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——Column host: Liu Ya
Zhang Qinghua
writer
How to pay tribute to an old narrative
What has been written so far by humanity may be substantially and to some extent related to previous narratives. This is not only an academic question, but also a common problem in creation. The poet-critic T.S. Eliot once talked about this issue under the title "Tradition and Individual Talent". The idea is that no one can write by personal talent outside of history and tradition, and that all his works are based on some kind of relationship with previous texts.
This statement can be more concrete: all writing is based on a dialogue with the texts and languages created by human beings before, either in its continuity, repetition, imitation, illusion, substitution, rebellion, subversion, and ...... In short, there will be a relationship. Even if the author does not want to, the reader will make a similar understanding when reading and comprehending, substituting his or her own prior knowledge and experience. Therefore, there can be no flying thing in the true sense of the text, let alone a de facto "rupture".
Because of this, we must not only "passively" relate to the narratives of our predecessors, but even "consciously" establish this connection, so that our writing can carry more content, obtain the confirmation of a certain traditional experience, and be merged into a genealogy, arouse more people's recognition, resonance or attention, and also produce more and broader meanings.
1. What is a "prototype" and how to greet it
I don't want to talk too much about academic issues, but I will briefly touch on them to prove that this topic is not made out of nothing. Regarding "archetypes", the Canada theorist Northrup · Frye, one of the descendants of the psychoanalytic school, first proposed the concept. Archetypes are mainly concepts derived from mythology, and Frye believes that literature originates from mythology, and mythology contains all the forms and themes of the evolution of later literature. This is also about how the correlation between structuralism and anthropology takes place. By studying myths, we discover all the core and important narratives of humanity contained in them, that is, archetypes.
Frye's argument makes sense, at least in the history of European literature, that these ancient archetypes have given literature the seeds and nourishment that have multiplied for thousands of years. These things are of course catalyzed by socio-historical factors, but they have always existed in certain unchanging structures. This is enough to show that literature not only belongs to "creation", but also to "protection".
It's too academic to talk about this, but I'll reduce it to a writing question. In fact, in his "Interpretation of Dreams", Freud has observed the spread and overflow of the unconscious. The "Oedipus complex" that lurks in the literature he discusses is very close to what Frye called "archetypes" and what Jung called "the collective unconscious". Freud discovered a secret in this, as a widespread unconscious psychology of human beings, the impulse to "kill the father and marry the mother", successfully lurked in the ancient literary narrative. With the development of civilized society, it has of course been cut off from secular ethics, or it has been "suppressed into the subconscious". But this existence in the subconscious is eventually transformed by the writer into a narrative, a primitive symbolic image that requires psychoanalysis to see clearly.
From Freud's student Carl Jung, Freud's analysis of the individual unconscious led to the emergence of a concept of the "collective unconscious," which he collectively referred to as "primitive imagery." These primitive images actually refer to those original models, and other similar beings are formed according to this original model.
In "The Interpretation of Dreams", Freud analyzed many dream images: for example, there are lengths, small rulers, knives, and all protruding objects, which he believed to be symbols of male sexual organs; All the boxes or indentations are symbols of female genitalism. This is a typical Freudian analysis, and these things were then elaborated by Jung into primitive images.
In The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,[1] Jung argues that the word archetype, which is the "form" ("reason") in Platonic philosophy, refers to an innate tendency in the collective unconscious. In contrast to Frye's anthropological dimension, Jung led the theory of archetypes to the study of the unconscious, opening up a deeper world in which the complexity of the mind corresponds to the complexity of the art world and the text.
These are two similar but different paths of study derived from the psychoanalytic school.
Frye also invented a concept called "racial memory." Ethnic memory is also strange, even animals, birds rely on what they rely on for their thousands of kilometers of migration, that is, the collective memory that transcends the individual. To take the closest example, why did Beijing Normal University gather crows from all over Beijing at dusk? If my car is placed under a tree, it will have to be washed the next day, otherwise it will not be able to drive, and the glass will be covered with bird droppings. Why do crows gather here? It's not because it wants to "study", but because it has a racial memory - it used to be called the "Iron Lion Tomb". In the urban pattern of old Beijing, this area may be relatively desolate, with "Xiaoxitian" to the south and "Taipingzhuang" to the north, which may be the funeral cultural area of old Beijing. In addition, there are many wild graves in this area, so crows also gather, and crows like more remote environments. Now that we are so prosperous and so densely populated, why are they still refusing to leave? That's where the racial memory comes into play, and they've seen it as their home for generations, so they can't take it away. Now it's the humans who have invaded the crow's home, and the crows are living peacefully with us, not attacking, just angrily pulling on our car.
Even animals have racial memories, let alone humans? So it makes sense for Freud, Jung, and Frye to think that although the early human unconscious was suppressed in civilized society, it still exists, and will be presented through dreams, and then enter or latent into the literary narrative through dreams.
We often say that literary works are "dream-like" and "dream-like", and the structure of dreams is similar to the structure of literary works, "Dream of Red Mansions" is a dream, and the core is Baoyu's "spring dream", as the core of human life experience, this dream then expands into Jia Baoyu's life - the stone under the nonsensical cliff of the Great Wilderness Mountain has become a beautiful jade, and finally turns back into a stone, but when he returns, he "compiles his history" and records its life story of "one life and one catastrophe". It became "The Story of Stones". The "practitioners" of this kind of illusion are a monk, sometimes they are "vast monks and misty real people", and sometimes they will transform into "lame Taoists and leper monks", they begin to transform the stone into a piece of beautiful jade, bring it to the world, and after experiencing prosperity and wealth, they will be "held hostage" again, led to the other side, and released back to the great wilderness. The lives that were described on it have now been put into words, recorded on the cold stones.
I don't know how many generations have passed, the story of "The Story of the Stone" has been circulated several times, and it has become "Love Monk Record" and "Fengyue Baojian", and it has come to the hands of Cao Xueqin in "Mourning Hongxuan", and after several additions and deletions, it has become "Dream of Red Mansions".
Baoyu's special dream, the "Spring Dream" made in Qin Keqing's room, is isomorphic to his lifelong experience of "moving from color to emptiness", and is also isomorphic to the rise and fall of the four major families of King Jia and Shixue, and also forms an isomorphism with the "Spring and Autumn Dream" of history as understood by the Chinese, as well as the finitude of the universe and existence itself.
In other words, "Dream of Red Mansions" itself is a particularly archetypal literary narrative, which we can call "dream narrative". This is a prototype of the Chinese narrative, which may come from Song Yu's "Gao Tang" and "Divine Daughter" Erfu, through Shen Jiji's "Pillow in the Record", Li Gongzuo's "Nan Ke Taishou Biography", to "Jin Ping Mei", to "Dream of the Red Chamber", you can find many similar literary texts.
Broadly speaking, perhaps all literary narratives are essentially a dream structure, and this dream structure is deeply intrinsically related to the unconscious activity of human beings. Therefore, the scenes in dreams, the artistic images in literature, are very closely related to the activities of the unconscious world of human beings.
The Chinese pay great attention to the traditional elements of writing, which in ancient times was manifested in the "use of classics" in poetry, and the experience of later generations must be related to the experience of predecessors, otherwise there is a lack of insight and no origin. This means paying homage to what has already happened, or projecting old experience into the present. This shows that the main body of the writing is there first