Chapter 17 Appendix: Starting from the lack of "Taipei People"

About half a year ago, when my research and analysis papers were published continuously in the magazine "Book Review Bibliography", the editor, Mr. Yinji, wrote a letter one day, talking about readers' reactions and impressions to my series of papers.He said that readers generally think that my comments are very reasonable, and they all admit that it is indeed a rare literary masterpiece. The question is: Does this novel have any shortcomings?A literary work has advantages, but it must also have disadvantages, right?Why don't you see the shortcomings that Ouyang Zi mentioned?Therefore, I implicitly suggest that after finishing each article, I should write another article focusing on the deficiency, so as to conclude my series of "literary criticism" works.

At that time, I replied to Yin and said that these papers of mine were not so much "literary criticism" as interpretation and analysis of literary works.It is my interest and scope of discussion to explain the profound and complex meaning of this book, and to analyze what techniques the author adopts and how to use these techniques to present and convey this profound and complex meaning.In other words, I first unconditionally accepted the author's outlook on life and the world expressed in his works—not necessarily the author's own—and based on an aesthetic point of view, I studied the writing skills of the novels.How to forcefully, subtly, and logically present this unique novel world in front of us.In this way, it is of course irrelevant whether my personal view of the world is consistent with various scenes of the world.

To be honest, the imaginary world created by Pai Hsien-yung in the novel is quite inconsistent or incompatible with the experience world of most of us in modern times.From the standpoint of ordinary people today, with a rational and critical attitude, I can make the following criticisms of the world scene and moral values: 1. The "past" is not necessarily so beautiful, full of vitality and glory; the "now" is not necessarily so ugly, only decay and ruin remain.This point is the same when extended from four aspects: culture, society, country, and individual.Take a cultural issue as an example, the world in China is very repulsed by Western technological civilization.However, machines and science also have "beauty", and how many benefits they have brought to mankind!

2. Although human beings cannot escape the destiny of birth, old age, sickness, and death, many things in the world can still change the direction of development by relying on our will and efforts alone. If we only lament but do not act, is it not ambitious? 3. "Spirit" and "flesh" do not have to be so opposite.Love and desire, under normal circumstances, go hand in hand, not against each other.In fact, it is difficult to draw a clear boundary between the soul and the flesh. In addition, love and youth are not necessarily related.People who have lost their youth can also love each other with true love.Modern people who grew up in Taiwan may also fall in love spiritually.

Fourth, "reality" is not necessarily ugly and despicable.Clinging desperately to fantasies that are impossible to realize, or ideals that have no reality as a support, may not necessarily ennoble one's temperament and preserve one's dignity. 5. In the world, there are too many superstitions. The above five points are only in general terms.I could easily write tens of thousands of words if I want to discuss in detail, give examples of the uniqueness of the world, or what is unusual.And assuming that whether the author's outlook on life and values ​​expressed in the work is in line with the current public is one of the conditions or conditions that determine the quality of a literary work, then the five major "criticisms" I listed above, and what can be written but not There are tens of thousands of words written, all of which are missing in a book.

Looking back at the comments made by the critics in recent years, those who belittle this book generally hold the same arguments as the five points listed above.That is to say, the "disadvantage" or "lack" of the work is obviously not a problem of the artistic attainment of the work itself, but a problem of the author's attitude towards life.However, is criticism of the author's outlook on life considered literary criticism?Or, to take a step back, does it have something to do with literary criticism?This answer depends entirely on the interpretation of the word "literature".

Some people think that literature is a means.Some people think that literature is both a means and an end.Some people think that literature is just an end in itself.This is an endlessly debated question.Therefore, the answers we seek also vary according to the different views of literature. Thus, the scope of the so-called "literary criticism" has not been clearly defined.And according to the literal sense, it can even be interpreted as "any criticism about literature".The definition is really vague.This is why I always hope that people will refer to a book, that is, the series of articles I discuss, as "interpretation and analysis of literary works" more clearly and precisely.

