Wens

Author: Cao Juren / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2002-07-01
Features: Book Review: “” is a left-right structure, composed of “mu” and “gu”. All local operas can only be considered as intermediate between “sitting and singing” and “acting”. Many local operas preserve the old appearance of the “lianxiang ci”. The singing of the “bengbeng opera” is similar to “daqing” and “xuanjuan” in terms of rhythm and pauses, generally with two characters per breath (sometimes the text can be split for rhythm). The dialogue is not as coordinated as Kunqu opera, so it can absorb many humorous expressions. Unintentionally, they applied the technique of actors interacting with the audience on stage and off stage, and many dialogues became more interesting because of the interaction with the audience (preserving the original nature of the comedy).
In “Ma’s Widow Running a Shop”, the portrayal of a nymphomaniac widow’s psychological is truly intricate and subtle. The success or failure of the portrayal depends on this point. The widow peels the window paper, spots a handsome scholar, and describes it in detail. This external description, though detailed, is still superficial. She asks the shop boy to invite the scholar to the back room, serves him wine and food, and still serves as a supporting role. Later, she decides to seduce the scholar, rushes out of the room in a frenzy, suddenly comes to her senses, and returns to hold her child, feeding it milk while thinking of how to get close to the scholar. She is afraid of seeing him and being speechless, so she sits on the bed, dozing off. Disturbed by dreams, she can no longer endure and, under the guise of delivering tea, goes to the scholar’s room. This is a bold and reckless journey into the harbor of passion, a true portrayal of the inner self. External details like bumping her forehead on the doorframe, frowning while feeding her child, and burning her hands on the teapot are powerfully complemented. After meeting, she transitions from lamenting to seducing to being overcome by Confucian moral principles. She returns along the same winding path. In some places, it is even more intricate and subtle than Ouyang Yuqian’s “Baochan Serving Wine”, serving as a reference for those writing historical sketches.
The word “indecent” is unclear to me about where to draw the line. Once, a traveling wooden puppet troupe came to the village, and the nuns at White Pagoda Temple were very happy to ask them to perform a version of “Journey to the West”. However, the performers ended up performing “Pigsy’s Bath”, making the nuns blush. Yet, she watched the entire performance without leaving. Local-colored operas rarely lack indecent elements. If one insists that they affect public morals, it is hard to argue logically.
“Ma’s Widow Running a Shop” only depicts the psychological of sexuality and, in my opinion, has nothing to do with morality. If the local color can be preserved with respect, it still holds a certain position in opera.
Two, the expression of sorrow
At the end of “Thunderstorm”, Feng and Zhou Chong are both electrocuted to death. Lu Shipin stands silently, like a plaster statue. The old servant says to her, “Ma’am, don’t just stand there! This won’t do. You must cry. You must have a good cry.” Lu Shipin replies, “I can’t cry!” The old servant says, “This is fate. There’s nothing you can do about it. But you must cry yourself.” Lu Shipin says, “No, I just want to be quiet.”
A friend who read the play asked me, “Why can’t Lu Shipin cry?” I replied, “This is the expression of sorrow. When sorrow and joy reach their extremes, they both lead to being stunned.” I cited an example from the 57th chapter of “Dream of the Red Chamber”: Ziyun trying to comfort Baoyu with words about Daiyu returning to Suzhou, saying it would either be next spring or autumn. She also mentioned that Daiyu had said that the things they used to play with as children should be clarified. Baoyu heard this and felt as if a thunderclap had struck his head. Ziyun waited and saw how he would respond. After a long time, she found him still silent. Qingwen saw him standing there, sweating profusely, with a purple face, and quickly took his hand, leading him to Yihongyuan. However, Baoyu’s fever was minor compared to his eyes rolling straight forward and drool trickling from the corners of his mouth without him noticing. Placing a pillow under him made him fall asleep; lifting him made him sit; pouring tea made him drink. This is the extreme expression of Baoyu’s sorrow. Later, when Baoyu saw Ziyun, he groaned and finally cried.
