative works in this aspect include "The Ancient Ship", "The Twentieth Act", "The Feathered Snake", "The Prisoner of the Oak Tree", "Red Tong Danzhu" and so on.In these works, the main characters without exception bear the physical harm and the pain of the soul. These sufferings are in various forms, but they all suppress people's life, freedom and passion, and destroy human souls. And will, make them taste the extremely painful life forever.In these texts, the writers opened the magic box of life in unison, allowing "suffering" to fly out with wings of various colors, shine with different brilliance, and change postures, and fall heavily in front of the readers. .When readers carefully search the magic box, they will be surprised to find that there are so many things called suffering stored in the magic box: spiritual fear, anxiety, tension, depression, loneliness, sadness, etc., and more There are physical hunger, cold, sickness, death, etc.In the face of such chaotic and heavy suffering, readers seem to see the groaning of people's bodies, the trembling of spirit and the shaking of soul.All that the author has painstakingly shown paints the text with a sad tone and conveys a deep chill. Sui Baopu in "Ancient Ship" experienced the death of his parents, so he has been suppressing himself inhumanly, unable to break out of the vortex of fear and sin; Extricate himself; Hanzhang has been acting as the fourth master Zhao Bing's sexual tool for many years, and he can't die.The characters in the novel lost their lives one after another, which eventually caused the rich old man to become mentally numb.It reveals the suspicion, abandonment, insult and struggle between family and blood, shows the horrific darkness of life, and shows the inner pain and emotional black hole of Sun Guangming, who was still a child.Many women in the world, such as Zhaopeng's daughter-in-law, Xiao'e, and Bai Ling, lost their young lives under the oppression of family literature and the dark side of modern politics.Du Yunqing and other women in "Act Twelfth" were "declared dead" by their hypocritical husband Kang Fennan, and they were imprisoned in a nunnery and endured cold and lonely years; I didn't get the happiness I wanted.Mo He, Ye Lianzi and other women in the novel endured the misery of a loveless marriage all their lives, were always slaves to men, and finally died alone. The protagonist in "Feathered Snake" has not been able to get rid of the entanglement of inner sin, and he does not hesitate to use physical destruction as his hope in life. A group of women in "The Prisoner of the Oak Tree" are unable to break free from the shackles of the "oak garden" all their lives, and can only preserve the freedom and dignity of life by dying. The women in "Chitong Danzhu" can only be weak at any time, unable to realize the true pursuit of life. Ni Wucheng and the people around him in "Moving into Human Shape" all fell into the abyss of culture, and finally the flower of life fell-----Reading these works carefully, it is not difficult to find that the writers are imagining the family and history. The book reveals such a truth: the reasons for the misery of human existence are different, including the pressure of life and the system itself, (such as women being squeezed by patriarchal culture) and the negative factors of human nature structure, etc.However, the disaster caused by the latter is even greater.Xie Youshun pointed out: "China is often a dark nation spiritually." [16] That is to say, the weakness of the Chinese nation's national character is the chief culprit of many human tragedies.The former may be changed after people's hard work, while the latter will make China fall into a weak state for a long time and be unable to extricate itself.Contemporary family novels show their own characteristics when revealing suffering, that is, focusing on the exploration of human tragic spirit and digging out the root causes of people's suffering.Along with suffering, many works also focus on exaggerating the despair of human beings.Kierkegaard said in his book "Fear and Trembling": "Fear is the possibility of freedom." [17] So is despair.As we all know, the nerves of human beings to perceive suffering are very sensitive.When too much suffering is unbearable, it will cause people to have incomparable despair.Therefore, many family novels are full of intense despair while showing suffering.However, this hopeless experience is not intended to plunge people into boundless darkness, what it wants to arouse people's thinking after extreme despair, and finally realize the self-salvation of human beings.This is just as Guo Moruo said: "The value of tragedy is not simply to make people sad, but to specifically arouse people to turn their grief and anger into strength, to support the element of life and fight against the element of dying." [18] Li Zehou also pointed out: “Tragedies in art reflect the conflict between reality and practice in the form of fierce conflicts in the process of plot or character development, so as to arouse people’s positive aesthetic feelings.”［ 19] In this sense, this display of despair is positive. It shows the author's deep thinking and emotional anxiety about life, history, and the ultimate destiny of mankind, and it shows the author's spiritual pursuit.They try to arouse human's passionate longing for immortality, and make the human spirit become his own master with the strong impact of "putting to death and rebirth".In one point, it is clearly shown in works such as "Ancient Ship".It reveals the writers' self-cognition of history, shows the writers' anxious emotions in the face of the chaotic era at the end of the century, and also demonstrates that Chinese cultural intellectuals take the future of the country, the nation, and the people as their emotional responsibility, and take nationalization and globalization as their responsibility. The sacred sense of mission and high sense of responsibility pursued for the times.And all these add a bit of poignancy to the tragic meaning presented in many family novels.

