Zhao Yi, a Qing dynasty, said it well: "There are talented people in the Jiangshan Generation, and each has led the way for hundreds of years." "An era, there is a literature of an era. We usually say that the Qin and Han Dynasties were the golden age of rhetoric, the Tang and Song Dynasties were the cardamom years of poetry, the Yuan Dynasty was the harvest season of opera, and the Ming and Qing dynasties were the prosperous years of novels.
The prosperity of Ming and Qing novels is first manifested in quantity, but also in quality, and quality is concentrated in famous works. We often talk about the four famous works, that is, the four classical novels of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", "Journey to the West" and "Dream of the Red Chamber". The reason why famous works are famous works is because they all have very rich and complex cultural connotations, which can withstand people's repeated chewing and aftertaste.
So, what does the cultural spirit of "Dream of the Red Chamber" refer to specifically? Xiaobian believes that the main cultural spirit of "Dream of the Red Chamber" should be "love culture". In the first episode of "Dream of the Red Chamber", the author once knew that this book was "the great purpose of love", and after reading this book, the empty karate people "saw the color because of the emptiness, and the love was born from the color; the love was introduced into the color, and the self-color Wukong changed his name to the love monk, and changed the stone record to the "Love Monk Record". On the palace gate, which conveys the author's deep meaning of "too illusory realm", the horizontal book is "Evil Sea Love Heaven", and the couplet is "Thick and high in the sky, lamenting the inexhaustible love of ancient and modern; foolish men and women, poor wind and moon debts are difficult to pay." ”
Li Yanzhai, who has read the second half of the book, also mentioned the last "love list" in the criticism. We can all see that the author occupies an important position in the creation of "Dream of the Red Chamber". Love has become the center and soul of the connotation of the entire "Dream of the Red Chamber".
The "love" here is not only the private feelings of children, but also the existence of a much broader and broader form of life ontological meaning, including family affection, friendship, and love, which has a philosophical meaning. Not only do we use affection for sentient things, but we also use affection for ruthless things, look at the world from the perspective of "love", and experience life from the perspective of "love". This contradiction between disillusionment with life and attachment to "love" is a psychological state that has long haunted Xueqin, affecting the creative conception of the whole book.
What is the relationship between Cao Xueqin's core creation of "Dream of the Red Chamber", and his own creative psychology? Psychologically speaking, literary works are expressions of a writer's aesthetic emotional experience. And the writer's life experience is the writer's aesthetic grasp of the meaning of human life. As a mental activity, it has three characteristics: one is to point to human life consciousness: that is, to the meaning, purpose and value of life; the other is to have an aesthetic nature: that is, to have emotional participation; and the third is to be experience-based, that is, to recall and reflect on things that have been experienced (including known). When ordinary people experience family ruin, they may only get a life experience, but Cao Xueqin has obtained a rich and profound life experience in the repeated recollection of this life experience.
♥ The profound experience of the world's heat and coldness, the portrayal of human feelings as the main work
Cao Xueqin was a royal household slave and belonged to the Zhengbai Banner. Cao Xueqin's maternal grandmother, Sun Shi, was the "Teaching Guide Mama" (Nanny) of Xuan Ye, the third son of emperor Shunzhi of the Qing Dynasty. His grandfather Cao Yin served as Xuan Ye's companion and imperial bodyguard, and later served as a weaver in Jiangning, and also served as the imperial envoy of the Lianghuai Patrol Salt Inspector, and was greatly favored by Xuan Ye. Xuan Ye went down to Jiangnan six times, four of which were taken over by Cao Yin and lived in the Cao family. The cao family's three generations of four grandchildren served as Jiangning weavers for sixty years. During this period, the Cao family became important members of Jiangnan's politics, economy and culture as a close confidant of the emperor. When Cao Xueqin was young, she grew up in this aristocratic life of "cooking oil on fire and flowers with brocade".
After Yongzheng ascended the throne, due to the involvement of the political struggle within the highest feudal ruling class, this "Bell Ringing Ding" home suffered a series of blows. Thirteen-year-old Cao Xueqin has since ended her life of "brocade pants, sweet and fat". The family left Jinling in the sixth year of Yongzheng and moved back to Beijing. This left an indelible memory for Cao Xueqin's young mind.
