Artistic Revenge: Reading Lu Xun's "Casting Swords" (Residual Snow)

From the external confrontation and struggle with the entire dark moral system, to the tearing of the inner soul, so as to carry out this cruel war in his own body on the level of pure art, is the breakthrough of some of Mr. Lu Xun's literary works (such as "Weeds"), and this "Casting Sword" has reached the pinnacle of this creation. 　　

The theme of the novel is revenge, but there are clearly two kinds of revenge in the text, reminiscent of Borges's "The Garden of Twisted Paths". One is the revenge of the superficial structure, and this revenge is the revenge within the morality of affection. That is, the king killed the father of the eyebrow ruler, and the eyebrow ruler was determined to avenge his father, and after many twists and turns, he finally got his wish with the help of the black man. Lurking beneath this revenge is another unfathomable, essential revenge. That is, if a person wants revenge, the only way out is to take revenge on himself. The world is devastated, hatred is pervasive, the sins committed by the human body against the human soul are incomparably deep, man has been overwhelmed by these sins, and the cause of man's sins is precisely man's desire, that is, life itself, so it is impossible for those who cannot move to take revenge from the outside. To take revenge on oneself is to mobilize the primordial force, to split the soul into several parts that are inseparable, to let them engage in a bloody struggle with each other, to experience the long-impossible love in this struggle, and finally to make them become you have me, I have you, to achieve that dialectical unity. This second kind of revenge is the true core of the story, the artistic spirit that we have overlooked. In order to carry out this spiritual revenge, the soul is divided into three, so that the thrilling story takes place between the three (black man, eyebrow ruler, and king). 　　

As soon as he came into this world, the pattern of revenge in his previous life had already been set for him: his father was killed by the king, and he had to take revenge; but the king was absolutely unattainable, because he was suspicious, old and cunning, and heavily protected, so revenge became impossible. When the protagonist walks into this inexplicable contradiction, the sharp conflict arises, and the black man appears as a guide. He pointed out a completely different, even opposite, path of revenge to the eyebrow ruler, and he raised the realm of the eyebrow ruler, so that the eyebrow ruler abandoned his body and embarked on the journey of no return with him. In this way, youth and blood condensed into a severed head, incomparably light and brave, and marched towards the depths of the netherworld. 　　

Because the eyebrow ruler is born in a fatal contradiction, his own character is born with a fatal "defect", that is, compassion or love, which is the nature of man. In order to realize his love for his father, he must extinguish his sympathy and become a hard-hearted and cold-hearted killer, but by his nature, he is absolutely unable to become a killer, so his revenge plan is a failure from the beginning. Here the story takes a turn, the tearing of the heart between the eyebrows begins, and the pattern of love and hate forever confronting each other within the soul is formed. The black man told meijian that if he wanted to truly take revenge on the king, he could only see his own body as the king, restart the whole plan with self-destruction, and carry out that kind of "head-for-head" intercourse to achieve the true unity of love and hatred. As he sings in the song: 　　

He uses a hundred heads, and a thousand heads uses ten thousand heads! 　　

I used a skull and no one. 　　

This is the essential difference between old-fashioned revenge and black man's revenge. 　　

Obviously, the eyebrow ruler is an individual with rational understanding in reality, his situation is a desperate situation, and his way out is through the impulse of blood, love and hate in his body. The black man is the vague and pure, idea-like self. The black man comes from "Wenwen Township" (the void), and he wants to use the love and blood and hatred of the ruler between his eyebrows to realize himself, and perform a good play of revenge. The ruler between the eyebrows should be lifted from the filth and ascended to the "other place" through the black man, so that the worldly love and hatred can be sublimated into the "blue light" that will never disappear in the universe. What is difficult for the reader to understand is the image of the king, and seeing those outward descriptions of "evil", it is easy for the average person to associate him with some kind of social identity, but such a novel has a different purpose. On serious reflection, isn't the element of "evil" in the king—greed, selfish love, tyranny, and so on—the common nature of man? Mr. Lu Xun has given such a terrible image to individuals in society, which shows his harshness and determination for himself, and his deep despair for the human situation (of course, first of all, the situation of Chinese). Therefore, the image of the king is the self of the old human nature, who is full of love and passion (love green sword), and cruel and sinister, full of killing opportunities. He kills people out of love, and once he falls in love with something (person or thing), it must be accompanied by killing. The image of the ruler between the eyebrows is the embodiment of an awakened new humanity, the self that constantly develops with sharp contradictions. In the early days, he also planned to kill people because of his love (love for his father), but soon he shifted from blind impulse to conscious awareness, thus changing the nature of revenge. As for the image of the black man, it is the potential possibility in human nature, the embodiment of the human spirit, the self on the artistic level. He is the essence of the soul of the ruler between the eyebrows, and the ghost that haunts the king's heart and has long been killed by him. Driven by fate, these three people finally converged in the rolling water of the Great Golden Ding, and a life-and-death bite revealed the inner war image of the soul. Before this glorious picture appeared, it was the awakened spirit that was singing: 　　

Wang Zeliu, 　　　　

Overcome the enemy, overcome the enemy, overcome the strong, 　　　　

The universe has no limits to its longevity. 　　　　