The law of historical development tells us that all materials and ideas that violate the continuous progress of human society will be swept away by human passion for life in pursuit of light and equality; any cultural system that hinders human desire for happiness and freedom will eventually be swept into the dustbin of history , This is the necessity of the material world, and it is also the necessity of human society.The writers in it have already grasped this point keenly, and expressed it clearly in many texts.As an important unit of Chinese history and culture, the family can best reflect the end of a certain period of history and the loss of a certain culture.However, after reading the text carefully, we found that their final expressions were not decisive and crisp, but contradictory and hesitant and half-concealed.This is because the development of history is not always black and white, and the advantages and disadvantages are clear. The demise of the old system and ideas will always be accompanied by the burning of many beautiful things, and these beautiful things are in harmony with the traditional culture and psychological accumulation of the Chinese nation. Entangled together, people can not abandon and let go.As a result, many family novels revealed the author's emotional entanglement and ambivalence that both hated and attached to.This vacillating creative attitude not only contributes to the rich and varied thematic meanings of the works, but also endows them with complex emotional experiences.It is a very convincing text.The protagonist of the work, Bai Jiaxuan, has devoted his whole life to maintaining the spirit and order of Confucian culture. However, the development of the times, the impact of modern civilization, and the liberation of human nature have shattered what he tried to protect.Bai Jiaxuan can only spend the rest of his life in the sigh of "the world has changed" and the helplessness of "the breath is exhausted".Not only Bai Jiaxuan, but also Mr. Zhu with the temperament of a saint, Mr. Leng with benevolence and morality, and Lu San who knows how to repay kindness, can only watch everything they were proud of fade away and fade away.As a writer, Chen Zhongshi virtualized the existence of the White Deer Spirit with magical techniques, but he also knows that these "elites" who grew up in the background of Chinese farming culture must be powerless to restore the old things that have been washed away by the waves.In the end, with the sadness of the end of the world, he reluctantly conveyed the deep feeling that "Bailu Village of Benevolence and Righteousness" is exhausted.Readers, on the other hand, taste a kind of deep sorrow in the tragic atmosphere of "the lamp oil is exhausted and the time has come" rendered by him.Li Rui's "Old Site" lays out the same tragic atmosphere.Although Li Zihen, the savior of the Li family, self-destroyed his appearance, sacrificed his youth, was perseverant, and tried his best to maintain the blood of the family and the glory it once had, but the turmoil of the times finally ruthlessly swallowed up the last line of motherhood in the Li family. The light of light destroyed Li Zihen's religious belief in saving his family, and finally wiped out this famous family that had survived for hundreds of generations.The work uses euphemistic and tortuous stories and lifelike characters to touch the despair and sorrow of the "end of life" experienced and felt by the Li family, which makes this "cultural fable" with obvious characteristics full of strong tragic color.

As mentioned above, elite intellectuals in the 1990s were at a loss when faced with the split and collapse of existing values, order, spirit, and character.When this kind of melancholy and bitterness piles up, the resentment must be vented and dissipated with the help of words, and with the help of my own imagination of history and family.Therefore, with the tragedy of "If I don't go to hell, who will go to hell", the writers devoted themselves to creating a series of "last ones" that tried to turn the tide.Such as "the last gentleman", "the last saint", "the last long worker", "the last virgin", "the last sober", "the last businessman" and so on.On these characters, the author's ardent pursuit and ultimate ideal are entrusted.For example, Mr. Zhu, Bai Jiaxuan, and Lu San are to Chen Zhongshi, Li Zihen is to Li Rui, "Fool" is to Alai, Kang Fennan is to Chengyi, and Shang Dazhi is to Zhou Daxin.However, because the "last one" crafted by writers can neither represent the "necessary requirement of history" (Engels's words) nor explain the "justice" of their behavior itself, they have become to a certain extent a social progress. The "alien power".They use the natural "hysteresis" of their actions to replace the writers' search for the lost spiritual home and realize the rolling aspirations in their hearts. They can only have enthusiasm for struggle but no obvious practical effect. When they appear on the stage, they have already put on funny The cloak of failure and failure, so they can only leave the stage sadly in the lament of exhaustion and the stillness of heaven and earth.Therefore, they are destined to become a ridiculous and pitiful group, with a specific color of sadness.Furthermore, the author made the protagonist highlight his tragic color in the process of transforming from tragedy to comedy.Although the "fool" in the book has been endowed by the author with wisdom and abilities higher than those of smart people, and has also made great achievements in his short life, the chieftain system he maintains that is doomed to perish brings him nothing but endless regrets. Such tenderness, and can only see the once strong and beautiful homeland destroyed.This is the sorrow of the characters, but also the lament of the author.Chen Zhongshi is also very clear about the weakness and powerlessness of the "last one", so he spared no effort to write the tragic fate of the characters, showing the feasibility of their "struggle behavior and the impossibility of the goal of struggle". The disobedience between"[20] and "their passion for struggle is constantly weakened, worn out and worn out in an unsustainable and irrecoverable ancient family civilization, outdated farming culture, and antiquated human ethics system. The specific process of "doing everything" [21] endows the characters with an indisputable tragic spirit.It can be said that Bai Jiaxuan's sense of urgency and the author's confusion are spiritually connected. Bai Jiaxuan did not find a powerful weapon to maintain the existing order, and Chen Zhongshi did not find a panacea to redeem the human spirit. Taste the bitterness of failure together. .

