About Lu Xun's language style

First of all, the three excerpts of Qian Lao's discourse on Lu Xun's language style are as follows:

One

The characteristics of Lu Xun's language are simply that it exerts the functions of ideography and lyricism in modern Chinese to the extreme. Zhou Zuoren once said that Chinese has three major characteristics, one is painting, one is musicality, and the other is gameplay.

And this "three sexes" has been perfectly reflected in Lu Xun's works. Lu Xun's language also has a characteristic, everyone reading Lu Xun's articles often feel that Lu Xun's words are "not clear". This is his unconventional method of expression, deliberately destroying grammar and rhetoric, because Lu Xun wants to express something that is difficult to express in language.

Lu Xun has a saying: "When I am silent, I feel full; I will open my mouth and feel empty at the same time." In fact, each of us has this experience: what we really want to talk about, things that belong to inner experience and feelings, cannot be said, and when we say it, it will change. This is the limitation of language, and Lu Xun wants to challenge this limitation.

He wants to use language to express some complex emotions and psychology that are difficult to express in language, so he often breaks the rules of existing language, existing rhetoric, and does "language adventures" to create a very unique rhetoric, a new language.

This may be where Lu Xun's writings are more attractive. Therefore, I once proposed that to understand Lu Xun's language, we cannot rely entirely on silent reading, but need to read aloud. The charm of Lu Xun's language, the strong and ever-changing emotions, many things that can only be understood and cannot be understood, need to be read aloud to understand.

Two

In fact, the marginal and anti-institutional nature of Lu Xun's essays is not only a verbal position and posture, but also manifested in his essay thinking and essay language at the same time.

In "A Treatise on Lu Xun's Essays Suitable for MySelf", I analyzed the "non-standardization" of Lu Xun's essay thinking, "often outside the conventional thinking line, another way", and the "anti-norm" of his essay language, "as if deliberately breaking the rules of grammar, violating conventional usage, and creating a disharmonious body, in order to break the shackles of language on thought, and at the same time achieve absurd and strange aesthetic effects." --This is also "not into the tune, not into the flow".

Three

Zhou Zuoren once said that Chinese has three major characteristics, namely, decorative, musical and playful. In fact, this is also the characteristic of Lu Xun's language. The decorativeness of Lu Xun's language is mainly reflected in its painterliness, sense of color and sense of lens; behind the musicality of Lu Xun's language is obviously the influence of traditional Chinese piaowen, Zhou Zuoren once advocated "mixing the simplicity of prose and the gorgeous article of Piaowen", and it was Lu Xun who really did it.

Lu Xun's works need to be read aloud, and the musical charm of his language needs to be felt in the midst of depression and frustration. The painterly and musical nature of Lu Xun's language not only has the influence of Chinese tradition, but also the result of his conscious reference to Western modern art and musical expression techniques, which may be more noteworthy;

The game pen and ink in Lu Xun's text shows Lu Xun's humor and wit, and contemporary middle school students will have their own understanding. The sense of color, music and lens in Lu Xun's language are also the closest to the thinking, appreciation and interest of middle school students, and the easiest for them to accept.

What cannot be ignored and avoided is the transcendent and non-normative characteristics of Lu Xun's language. In another article, I specifically mentioned a sentence from Lu Xun: "When I am silent, I feel full; I will open my mouth and feel empty at the same time." This shows that people, especially modern people, have the most complex feelings and deepest experiences that language cannot reach.

And "Lu Xun, as a true language artist, wants to challenge this ineffable and try to illuminate the ineffable world with language." Thus, in his works, especially in The Weeds, there is a great deal of "expression that violates everyday habits of thought, rhetorical habits, and linguistic norms."

Such a conscious language experiment, and even a language adventure, although often criticized by the "language barrier", he did "open up a new space for expressing the indescribable life experience of modern people in Chinese, and show the infinite and broad performance prospects of modern Chinese". This may be Lu Xun's greater contribution to the development of modern Chinese literature and language.

What cannot be ignored is Lu Xun's stylistic experiment. Lu Xun's novels, essays, prose poems, and essays are undoubtedly the most important examples for middle school students to learn modern styles. How to interpret the texts of Lu Xun's different styles selected into the textbooks has become a major problem in middle school language education.

