Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow contains great potential, which makes its historical understanding and modern interpretation colorful, especially its theme debate, which has been repeated for thousands of years and lawsuits continue. The three opinions are "satirizing the king", "praising love" and "the double theme of paying equal attention to irony and love". The main evidence of the first opinion "satirizing the king" is that Chen Hong's "Song of Eternal Sorrow" says that "the interested party not only feels guilty, but also wants to punish the stunner and suppress the order, hanging in the future." The second point of view, Ode to Love, is based on text analysis, combined with Bai Juyi's emotional experience, and observes the lingering love tragedy between Li and Yang with a modern view of love. It is believed that the author expressed the love ideal of "May the sky fly, may the two birds fly together, may the earth live together, and may one tree have two branches" and a deep sigh after this love ideal disappeared. The third opinion, "double theme theory", holds that the works integrate irony and love, criticism and sympathy, and are dialectical and uncompromising.
The above three main viewpoints, regardless of paranoia or dialectical compromise, have their own logical starting point and argument basis, and all reveal the ideological implication of Song of Eternal Sorrow from different perspectives and levels, even reaching what Hegel called "one-sided and profound". However, judging from the openness of the text and the subjectivity of literature, the above similarities and differences are limited to the metaphysical interpretation of the political and love elements in the works, lacking a profound grasp and prominence of the author's subjective experience, so it is difficult to understand the emotional orientation of the works and get rid of the dilemma of various explanations.
The author tries to start with the author's subjective experience, and through the definition of "sentimentality" and the revelation of its emotional core, thinks that "Song of Eternal Sorrow", as the product of the fate of Bai Juyi, a gifted scholar and sentimental person in the middle Tang Dynasty, has cast the poet's profound life experience and sentimental mood of the times, and is filled with the poet's sad and helpless sentimental atmosphere about his fate. The author sublimates this secular emotion into aesthetic emotion and completes the poetic expression of sentimental experience.
First, sentimentality: faint diffuse and lasting sadness and helplessness.
Sentimentality is a kind of human emotion, a kind of mentality in essence and a special form of human emotion. It is not only the research category of psychology of emotion, but also a universal emotion and literary tradition of artistic expression.
Psychology of emotion believes that emotion and emotion are the psychological reflection of whether the subject meets his needs, and they belong to the same category but are at different levels. For human beings, emotion is inseparable from emotion, which is a concrete biological expression of emotion and a social existence developed on the basis of emotional stability. Sentiment, as an emotion of human beings, is essentially a state of mind. "Emotion is a deep, weak and lasting emotional state ... Emotion is diffuse, not a specific experience of something, but an experience that affects the subject's attitude towards things for a period of time after being aroused by a certain situation."
Judging from the intensity of human emotional experience, sentimentality is different from intense and explosive passions such as ecstasy, anger, depression, despair and extreme sadness. Sentimentality is a low-intensity and weak sadness and helplessness, and it is introverted rather than extroverted. Jie Jiang, a poet in the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote a vivid specimen: "Teenagers listen to the rain and sing songs upstairs, and the red candle is faint." In the prime of life, the boat is listening to the rain, the river is wide and the clouds are low, and the broken geese are called the west wind. Now listen to the rain monk said that the stars are in the temples, and the joys and sorrows are always ruthless. Wait until dawn before the next step. "In the immersion of time, the taste of life changes from rich fragrance to bitter turbidity and finally becomes light and transparent; In the migration of years, the soul turns from joy to sadness, and finally becomes a helpless sigh. Life experience is a hotbed for cultivating sentimentality.
Judging from the breadth of human emotional experience, sentimentality has both spatial dispersion and temporal persistence. We can usually experience that when a person is in a certain state of mind, he often looks at everything in the same emotional state. The so-called "where petals flow like tears, lonely birds sing their sorrows" is shocking and hateful when full of worries; When spring breeze is proud, it is full of spring. The emotion aroused by a certain situation is often manifested as a deep and weak emotional state that spreads around. At the same time, the mood is often more lasting because of the importance of events or things, such as the replacement of dynasties, the passage of years, the decline of prosperity, the beautiful destruction, the burial of love and so on. These things are the most likely to cause lasting sadness.
From the expression of human emotional experience, there are also relatively stable individual differences. Poets are naturally enthusiastic and sensitive. For the same experience object, a poet can often surpass ordinary people's ordinary experience, not only develop emotional experience in a detailed and hierarchical way, but also raise all kinds of emotional experiences to the height of aesthetic experience under the control of reason, making them become his internal aesthetic needs and evolve into profound and long poetic beauty.