Western aesthetic theory tells us that tragedy is the highest stage and crown of art.The tragedy of fate is the initial form of human beings to show their tragedy consciousness.If tragic works of art lose the analysis of human destiny, they will violate the deepest spiritual logic law of tragedy, thus far away from the true meaning of tragic art.Authors of contemporary family novels have grasped this point and expressed it creatively.The inner driving force of this expression is still the writers' thinking about the truth of human existence.Although responsible writers try to use metaphysical infection to free human beings from suffering and live a happy life, the history since the beginning of human beings has made people feel various inescapable forces, which make human beings continue to live again and again in the long process of existence. Facing the same confusion and problems; facing the same embarrassment and helplessness.For example, the tragic fate of women has been passed down from generation to generation; the spiritual suffering caused by the sensuality that exists in every era;That is to say, human beings have been experiencing physical pain and mental suffering since their appearance; they have been bearing the anxiety and fear of survival; they have tasted the sadness and despair of emotion;No matter which era we are in, human beings are so weak and powerless, they may be defeated by some material and spiritual power at any time, and they often feel that they are falling into the hell of peace and have nowhere to seek escape.As a member of human beings, writers have a deeper understanding than ordinary people.They inevitably want to describe the ups and downs in the process of historical evolution, describe the fateful existence of people confined to blood families, show the irrationality of history, seek the inner root of the disharmony between human life and the surrounding world, and discuss these causes of human beings. Severe torture of painful ideas and behaviors, trying to arouse people's sensitivity and attention to evil, so that human beings can achieve true freedom of life.The non-stop struggle of human beings is likened to "turning the raft", which shows that human beings will never give up the pursuit of rights and wealth, even if they lose their lives; "The Old Site" declares the fate of human beings to fight repeatedly with bloody facts The ending opens up the heart of weeping blood and tells about the similarity of women's fate; it takes the power change of different political groups as the object of care to reveal the inescapable reincarnation-like fate brought by the negative factors in people's personalities.Among the many works that declare this theme, "The Prisoner of the Oak Tree" deserves a detailed analysis.The author Jiang Yun tells readers with an irrefutable family transition curve that as "the incarnation of the destined potential and huge family blood cultural relay", [22] the women in "Pu Yuan"—Chen Guihua, Duan Jinchai, Guan Yunyu, He Liandong No matter how hard they struggle, Su Liu, Minsheng, Fenzi, etc., cannot escape the tragic fate endowed to them by the red thread of "family". In them, suffering is the genetic gene flowing in the blood; Imprints carried.No matter how beautiful, gentle, kind, or romantic they are, they can't go beyond the trajectory delineated by traditional culture and the patriarchal center, and eventually make the flower of life wither and wither.Not only that, even the way they fight against suffering—suicide, is so uniform, and there is no other choice.It seems that they can only bid farewell to the absurd world that once brought them hope and destruction by suicide, and get rid of the plight of life; The fall of life, to maintain the dignity of life.They are all submerged in the invisible and tangible family chains, drawing a picture as eye-catching as blood in the cycle of life.When we deeply examine the view of fate and the theory of historical cycles, we find an interesting phenomenon, that is, when writers cannot find a realistic entry point in their creation, they will turn their eyes to history and regard the meaning of the end of history as It is understood as a "fate-like cycle" to explain the appearance of human existence and the deep mysteries of the soul, and this kind of subjective narrative makes many family novels shrouded in a hazy mixture of fate and history. It shows a tragic aesthetic tone, which makes people feel a strong artistic shock while giving readers "metaphysical comfort".

To sum up, the contemporary family novels, with their strong and desolate tragic colors, give an all-round aesthetic attention to the picture of human existence. While showing the irrationality and cyclicality of history, they also shape many emotions and resistances that are entrusted to the author. The figure who staggers forward with his own nature neutralizing all kinds of mysterious forces from the outside world is a unique example of conveying sad feelings and arousing people's thinking, showing the touching and soul-stirring aesthetic power of works of art rich in tragic connotations.This is worthy of our special attention.