During this period, Lao She wrote 1 novel and published 12 short stories on average every year. This simple figure proportion reflects Lao She's devotion to popular literature and art when the war comes, and then reflects Lao She's rapid shift from a new literature position to a popular literature position in order to implement nationalism, which implies the huge price Lao She paid for practicing the spirit of sacrifice.
The reason why Lao She used the almost extreme expression of "pain" to sum up his mood of engaging in popular literature and art creation, in addition to all kinds of technical difficulties, and more importantly, lowering his head to devote himself to the production of popular literature and art means giving up on new literature to a great extent. Because of Lao She's citizen background, popular literature and art have a natural affinity for Lao She. Influenced by opera and Quyi since childhood, Lao She was more conscious and decisive than ordinary writers when she joined the creative trend of the Anti-Japanese War. However, when she joined the popular literature and art, she was more aware of some natural defects of the popular literature and art, especially its qualitative conflict with the cause of new literature, which led to more creative tendencies.
Great pain.
The conflict between new literature and popular literature has a long history. Jiang Zuyi once endowed popular literature with the concept of "people's literature" and summarized its essence as follows
From the perspective of the relationship between literature and spirit, 10 kinds of non-human literature, including street novels and operas, are excluded, such as "slave books with the theme of the emperor's champion and prime minister", "holy father and holy husband" and "old dramas with harmonious crystallization" of various non-human thoughts, which are the main body of Chinese popular literature. The dispute of "human literature" is an important event in the new literature movement, which opens the theme of human nature in China's new literature. Looking back, Hu Shi's "Don't Avoid Vulgar Words" in Literary Improvement and Chen Duxiu's "Building a Clean and Popular Social Literature" in On the Literary Revolution are directly related to the continuous mistakes of China literature in the 20th century in losing its self-identity due to its popularization. For example, Wang Shouzhen, one of the active advocates of "new wine in old bottles" during the Anti-Japanese War, said: "Implementing the creative technique of new wine in old bottles is the spirit of the literary revolution in the May 4th era.
Zhao, another commentator, said: "The old form denied by the May Fourth Movement is the classical Chinese which is divorced from the popular spoken language, that is, the so-called' Tongcheng fallacy, the literary selection is evil'." As for the old forms we use now, such as Water Margin, Dream of Red Mansions, Journey to the West, Scholars, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and so on. , as well as dialects, ballads, proverbs, folk stories and other forms, were not denied at that time, but were consciously advocated because they were close to the popularity of spoken English. It can be seen that some problems really have their origins, and some things are wrong from the beginning.
"New wine in old bottles" is the use of old popular literature forms such as drum lyrics and Beijing opera to fill in the content that meets the requirements of the times, that is, anti-Japanese war propaganda. Mao Dun explained that "there is a fixed story frame first, and then the characters are filled". Today, Lao She has a simple saying, that is, "old forms and new materials". The method of introducing "old bottle and new wine" into literary creation is essentially to dispel the literariness and creativity of literary creation, and replace new literature with popular literature. Lao She 1938 compared the differences between the old and new literary forms from four aspects: writing, content, thoughts and feelings, and interest in talking about popular literature. This comparison shows that Lao She did not give up thinking about the essence of literature while actively engaged in popular literature creation, but also for Lao She/Kloc.
Lao She kept a clear head from the beginning and held a completely different view on the Cultural Revolution. His temperament, personality and beliefs determine his life.
When War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression broke out, Lao She once said that he would die for his country. Later, it was preserved, but it was treated unfairly during the Cultural Revolution. As a scholar, he couldn't figure out how his dear motherland could be unrecognizable overnight. He wanted to admonish others and wake them up with his own death, so he plunged into his nearest lake and merged with the nature he loved. He died for integrity. It can be seen that in his eyes, the integrity of individuals and countries is above everything else. At this point, he stood at a height that contemporary literati could not reach.