This in turn promoted my research on Lu Xun: I spent a lot of energy on Lu Xun's "text perusal", which led to a lot of interesting discussions and studies on "Lu Xun's style", such as the "calm aesthetics" of Lu Xun's novels, the "casual talk" of Lu Xun's prose, the "monologue" of Lu Xun's prose poems, and later put forward the research direction of Lu Xun's "essay aesthetics", and so on.

In my opinion, this is all a great space for development, and it may even become a new breakthrough in Lu Xun's research. It can be seen that when I participate in the practice of language education reform, I can always grasp the theoretical problems in it, which in turn promotes the understanding and research of Lu Xun and achieves the combination of practical and theoretical research.

Generally speaking, Li Ao believes that Lu Xun was influenced by Japanese grammar because of the alternating era of old and new literature, so the grammar did not understand, and Lu Xun's thought was profound, but its grammar was bad and outdated.

Here are the author's points:

When I look at problems, I often borrow the yin and yang thinking of Chinese medicine, that is, the yin and yang of everything are mutually rooted and mutually opposed.

Therefore, the first thing to admit is that lu xun's generation was indeed influenced by the old and new grammar, and at the same time Lu Xun was also influenced by the Japanese language, which must be admitted, and without acknowledging this, it is impossible to further understand the background of Lu Xun's language habits.

However, people born in the old and new eras and influenced by vernacular and literary grammar do not mean that their grammar must be "oppressed", such as the teacher's articles, which are both vivid and profound, and have the legacy of the magnificent literary style.

When the instructor was old, he recalled: "At that time, I was urged by the old talents to spend a lot of energy to study and make a good text, so that if I needed it now, I could still make a better text", which shows that although everyone was born in the era of alternating between the old and the new, it is not difficult to change the style of writing.

And why does Lu Xun still use such a unique language style? Elder Qian believes that first of all, this is Lu Xun's intention to show an "anti-system" integrity, just like Guo Degang's cross-talk "I want to oppose the three customs", which satirizes the "mainstream" cross-talk actor's ban on it.

Secondly, Elder Qian thinks that Lu Xun is trying to illuminate the ineffable thing with language, and I think that if you want to do this, you must first have another kind of logic and thinking, if it is just a random reversal of the order, then there is no such thing as "language experiment".

So where does this other set of laws come from? Naturally, it is a Japanese and ancient language system, so from another point of view, others who want to "experiment" may not be qualified, so in some cases, their shortcomings can also be converted into advantages.

In Adler's book "How to Read a Book", he mentioned a very important point, that is, in order to understand a book, the most critical point is to reach a "consensus" with the author of the book, that is, to understand the most accurate meaning of the words and words used by the author, in order to understand the connotation that the author wants to express.

As the main general and general of the May Fourth Movement in that era, Lu Xun naturally had many readers who reached a consensus with him, but with the explosion of information today, it is difficult for more and more readers to reach a "consensus" with Lu Xun's articles, and from this point of view, Lu Xun's "experiment" is undoubtedly a failure.

From another point of view, after the human brain adapts to a kind of thinking logic for a long time, for words such as "Jiluo", especially in a long text, the human brain will automatically recognize it as "logic", but if a large number of word order logic reconstructions appear in an article, it will make the brain feel at a loss for a while, so as to concentrate more energy and attention, rethink the logic and word order laws behind it, as a Lu Xun-style article with "deep thinking", such writing will undoubtedly attract more attention and thinking. From this point of view, Lu Xun's "experiment" was successful.

At the same time, there is another reason to pay attention to, that is, because Lu Xun's articles are often banned or tampered with during the special period, therefore, in addition to the name "Lu Xun", Lu Xun has also used more than 10 other pen names, so in order to allow readers at that time to see at a glance that this is Lu Xun's article, Lu Xun retained his special language style as much as possible, which is also a reason that cannot be ignored.

The author always believes that reading is a niche thing, everyone has their favorite style and writer, as long as it is needed, it will never become obsolete.

Just like Chinese medicine, no matter how it is suppressed, in the face of the helpless black death, plague and new crown in foreign countries, Chinese medicine still shows its irreplaceable vitality.

Lu Xun's language is good or bad, everyone can have different views, but in terms of education, whether it can become the "most important model for middle school students to learn modern styles" The author holds a negative attitude, just like learning Chinese medicine, no one stipulates which school must be learned, or from typhoid fever, or from Wen Disease, or from Dongyuan, or from Danxi, because Chinese culture has a characteristic of "circle", we can reach the Tao from any angle, with the personalization of education, it is not impossible to take Jin Yong into the textbook.