Crying is not sorrow; tears can even dilute sorrow. One afternoon, a stranger named He visited me. He told me that he had written many drafts and sent them to various publications, only to have most of them rejected. He implied that editors often judged manuscripts based on the author’s surname rather than the content. In a capitalist society, manuscripts are commodities, and editors having biases is understandable. However, the shortcomings of the writer themselves should not be ignored. At the time, I discussed with him the “understanding of themes.” I told him that among my students, there were about seven or eight who wrote well, but few could find good themes. Perhaps the rejected manuscripts were well-written but lacked good themes! I also told him, “Once, a student from Jinan University named Yang showed me an article. I said the theme was good, but the writing was not. Later, the article was published in ‘Qingguang’, and he brought it to me. I still said it was poorly written. Indeed, when he inquired, the editor was drawn to the theme.”
Why does the quality of an article depend on the quality of its theme? Because every article you provide an opinion. Society may respond with indifference, resonance, or opposition, and this cannot be controlled by beautiful words. If you have a correct opinion, readers will naturally react. I remember once when Lu Xun gave a lecture, he said, “The path from social sciences to literature is straightforward, but the path from literature to social sciences is reversed.” (This is the general idea.) That is to say, once you understand social sciences, you gain new perspectives on the current social situation, find many new themes, and can write endlessly. Take an example: When I lived in Zhenru’s Yangnan Apartments, an old woman in the dilapidated house next to my apartment suddenly fell seriously ill. Our landlord, who was related to her, showed little concern. Suddenly, the pastor of Huaxia University in Yangjiaqiao began sending milk and bread to her every day, and even sent a mosquito net to hang in her room. For a few days, the pastor even visited her twice in person. I was greatly surprised, thinking that church people must have true charity. Soon after, the old woman died, and our landlord asked me to donate money. I asked how much the pastor had donated. He sneezed and said, “Donating money? Dreaming. He wanted that old woman to donate her land to the church. She refused to sign, so why would he keep bothering her?”
This theme would have been a moving masterpiece in the hands of Chekhov or Maupassant. Yet, I tried to write it several times but couldn’t. Why? Because I only knew it was a good theme but lacked the ability to analyze it deeply. In other words, I didn’t know where to start. This brings us to the issue of understanding themes. Simply saying that the pastor was hypocritical and everything was fake would be too shallow. Even exposing the pastor’s cunning might not be enough. It is necessary to highlight the pastor’s clumsy and contradictory behavior in this farce to fulfill one’s duty. This subtle psychological analysis requires deep social science knowledge to handle with ease. Therefore, in my personal opinion, when writing, to deconstruct a good theme, to analyze it deeply before consolidating it, this work seems much more difficult than everything else.
The “fu” form is characterized by meaning, differing slightly from the “poem” that triumphs with emotion, environment, and meaning. “Fu” means to lay out, like making a bed, narrating a story or a person’s experience, covering time and place. Its development along the line of narrating things merges with prose, becoming parallel prose and four-six prose. If “meaning” is the main focus, supplemented by poetic context, like the small fu of the Wei, Jin, and Six Dynasties periods (also the origin of European novels from narrative poetry), it merges with narrative poetry. Du Fu’s “General’s Lament” and “Autumn Thoughts” are very similar in form to “Lament for a Husband” and “Parting Lament”. However, whether it is the small fu of the Six Dynasties or Du Fu’s poems divided into chapters, the organization is lacking, and the content is too monotonous. Judging the ancients with our modern perspective, we still cannot match the complexity, grandeur, and beauty of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” or Goethe’s “Faust”. With Du Fu’s poetic talent, if he could grasp the era and organize those hundreds of poems about chaos and displacement into a cohesive whole, it could be considered a true narrative poem.
Twenty years ago, Mr. Wu Fangji tried various ancient poetic forms to write “The Siege of Xi’an”, about three thousand characters long, which was already quite long compared to traditional Chinese poetry. However, even in narrative poetry, it is still very short. The content also expresses personal grievances, with more lyrical than narrative elements. Last year, I read a narrative long poem titled “Who Lives Happily in Russia?” with over eight thousand lines. It depicted a turbulent society and the psychological responses of people from all walks of life, like a long novel in itself!