Having said that, let us assume that the nature of the outlook on life expressed by literary writers in their works can really affect the quality of the works to a greater or lesser extent.However, this kind of criticism based on the general morality or values ​​of the world, used in the quality appreciation of literary works, will cause some difficulties that cannot be solved in the actual evaluation.Now let me explain it slowly. The first is the question of "right or wrong" or "right or wrong".We have a moral code: "discern right from wrong".This is a very bright and aboveboard statement, but it is absolutely difficult to implement.There is often no absolute boundary between right and wrong, between good and evil. It all depends on which angle you look at it from. Take marriage as an example.People of the older generation, relying on their more knowledge and experience, often think that the first condition for a successful marriage is that the husband and wife have similar backgrounds, so that it is easy to get along peacefully after marriage.Therefore, when a rich girl falls in love with a poor teacher and refuses to marry unless he is the only one, her parents will scold her for being ignorant and immature, and think her attitude towards choosing a marriage partner is "wrong" and "incorrect".However, as far as the daughter is concerned, because she loves this poor teacher wholeheartedly, she feels that without him, life is meaningless and that with love, any difficulty can be overcome. I definitely think that parents' views on choosing a marriage partner are completely "wrong" and "incorrect".So, if we insist on "distinguishing right from wrong" and defining the "correct" attitude in choosing a marriage partner, should we adopt the parents' point of view?Daughter's point of view?Or do a social survey to find out whether there are more people who agree with the parents, or more people who agree with the daughter, and the minority obeys the majority to determine the standard of right and wrong?When we live in this world, we often encounter a direct conflict between "emotion" and "reason", and we must choose one or the other.Some people think that it is "right" to choose emotion, and some people think it is "right" to choose reason. Which attitude is "right"?What kind of "wrong"?This is of course all a matter of personal opinion.

Give another example.A man who lived in Hiroshima, Japan during the Second World War, witnessed the extreme horror and tragic scene of the atomic bomb explosion, and thought it was extremely immoral, so he devoted his life to calling for the control of the use of atomic and nuclear weapons.He could very well be called a "humanitarian".However, those of us living in China, who have witnessed the Nanjing Massacre and the Chongqing Bombing, certainly think that using atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender and ending the Japanese army’s cruelty to our compatriots is the truly moral thing.This is not a matter of tit for tat, and it does not necessarily have to be a matter of national and ethnic concepts, it is also based on "humanitarianism".So, right and wrong, moral and immoral, how to judge?By whose standards are you judging?

The measuring scales of right and wrong, good and evil, not only vary with different viewpoints or standpoints as shown in my example, but also vary with each person's experience and environment. In the flow of time since ancient times, there have been great changes.For example, ancient Chinese society was male-centered, and it was believed that a woman's lack of talent was virtue.At that time, regardless of men, women, young or old, most people definitely believed that this was a "correct" concept, but today people don't think so, and feminists would probably say that this is the most "evil" and "immoral" Thought.It can be seen from this that the social concepts of right and wrong, good and evil are not only constrained by the factors of "people" and "place", but also limited by the factor of "time". There is no fixed and eternal standard at all.

