Wen | Delin
The Law of Stories is a short book recently published by Shi Aidong, a researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and vice president of the Chinese Folklore Society. In his view, folktales are a structurally stable combination of functions, a self-organizing system, and a tree of life.
"It's always a routine that wins the hearts and minds of the people", this is not false. Throughout the ages, the structure of the story seems to be growing in disorder, but in fact, all plots have a relatively stable structure or routine, and all the routines are the optimal results of specific functions that restrict each other.
It can be said that every popular folk tale is the best way to play in a specific language game.
"The Law of Stories", by Shi Aidong, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore
The story structure is fixed
In the field of literary theory, there is a classic story about Flaubert.
One day a friend went to visit Flaubert and found him crying bitterly, and the friend asked him, "What makes you so sad?" ”
Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary is dead!" ”
The friend asked, "Who is Madame Bovary?" ”
Flaubert said, "The heroine of my novel. ”
The friend advised, "Since you don't want her to die, don't let her die." ”
Flaubert said helplessly: "It is the logic of life that makes her have to die, I have no way." ”
This story is often used to illustrate that "the inevitable fate of a typical character in a typical environment is the inevitable result of the logic of life."
Although things are universally connected and the ways of connection are infinitely diverse, in the story world, there are only limited characters, limited things, and limited connections. Stories are confined to confined time and space, so they run according to certain rules.
For the reader, although the gap between the story world and the living world is very large, people rarely compare the truth. Because the reader has assumed that this is a "story" and not a "news event" before listening to the story, it is read with the logic of the story from the beginning.
Since the story takes place in a separate space, The Rules of Story points out that the game's story is closed.
The relationship between the story characters is closed, and there can be no redundant, non-functional characters. For example, the bad guy in the story is also a "arrow stack" bad guy, bad enough to "have sores on the head and pus on the feet", then, if the function of "long sores" is assumed by a character, often the function of "pus" is also assumed by the role. This is significantly different from novels and the like.
In addition, the story only considers the relationship between the characters, and does not consider the "melon-eating masses" outside the characters. For example, the "Water Flooding Golden Mountain" in "The Legend of the White Snake" and the "Snow drifting in June and the three years of drought" in "Dou E'er" will not consider the innocent suffering of the people, because the masses are not story characters and are not included in the scope of story ethics.
The story's features and props are closed. In layman's terms, functional items are the actions of the characters in the story, and these behaviors are meaningful to drive the storyline. This means that there can be no superfluous, meaningless behavior in the story.
For example, in "The Story of the Fisherman and the Goldfish", before the fisherman comes to the beach, he only needs to use the phrase "the fisherman goes to the beach to fish" as an explanation, and there is no need to detail how the fisherman gets up, how to brush his teeth and wash his face, how to eat breakfast, how to check the weather, how to clean up the fishing gear, how to say goodbye to his wife and other details.
The logic of the story is self-consistent, the plot is self-closing, that is, the emergence and resolution of contradictions must exist correspondingly.
For example, in "Water Margin", the Liangshan heroes Zhengtian Hu and Zheng Wangqing are independent units added later. In this unit, when zheng tian hu received seventeen demotion generals, when zheng Wang Qing, the good man of Liangshan was not folded, while Tian Hu's seventeen members of the demotion were completely damaged, and all the indicators of the liangshan hero returned to the state when they were just recruited. All contradictions arise in pairs and resolve themselves.
The story is a "self-organizing system" with the characteristics of automatic adaptation and automatic optimization in a specific environment. This kind of self-adaptation is not the behavior of any person, but the result of continuous revision, mutation, improvement and collective optimization in the circulation process of word of mouth.
In addition, the storyline must logically be self-enclosed and self-improving, and there can be no defects, as long as there are defects, "tension" will be formed. Every tension must be dispelled by introducing a new motif until it is consummated.
The reunion ending is popular
The ending of a folk tale is predetermined and closed, and the storyline is only a process towards a predetermined ending. Generally speaking, people who are familiar with folk tales can basically know the end of the story when they hear the beginning of the story. This is because the ending of the folk tale is originally pre-set. The Law of Story refers to the pre-set folktale ending as the "meta-ending."
In Shi Aidong's view, the reunion ending is the most typical meta-ending. In order to achieve a happy ending, the characters in the story can even violate the ethics of life and the logic of life.
For example, in many witty character stories, the bad guys are talkative, keep their promises, stupid and cute. For if the bad guy isn't stupid, he's not fooled; if the bad guy doesn't keep his promise, he can't punish them.
On the contrary, good people or witty people are often lies, words do not count, and do not pay attention to integrity. Because if a good person does not lie and is honest in everything, he will not be able to gain the trust of bad people, nor can he win with the weak and win with cleverness.
Aesthetician Zhu Guangqian once teased: "Drama is almost synonymous with comedy in China." Chinese playwrights always like to end the reunion of good and evil. The protagonist of the play is a poor student who went to Beijing to take the exam, won the title of the gold list, and then became a high official, returned to his hometown, and finally became a family member with the beauty who had been in love for a long time. Or the protagonist suffers grievances, is persecuted by powerful traitors, and is tortured to the end, but is finally able to take revenge because of the justice of a certain Chincha or Qingguan Grand Master, or because he himself is favored. Dramatic situations are, of course, often interspersed with unfortunate events, but the ending is always a reunion. ”
Some people simply boil down this kind of story to a simple sixteen words: "The prince is in trouble, the lady raises the man, the yuan is a little, and Pepsi dissipates." ”
Some people even compiled it into a folk song: "Talented people meet and rejoice, privately book a lifelong back garden." The fallen prince zhongzhuangyuan, the title of the gold list is reunion. ”
Wang Shuhui gong wrote "The Tale of the West Chamber". "The Tale of the West Chamber" ends with a reunion ending.