From a formal perspective, narrative poems are usually longer than lyrical poems. In terms of ci and qu, xiaoling is suitable for expressing emotion and describing things, while manci is suitable for narrating and reasoning. Content often determines form, and that is undeniable. However, the same form can be written excellently by one person but poorly by another. The length of the poem has no connection to its success or failure.
Now that we advocate for narrative poetry and strive to create it, we can break free from the styles of the past and create our own. The narrative should focus on the evolution of one event as the main thread, sometimes inserting scenes of “describing things” and sometimes segments of “expressing emotion,” like close-up shots in a film, making the entire poem more vivid. Narrative poetry and fu are said to have the same origin, not only in complex content but also in complex form!
Two, thoroughly study the “Wenxuan”
In the late Qing Dynasty, Liang Qichao advocated a “revolution in poetry”. He said, “Although I am not a poet, I have often discussed poetry, believing that the realm of poetry has been exhausted by predecessors. Even if there are excellent ideas and sentences, they seem to have appeared in some collection before. It is a pity. If I do not write poetry now, I will not. But if I do, I must be a Columbus of the poetic world. Just as Europe has exhausted its lands, it cannot but seek new lands in the Americas and along the Pacific coast. To be a Columbus of the poetic world, one must possess three strengths: first, new themes; second, new expressions, yet incorporating the style of the ancients. Only then can one become a true poet.”
Forty years later, this still serves as our new hope for the poetic world. Poetry of the future must have new themes, new expressions, and, I would add, new forms. The new poetry of the past twenty years has failed to establish new forms or refine new expressions, and the most disappointing aspect is the lack of new themes. Those who aspire to create poetry should work even harder toward this goal. (Old poets, influenced by Buddhist and Taoist thoughts, observed and achieved tranquility, excelling at describing things. They were particularly skilled at writing about the state of “no self”. Their lyrical works were often subtle and resonant, but narrative poetry was rare. New poets excel at expressing passionate emotions but are poor at describing things. Narrative poetry was also rare.)
Regarding the techniques of writing narrative poetry, the great Tang poet Du Fu deeply understood its “secrets”. Du Fu encouraged his son Zongwu to “thoroughly study the principles of Wenxuan”. The “principles of Wenxuan” refer to the methods of the fu writer (in modern terms, the methods of learning narrative). In Du Fu’s poetry, such as “Northern Expedition”, the title and structure use the fu form, and “Eight Lamentations” uses the style of Han and Tang historical commentaries, both being applications of the “principles of Wenxuan”. Mr. Luo Rong’s “Selected Readings on Du Fu” states: “The Du poems that are grouped under a general title have two examples: one where each poem stands alone, such as ‘Miscellaneous Poems from Qinzhou’ and ‘Ode to Ancient Sites’, and the other where the poems follow each other, forming a coherent structure, such as the three poems of ‘Rejoicing at Reaching the Imperial Court in Jiangcun’.” The former follows the method of Ruan Ji’s “Lamentations” and Cao Zhi’s “Miscellaneous Poems”, while the latter follows the method of Cao Zhi’s “Seeing Off” and Tao Yuanming’s “Returning to the Countryside”. Therefore, when selecting poems, one can extract excellent chapters from others’ works, but when it comes to Du Fu’s poems, one must first observe their organization and cannot cut them arbitrarily.”
This explains how Du Fu paid attention to the creation of narrative poetry. (Hu Shi’s discussion on the narrative poetry form of “The Peacock Flying Southwest” was influenced by Buddhist scripture translations, but the influence of Han and Jin fu writers on Tang poets was even greater.) The path Du Fu pioneered influenced Bai Juyi, Su Shi, Lu Fanglong, and Huang Zunxian in the late Qing Dynasty, but this path was never established as a major road in the poetic world, and it is up to us to explore it.