Through the nearly 50-year struggle of zhou Zhigang, a three-generation worker in the guangzi film street in Tongle District, Jichun City, Jiangliao Province, Northeast China, the TV series "The World of People" shows the complicated human landscape of contemporary Chinese society from the 1960s to the first ten years of the 21st century, bringing a rich and profound taste of meaning to the audience. It is true that the play can be commented on from a number of different perspectives, but it is easy to say briefly that its appearance itself constitutes a clear signal that the long-explored paradigm of Chinese realism has matured at this moment.
This drama has outstanding achievements in the combination or fusion between the aesthetic principles of foreign realism and Chinese cultural traditions. As one of the creative principles, realism, in the more than one hundred years after entering China, has gone through several stages of exploration such as "realism", "revolutionary realism", "socialist realism", "combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism", and finally found a unique path combined with Chinese cultural and artistic traditions in this drama, which may be interpreted into a Chinese-style realism principle that may be called mental realism for the time being. Mind nature, or mind science, here is a confucian benevolent heart, Taoist heart of heaven and earth, and Buddhist that is the heart of The Buddha, and many other doctrines of the mind are the core of the human mind connotation of the ideological tradition and behavior mode, so that the truth can gain self-understanding in the subject's mental connotation, releasing a rich and profound meaning. Some previous period dramas, such as "Golden Wedding" (2007), "Wenzhou Family" (2012), "Holy Heaven's Gate" (2012), "Under the Gate of Zhengyang" (2013), "Parental Love" (2014), "Ordinary World" (2015), "Chicken Feathers Fly to the Sky" (2017), "White Deer Plain" (2017), "Love Man Courtyard" (2017), "Dajiang Dahe" (2018), etc., They have all made aesthetic achievements that are different from each other but equally important in the exploration of this paradigm of mental realism. It is precisely in the cross-genre literary and artistic transformation of "The World" from novels to TV series that this paradigm of mental realism shows a mature aesthetic style on the basis of previous explorations.
First, benevolent evaluations permeate real depictions. This drama has made a truthful depiction of all the vicissitudes of Chinese society in the past 50 years without deliberate avoidance, so that the audience can evoke deep resonance in the depths of their hearts, as if the pain of the long-term separation between Zhou Zhigang and Li Suhua is their own pain. Then there is the failure to follow the routine of "good people have good rewards", but to endure the suffering caused by accident or necessity. As the son of Zheng Juan and Zhou Bingkun, Zhou Nan, unexpectedly, after being admitted to an American university, he was suddenly shot and died, and Zhou Bingkun killed the other party in angry struggle with Luo Shibin and went to prison. But at the same time, the play does not make the audience sad to the end and cannot be contained, but in the truthful depiction of tragic suffering, it always penetrates into the Chinese spiritual wisdom, especially the Confucian benevolent heart and the tenacity and perseverance of "born in distress and died in comfort". The specific performance of this in the play is that almost all the characters are not bad people or evil people in the end, but most of them are good people, and even a few characters with faults or faults have their own opportunities for good or from evil to good. Debao and Chunyan, who had maliciously reported Zhou Bingyi out of selfishness, finally woke up because of the kindness, compassion and benevolence of Zhou Bingkun and Zheng Juan, and returned to the "Six Little Gentlemen" group and reconciled as before. This is obviously due to the fact that the pursuit of authenticity is filtered or guided by a benevolent heart.
Second, ideal expression and cold reflection blend together. Since it is a realist work, it undoubtedly requires a cold examination of the contemporary social reality depicted. The show did just that: it didn't shy away from the contemporary historical issues involved and the problems that still exist in reality. As for the undesirable phenomena such as the outlaws or unhealthy tendencies in the official circles around Zhou Bingyi, including the corruption and degeneration of his "buddy" Yao Lisong, the drama mainly exposes Zhou Bingyi's decent style and its difficulty in adhering to it, as well as Yao Lisong's sincere advice. In contrast, the play pays attention to the dynamic side of exalting positive strength and idealistic spirit, especially so that this positive force and idealistic spirit not only comes from the daily words and deeds of ordinary citizens Zhou Zhigang and Li Suhua in Chinese cities, but also from the families of decent high-ranking cadres such as Governor Hao and Jin Yueji, and even more so that this fine tradition can be passed on in the descendants of these two families. When Hao Dongmei scolded her mother, Jin Yueji, for not helping her husband Zhou Bingyi, who was about to be expelled from the publishing house, jin Yueji replied: The destruction of the of a thousand miles in the ant nest all started from small things, and now the phenomenon of public power and private use in society is increasing, everyone is accustomed to it, if everyone feels that they have power in their hands and are not used for waste, then this society is not far from collapse, in this sense, Bingyi is right. This statement reflects the positive forces and idealistic spirit that guides us today. And Zhou Bingyi did indeed perform by example in his work. He was not only honest and honest, but also strived to forge ahead and benefit the people, and in order to win over investors, he went to the hospital with a weak body with stomach pain and went to the hospital to fight for alcohol. Such a righteous demeanor has always been guided by positive forces and idealistic spirit.
Third, from essential insight to divine portrayal. This drama is not like in the hands of 19th-century European Dickens, Balzac, Courbet and other classical realist writers and artists, to obtain a scientific understanding of the nature or law of reality through the portrayal of social authenticity or objectivity, but consciously inherits the Tradition of Chinese Interest, leaving a large number of "blank spots" or "unsettled points" that are not hard to evaluate in the narrative of the Zhou Zhigang family story and related stories, containing meaningful meaning space, allowing the audience to automatically enter it to fill in the blanks and evaluate. For the life path of the three brothers and sisters of the Zhou family, the audience can fully derive their different experiences and evaluations, whether it is looking up, recognizing, praising, or not understanding, opposing, scorning, etc. Of course, if the audience looks up to but cannot reach the way of Zhou Bingyi's upright upper-class officials, understands but does not agree with Zhou Rong's self-congratulatory way of learning, and shows pity and praises Zhou Bingkun's way of being an ordinary migrant worker who is honest and righteous, it is normal. For the depiction of the world, the play leaves a broad space of ambiguity, uncertainty and repeated reminiscence, leaving the right of ultimate arbitration open to the audience. While watching the evolution of the three generations of the Zhou family story, while recalling their own life course, the audience will surely give their own diverse and reasonable judgments. When these elderly people in their sixties and seventies, middle-aged people in their 40s and 50s, and young people who are just 20 or 30 years old all compete to send their different life experiences to the gaps in the story and draw their own life experiences and understandings, the narrative task of the play has been completed. The meaning of a good work should not make the audience feel unobstructed or only get one interpretation, but should be rich in meaning and long-lasting, so that they can independently appreciate the polysemy aesthetic effect of its conveying portrayal in the "deep text hidden, aftertaste song package" of the work.
If there is any place that can be improved, it is that the play would be better if it could have more original artistic discoveries in the historical knowledge of the historical changes in contemporary society and more powerful deep criticism and enthusiastic praise. Nevertheless, through the hand-in-hand of novels and TV series, "The World of Man" has jointly promoted the Chinese-style mental wisdom to lead the spiritual principles of realism, and has embarked on an artistic path of Chinese realism, an experience that is presumably able to give useful aesthetic paradigm enlightenment to the contemporary narrative literary and artistic creation of similar themes.
(The author is a professor at the Research Center for Literature and Art studies at Beijing Normal University and vice chairman of the China Literary and Art Critics Association)
Author: Wang Yichuan
Editor: Xueying Wang
Planner: Wang Xueying
Editor-in-Charge: Xiaofang Xing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.