Text/Gao Dengquan
Artistic works, especially poetry works, mainly focus on aesthetic images, from images to artistic conception, which is the highest realm pursued by every poetry creator and reader.
Poetry is one of the earliest traditional arts in China. It is a language art as well as a lyrical language art. From the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period to the prosperous Tang and Song Dynasties, from quatrains to metrical poems, from classical poems to modern poems, from metrical poems to free poems, China's poems are constantly progressing, developing and breaking through. In the thousands of years of civilization history in China, the well-known poems handed down from generation to generation either express the poet's love for great rivers and mountains, or express his understanding of life and thinking about the world, or express some strong and great love.
The success of a poem depends on how the author properly handles the relationship between the two basic elements of the poem, "emotion" and "scenery", so that they form a unity and melt into the poem; Secondly, the beautiful combination of images and the careful creation of artistic conception will bring long-term artistic life to poetry, make the artistic value of poetry spread for a long time, and make the power of poetry reach the level of shocking life and awakening the soul.
This is mainly due to the skill and beautiful art in poetry, that is, the image and artistic conception in poetry.
1. Poetry is mainly about the art of beauty, which requires that poetry creators not only have Shuang Yi's eyes to find "beauty", but also have more sentimental feelings than ordinary people.
On the one hand, they can "see the world in the sand and the sun shines on the crow's back"; On the other hand, falling flowers hurt spring, and people feel it when they see running water. While observing nature, changes in the human world affect his inner universe all the time.
For example, in Li Bai's bold poems, there are also some works full of resentment: "This life is not satisfactory, and tomorrow I will hang my hair and take a fishing boat." "Alas, how can I bow and scrape to those high-ranking officials whose sincere faces will never be seen?" In Du Fu's melancholy poems, there are also some works full of joy, such as "Good rain knows the season, when spring comes" and "On a green spring day, I sing loudly, drink deeply and start my home".
Their specific emotions are not without reason, but there are traces to follow. Li Bai was chivalrous by nature and despised the world. Since his ambition to make contributions cannot be realized, why not roam in the ideal realm? Du Fu suffered from displacement and war, worrying about his country and people, but it was hard to hide his excitement on the night of spring rain. When the good news came that the army had recovered its lost territory, he couldn't help crying all over his clothes, and his ecstasy was beyond words.
This is the concrete embodiment of emotion and scenery in poetry. In poetry creation, generally speaking, the emotion of poetry should flow out like running water, not shout it out with your mouth. Poetry is a trickle, a mountain stream, and the rhyme of Ding Dong. The most taboo is to express directly out of thin air. When writing poetry, it is often combined with concrete and sensible scene description.
Regarding the relationship between "sentiment" and "scenery", Wang Fuzhi systematically expounded that "sentiment is true, sentiment is beautiful, scenery is not stagnant, and scenery always contains sentiment", and "there is sentiment in the scene, sentiment contains scenery, so the day is: the scene is full of sentiment, and sentiment is also full of sentiment". (Selected Poems of Tang Dynasty, Volume 4).
Wang Fuzhi believes that there are three forms of scene combination: one is "emotion" in "scenery", which contains emotion with the scenery, such as "hanging the capital for a long time, washing the mallet and beating it" to convey the feeling of "living alone and remembering the distance"; Second, the "scenery" in the "emotion" makes the emotion vivid, such as "none of my relatives and friends can reach me, and I am old, weak, sick and lonely", which shows the life experience in the scene of climbing Yueyang Tower; Third, the scene is "wonderful", such as "I have been there, Liu Yiyi; When I think about it today, it's raining heavily. Here, I write my sadness with joyful scenes, and mourn Syaraku with sad scenes, so as to double his grief and joy and achieve the state of "blending scenes without separation", so that poetry can express emotions in expression, produce beautiful poems and achieve the effects of blending scenes, blending scenes and voyeurism. In modern vernacular poetry, the expression combined with scenes has been further developed mainly because of the clarity of expression and the liberalization of form.
Xu Zhimo's masterpiece Farewell to Cambridge can be regarded as a masterpiece of blending scenes.
When revisiting the old place, the poet did not exaggerate his sadness too much. Instead, it talks with weeping willows, aquatic plants, clear springs, floating algae and starlight in a perceptual style. He wants to dream and "sing at the stars", but it is hard to have the relaxed mood as before. "Summer insects are silent for me, and silence is Cambridge tonight." "I waved my sleeve and didn't take it away."
When he waved goodbye, his heart was complicated, including his infatuation with Cambridge and his reluctance and helplessness to leave.
