The above metaphor may not be accurate enough for experts, but I often like to use this description method. There are three attitudes towards theory: one is rationalism. They need a lot of terminology and repeated logical deduction to define these three ideas clearly. Once clearly defined, a group of theoretical thugs immediately said "no". These thugs never build, but only deconstruct. They know that if they try to build it, it will be their end. Their contribution to the theory is to force the former to work like Sisyphus who pushed the stone up the mountain. This is the second attitude. There is a third kind of person who thinks that thoughts are unspeakable and can only "perceive thoughts as roses". This sentence was once regarded as a stupid joke, but it also has some truth. Lao Tzu said, "Tao can be Tao, but not surprising", that is, truly profound thoughts can't be said. Once spoken in logical language, language betrays thought. You can only use symbols and intuition. Modern physicist Schrodinger said:
We modern intellectuals are not used to taking a visual analogy as a philosophical view; We insist on logical reasoning. But for this requirement, logical thinking may at least reveal so much to us: it is probably impossible to grasp the foundation of the phenomenon through logical thinking, because logical thinking itself is a part of the phenomenon and is completely involved in it. In this case, we might as well ask, are we forced not to use visual analogy just because we can't prove it strictly? In quite a few cases, logical thinking leads us to a certain point and then leaves us, whether we are alive or dead. Therefore, when we are faced with a field that these ideological lines cannot directly enter, but it seems to be the direction they guide, we can try to enrich this field in this way, so that these ideological lines will not disappear or be interrupted casually, but gather at a central point in this field; The result of this is tantamount to giving us an extremely valuable panorama of the world, and its value cannot be measured by our strict and absolutely unambiguous standards from the beginning. There are hundreds of examples of scientific application of this program, which has always been considered correct.
Besides physics, what about the spiritual world? However, the contribution of the third person is rarely recognized by the theoretical circle. One of the few exceptions is the Russian thought of Berdyaev, a Russian religious liberal. Many conclusions in this book are "Oh" with the nose. Everybody don't laugh! "Oh" is perception. This is the best book to explain Russian thought in the19th century, with amazing accuracy and profundity.
When I preach to you "using symbols to explain ideas", I "became" a modernist myself.
The gradual change of any literary ideological trend is not groundless. Theorists who think that all their inspiration comes from clever brains are actually the stupidest. This ignorance often makes them prisoners of fashionable ideas. The most hidden motive force for the change of literary ideological trend is the basic social contradiction and social psychological demand. The origin of modernism and post-modernism literature can be traced back to the end of the Renaissance, but the literary trend that really became a grand view was accompanied by contradictions and spiritual crisis in capitalist society. 1848 The decline of France after the revolution made Baudelaire, one of the founders of modernist literature, discover that "the whole society is just a rotting corpse". He said:
Look at and analyze all natural things, as well as all behaviors and desires of pure natural people, and you will only find terrible things. All beautiful and noble things are the products of reason and thought. Crime originated from nature, and humanoid animals gained their love for crime from the womb. On the contrary, virtue is artificial and supernatural ... Evil comes naturally and inevitably, without effort: kindness is often the product of art. ..
Baudelaire just said what the Bible has already said, but the Bible tells people that God can save everything, but Baudelaire questioned this. Despair of society and people constitutes an important feature of modernism.
At the beginning of the 20th century, due to the intensification of capitalist contradictions, this despair greatly expanded. World War I, a dirty imperialist war that carved up colonies, plunged the whole of Europe into disaster. Countless people were rushed to the front line and slaughtered, while people in the rear were starving. In France, the price of wheat has tripled and the price of daily necessities has doubled, while wages have not risen at all. The serious social crisis caused the optimistic and rational pillar that supported the whole literary building in the19th century to collapse. If a highly developed reason encounters a crisis, people will fall into deeper despair. When people thought they had boarded the fairyland, they suddenly found cliffs and abyss in front of them. That kind of sadness can drive people crazy. Nietzsche declared: "God is dead!" One writer after another went crazy or committed suicide: Strindberg's Ghost Sonata was written in a crazy state; Jack London ended himself like his hero Martin Eden, but committed suicide by taking poison; Woolf, the master of stream of consciousness, threw himself into the river; Hemingway shot him in the head with a gun; Zweig, Austria uses gas; Mayakovski, the poet "the most talented in the Soviet Union", also used a pistol; Ye Saining followed in his footsteps; ..... Their hearts are like fragile reeds, still trembling when there is no wind. The cold wind suddenly broke out, and they ended their lives one by one, and more writers fell into the abyss of pessimism. Irrationalism represented by Pageson is surging and sweeping the ideological and cultural circles. Bo Han, a French poet, faced a world full of human desires and moral decay and missed Baudelaire, a poet who died of opium. He believes that Baudelaire and American writer Allan Poe opened up a literary school called "Modernism", and thus began a crusade against the rational spirit. 1In September, 886, the little-known poet Jean Morea put forward the title of "symbolism" in le figaro, which started the modernist literary movement. Symbolism poetry is the oldest school in modernist literature. It breaks through the hard shell of rational spirit, sails to the abyss of human mind, and explores the irrational kingdom bound by reason. Along this line, there are also symbolism in the fields of novels and dramas-"expressionism" literature and "stream of consciousness" literature.