Luckily, I came to the light! 　　　　

Qingqi Guangxi will never forget. 　　　　

The other place is different! 　　　　

Oh wow, 　　　　

Oh come back, oh come to accompany the blue light! 　　

The battle horn was blown, and the black man had been reduced to the flesh of a skull, and the deadly pleasure was to be achieved by killing himself in battle. He will cooperate with the black people, wrestle with the king in the boiling water, kill the king, and completely confuse their own flesh with the king, and finally completely destroy the flesh and rise to the realm of pure spirit. Fighting is terrible, pain is pleasure, hate is love, biting each other is unity, the king is me, I am the king, and destruction is regeneration. The connotation of the soul is incomparably rich, and no one can exhaust it. Such a spectacular unity, a terrifying reunion, is precisely the realm of art. Only an artist with immense courage would dare to stage such a hellish vengeance drama above the raging fire and in the midst of boiling water, and in a country full of righteous gentlemen, such a thing is really difficult to imagine. The lewd minor key in the song is the groan that comes before the eyebrow ruler is about to intersect with the king, the king is both the object of his transcendence and the foundation of his existence, biting the king is biting himself, the interweaving of hate and love makes him extremely excited, and the flight of the creative spirit will occur at the same time as the ugly struggle of life. Without the vulgarity of "belching", there will definitely be no "magnificent" grandeur and majesty, and the broad soul can accommodate everything in human nature. The "return" here is by no means the return of the Chinese people "searching for roots", but accompanying the "blue light" on the occasion of the reunion with the king to sublimate the spirit to "a different place". 　　

This opportunity for revenge was leaked by a passage from the Black Man: 　　

"I have always known your father as I have always known you. But I want to take revenge, but I don't want to do it. Smart kids, tell you. Don't you know how good I am at revenge? Yours is mine; he is me. There is so much in my soul, and the wounds I have inflicted on me, I have hated myself!" 　　

The eyebrow ruler did not fully understand the meaning of the black man's words, but in the deepest part of the teenager's heart, something must have shaken it, because the black man said his instinct (the instinct to live), and there was only one way to die in front of him. So he resolutely obeyed his instincts and set about creating something he had never created before. Black people are cold on the outside, but they have true love and fraternity in their hearts. He understood human nature, knew that when people live, there will be hatred and harm, and he regarded this as a situation of survival, and he had already forgiven everything in his heart. But forgiving everything does not mean that he no longer cares, he has recorded every vendetta in his own account, and he is determined to take on the mission of revenge. The love of the black man and the love of the ruler between the eyebrows (and even more so with the love of the king) show a qualitative difference here. It is conceivable that the eyebrow ruler, at the time of the setback of narrow revenge, is anxious, frustrated, and dissatisfied with himself, and if the black man does not appear, he will linger outside the palace for a long time, and develop a deep dislike for all this, which is the logic of his character development. The black man appeared in time, and a new hope appeared in the desperate situation between the eyebrows, and the black man told him the true meaning of love and hatred, and from then on the blind impulse turned into a conscious pursuit. 　　