Because of the harmonious interweaving of emotion and scenery, readers seem to be immersed in poetry and painting, and are deeply infected. It seems that clear water does not flow into the author's heart, but into the reader's soul. That touch of sunset illuminates not the poet's feelings, but the reader's eyes. Readers can feel the picture of poetic scenes between his lines, and feel the perceptual beauty of poetry as its language art from the picture.
Secondly, regarding the combination of images in poetry, the so-called images can not be clearly stated in one sentence, because images themselves are a rich and complex system, a psychological existence and an aesthetic representation, and we can only feel them from different sides.
The reason why we first talk about the relationship between emotion and scenery in poetry is because "meaning" and "image" are a pair of concepts corresponding to "emotion" and "scenery". Those excellent poets always combine objects, scenery and events with their own subjective interests to produce a sensible image to convey specific feelings. Li Bai's "Song of Autumn Pu": "White hair is three thousands of feet, and sorrow is as long as long.
I don't know where to get autumn frost in the mirror! The "worry" that is difficult to copy is vividly turned into white hair and autumn frost in the mirror, expressing the full sadness caused by lack of talent and ambition. Du Fu wrote in "Spring Hope": "Although the country is divided, the mountains and rivers last forever, and all the plants are spring.
Every petal has shed tears, and the lonely bird has mourned. "The poet depicts the feelings of worrying about the country and hurting the chaos through specific scenes, which makes us feel as if Chang 'an was burned and looted by the Anshi rebellion, and the poet wept for the feelings of parting and listened to the sadness of the birds.
In Meng Jiao's Ode to a Wandering Son, "the thread in the hands of a fond-hearted mother, make clothes for her wayward son, sewing them carefully, and I'm afraid I won't come back late", which shows the reluctant parting between mother and son through sewing clothes, and every stitch embodies the profound meaning of maternal love.
"Only an inch of grass is a little sentimental, and it is reported as three spring rays", which is affectionate and thought-provoking, and has been widely praised for thousands of years. Therefore, the word "image" appeared in China's traditional poetry creation theory very early.
In the Book of Changes, there is a saying that "sages do their best to set up images", which means that with the help of images, ideas that cannot be clearly expressed and explained can be expressed.
In Wen Xin Diao Shen Long Si, Liu Xie put forward the aesthetic proposition that "seeing an image carries a pound", that is, using it according to the image. In short, image is the product of the fusion of subjective feelings and objective images. "Image" refers to the poet's perception. "Meaning" is the trigger point of "image", and "image" is the carrier of "meaning", and the two are integrated and rely on each other.
In order to express specific emotions, poets choose specific images that come into view, and then form poems through organized language and words.
In the process of poetry creation, when the subject wants to convey some emotion or express some experience, "meaning" appears, and the individual, special and concrete perceptual representation expressed by "meaning" is "image". "Meaning" and "image" are dialectical relations. Without "image", "meaning" often cannot appear. Without "image", it is empty and superficial.
Meaning is carried by image, and image is enriched by meaning. The combination of the two is image. The combination of images can be divided into two types. One is direct image, which chooses a specific object that can entrust feelings, and through image description, it has distinct sensibility.
Ma Zhiyuan's "Tianshajing Qiu Si" is a picture of autumn dusk, with a group of emotional scenes: withered vines, old trees, faint crows, small bridges, flowing water, people, ancient roads, westerly winds, thin horses, sunset and heartbroken people at the end of the world. The picture reveals a bleak and bleak atmosphere, which shows the poet's state of mind that he is in a foreign land, dying and miserable.
The second is indirect image, which concretizes and implicitly conveys abstract perception and emotion through metaphor and symbol, giving people a lot of inspiration. Cang Kejia's "three generations" is an image metaphor: "Children, take a bath in the soil; /Dad, sweating in the mud; /Grandpa, buried in the soil. "
This poem vividly describes the real life of farmers in old China with three images related to land, showing that teenagers, middle-aged people and old people are always bound to the same land and bear the same fate from generation to generation, which shows the poet's deep sympathy and sadness.
This is the expression of image. In the generation of these images, intention and imagination have played a great role, because intention is the tortuous integration of the subject's ideological tendency, will pursuit and desire attempt in aesthetics, and it is a manifestation of human aesthetic needs. Imagination is a psychological ability and mechanism to grasp the world freely and create forms by using appearances.
The combination of imagination and intention creatively creates a colorful image world in the infinite freedom that transcends everything.
Judging from the function of image and its role in artistic works, artistic works, especially poems, must take image as the carrier and image as the key link. People enter the most beautiful artistic realm of poetry step by step through the images in their works.