Schopenhauer's pessimism, Bergson's consciousness of life flow and Nietzsche's philosophy all greatly supported the development of modernist literature. However, the most powerful spiritual pillar of modernism is Freud's "subconscious" theory.
Man's understanding of his own history is a process from outside to inside, from abstract to concrete. From knowing the outside world to knowing oneself, from knowing one's own skin to knowing one's own heart, from building sober reason to showing interest in the unconscious and subconscious.
Writers and artists explore the unconscious and subconscious much earlier than psychologists. When Shakespeare talked about "unconsciousness" through the mouth of the characters in Hamlet, psychology as an independent discipline had not yet been born. However, when Freud put forward his psychoanalytic theory at the end of 19, it caused a great shock in the literary and art circles. It can be said that with Freud, modernist literature came into being.
Freud's "personality structure theory" regards the human mind as a multi-level and interactive system;
Superego: implementing moral principles;
Self: implementing the principle of realism;
Id: Carry out the principle of pleasure only.
This is a dynamic system, and most of the energy is stored in the ID. As far as consciousness is concerned, the id is equivalent to the subconscious, and its activity law does not follow the rational logic law at all. Freud obtained three laws of subconscious activity from the analysis of dreams, which are called "primitive thinking" laws:
First, anything can cross time and space and be connected.
Second, the direction of thinking is carried out under the control of emotion and desire, and does not follow logical laws.
Third, it is often expressed in the form of "concentration", "transfer" and "symbol".
Freud also believes that the subconscious region of human beings is a dark boiling cauldron full of desire turmoil, in which sexual instinct is the energy that plays an important role. Any repressed desire of human beings is produced by universality, including artistic creation, which is the catharsis and sublimation of sexual instinct. Freud's universalism is obviously absurd. Later, he made some supplements and amendments himself, and his disciples Jung and Adler also severely criticized his universalism. But there is no doubt that Freud established a new model about human psychological structure. Almost any modernist school can't deny that Freud's theory fundamentally destroyed the mode of "modern people" and opened up a new spiritual world for them. Even realistic literature cannot but admit its influence on itself. Brighton, the leader of the surrealist school, publicly declared that he was an admirer of Freud, and wanted to use the liberation concept of "devil-sense-subconscious" to counter the repression concept of "God-spirituality-consciousness". Futurists are keen to express their subconscious desire for destruction; Almost all the characters in the novels written by conscious novelists have lost their sober sense and moral concept of honor and disgrace, and their hearts are full of inexplicable noise and turmoil, dominated by vague, dark and degenerate desires.
Although Freud himself should not be responsible for "sexual liberation", it is a fact that his theory aroused people's strong interest in sexual psychology and promoted the disintegration of the family. Eliot's The Waste Land borrows the research results of alchemy, describing women as the "holy grail", knights' swords as men, and knights looking for the holy grail as sexual intercourse between men and women. The whole poem is like drowning the sea of desire of Phoenician sailors. Only by converting to Christ can people be saved. DH Lawrence, who creates modern psychological novels with realism, is the staunchest theoretical supporter and artistic practitioner of Freud's universalism, and his main works are centered on this. As early as 19 13, in Sons and Lovers, his son Paul was a patient entangled in Oedipus complex, and his strange relationship with his mother was similar to heterosexual love, which completely conformed to Freud's theory. His "Rainbow" and "Woman in Love" show the author's view of sexual love by describing the practice of various characters on sexual relations: human desires and instincts are not evil, but suppressing them is evil, and people have the right to pursue natural and harmonious sexual relations and realize sexual self-liberation. The later work Lady Chatterley's Lover symbolizes the inactive British ruling class with Sir Chatterley who is incapacitated, while the vitality of Britain is symbolized by Lady Chatterley's lover, worker Mailer and the vibrant forest where she lives. It was the sexual union between Lady Chatterley and Mailer that revived her. In this novel, sharp social contradictions are attributed to "sex", and sexual liberation is used to solve social contradictions, reflecting the poverty of western society and culture. The book described the process of sexual life many times in poetic language, so it was banned by the British authorities. Sexual description is very popular in modernist works and is opposed by many serious writers. For example, Kafka, a master of expressionism, thinks that you can't become a master by sexual description. Neither he nor Hemingway described sexual behavior in detail in his works.
The revelation of dark kingdom in people's subconscious indicates the ebb and flow of western aesthetic ideals. Modernism is more real than realism in revealing the inner world. From the aesthetic point of view, it opens up a new perspective, meets new aesthetic needs, and is also an important contribution.
From Baudelaire and Poe in the middle and late19th century, western artists' doubts about the rational spirit of the modern bourgeoisie experienced the late symbolism at the beginning of this century. The influence of Imagism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism reached its climax when the First World War broke out. The disaster of war is undoubtedly a fatal blow to the modern rational spirit and accelerates the decline of "modern people". The long poem "The Wasteland" published in 1922 is not only a symbolic depiction of the post-war European social picture, but also a concentrated expression of the crisis of modern rationalism. Its artistic achievements make it a milestone in modernist poetry. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for his masterpiece.