Let's focus on the middle and late 1980s. At that time, there was a so-called "prose fever" in China. At that time, the overwhelming appearance of prose magazines, comprehensive literature magazines and youth love, marriage and family newspapers, coupled with the expansion of newspapers and the rise of supplements and weekend editions, made prose the most popular literary genre and became a bus that everyone could take. Prose fever. However, this "craze" has not brought us the optimism we deserve: What kind of prose is this? Without deep emotional ability and sensitivity, deep pain and magnificent joy are being warmed and enjoyed, great human desires have become personal desires, and small desires, passions and ideals have become fragmentary and fancy decorations. With the poor performance of the so-called "Little Women's Prose", the broken parents were short-lived and even lost the public's appetite. Just like popular novels, pop music and family soap operas, popular prose is at best a popular text and a boring kitsch.
At this time, a prose text named "Great Cultural Prose" by critics began to appear, which is the prose style represented by Mr. Yu's "Cultural Journey". As soon as she made her debut, she attracted everyone's attention with her unique perspective, free and easy writing, profound connotation and heavy cultural heritage.
The ancients had the spirit of "reading thousands of books and following Wan Li Road". I said to:
"When studying the ancient thread-bound books in China, they will also hear a group of great poets and scholars in their ears."
So, he
"Leave the desk, put on long-distance love clothes and push open the door of the study."
"The real step of China culture falls on this vast and desolate land."
"In this seemingly ordinary station, people, history and nature have been mixed together in chaos, so I have the impulse to write an article."
("Yu Culture Journey") So I moved from my study to the "old site". "As a result, a number of excellent essays with beautiful writing and profound thoughts were born from his works." Yangguan Snow is one of the scenic spots.
Yangguan, now southwest of Dunhuang County, Gansu Province, is the main road leading to the northwest frontier in ancient times, named after it is located in the south of Yumen Pass. Papers such as Taoist Pagoda and Mogao Grottoes, which focus on cultural resorts and tourist attractions, are actually very risky, because many famous essays are left behind, and Yu's cleverness lies in that he only chooses a limited natural landscape and combines the relevant human landscape to interpret them in two directions, thus creating a picture of human landscape, which makes people linger here. At the beginning, the author talked about the view that ancient literati were "insignificant", and the outstanding point of civil servants lies in officials rather than in literature. However, when they remove the black veil, the poems they scribble casually can last forever. This seems to be a casual beginning. In fact, this is the purpose of this paper, and it also paves the way for the following discussion. Starting with Baidicheng, Yellow Crane Tower and Hanshan Temple, the author further expounds the magical power of literati in past dynasties to "turn an obscure corner of a vast world into a hometown in everyone's heart". Then naturally, Wang Wei's famous work Fortress Besieged was introduced, and the topic turned to the topic. This kind of opening writing can be seen everywhere in Yu's prose, just like focusing on the plane, from far to near. When the author asked an old man about the route to Yangguan, he was told that "there is nothing to see, but some literati tried their best to find it." The old man looked at the sky and added, "It has been snowing." The author naturally ignored it and turned and got into the snow. The snow was not big, and besides, the author had no intention of writing about natural snow, so it passed by.
Then I walked in the desert, and then I saw the tomb left by the ancient battlefield. Faced with this situation, the author spreads the wings of imagination and flies in historical time and space. He described the killing scene of Ma Tie Jingo and the disaster brought to the people by the war in affectionate and soothing language.
Like the horseshoe of rain, like the cry of thunder, like the blood of notes. The loving mother in the Central Plains has white hair, the spring boudoir in the south of the Yangtze River is far away, and the children in Hunan cry at night. Farewell to my hometown in Liu Yin, the general glared at me and hunted military flags in the north wind.