Because in the image world, the aesthetic characteristics of poetry art are concentrated, and through the image world, the subject's "meaning" changes from connotation to expression, and poetry art becomes an aesthetic object realistically; With the help of the image world, the exchange of aesthetic experience between readers and authors can be carried out and completed.
Thirdly, regarding the construction of poetic artistic conception, "articles are natural and skillful hands are rare". Good sentences can only be produced in high artistic perception, and only good writers with high artistic discrimination can recite good sentences in accidental opportunities.
As long as a good sentence appears, history will not be forgotten and art will not be forgotten.
"Lonely smoke in the desert, the long river sets the yen", which writes the unique features of the frontier and is fascinating. "The spring tide comes with rain in a hurry, and there is no boat to cross the wild." The empty scene gives birth to the realm of selflessness. Wang Guowei said in The Thorn on Earth that the primary requirement of poetry writing is "meaning and realm" and "realm is self-contained".
Tao Yuanming's poems have a quiet and leisurely artistic conception, while Wang Wei's poems have a quiet and beautiful charm.
So the artistic conception is from the overall effect of poetry.
"Meaning" is emotion, which is the poet's subjective thoughts and feelings, and "realm" is the realm, which is the arrangement level of emotional images in poetry.
Artistic conception is the artistic realm formed by the blending of the poet's subjective thoughts and feelings with objective things. So, what is artistic conception? Mr. Zong Baihua pointed out that artistic conception is "the most central aspect in China's cultural history and has contributed to the world."
The so-called artistic conception mainly refers to the use of artistic images, on the basis of the integration of subject and object and the forgetting of things and me, to lead the receiver to a realm that transcends the real time and space and is full of metaphysical ontology.
In the history of China's aesthetics, it has gradually become the ultimate pursuit of artistic works. Of course, from the characteristics of artistic conception, it is a limited image, which leads to a philosophical significance to life, history and the universe.
In poetry works, through the carrier of image, the artistic conception of poetry is at the intersection of subject and object, which has the characteristics of continuous generation because of the blending and mutual growth of scenes. Bian's short poem "Broken Chapter" embodies such characteristics. "You stand on the bridge and watch the scenery. /The person watching the scenery is watching you upstairs. /The bright moon decorated your window,/You decorated other people's dreams.
Firstly, two compositions are presented, in which images such as figures, bridges, landscapes, buildings, windows, bright moons and dreams are carefully arranged and arranged by the author, and unrelated things are connected by "seeing" and "decorating".
Secondly, the picture subtly conveys the poet's philosophical thinking: in the life of the universe, everything is relative (you are both the appreciator and the appreciator) and interrelated.
Thirdly, the exchange of the position of subject and object, the alternation of real images and the emergence of dreams embodied in poetry make poetry show the space of activities and convey the poet's life experience beyond emotion. Let people praise the dignity of life and personal dignity from their works, so as to transcend the external image and reach the realm of deep philosophical thinking.
Mr. Zong Baihua divided artistic conception into three levels. The first level is "intuitive modeling", which is characterized by static reality; The second layer, "the transmission of positive life", is characterized by flying and ethereal; The third layer, "the revelation of the highest soul", is characterized by transcendence and sacredness.
Therefore, the analysis of poetic artistic conception should not stop at its single-layer display, but should dig deep into the image system of the blending of subject and object, and understand the "image outside the image" and "intention outside the taste" in order to deeply understand the unique charm of artistic conception.
In the process of reading poetry, only by entering the real artistic conception can we find the soul of poetry, understand the meaning expressed by poetry, and seek the true meaning of being a person and being a thing from those simple or ethereal languages.
Four. On the relationship between image and artistic conception From the perspective of the emergence and development of image, artistic conception is based on the existence of image, which requires the integration of subject and object and the integration of things and me.
Both of them are psychological states formed when the images of subject and object collide. Eliot once commented on China's classical poems: "A Chinese character is an image, and a sentence is a group of images."
Based on this theory, China's poems were translated. In fact, this view still stands in the perspective of western poetry to analyze China's classical poetry, which is naturally biased.
China's classical poems lay particular stress on "artistic conception", which is a whole artistic conception. It is different from one or a group of "images" expressed in western poetry.
From the way of image combination, image is generally the feeling and experience of the object described in the text, and artistic conception is a kind of realm achieved in the atmosphere of image contrast, a kind of immersive feeling.
The creation of images and artistic conception is not done by the author alone, but by the author and readers. The author creates an artistic atmosphere, which readers feel. The combination of the two creates images and artistic conception, which is more in line with China's concept of harmony between man and nature. Image and artistic conception are China's unique understanding and concepts.
