Comparing Dante's Divine Comedy with Eliot's The Waste Land is quite meaningful. Both works are produced in the turning point and turbulent period of history, and both have magnificent epic bearing and mysterious religious consciousness. They all try to paint a picture of their time and point out ways to save themselves for people. The Divine Comedy, on the other hand, provides people with a neat and clear picture of the world: hell (ninth floor), purgatory (seventh floor) and heaven (ninth floor). Everyone can find their exact position or help themselves in this picture according to their own industry. The rigor and clarity of this world outlook determines its rigor and clarity in artistic form. The whole poem loo, except the preface, has 33 poems each, all written in three lines. The formal "three" is the projection of the original "trinity" of the world (father, son and holy spirit). This high adaptability in content and form makes this epic reach an almost unparalleled perfection. The situation in The Waste Land is the opposite: the picture of the world it provides is vague and chaotic, and people can't find out the picture of the world running from it; This vagueness and confusion is a sign of the decline of modern reason in the west; The obscure language structure used in the whole poem just fits this world picture. The Divine Comedy literally means that good is rewarded with good and evil with evil, while The Waste Land is full of evil desires and good death. Divine Comedy shows a strong sense of "evil", while Wasteland is weak. The Divine Comedy leads people to "paradise" Jerusalem, while the principle of famine makes people feel homeless. Divine comedy pursues personal perfection, while wasteland pursues the consciousness of death. Both of them converted to Christianity, but The Divine Comedy was full of optimism, while The Waste Land played up a strong sense of gray.
Please note that when there is a "fault zone" in society, "wasteland literature" often comes into being. In western history, the most typical wasteland period is the so-called "Baroque period" in the 4th and 5th centuries-the period when ancient Rome was about to perish, the period when17th century began, and the "low valley" of capitalist development at the end of last century, the beginning of this century and around the First World War. The spiritual "wasteland" period is not necessarily the decline of literature, but often the opposite. The literature in the wilderness reveals that the mind is broken, the atmosphere is pessimistic, the thought is mysterious, the structure is abrupt, the language is mysterious, and in general, there is the kind of psychopathy of mental patients.
Like The Divine Comedy, The Waste Land uses a lot of myths, but The Divine Comedy mostly uses materials from Homer in ancient Greece, which reflects the awakening of individual consciousness in human childhood and the initial thinking about the laws of the universe. This kind of thinking itself means that people are divorced from nature. However, most of the references in The Waste Land belong to the myth era, that is, the myth of ignorance. During this period, man and nature are still in the period of "umbilical cord connection". Man and nature are integrated, individual consciousness is like an embryo, restless in the mother's womb of nature, and both man and nature are more chaotic. Eliot believes that the material ruins and spiritual ruins caused by the First World War prompted people to return to the mythical era earlier than Greek civilization. From Sacrifice to Myth by Ms. Wei and Golden Branches by Fraser vividly depict the world scene of that era. In these two books, the author recorded a lot of legends, saying that the disaster epidemic in primitive times caused Shan Ye to be barren, plants stopped growing, animals were almost extinct, and women mysteriously lost their fertility. According to the understanding of primitive people, it must be that the god of main reproduction (such as the fishing king) is sick or killed (Jesus is also the god of main reproduction, and there is a legend about his killing in the golden branch). Only when young heroes appear and look for the "holy grail" with swords in their hands can the fisherman's illness be cured and the wasteland be revived. The "sword" here is a metaphor for men, and the "holy grail" is a metaphor for women (spades and hearts in cards are transformed from swords and holy grail respectively). The story of looking for the Holy Grail comes from people's initial consciousness of the origin of all life in the universe, which is only expressed in the form of myth. When human beings enter the civilized era, they often take "wasteland" as a symbol, which means the destruction of human spirit. Ezekiel in the Bible records that Israel ordered their homes to be turned into ruins because they worshipped pagan idols. Before the demise of ancient Rome, the city of Rome was burned down five times, and the "holy city" was reduced to ruins, which was God's punishment for dissolute Romans. "Wasteland" is the evil result of human crime. By the end of the Renaissance, in Hamlet, Shakespeare compared the world to a "barren garden full of vicious withered grass", making "wilderness" a symbol of evil forces. In King Lear, the crazy King Lear lives in a wasteland, and the wasteland itself has cosmic significance. Therefore, at the beginning of this century, it was not an invention for Eliot to compare death to a wasteland, but he expanded the spiritual connotation of the wasteland in an extremely broad historical span, making it a symbol of the destruction of the material world and the spiritual world.