The contradiction faced by the eyebrow ruler and the contradiction between the king are actually two stages of the same thing. He loves his parents and sympathizes with the rat, and his love is manifested as goodness, but this goodness cannot be sustained alone in life (unless one stays in infancy), and for a person to become a real person, the soul must be divided. The survival premise of the murder of the father of the eyebrow ruler is the fate faced by man, that is, revenge makes human love (goodness) impossible, but without love and compassion, man is no longer human. The only thing he could do within the iron circle of fate was to let his soul slam into it, for he could neither lack love and sympathy, nor hate nor evil, and both sides of the contradiction were equally powerful. It is entirely conceivable that he, who had sympathized with the evil rat, still felt the pain of the skin at the moment he bit the king's head, and this pain was his pleasure. Speaking of the king himself, he was hated for love. Because loving Qingjian loves too deeply and kills people, he is hated too deeply by people. The king's love comes in the form of evil, exclusivity, and this faint love without self-consciousness cannot last in life, he is surrounded by hatred, he faces the annihilation of his own body, because he has no soul division. These two people embody both the level of the human soul and the stage of human nature's time development. The black man is the embodiment of the highest level of human nature, although he seems to be similar to the idea, but by no means to eliminate the inner contradictions, his contradictions are sharper than the ruler between the eyebrows. He looked black and thin, his eyes looked like two phosphorus fires, and his chest was burning with thousands of years of dead fire, and he had a hunger for revenge. Why Revenge? Only because love is too deep, too obsessive, just because this love cannot be achieved alone. To achieve love requires revenge, he is a veteran of this way, and he also knows that thin, loveless hatred (such as the hatred of the king by the eyebrow ruler) will not solve the problem, and the eyebrow ruler depends on him to promote him. The revelation of his sharp singing voice is that true love is a matter of losing one's head, that love and blood are inseparable, and that gloomy, cold-blooded killing scenes reveal the melody of love. After conveying this spirit to the head of the ruler at the bottom of the eyebrow, he aroused the passion of the skull, and a new humanity was born in the fierce fire and boiling water. The duty of the black man is by no means to quell the contradictions, but to provoke sinister wars. He enjoys great pleasure in self-destruction, sings reunion songs in killing, and elevates ancient revenge to pure art, giving a new meaning to the eternal theme of revenge. His realm is the realm of art and humanity. The process of personality development between the eyebrows is the process of unfolding internal contradictions. At the beginning of the story, the incident between him and the mouse is actually an exercise in his relationship with people. The eyebrow ruler is naturally careful, sensitive, and compassionate, and this temperament also unfolds its own contradictions when dealing with the contradiction with the mouse. The rat is abhorrent from the inside out, but it is also a life like him, and in the face of great difficulties, it is also like him to have the instinct to survive, and it is natural to compare the heart to the heart, and it is natural for the ruler between the eyebrows to develop deep sympathy for it. But this sympathy was a taboo, and the rat would continue to do evil to him as long as he lived, so he killed the rat and committed an unforgivable sin against his soul. There was blood flowing from the corners of his mouth, a life died at his brutal feet, the sadness of the ruler between his eyebrows could not be described, and he could not find a solution to his inner contradictions. Then his mother told him about the terrible past, hoping that he would change his gentle disposition and avenge his father. On impulse, he also blurted out, "I have changed my gentle disposition, and I want to take revenge with this sword!" Such words. But "the country is easy to change, the nature is difficult to move", and the gentleness of the ruler between the eyebrows is his nature. With such a disposition, he is doomed to be unable to deal with his relationship with men, for it is much more difficult than his relationship with rats, and he himself, "evil" (vengefulness) and "goodness" (compassion) are always in his heart. Therefore, after he had assured his mother, he still could not sleep, and it was not at all like changing the appearance of his gentle disposition, and his mother's disappointment was inevitable. Born with this kind of artist's personality, how can he go to the world to avenge it? Then he saw the enemy, and his heart burned, and he was about to rush up. Fate did not let him succeed, but he was entangled in the people and could not get out. With his temperament, carrying a sword on his back is afraid of injuring people by mistake, where will he go to violence against the people? So I watched as an opportunity for revenge was lost. Bai Bai was impulsive, the goodness in his heart prevailed again, thinking of his mother, the tip of his nose was sour, and that look seemed to be less and less the material for the killer. The Black Man came and told him that revenge had become impossible, and that his own life was in question, for the king was coming to arrest him. The eyebrow ruler fell into sadness again, as if this revenge was no longer for himself, but mostly for his mother. How does a black man shape the ruler between his eyebrows? The black man did not want the ruler to become a cold killer, nor did he want him to become a sad person with long sighs, he wanted his head. With this head, he can push the contradiction between the eyebrows to the extreme, that is, love to the extreme and hate to the extreme. He had already seen that the ruler between his eyebrows was exactly that kind of material—the material that he used his body to experiment with. It should be said that the black man is the development mode destined by the eyebrow ruler, and if the eyebrow ruler develops according to his model, it will retain everything that was originally in the character, but will not perish spiritually. The ruler between the eyebrows that had removed the body and only the head remained changed, the obstacle disappeared, and the head of the light spirit became dare to love and hate, neither cold nor sad. Because before the supreme judgment platform, everyone is equal and the same, biting is also intercourse, people experience bitter pain, dizzy pleasure, but there is no longer the fear before doing evil and the sadness after doing evil, and the worldly hatred and love are transformed in this extreme form. The weight on his heart between his eyebrows was relieved, his emotions were released, and he smiled and closed his eyes. This time, he no longer had to grieve the king's death, for his head had become one with him, and the king had become himself. 　　

The Chinese people, nourished by the culture of "the unity of heaven and man", are most afraid of this kind of soul division, so this aspect of Mr. Lu Xun as a pure artist has long been covered up and distorted by some intentions, and the fixed interpretation of Lu Xun's art has not been broken for a long time. What I am ashamed of my husband is that his lone soul wanders in the desert for a long time, and he cannot meet his kind. It is hoped that with this short article, the new exploration and research of Lu Xun's literature will be promoted.