In fact, the reunion story is a worldwide folklore phenomenon.
Shi Aidong has examined 200 Italian fairy tales, of which at least 150 ended in a reunion. Even Disney animated stories, the content of which is that the hero has experienced various dangers and will eventually be destroyed.
According to the Law of Stories, elite intellectuals criticize the reunion of traditional dramas often because they cannot understand the social function of theatrical performances in folk life. Rural drama is not a purely literary act, but more importantly, as part of a festival or celebration ceremony, it needs to cater to the background theme. In addition, it also functions as ethics education, that is, values education.
Because of this, "instead of reducing the pursuit of reunion to national nature, it is better to reduce it to secularity, folkness, and human nature."
However, the Law of Stories also proposes that the critique of reunion by elite intellectuals is mainly for enlightenment purposes. Whether it is Enlightenment literature or revolutionary literature, the most important thing is to establish the theme of "dissatisfaction" with the current situation of society, and only its dissatisfaction can awaken the people to stimulate their spirit, summon their fighting spirit, and rise up to change their status quo. The reunion story was considered to be a literature that whitewashed reality and paralyzed morale, contrary to the purpose of enlightenment, and was therefore ridiculed and criticized by elite intellectuals.
Where is jin yong's novel?
Although folk literature is generally a stereotyped narrative, it is very popular in the market, so even in the contemporary era, writers or screenwriters cannot escape the constraints of these "routines" when creating. However, a good writer or screenwriter will try to add some variables to the "routine" to bring readers and viewers a novel feeling.
The Law of Story compares epic literature with Jin Yong's martial arts novels. The culmination of oral literature in the epic collection, with the help of the expression of epic artists, epitomizes the universal national will, public aspirations and aesthetic ideals, and its heroization and character relationship have formed a fixed pattern. Jin Yong novels are similar to epic literature, there are certain patterns, some models that can be used repeatedly, constantly improved, and constantly given fresh meaning.
The most basic framework is that whether it is an epic hero or a martial hero, their growth will mostly go through a process of "special birth, painful childhood, rapidly growing adolescence, successful marriage proposal, major setbacks, and great reunion". The hero image of the two will have some common characteristics: the hero's life is mysterious; the hero lacks fatherly love from childhood; revenge is a major mission of the hero's life; the hero has an amazing growth rate; there are many beautiful women around the hero, and the hero loves the most outstanding one...
The reason why Jin Yong's novel can become a classic, won the favor of many "iron fans", and has many of its own "secret recipes". For example, in the shaping of the hero image, Jin Yong not only follows the established structure of the hero story, but also takes into account the formal skills of the extraneous branches; there are both the unchanging components of the hero motif and the variable points of the discourse skills; both the essential narrative function and the folk taste that comes to hand.
Stills from the 83rd edition of "The Legend of the Eagle Hero"
Taking the "Peach Blossom Island Gambling Tournament" of "The Legend of the Eagle Shooter" as an example, Jin Yong combines folk tales such as "Three Problems", "Silly Son-in-Law Story" and "Gambling With the Evil Man" into a plot, making this marriage gambling game dangerous.
In order to ensure the victory of the stupid son-in-law in the gambling game, Jin Yong arranged a play by the old naughty boy Zhou Botong, so that Guo Jing could first learn the unique skills from the old naughty boy and memorize the "Nine Yin True Scriptures", and this is precisely the folk story in which the stupid son-in-law misheard and misheard, did not know how to be flexible, but was blessed by misfortune, and the wonderful use of the story of the weak defeating the strong.
In folk tales, as opposed to the cute silly son-in-law, there is always a beautiful daughter-in-law, so Jin Yong has created a beautiful heroine Huang Rong for us. Huang Rong is intelligent by nature, slightly brutal, and is the number one nemesis of his stupid brother Guo Jing. From eating and drinking Lasa to facing the enemy, Guo Jing is acting under the control of Huang Rong, and these actions are often mechanical behaviors, which add a lot of hilarious curiosity.
When the "Legend of the Archery Hero" ended, the story of the silly son-in-law continued, and Duan Yu and Xuan Zhu in the "Eight Parts of the Heavenly Dragon" had been at different stages, braving the stupidity of the silly son-in-law, hitting and bumping everywhere by mistake, but the fool had a foolish fortune.
In addition, there are a large number of witty character stories in folk literature, which Jin Yong cleverly placed into the text, which is quite interesting.
Huashan discussed the sword, Ouyang Feng went into a fierce fight with his life, and actually forced Huang Yaoshi and Hong Qigong to retreat, seeing that he was about to seize the throne of the first martial forest in the world, Huang Rong was in a hurry, and used the radical method to let him fight with his own shadow on the stone wall, Ouyang Feng was really deceived, and as a result, his hands and feet hit the stone wall, and the pain was unbearable.
Shi Aidong believes that this plot is clearly inspired by the story of the Indian fairy tale "The Lion and the Rabbit", in which the lion wants to eat the rabbit, and the rabbit uses the radical method to make the invincible lion fight with the reflection in the well, and the lion is drowned by the well water.
The German literary theorist Yao Si said: "Only when the continuation of the work is no longer thought from the subject of production, but from the perspective of the subject of consumption, that is, from the aspect of the author's connection with the public, can we write a history of literature and art." It can be seen that the success of every excellent work is no accident.