After Yongzheng's death, although the Qianlong Emperor revoked his original accusations against the Cao family, he failed to return his original official position and family property to the Cao family. Therefore, Cao Xueqin had to go to the designated place to serve as a messenger like a normal flag person. He worked for a period of time in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and his life was also very mediocre, and he was later deposed for his words and deeds. During this period, Cao Xueqin successively lived in her aunt's house, her father-in-law's house, and also lived in temples, horse sheds, "water nests" and other miscellaneous places. Around the nineteenth year of Qianlong, Cao Xueqin, forced by life, had to move from the city to the mountain village in the western suburbs. There he had a small house with "rafters and a tile stove rope bed", where he made a living selling paintings and being a village school teacher, and lived a life of "looking at the western mountains and eating twilight" and "eating porridge and wine for the whole family".
"Who has fallen from a well-off family into a difficult situation, I think that in this way, you can probably see the true face of the world." 」 And Cao Xueqin's home is not only "well-off", naturally more real than Lu Xun's view of "the true face of the world", and he will have a profound understanding of the coldness of human feelings. Cao Xueqin was born rich, in her early years she was accustomed to being served by others, and now she is in her prime, but she has to live the days of sending people to the fence and being blinded by people, and her inner desolation can be imagined. "The bell rings, the troubles are clear, the wisdom is long, and the bodhi is born." Looking back, the past is empty. Comparing the past and the present, there are many emotions. The writer's creation is always closely related to the writer's life experience, and it is always unconsciously marked with deep subjective emotions.
In the face of the huge gap in life, Cao Xueqin tasted sour, sweet and bitter. This painful life experience will inevitably have a huge impact on his creation, and the description of human feelings and worlds will naturally become an important content for him to show when creating. Psychology believes that when the author is creating, he will point to the meaning, purpose, and value of life. Cao Xueqin's life of despair can only make him return his value orientation to his heart and return to human nature.
Through "Dream of the Red Chamber", Cao Xueqin wrote about the hypocrisy of people's conflicts of interest, and the world was cold. Therefore, whether it was zhen shiyin's family that defected to his father-in-law's house when he was broken and lost, or Jia Yucun later found out that Zhen Shiyin's missing daughter was actually Xue Pan's concubine Xiangling but did not rescue her, or whether Jia Tanchun, the third lady of Rong Province, was ashamed to recognize her mother's brother as her brother-in-law, or Jia Mu, Lady Wang, and Xi Feng did not hesitate to use the poisonous strategy of "dropping the bag" to make Baoyu and Baochao become intimate, and killed Daiyu and drove Baoyu crazy, this is all a great exposure of the ugliness of human nature. As a result, Cao Xueqin painted the worldly yanliang sculpture of human love into three points, and also truly reflected Cao Xueqin's own many personal experiences and creative psychology.
♥ The external manifestation of debauchery, the inner world of true gravity
From the very few information on Cao Xueqin now, we know that he is an extremely talented person. Cao Xueqin is a poet. His poems, with novel ideas, are in style similar to those of the Tang Dynasty poet Li He. His friend Dun Cheng once praised: "Aijun's poetry pen has a strange spirit, and he chases changgu to break the fence." He also said, "Zhijun Shi's courage is like iron, and he can communicate with Dao Ying." "Cao Xueqin is also a painter who likes to paint abrupt and strange stones. Dun Min's "Inscription Qinpu Painting Stone" said: "The proud bones are as strange as the king's world, and the ruggedness is even more difficult to see this fragmentation." Drunken Yu swept like a rafter pen, writing out the block in the chest. It can be seen that when he painted the stone, he pinned the uneven atmosphere accumulated in his chest.
However, the unsatisfactory reality makes this talented person "talentless to make up for the sky", and can only "mourn day and night". Born in Youyu, died in poverty, had a bumpy life, and was full of world heat, Cao Xueqin had both a full belly of talent and a stomach full of resentment, so in the face of the superficial prosperity of the "Kangqian prosperous world", there was a very strong rebellious psychology, and this rebellious psychology formed his debauched character.
In the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest", Ruan's arrogance and personality are famous, and Cao Xueqin has a nickname "Dream Ruan", which expresses her yearning for Ruan. Duncheng gave Xueqin poems: "Infantry white eyes slant toward people"; reminiscent of Xueqin poems: "Crazy than Ruan Infantry", these are the embodiment of Cao Xueqin's debauched and uninhibited personality. According to the view of the famous red scholar Zhou Ruchang, Cao Xueqin's debauched and uninhibited personality is mainly manifested in three aspects: first, laughing and scolding, and being arrogant; second, Su Xi is witty and funny; third, cynical and cynical, arrogant and crazy.
