Recently, I read the Psychology of Tragedy by Mr. Zhu Guangqian. He raised an unexpected question, but it was the most basic one: "Why do people like to watch tragedies?" Once the hardships in life are encountered by us, we often avoid them or fall into great sadness. Why are people so obsessed with tragedy? In the life of ancient Greeks, watching tragedy was an annual sacred festival. Aeschylus, Sophocles and euripides were all addicted to tragedy creation, leaving behind classics to eulogize future generations.
"Tragedy is the highest form of poetry", which was born from lyric poetry and dance. It has gorgeous rhetoric and surprising images of poetry, as well as the beauty and mystery of dance. It almost co-prospers with poetry and co-declines with poetry. Like jung's introverts, we are addicted to the pleasure of tragedy.
If the protagonist in the case of humiliating his mother is watching antigone, he will bring his heart into it completely, face the entanglement between natural law and human law, and finally fall into natural law, that is, the concept of ID, with the strong support of sensibility. He will find the logical similarity of his revenge for his mother when antigone supports his brother, that is, for moral excesses. This is also the process of his dialogue with himself. He was immersed in the tragic effect of antigone again and again, and derived from his heart, "Isn't that what I am?" His identity found a home in an instant, resulting in the pleasure of "coincidence" and "identity".
Why do we like watching tragedies? Hegel said, "Youyou."
Doing nothing, we try to occupy a small position in the big time container and spy on eternity. When a woman tortured by love and marriage jumps out of the cage from a failed marriage and accidentally catches a glimpse of Medea, she will compare her bitter experience with Medea. Medea, desperate for Jason, abandoned her father and hometown, sacrificed her priesthood, and most importantly, lost herself and was willing to become an ordinary wife. This kind of female audience will define their own experience as the same pain, thus exclaiming: There are thousands of Qian Qian in Qian Qian, and the worst result of love is the same ending. In addition, she will also learn the tragic pleasure of awakening women's independent consciousness. Time is no longer the helplessness and persecution of "female anxiety", she will gradually find her own value and shine in the field of self. The modern urban drama Beijing Women's Picture Book shows women's independent consciousness and is also a derivative of Medea-style pleasure.
Tragedy is different from the solemnity of sculpture and the mystery of dance, and it is easy to lose the sense of distance in stage interpretation, which makes the audience produce "criticism". The interpretation of tragedy is the actor's "subjective activity", and the audience produces habitual associations and arouses more or less practical attitudes. Actors are ordinary people like us, and they can cry, laugh, love and hate like us. The audience shared the same sorrow and joy with the actors, applauded the lovers and hated the villains. The actor of Sister Rong was scolded in public, and the actor of The Temptation of Going Home was scolded on social software. This series of absurd farce is an example of losing distance.
Mr. Lu Xun once said: "Tragedy is to tear up beautiful things for people to see." It shows the tragedy of destruction and the magnificence of struggle. Oedipus is the ideal figure we worship. Fate made him fall into the trap of killing his father and marrying his mother, but he was a self-punishing hero with terrible sins. Medea clearly knows that she is a priest of the goddess of the underworld. She has superhuman ability, enough to support herself to survive in this world. She killed her children in an abnormal rational state, achieved the greatest revenge on Jason, and found her self-identity at the same time, tearing off the label attached to her by the patriarchal society. Oedipus and Medea suffered pain that ordinary people could not bear.
Our daily life rarely becomes a "tragedy" in aesthetic sense. We like to watch tragedies and see the limitations of people through this small gap. Water under the bridge.