This is a poem that needs to be read with intelligence. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, it is full of allusions and obscure. However, once you break through these "obstacles", a powerful emotional flood will drown your body and mind.
The "inscription" of the whole poem makes the finishing point to mention the theme of "death":
Yes, I saw Sybil in Gu Mi hanging in a cage with my own eyes. The children are asking her, "Sybil, what do you want?" She replied, "I'm going to die."
Three "wasteland"
The Waste Land shows Nietzsche's spiritual world of "God is dead". Malraux also declared that "man is dead", that is, the concept of subject pursued by man disappeared without a trace. "People are dead" makes people's alienation irreversible.
The philosophical theory of alienation is not the content of our discussion. As far as literary works are concerned, people began to pay attention to the problem of "people become inhuman" from the Shakespeare era (such as King Lear), which has a lot of profound artistic enlightenment in western works in 17, 18 and 19 centuries. However, this revelation is often one-sided and concrete. For example, King Lear reveals how "power" leads to "father banishing women, women killing father, brothers killing each other and sisters killing each other", while Balzac shows that "money" leads to the variation of human nature. Generally speaking, the exposure of alienation in literary works in the era of free capitalism is far less comprehensive and sharp than that in modernism. In the relationship between man and nature, modernist works show the oppression and revenge of the material world on man. In some works, we see how people become animals and lifeless tables and chairs. With regard to the relationship between man and society, modernists comprehensively discussed the suppression of human nature by social structure (including contemporary "operationalism") from the perspective of "individual freedom", comprehensively questioned all values of western society, including religious belief, ethics, free education, commercial civilization, aesthetics and sexual morality, and regarded man as an outsider, exile, spiritual aristocrat or criminal. In the relationship between people, modernists believe that "existence precedes essence" and regard individual consciousness as the center of the universe and life, so collisions and conflicts will inevitably occur between people. "Others are hell", and eternal life cannot be freed from this hell. In the relationship between man and himself, he advocates instinct and subconscious, which is mysterious. The revelation of "alienation" by the modern school has a strong pessimistic color, because it does not touch the economic motivation of alienation, nor can it see the realistic way to eliminate it. Their efforts to find themselves have further opened up the virgin land in the human mind and provided people with a vast, profound and mysterious inner universe. All these constitute the spiritual confusion of western "modern people" in the first half of the 20th century. Austrian writer Franz Kafka is the first outstanding and comprehensive master writer who expresses this confusion.
Auden, an English poet, said: If you want to name a writer whose relationship with our times is similar to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, Kafka comes to mind first. Kafka is indeed the spiritual representative of the first half of this century. It was he who first showed the "confusion of modern people" and made remarkable and outstanding artistic creations. His masterpiece is the novel Metamorphosis.
Comments on Metamorphosis are numerous, and you can easily find them in various publications and papers, so I won't repeat them here. I just want to explore the inner secret of this work from the perspective of aesthetic acceptance.
