In the Middle Ages, if you were to write a novel on parchment that could only produce four pages from a sheep, the good guys asked you, "Hey what are you going to write?" Then you replied, "I plan to write about my life of being rejected by countless girls and dying of old age", then congratulations, you have found the reason for your desolation, that is, "you are a little stupid", you use such expensive parchment to write this kind of thing, do you reflect on whether it is a little silly?
In an era when paper is precious, ink is expensive, people who can write are expensive and their life expectancy is not very long, the degree of freedom of literature is very low, the subject matter is very limited, if you have the opportunity to pick up a pen and face a large piece of parchment, you have to write it in the format of a folio, you must write very carefully: first, you are speaking to people in the next few centuries; second, the content you say must be worthy of the paper in front of you, because you can be willful, but your descendants see your manuscript, he is likely not as willful as you. They'll scrape off the words you've written and keep using this piece of parchment.
In the Middle Ages, people also wanted to live and love men and women, but they and most of their voices were obliterated by history, because paper was too expensive. It was not too late for Europe to introduce papermaking, but there were no readily available cotton wool rags in Europe for craftsmen to take to papermaking, and artificial paper was not much cheaper than parchment, so when Gutenberg made his printing press- he found that he could only print on parchment, but the books he printed were not much cheaper than manuscripts, but the style was much lower.
Medieval scene: writing with a quill pen in the right hand and a knife as an "eraser" in the left hand
So when European agriculture began to grow cash crops in large quantities, and the poor no longer wore a single piece of clothing for a lifetime, the revival of literature began, and the first manifestation was the richness of the subject matter: people no longer shouted at centuries, but instead they began to stand under the lights, so that centuries of people could see themselves. "Man" is not a hero, not a demigod, just an ordinary person, and even a little bit of a head is not very bright, such as don Quixote de Lamanchal knight lord on the stage; maybe they need to have all kinds of adventures, but they are no longer the son of God or the chosen man of God, nor a perfect hero of the Greek epic; he may be stupid, or bad, or he may be robbed of reason by love, like the Doncred knight in Tasso's poem, who shoots down a knight's helmet with a spear on the battlefield, The helmet fell to the ground and the blonde hair was scattered, and at the same time a face that made him unforgettable at first sight appeared, and his attendant raised his sword to slash at the female knight, and Lord Don Cred could not stop it, slashing the sister, and the blonde hair was splashed with red blood, like gold inlaid with rubies. Such a moving scene should be written even in the parchment age, but we can only see the Renaissance era, and we should thank the cotton growers who promoted the progress of literature.
From the miracles, adventures, and great deeds of heroes, perfect people, gods, and demigods to the miracles, adventures, and great deeds of man, it is the first step for literature to descend on the human world, and the second is to meet the lives of ordinary people from great deeds, miracles, and wonders. From curiosity to experiencing life, it is the second step.
Van Ulster's depiction of Renaissance women reading scenes
By the 18th century, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe could also be regarded as traditional literature, Mr. Robinson drifted to the island to survive on his own ability, and in this point he was a continuation of the Odyssey, but Robinson was an ordinary man and not a demigod, so he was a continuation of modern literature. And in Stern's "The Biography of Tristram Xiangdi", who cares if XiangDi's father did not wind the clock before he fell in love? Which author of the pit daddy threw the protagonist in his mother's stomach for ten months and turned his head to talk about his uncle?
At this time, people no longer read to learn virtue, to feel the greatness of God or the greatness of man, no longer to perfect their own morality, or to pursue any truth, but to enjoy, to be entertained, to experience the lives of others, another person who is similar to himself, not a person who exalts thunder.
It turns out that literature can be like this! Someone else gave Rousseau a copy of Robinson, and he seemed to feel a new world. And "The Biography of Xiang Di" also caused a sensation in Paris, and the uncle who was hit halfway by the shell could actually become a character in the novel, and Stern, Fielding, and Gore Smith caused a sensation, and then they followed suit.
Rousseau created a trend of the times, the plot does not matter, the characters do not matter, the content of "New Lois" is various, but who cares about the content of that era? People are looking at those love letters, those overflowing emotions. Rousseau's students went further on this basis, Goethe's "The Troubles of Young Werther", what clothes the protagonist wears, you still remember, because everyone imitates this dress in the era of the wild rush, blue coat and yellow vest, but what does the protagonist do is it still important? What else did he do besides fall in love? Who remembers? It's love, it's two people, did Charlotte's chest Goethe say? Obviously not, but does it matter? It is love, on the stormy plains, in the garden under the moonlight, dancing a four-person square dance, is love, is bitterness, is sadness, and finally commits suicide, everything is over, the reader is crazy. An era has begun.
18th-century painter Boucher's masterpiece Madame de Pompadour
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, horror literature, unrequited love literature, and detective fiction all appeared. And the real pioneering is the television cinematography of the novel, this pioneer is Balzac, Balzac's novel art in the creation of "The Tall Old Man" made a breakthrough, he and his sister showed off for a long time, saying that he found the gold mine, because he finally thought of how to make his novels in the independent book at the same time to connect with each other, the characters shuttled, the story of the novel ended but life continued, not only the life outside the book continued, the life in the book also continued, "Human Comedy" The characters in this novel transcend the specific novel, and they do not just live in several novels that are coherent with each other, they live in the world of novels, the protagonist of this novel is a supporting role in another novel, and the protagonist of this novel engages the lover of the protagonist in another novel, which angers the financial predator and finally dies. When you are sick, go to Dr. Pianson, ah, there is a scandal to be exposed by the newspaper? Just go to the unscrupulous reporter Emil Boronday, the ghost may be looking for the next handsome guy in some dining apartment, and the financial tycoon Baron Neutzingen is going to run to Belgium again?
