Melodies of the Dust Land Chapter 6

Let’s still take the songs listed above as examples: It is indeed a special and accidental phenomenon for a grown-up woman to raise a baby before she is married, but this song uses this as the description object and writes about the girl’s love for the baby. He also said that "baby born from a bamboo shoot is good" and "born from birth". This is a powerful challenge and mockery of the heavily guarded feudal ethics and traditional concepts! Isn't it a concrete demonstration of the desire of the majority of working women to break free from the shackles of feudal ethics and pursue freedom in marriage and love? The poem "Wear blue, all in blue" embodies the simplicity of the working people's thoughts and feelings and their pursuit of beauty from the perspective of clothing. Isn't it also very valuable? As for the song "Ten Insufficiencies", the content of the work itself vividly reveals the insatiable greed of the feudal ruling class, thus showing a concept of the world of the entire feudal society, and mocking and denying it (of course, this This kind of negation is not thorough and profound due to historical limitations) Its spearhead directly attacks the ugly consciousness of the feudal class.

I think the description of real life in northern Shaanxi folk songs, whether it is its choice of subject matter, angle, or arrangement of events and plots, is extremely strange, wonderful, and wonderful. The strange thing is that it is different, the wonderful thing is that it is both ordinary and strange, and the good thing is that these strange things always contain the connotation of social life. Starting from ordinary real life and focusing on "everyday life within the eyes and ears" is the embodiment of materialist reflection theory in literary and artistic creation, and is also the essence and characteristic of realist literature and art. But natural beauty is not equal to artistic beauty. Art has its own special way of reflecting real life, which is to use the special to see the general, and to use the accidental to see the inevitable. Real life contains a wealth of peculiarities, and such peculiarities all reveal the general nature of life. Therefore, the more real it is, the more strange it is, and the more strange it is, the more real it is. This is the dialectical unity of life and art. The process of literary and artistic creation, to be honest, is nothing more than discovering the extraordinary in ordinary life, and then revealing the rich connotation of life through the extraordinary. This is called "seeking wonder from truth, revealing truth from wonder".

Goethe has a famous saying: "The skill of a poet lies in his intelligence enough to see a fascinating aspect in commonplace things."

Seeking wonder from truth, revealing truth from wonder, is a special way of typifying literature and art, and it is also the only way. It is a test of the author's talent. Those who know the truth but don't know how to seek out its wonders don't know the art of literature and art; those who know the wonders but don't know how to reveal the truth don't know the art of literature and art.

Of course, in this process, the author's subjective factors play a large role, but one thing must be corrected: as a realist literature and art, the author's subjectivity must be subordinated to the objective reality of social life. The authors of northern Shaanxi folk songs must have many unhealthy things in their minds due to the limitations of the times and society, but what is valuable is that they respect the objective reality of life, obey the objective reality, and reflect the objective reality. Therefore, northern Shaanxi folk songs are also It has extremely high value in understanding social life.

Although Northern Shaanxi folk songs and Northern Shaanxi folk tales and legends are both oral creations of the working people, they take different paths in terms of creation methods: Northern Shaanxi folk tales and legends more concentratedly reflect the working people of Northern Shaanxi. The pursuit of life, ideals and different "understandings" of natural phenomena are a wonderful world created by the rich imagination of the working people in northern Shaanxi. Therefore, its romanticism is extremely strong. Northern Shaanxi folk songs are different. They are basically improvisations of working people facing real life. They are a true and concrete understanding and feeling of real life. They are the most direct reflection of real life. Therefore, they have the distinctive characteristics of realism.

Realism must strictly face real life and be a true and concrete summary and reflection of real life. However, because social life is very broad and complex, including many aspects of content, any huge literary and artistic work will appear small and simple in front of this huge and profound social life. Its breadth is only an extension of life. To a certain extent; its depth is only to a certain aspect of certain essences of life. Literature and art should of course provide a concentrated summary of life and should have the capacity to transcend the scope of subject matter. This is also the significance of artistic typicality. But this generalization and transcendence are by no means endless. It is restricted by literary and artistic forms. "A Dream of Red Mansions" has more than a million words and can be called a highly typical masterpiece, but it only summarizes the internal life of the declining feudal aristocratic class. In the face of the social trend in which peasant resistance movements were emerging one after another and democratic ideas were rapidly sprouting at that time, it was still just an aspect, a side, or, in other words, a tributary that merged into the mainstream.

Here, the issue of understanding typification is involved. Society as a whole is composed of several individuals; the mainstream of social life is also composed of countless tributaries. As literature and art, it reflects a certain aspect of social life and reveals the social connotation of certain things and phenomena. It is typical.

Based on the above understanding of typification, we have an objective analysis and understanding of the ordinary, small but peculiar life reflected in folk songs of northern Shaanxi. Folk songs are improvisations of working people. A small link in their daily life may trigger their emotions, arouse their associations, and form a song. When I see a piece of white snow, I come up with a verse, "It's snowing in the sky and it's white on the ground. Brother, how long have you been gone?"; when I see the spring swallows in pairs, I think of myself and sing "A pair of Hu Yans hold their mouths in their mouths." Mud, it's hard to leave you behind if you leave the next village." Hearing something new and discovering a "weirdo" who was different in some aspects aroused my thoughts and emotions, so I made up songs to sing, such as "The Wind Blows", "Welcome to the Spring Festival", This is how songs such as "Brother-in-law Zhang's New Year's greetings" and "Meeting My Aunt" came into being. This is the formation of the original embryo of folk songs. When the song was sung, it sounded good to everyone, and it also touched their own emotions and associations, so they passed it on to me and to others. This process of dissemination is a process of social inspection of works, and it is also a process of typification of folk songs. People often add two lines to this and subtract two lines to that based on their own understanding and feelings of life. Over time, a song matures from an embryo. It often summarizes people's general understanding and feelings about life, and is therefore extremely typical.