After reading these, I thought of "the north wind rolled white grass, eight In the snow crossed the Tatar" (Bai Xuege sent Tian Wu home), "three slaughterhouses a day, and the drums were cold all night" (Ge Yanxing by Gao Shi), "Drinking horses over autumn waters! The stream is cold and the wind is like a sword. When we look at the sunset on the sandy plain, we can see the distant and shadowy Lintao "(Wang Changling's Xia Sai Qu)," It snows in the mountains and looks smokeless "(Wang Wei's Westbound Ridge)," Oh, when will the Tatar army be conquered and when will my husband come back from the long battle! ... "(Li Bai's Midnight Wu Ge)" When a man wants to sleep, the general has white hair and tears "(Fan Zhongyan's proud fisherman) and other touching poems.
The author still refuses to give up. He also compared the tombs in Yangguan with those in the Central Plains. The former is a "careless sand pile" and the latter is "stuffy in the beautiful scenery". In the author's eyes, the tomb of Yangguan also has the charm of taking people's souls.
The "Yangguan Ancient Site" was finally found. Actually, there's really nothing to see here. The beacon tower is still there, most of the reeds have collapsed and swayed in the cold wind, and the mountains in the northwest are covered with layers of snow. Of course, the author didn't come to see the scenery. With the help of the immediate landscape, the author pays attention to the thinking left by history. Standing in the ancient ruins of Yangguan, he thought of Wang Guowei, who thought of the demeanor of the prosperous Tang Dynasty. He wrote that the statue of the Tang Dynasty can be recognized at a glance because it has a strong body and confident eyes. Only those artists who really wake up from the nightmare of the Middle Ages and are quite sure of the future road can create this confidence. Mona Lisa's charming smile appeared many years after the statue was made in the Tang Dynasty. For Wang Guowei, the boundary between poetry and painting repeatedly discussed by western philosophers such as Lessing can "go in and out with their feet". However, "the palace in Chang 'an only opened a narrow side door for artists to bow down and enter as humble attendants", while the old man in history "returned to the genealogy of the three emperors and five emperors with trembling. "Kyushu's painting style is fading, and the poets from Yangguan in the west" are mostly officials. "This is the most painful thing for the author. No wonder he wrote: "The snow in Yangguan is getting sadder and sadder." He groaned for the collapse of Yangguan and her collapse in "the spiritual territory of a nation"!
It is worth mentioning that Yu's prose has a strong lyrical color, but it is unfair for someone to label him as "pseudo-romanticism", "melodramatic" or even "sensational". Some lyric sentences in this article are very wonderful and express thoughts and feelings well. For example, in the last sentence, he went like this: Let's go home, it's getting late. I'm afraid it will snow again. It seems dull, but it contains a lot of sadness, which I think is a vivid stroke. Yu Zeng once said: The landscape in my heart is not entirely a natural landscape, but a human landscape, which is caused by the long-term charm of China's history and culture and its long-term influence on me. I can't get rid of it. Everywhere I go, there is always a heavy historical pressure hanging over my whole body, which makes me inexplicably moved. Sigh for no reason. (Yu, "Cultural Journey") He walked out of the study and into the ruins, savored it with his whole body and mind, and with his profound knowledge of literature and history, he wrote a number of profound and desolate works, which were not the same as those essays that groaned without illness.
Yu's prose spans a long time and space, with strong ideological contrast, praise and criticism, praise and nostalgia, intellectual generalization and emotional rendering, historical meditation and personal experience narration. Many intentions are one after another, ups and downs, the interweaving of folk customs and artistic classics, the close coherence and blank of time and space, and the long-distance echo of intentions, which make his articles reflect complex and colorful characteristics, thus winning the love of the majority of readers. As the famous critic Sun Shaozhen commented in the article "The Broken Bridge from Aesthetics to Wisdom", his prose is not a traditional spiritual sketch, nor is it a light artistic discourse implied by "throwing a dagger at a spear". His prose is really a great prose discourse. Since the May 4th Movement, there has not been such a large-capacity and deep-seated discourse that integrates thoughts, wisdom and emotions. I think this evaluation of Yu is well deserved.