There is no fixed standard—this is the first major difficulty we will encounter when we try to evaluate literary works based on the "right" or "wrong" of the subject matter of the work or the "right" or "wrong" view of life expressed by the author in the works. Literary criticism, its arguments and opinions, are absolutely impossible to obtain unanimous agreement from readers, because everyone has different opinions and opinions.Even if the minority is forced to obey the majority, and the opinion of the majority of the society is the standard of right and wrong, there are thousands of other societies in the world, and the majority of people in other societies may have completely opposite opinions.Even if the majority of people in every society in the world hold the same view today, what about tomorrow?What about the day after tomorrow?What about thousands of years later?Who dares to guarantee the future? Outlook on life varies from person to person, values ​​vary from person to person, and the same thing in the world often has both good and bad sides, or even more.Under such circumstances, value judgments based on any fixed outlook on life will inevitably arouse the resentment of the majority or the minority.This refers not only to literary criticism articles, but also to literary works themselves.However, literary creation is completely different from literary criticism. Originally, the author needs to express his own or his imagined views on life in explicit or implicit ways, otherwise it is not a literary work.In this way, no matter how the writer himself or the characters he creates have an outlook on life—optimistic or pessimistic, extroverted or introverted, timely or untimely, dogmatic or undogmatic, it is always impossible to meet the taste of every reader, or the ideal of life. view.It is also impossible to make every reader feel "real".Therefore, if the quality of a work is really determined by the nature of the writer's outlook on life expressed in it, then those that suit one's own taste or viewpoint are called "good products" and those that do not meet one's taste or viewpoint are called "bad products". Some people say that a literary work is good, and some people say it is bad. Opinions vary, and there will never be a consistent conclusion.It is impossible to have a perfect work, and it is impossible to have a complete failure. I think that some readers of "Book Review Bibliography" believe that literary works have advantages and must also have disadvantages, and they are more or less influenced by this view of literary criticism. So, what kind of criticism method, is there a criticism method that can have a fixed standard?Can you be free from personal opinions?Can the success or failure of a work be precisely measured?Can there be the possibility of convincing readers without having to "different people have different opinions" as the final conclusion? I know of one such method of criticism.But to accept this method as a "literary criticism" method, there is a prerequisite, that is, to treat literary works as pure works of art.In this way, we can evaluate whether the form of this artwork is complete from an aesthetic point of view.Carefully analyze the author's writing skills to see if they express the meaning and the world that the author wants to express beautifully, vividly, appropriately, and reasonably.If the artistic form of the work is complete, it is a successful work; if it is not complete, it is a less successful work; if it is fragmented, it is a complete failure. Of course, many people are unwilling to accept this "aesthetic" literary view.But I want to.Except for those who use literature as a purely blind transmission tool, the vast majority of people, even if they do not think that literary works are pure works of art that are not subject to secular moral norms, will admit that literary works contain a considerable amount of artistic content.Therefore, although the method of criticism I offer cannot be said to be the method of literary criticism, at least it can be said to be the method of evaluating literary works that has the most fixed and reliable standards and is least affected by the factors of "person", "place" and "time". A sort of. Many people, probably most of the literary readers, think that literary works are indeed works of art, but in addition to the basic artistry, they should also have practical educational functions, and at least indirectly, the function of reforming society.This seems like a legitimate claim.However, when engaging in literary criticism from such a point of view, unexpected difficulties still arise.What I want to discuss next is that when we introduce a fixed moral value, that is, the moral value considered "correct" by most people in the present world, to the field of humanities and literary criticism, in addition to the difficulty of having no standard, we must also face A big problem. That is, artistry and social education are likely to be incompatible with each other.A literary writer can (or should be able) to observe and present life from any angle.As for the viewpoints he adopts, unless they happen to be in favor of contemporary social welfare or social reform, he has no way to give consideration to the artistry and social education of his works.Under such circumstances, if writers infuse social and educational meanings into their works in order to meet the expectations of the public, the result is often to seriously damage the integrity of the artistic form of the works. Take for example.In the above, from the standpoint of ordinary people in modern times, I put forward five criticisms of the moral values ​​of the world.Let us assume that these are the flaws in the book, and Bai Xianyong is determined to correct these flaws and make the work perfect.He thought that Pu Gong in "The Song of the Liang Father" was too superstitious, too ignorant of reality, and a bad example in today's society, so he decided to ask him to get out of the "ivory tower".So, one day, Mr. Pu suddenly realized that he tore off his black satin robe, extinguished the ambergris incense in the bronze incense burner, opened the door of his house, and auctioned off all the ancient calligraphy and paintings inherited from his ancestors in exchange for a stack of banknotes. All are given to the poor in the countryside.He felt suddenly reborn. If a story like this is handled well and presented properly, it is possible to write a good novel. Although it must be completely rewritten from the beginning to the end, the title of "Liang Fu Yin" must not be retained.However, this "awakened" Park Gong story becomes a serious problem when we understand and appreciate it as a whole.It totally destroys the logical system or coherence of this fictional world.But the author deliberately created it as a whole form.As early as the first page of the novel, the author quoted Liu Yuxi's poem "The Bird Clothes Lane" to clearly point out the common theme of all the articles.Based on this indication alone, we can already know that the author intends to limit the subject matter of this book to the "end of the old" and does not involve the "new beginning".And the Park Gong story of "Enlightenment" is obviously a "new beginning".Such an optimistic and forward-looking novel, sandwiched in it, is likely to inspire the hearts of the people and produce social education that most people in the world consider legitimate (it can also avoid being accused of "overgeneralizing"), but it greatly damages the consistent theme awareness and The language atmosphere forms a serious "missing" in the art form. Some people may say: Then, rewrite every article to make it optimistic and move forward, so that the theme and atmosphere are not unified?Isn't an art form complete?Of course it is - if every article is revised successfully, however, it will be a completely different book, which has nothing to do with wind and horses.Therefore, the five major "criticisms" I put forward, if you want to say that they are "missing", there is no way to "correct" such "missing".To "correct," the integrity of the art form must be sacrificed. Many people say that they are too pessimistic and negative, and only present the desolate and declining side of life, but not the happy and healthy side of life.Isn't it a partial generalization?Where is life really like this? These words are all right, and I agree, but this has nothing to do with the success or failure of literary and artistic works.Like dawn and dusk every day.If the background of a novel is dawn, we do not require the author to also write about dusk, or to write another novel with dusk as the background.Likewise, both life and death are inevitable human phenomena.If a writer chooses to describe the sorrow of death, why should we require him to also describe the joy of birth?