The misfortune of life did not destroy Cao Xueqin. On the contrary, Cao Xueqin's emotional world is colorful. He used "laughter and anger" to show his personality, "witty and funny" to show his uninhibited, and "cynical and cynical" to reflect his rebellion. Let us see Cao Xueqin's lonely soul and the helplessness of rare acquaintances. "Full of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears. All cloud authors are stupid, who understand the taste. Although Cao Xueqin tasted the pain of life, she still thought about the real world obsessively.
From the perspective of creative psychology, a person without passion cannot talk about creation, and a person who exerts his passion in reality and has a full psychological balance and full tranquility will also not have the impulse to create. The more unmet human needs are, the stronger they tend to become, and the more irrepressible the motivation that arises from them. The heavy love of the inner world, the infatuation but in the lonely wasteland, the helplessness of longing to understand and having nowhere to pour out, Cao Xueqin is to transform this grudge into a "love" word in "Dream of the Red Chamber" to be vividly displayed.
A "Dream of the Red Chamber" is essentially a big catharsis of Cao Xueqin's rebellious psychology, and it is also a sublimation of her rebellious personality. This kind of rebellious psychological catharsis is different from ordinary psychological catharsis, it is not satisfied with obtaining a temporary psychological balance, but in the pursuit of an eternal truth thinking. It shows people that in the face of life's setbacks and frustrations, people can become strong and eternal through writing, and even in the most depressing and ugly moments of life, there will be the most beautiful and precious things, which is the true feeling of the world.
♥ Reminiscing on the sentimental feelings of the past, an important motivation for the psychology of creation
Cao Xueqin has experienced a prosperous period of time and has had good memories in her childhood.
Dun Min's "Gift of Qin Garden" said: "Yan City weeps and songs and meets sadly, and QinHuai wind and moon remember prosperity." Cao Xueqin, who has lost her life, will inevitably chew on the beautiful past repeatedly in her heart, and the years that have passed will become more and more lovely in the memory.
As Stanislavsky said, "Time is the best filter, the best scrubber for recalling and experiencing, and not only that, but time is also the most wonderful artist." It not only washes clean, but also poeticizes memories". However, these poetic memories often form a strong contrast with the reality in front of them, resulting in a cycle of recalling happiness and generating pain: the lack of reality and pain make people recall the happiness and happiness of the past, and the joy and happiness of the past reflect the desolation and pain in front of them. As the outstanding American poetess Dickinson wrote: "If I had not seen the sun, I might have endured darkness, but now the sun shines even more desolate on my loneliness." ”
Zhen Shiyin's "good song note" to the empty karate people: "The burrow is empty, the bed was full of wats; the grass and intestines were decayed, which was once a song and dance field; the spider silk is full of carved beams, and the green veil is now on the canopy window." Say what fat is thick, powder is fragrant, how to two sideburns into frost? ”
From here, we can see how the sharp contrast between the living environment on this night hit Cao Xueqin's feelings, and how the happiness of remembrance and the pain of reality are entangled in his soul. In fact, the people who feel the most pain are not those who have been living in miserable situations all the time, but people who have deeply felt happiness and have always expected happiness.
It is this painful psychological experience that makes Cao Xueqin's thinking and imagination particularly active, not only wanting to try to discover the causes of regret and pain, to think deeply about the past, to recall the past, to save a lost world; but also to find hope, to create a new world, in order to restore psychological balance. The nostalgia for the past and the happy remembrance have become an important creative motivation for him.
"Dream of the Red Chamber" raises the respect and praise for women to an unprecedented height, which is closely related to his life experience. Cao Xueqin said to herself in "Ordinary Cases": "Today the wind and dust are busy, nothing has been achieved, and I have overlooked all the women of that day, and I have pushed them one by one, and I feel that their deeds and insights are all above me, and he Tangtang's eyebrows are not as good as his skirts?" He also said, "Although my sins are inextricably insoluble, there are people in the boudoir who have been in the past, and they must not be destroyed because I am not shawn." ”
Cao Xueqin very clearly proposed that his creative motivation was to write a biography of a strange woman he knew, describing "the girlfriend's girlfriend of the day". We all know that the characters in the work are derived from reality and are higher than reality. Without a profound experience, the author could not have created such a moving and impressive image of each woman in the book.
Cao Xueqin's poem said: "Floating is very hard and busy, and the feast will eventually end." Sorrow and joy are as illusory as ever, and dreams of ancient and modern times are absurd. Rumors of red sleeves are heavy, and there are more lovers who hold hatred for a long time. The words seem to be blood, and ten years of hard work is unusual. ”
This is a little description of the pride of the past, the catharsis of the author's repressed emotions in real life; the description of the carefree and unrestrained feast and poetry meeting of the sisters of Daguanyuan is a remembrance of the author's past feelings and "infatuation".