Sentiment is a universal emotion and literary tradition of artistic expression, which is often widely expressed in the declining times, thus forming an inherent tradition of artistic rise and fall. For example, in the second half of the 8th century, European sentimentality spread all over art fields, forming an important art school after classicism. It describes the inner world of nature and human beings with morbid sadness and sadness, and tells the general sadness and helplessness of the decline of feudal nobles. In China literature, almost every declining era is filled with sentimental feelings. Li Sao by Qu Yuan at the end of the Warring States Period and Nineteen Ancient Poems by literati at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, especially the poems and songs in the middle and late Tang and Song Dynasties, mainly describe the eternal themes that good flowers don't bloom often, good times don't exist often, good times are fleeting, and great events are hard to come again. As for A Dream of Red Mansions, it is the grand theme of the Millennium when the prosperous times disappear and there is no way back to heaven. Goethe said: "Art in the declining era is subjective." This shows that the thoughts, emotions and artistic expressions of Chinese and foreign scholars in ancient and modern times are * * * common: facing the moment and eternity of time, the closed and infinite space, the fragile and powerful soul, the release and extrusion of civilization, the literati's sadness arises spontaneously. Therefore, fundamentally speaking, "sentimentality" stems from the artist's extraordinary sensitivity to time, space, soul and civilization.
Based on the above discussion, we can roughly interpret "sentimentality" as: sentimentality is essentially a psychological state, a negative subjective experience when objective things can't meet the needs of the subject, showing a faint and lasting sadness and helplessness, which stems from the life experience that human beings can't surpass the living situation, and is a universal emotion and literary tradition of artistic expression.
Second, meeting: the fate of the Greek generation and talented people and beautiful women in the middle Tang Dynasty.
Regarding the origin of the creation of Song of Eternal Sorrow, Chen Hong's Biography of Song of Eternal Sorrow explains: "In the winter and December of the first year of Yuanhe, I was in charge of Zhou Zhi in Bai Letian, Taiyuan. Hong and Wang Langya betrothed her husband's family to the city and took the immortals to visit the temple in their spare time. Speaking of this matter, they sighed. The hostage raised a glass of wine in front of Lotte and said,' What Fu hoped for was not to polish it until it was born, but to disappear with the times and not be known to the world. Lotte is deeper than poetry and deeper than emotion. "How about trying to sing?" Lotte sang because of everlasting regret. "It can be said that" Song of Eternal Sorrow "is the product of the fate of a generation of talented people and beautiful women in the middle Tang Dynasty.
Let's talk about Hideyoshi first. The story of Li and Yang, whether as a historical event or as a folklore, is undoubtedly a very attractive and challenging theme for literati, because it contains great significance potential and broad aesthetic space. Among them, politics and love are the two most prominent elements. Politics is a great change from "Kaiyuan Prosperity" to "Anshi Rebellion", and love is a rare joys and sorrows between emperors and concubines. There are many factors such as imperial palace, power, beauty, death, fate, morality, religion and so on. Faced with such a meaningful theme, it is an interesting question what the literati want to express and how to express it. Scholars can choose to criticize the emperor's debauchery and indulgence, or they can choose to criticize women's troubles and charm the king to pour out the country; Scholars can choose political tragedy to bury love tragedy, or they can choose to write the feeling of rise and fall with the feeling of separation. In a word, the strong tragic color separated from the elements of politics and love is dazzling. On that day, the soul tremor of the whole country, especially the intellectuals, still shocked people's hearts. Then, after 50 years of war, the literati in the middle Tang Dynasty have the responsibility and more choices to express their current feelings from the aftermath of that day's collapse, but you must look for your own inner rubble from broken walls where politics and love collapsed. In fact, since the change of Ma Wei in the 15th year of Tianbao (756), the stories and legends of Li and Yang have been circulated among the people, and literati have never stopped their own construction. Bai Juyi was Du Fu before, followed by Yuan Zhen, Zhang Hu, Li Shangyin and Du Mu. But they either recite history, express their feelings, learn lessons, satirize rules, be in trouble, or be dissolute by emperors. In terms of artistic form, more traditional laws and new Yuefu are chosen, and the space of artistic form is limited to accommodate the rich literati feelings. As a result, the strings of art are still playing with their unwilling and dare not forget political feelings, and the changing art packaging still wraps the strong soul tremor of heaven and earth.