When a poet jumps an object onto a piece of paper with words written on it, his feelings about the object are completed by the reader, forming an image. "A thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets." Different readers may feel different images.
For artistic conception, the requirements are higher. Feeling a poem, some readers may not reach the ideal state, or be limited to the feeling of images.
But we must admit that all poems generally have images, otherwise there will be no poetry, but not all poems can create artistic beauty. In the aesthetic category of image and artistic conception, the beauty of image is easy to feel, but the beauty of artistic conception is difficult to understand. Feeling the beauty of artistic conception requires the appreciator's accomplishment, life experience and living environment.
The imagery of Li Bai's poems is more beautiful, and the artistic conception of Du Fu's poems is more beautiful, which is also a factor that makes Li Bai's poems more popular.
But the process from image to artistic conception is the same, but after all, it does not belong to the same level of concepts, and there are differences.
First, the image mainly focuses on aesthetic breadth, and the artistic conception mainly focuses on aesthetic depth. The artistic conception is far-reaching and the image is broad. From the perspective of space, the image is horizontal, while the artistic conception is vertical.
For example, "Lonely Smoke in the Desert, the Yellow River gathers yen" takes artistic conception as the main theme, supplemented by images, which embodies a landscape that spans time and space; Qu Yuan's Tian Wen is mainly a horizontal arrangement of images, and its artistic conception is slightly inferior.
Secondly, artistic conception is the sublimation of image, and it is a nihilistic and fantastic aesthetic world reconstructed by the subject's mind breaking through the boundaries of image. Only by breaking through the shackles of "image" and subliming to philosophy and ultimate can "meaning" approach "artistic conception".
From image to artistic conception, it is from finite to infinite, from metaphysical appearance to metaphysical perception; Artistic conception can not exist independently without image, but can only be realized by transcending image.
Thirdly, in China culture, image belongs to the artistic category, and artistic conception refers to the existence and movement of spiritual time and space, which is an aesthetic category.
For China artists, emptiness, emptiness and distance are always the core goals of their creation.
As a representative figure of romantic poetry, most of the images in Li Bai's poems transcend reality and rarely show the real world. His poems mostly express the spiritual world, and reading Li Bai's poems will gain great spiritual freedom, which is beyond life.
The language of Li Bai's poems is simple, naive and natural, but it strongly expresses the author's self-awareness and passion. As a spiritual image, the poet's image is almost everywhere in Li Bai's poems. "Don't you see how the water of the Yellow River flows down from the sky into the ocean and never comes back?" "The Yellow River falls into the East China Sea, and Wan Li writes in his heart." "I want to cross the Yellow River, but ice will block the ferry, and Taihang Mountain will be covered with snow." "The lonely sail is far away from the blue sky, and the curtain sees the Yangtze River flowing in the sky."
The images of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River show Li Bai's spiritual world, which is vigorous and magnificent. This is Li Bai's image.
The negative emotions in Li Bai's poems can't hide the beating and passion of his life, and the images in his poems are always vivid and full of power.
If mountains are the majestic temperament of Li Bai's poetic images and rivers are the source of strength in Li Bai's chest, it will be endless.
As a representative figure of realistic poetry in Tang Dynasty, most of Du Fu's poems show compassion for life. As Du Fu with self-purification sentiment, Du Fu himself shares joys and sorrows with the people.
Du Fu's poems mostly express the beauty of artistic conception. His poems are very extensive, close to the production and life of the broad masses of the people, praising the great mountains and rivers of the motherland and describing people's suffering and social unrest.
These things are the infinite expression of the so-called artistic conception in the aesthetic category of emptiness, emptiness and distance. Therefore, image and artistic conception are not only closely related, but also fundamentally different.
In the creation and reading of poetry, only by organically combining the two, from image to artistic conception, can we feel the inner beauty of poetry and reach the highest aesthetic realm pursued by readers and authors.
In short, from the search for images to the generation of artistic conception, readers will go deep into two realms, namely, the realm of self and the realm of non-self. From the emotional expression of poetry, it is found that the emotion and the highest realm of poetry are based on the formation of images. At first, they all started from "emotion" and "scenery", and the blending of scenes created the realm of beauty and achieved the unity of "image" and "artistic conception". In unification, "artistic conception" emphasizes the realm formed by the blending of subject and object. Exploring poetry and deepening artistic conception are the eternal pursuits of poetry, as well as poets and readers.
References:
1. Writing (published by Wuhan University Press 1998)
2. Aesthetics (Published by Commercial Press 1979)
3. Introduction to Art (published by Higher Education Press 1999)
4. Introduction to Literature (published by Wuhan University Press 1998)
5. History of Chinese Ancient Literature (published by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House 1989)