By the end of the Romantic movement, everything could be the subject of a novel: an ordinary man, lonely, empty, cold, hooking up with a girl in a salon, a girl in a mineral spa, a traveler hooking up with a girl in a candy shop in Baden-Baden (a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany); or meeting an old lover while hooking up with a girl; or reading about a murder in the newspaper, everything became the subject of literature, and no one jumped out again: "You're a little stupid, right?" Waste of paper and ink to write this kind of thing", the one who in the 10th century asked sharply , "Write this thing?" You're a bit of a fool, aren't you? "The good friend is forever engulfed by the progress of history, and this time we, the melancholy, the empty, the bored, laugh to the end.
Another problem of literature is thus exposed to the sun. In an era when the subject matter is unprecedentedly developed, novels are varied, why should we read this book instead of that? At first, everyone looked at word of mouth, that is, word of mouth, in the era of Louis XV and Louis XVI, Voltaire sneered, when do people in our time read books? People of our time only read books after waking up in the morning and before going out in the afternoon, why should they read books? In order to discuss it in the salon in the afternoon. Yes, a few men or women who are willing to read and chat, preferably at the same time, have money, have access to power, and of course in Paris are mainly women, and their views on a book determine the fate of a book, and more importantly, the fate of the author at the back of the book.
Madame Joffran's Salon Reading Club (1755) by Charlie André Van Lu
People in the Baroque period chatting about books in salons can be regarded as literary criticism. In the same period, with the advent of publications, real literary criticism also emerged, such as Lessing's Hamburg Review, which was a critical work of the period, literary magazines and newspapers were in the ascendant, and the main function of magazines was to provide short and medium-length literary works for people to read, and another function was to publish literary criticism, because until the 1910s, a considerable number of people read newspapers or magazines in cafes, bars, and clubs. Because of the rise of publishing, literary criticism has changed from a salon conversation to a literary category.
Tell which book is good? Which book is worth buying? Why does it look good? Where does it look good? This is literary criticism, from commenting on the plot to commenting on the author, telling you why the author wrote this, and by the way, breaking the news for you, which is the simplest and crudeest summary of the literary criticism of St. Beuve's time, that is, the romantic era. The drama of this era is equivalent to our CCTV golden TV series today. In France, which had just been defeated by the British and restored the Bourbon Dynasty, a group of Englishmen actually came to France to perform Shakespeare! Is it tolerable or intolerable? So the scolding was everywhere, and at this time there was such a group of leading the way, they saddled the British theater company before and after the horse, but also had to fight with the patriots in the newspaper, one of them was a fat man who was also an officer of Napoleon, really damn, this fat man was Stendhal, he wrote the famous non-national article "Racine and Shakespeare".
The Leading Party itself staged its own drama. Hugo this guy wrote "Cromwell", although it did not cause a big sensation, but this guy was afraid of splashing ink on the faces of the people and wrote a "Cromwell Preface". This time it exploded completely, and before his other play "Onani" was staged, the two sides were rubbing their fists and preparing to do a big fight, and on the day of the performance, Hugo's thugs and the unknown masses and the patriotic masses fought, and Theophile Gautier grabbed a cheering woman and shouted, "What are you doing!" ", what a sweep.
When writing The Red and the Black, the fat man Stendhal believed that literature must pursue a serious and accurate style, he claimed to read two pages of civil law before writing every day, and then write. Decades later Flaubert responded to Stendhal from his point of view when he was talking about Balzac. He thought Balzac's story was good, but Balzac didn't know how to tell his story, flaubert's implication was that he obviously knew how to write, but the result of his style pursuit of the work was that he only wrote a Balzac-style novel "Emotional Education", "Emotional Education" would undoubtedly be a good one if it was stuffed into "Human Comedy", but if Balzac also wrote so, if "Human Comedy" only had one "Emotional Education", That Balzac could have been forced by his creditors.
Her Favorite Old Time, George Dunlop Leslie (1835-1921)
During the Second Empire, literature as an art, or as a science, was maturing, and in terms of plot and content it had developed to an astonishing degree, but it was still naïve in its approach, so Baudelaire said that "the modern poet must first become a critic" and that it is more important to "write how" than to "write what". The inherent skills of literature itself, the melody of poetry, and the beauty of contentless rhymes have become important topics, and the painterliness of poetry, the specific colors and images brought by language, have become the goals pursued in the period of aestheticism.
In the era of high literary costs, literature is divorced from daily life, when social progress makes the cost of literature fall, it is once combined with daily life, and when the cost of literature is further reduced, so that the author can almost not rely on the income brought by literature to live, it is once again detached from life, to the realm of self-reliance, this is Baudelaire's initiative, and Wilde hangs on his lips every day "art for art's sake".
Portrait of Sonia Nips Klimt