Kafka's Metamorphosis has the same name as a famous work in ancient Rome, namely Ovid's Metamorphosis. This in itself means that the author believes that after thousands of years of struggle, human beings have not sublimated themselves from animals, and the sublimation conditions created by human beings have in turn become the ropes that bind people themselves. To paraphrase the devil's prophecy in Faust, it is "worse than animals". The difference is that Ovid's transformation is two-way. People (gods) can change plants, and animals and plants can become people (gods). Although the whole book is sad, it still has a sense of freedom of harmony between man and nature. Kafka's works of the same name are all one-way: Grigor, the hero, becomes an ant and can never become a human again. Only the retrogression of human nature has no sublimation of human nature, so he is even more desperate. The plight of modern westerners has long been revealed, but Metamorphosis provides people with a highly generalized image symbol, which truly reproduces the theme of human alienation with amazing absurd framework and amazing details. Different from Balzac, the author did not clearly point out the social conditions that caused the degeneration of human nature, but only deeply discussed the alienation feeling in his heart. The universality and authenticity of these feelings lure readers into the hero's insect world, and after reading it, they seem to have become insects themselves.
German Fischer and his son believe that the aesthetic process is a process of empathy, which is divided into three levels: forward emotion, backward emotion and moving emotion.
According to Fei and his son's point of view, the Metamorphosis is analyzed.
In fact, people become bugs, which violates people's common sense of life, thus causing difficulties in acceptance. If this difficulty is not overcome, readers will eventually think that the story is false, and the aesthetic process of "empathy" will not happen.
If a mediocre writer wants to write in his own works that his hero has become an "ant", he must first spend a lot of pen and ink to render the strange and mysterious environment (thunder, fog, clouds, sparkling fire ...), and then write about his strange feelings in the process of becoming a bug and his panic after becoming a bug, so that he fainted ... In short, writing an amazing fact requires all kinds of amazing factors and consequences. Kafka's metamorphosis began so insipid:
One morning, Grigol Samsha woke up from an uneasy sleep and found himself lying in bed, turned into a huge beetle. "
The beginning is as simple as talking about something people are used to. The author's insipid tone is far from people's habitual psychological reaction. Readers are puzzled by the writer's calm attitude. This kind of doubt constitutes a "progressive emotion", which guides readers to follow the author's progress. On the other hand, according to the writing style of mediocre writers, there is a distance between the works and the habitual psychology of readers (perhaps from many such works), and there is no "strangeness". Although you are smoking, readers will only be dull and even unable to read.
According to customary logic, how scared should a person be when he finds himself a big beetle? He may shout, struggle and faint. If you keep writing like this, readers will still stand aside and look on coldly. None of this happened in Kafka's works. When Gregor found out that he was a tapeworm, he didn't panic because he suspected it was a dream. As a small clerk who works hard all day, how much he needs sleep. In this way, it is easy for ordinary readers to suspect accidents and sudden events as dreams. At this point, the reader's mentality has changed from suspicion to being close to the people, which coincides with Gregor's mentality. This coincidence is the forerunner of emotional transfer. I want to get up, but I can't, thinking I'm just too tired ... After reading this, the reader's mood begins to change from doubt to pity and sympathy for the shop assistant ... An unfortunate person who doesn't realize his misfortune often wins more sympathy. At this time, although Gregory in the book has not realized that he has really become an ant, the reader's mood has already appreciated this emotion in front of him. At this time, "forward emotion" has turned to "follow emotion".
It's almost 7 o'clock. His mother urged him to get up and go to work. He tried to answer his mother's cry, but he couldn't make a sound. He could only make a squeak. This phenomenon has not attracted Gregor's attention. He has become an ant, because he is overwhelmed by a terrible anxiety: what if he misses the train and delays his boss's business, and he is fired? How do elderly parents and young sisters make a living? This mentality is very real for a small clerk. At this point, readers are shocked: after becoming inhuman, people are not suffering from their own misfortune, but are worried about the consequences that he will bring to other relatives after becoming an ant. The manager sent a secretary to rush him to the railway station, and found that he had turned into a bug, so he rolled down the stairs in fear. This incident deepened Gregor's anxiety: losing his job seemed inevitable. And the reader's mood began to produce a kind of "alienation" with him: the hero's mood is anxiety and the reader's mood is sadness. When readers feel this way, it shows that readers have unconsciously accepted the absurd framework of "man has become a worm" and have begun to mourn for gregor who has become a worm.