Besides, natural talent. Bai Juyi was one of the poets with high artistic accomplishment, strong creativity and innovative spirit in the middle Tang Dynasty. At the age of sixteen, he won the favor of Gu Kuang, a former poet, with a poem Farewell to Ancient Grass. He wrote nearly 3,000 poems in his life, which is the most intact among the poets in the Tang Dynasty. His poems are well-known at home and abroad, and are well known to women and children. Students are scrambling to imitate them, which has become a great spectacle in the history of Tang poetry communication. He advocated the new Yuefu movement, trying to realize the Confucian ideal of saving the world with plain language, euphemistic rhyme and practical irony, which effectively promoted the poetry innovation movement in the middle Tang Dynasty and opened up a new world of Tang poetry after Li Bai and Du Fu. Chen Hong had an eye and said that he was "deeper than poetry". "The Biography of Bai Juyi in the New Tang Dynasty" says: "Living in one place, people meet unique people and write articles ... In Zhenyuan, he is an outstanding scholar and complements the school." It was not until the first year of Yuanhe (806) that Bai Juyi wrote Song of Eternal Sorrow that he showed his outstanding talent in the official career examination. In the spring of the 16th year of Zhenyuan (800), he was a 29-year-old scholar, which was rare in the difficult examination room of "Ming Jing at the age of 30 and a scholar at the age of 50". In the 19th year of Zhenyuan (803), she took the examination of the excellent evaluation of official books, passed the post of secretary, and was a provincial school bookkeeper. In April of the first year of Yuanhe (806), she passed the examination of "combining talents with knowledge and emphasizing physical use" with excellent results. However, because of his outspoken words, he failed to serve the emperor as an exhortation officer in his ideal life, and made up for the post of captain of Zhouzhi County. At that time, Bai Juyi was 35.
Let's talk about sentimental people and the middle Tang Dynasty. Bai Juyi mentioned his feelings many times. For example, in the seventeenth year of Zhenyuan, at the age of 30, he said in the article "Sacrificing Six Brothers": "Sages are forgetful and stupid, and those who are attracted by love only live in Yi and his brothers." Four years later, at the age of 68, he said in "Don't forget the order of love": "For non-saints, you can't forget love, and it will not be inferior to love." It can be seen that sentimentality runs through his life. Later generations have noticed this many times. For example, the poem "Raft" by He in Qing Dynasty said that Bai Juyi was "the best talent", while Zhang Zonglu's "Questioning and Deleting Stories" in Qing Dynasty praised Bai as "the person with the deepest love". By investigating Bai Juyi's life behavior and temperament endowment, and his poetry creation, we think that Bai Juyi's poetry creation is rich in emotion, but generally presents a sad and gloomy face, lacking the boldness, vigor, heroic romance and lofty sentiments shown by the weather in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. This kind of emotional appeal is most obvious in his sentimental poems and miscellaneous poems, and it is precisely these two kinds of works that are most popular and widely read, which shows that sentimentality is a common aesthetic psychological demand in the middle Tang Dynasty, and the literati group constantly strengthens, deepens and summarizes this emotional experience through creation under the impetus of this extensive aesthetic psychological demand. This emotional orientation and creative tendency are rooted in the difficult times in the middle Tang Dynasty. We know that the "Anshi Rebellion" made the prosperous Tang Dynasty decline from prosperity. The national strength declined because of the separatist regime of the buffer region, and the whole era lacked the open, stable and dynamic atmosphere of the era during the prosperous Tang Dynasty unified empire because of closure, chaos and decline. The mental outlook of intellectuals has also changed significantly due to the changes of the times. Intellectuals in Zhenyuan, Yuanhe years, such as Bai Yuan, were mostly born after the end of Tianbao and grew up in Dali and the middle of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The danger of imperial division, the call of the spirit of the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and the system construction that power groups tried to pull back the decline made ZTE's desire stronger and stronger, and the reverie of the prosperous new century was like a shot in the arm. However, the way out for intellectuals is getting narrower and narrower. A passage in Bai Juyi's Nine Books with the Same Yuan reveals certain historical information: "I didn't know there were literati until the fifteenth and sixteenth five-year plans, so I studied hard." For 20 years, I studied during the day, studied at night, and occasionally had poems. It leads to sores on the mouth, lips and tongue, dry elbows, poor leathers, early whitening of teeth, and a glance like a fly hanging beads on the eyes. Gai is caused by studying hard and writing hard, sad! " From this, we can see the extraordinary hardships paid by intellectuals in the middle Tang Dynasty for fame and fortune, as well as the mental outlook of aging before aging. However, when they fought their way out, they found that "the nine-product families don't levy, and their high-income children pay more attention to debts than prizes, and they all live in labor and eat the people." "Although there are sonorous talents, it is better to bite the fat, vault, and the party and the party. Although there is no strength, it will be soon. " The accumulated drawbacks of the imperial examination, the contradiction that the bureaucratic system is difficult to adjust, and all kinds of ugliness and unfairness in society have made ordinary intellectuals move from persistence and participation to depression, helplessness and sadness. Therefore, "the spirit of the times is not in the boudoir immediately; Not in the world, but in the mood. " (6) Love children instead of heroic feelings, idleness instead of meritorious deeds, and deep affection and delicacy instead of broad feelings. What pervades the minds of intellectuals is the faint sadness and sorrow that tries to transcend the tragic fate and is ultimately helpless, an eternal sentimentality.
It is Bai Juyi's luck and the choice of the times that a sentient and powerful person met in the middle Tang Dynasty. Therefore, after casting the poet's profound life experience and sentimental spirit of the times, romantic feelings and grievances naturally came, and a deep sense of helplessness to the tragic fate spread.