attitude of life that is not acceptable to the secular world. You don't swim for the sake of swimming, but you experience freedom in swimming. Hu Shi said that Wu's family property was lost in Qinhuai, but I think that "the sediment throws a gold and bears a burden" on purpose. Only after losing his property and breaking free from the constraints of the clan can he enter literary creation with a pure state of mind.
"The owl is a disciple of the East, but it's hard to solve the problem of singing"! When Wu Jingbang, a 33-year-old penniless man, moved to Nanjing, he was already a "black sheep" in the eyes of his people. To the point where it rained for three days, the stove was cold and there was no money, he still refused to take Fu Xuehong's Ci exam. When the "elder's bitter words and mumbling" interfered with his freedom, he "crossed his hands and thanked the elder, and his eyebrows were like halberds and tigers". [45] His "stupidity", "stupidity" and "concealment" remain unchanged throughout his life, how similar he is to Xiao Yan!
Wang Mian is regarded as a "celebrity" in The Scholars. The reason why he has such great ability is because he is an "open and aboveboard" person and an "interesting" person. Wang Mian is both a childlike cowherd and a talented freak. He painted lotus flowers, "the spirit and color of the lotus flowers are alike", because he himself is a lotus flower that grows out of mud and is not stained. "When the flowers are bright and beautiful, I took a ride of cattle to my mother's car. He wore a high hat, a wide coat, a persistent whip, and sang songs in his mouth. He played around in rural towns and lakes, causing the rural people to laugh with him in groups, and he didn't pay attention." How spontaneous and naive it is! Faced with the threat of "killing a magistrate of a county", Wang Mian would rather live on the street than bow his head. He is far away from the hut and is pregnant with the whole world. He tells the essence of taking a stake in an official position: "This method is not good! In the future, scholars will have a way to be honored, and they will despise the source of that article. "
In the novel, Father Feng Si seems to have calcium dobesilate capsules, but it is actually a key. According to textual research, the prototype of Feng Si's father is chivalrous Gan Fengchi. [46] At that time, Li Wei, the governor of Zhejiang Province, described Gan Fengchi in his memorial: "Check this generation of gangsters, make a false letter, stir up feelings, really hate them, and it is difficult to let them slip through the net." There are no more people who think carefully about the good things in Jiangsu and Zhejiang than Gan Fengchi and other criminals who have been captured now. " For such a rebel, Wu Jingbang sincerely praised: "The government severely punishes the secret network, and how many scholars bend their knees when they see it. You, a small people, regard it as dirt, which is respectable!"
The Scholars ends with the stories of four extraordinary men. When "the celebrities in Nanjing have been gradually sold out", the strange man appeared in the middle of the street. The season when you can write meets the year, "but you refuse to learn the ancient calligraphy, but you just create your own style and write by pen." "If he doesn't want to, let your princes send him a lot of money, and he won't even look at it." He greeted Shi Yushi's face and scolded him: "What kind of person are you? Dare to ask me to write! I'm not greedy for your money, I don't admire your power, and I don't borrow your light. Don't you dare ask me to write words to express my independent personality and high spirits. Wu Jingzi regards the "Four Wonders" as the first-class figures who "narrate the past and think the future". The Confucian forest is a mess, while the well city has a shining personality. Wu Jingzi has quietly changed a brand-new value standard. Why can we maintain the independence of personality and the freedom of mind in the street?
Jing Yuan, a tailor, can play the piano, write and like to write poems. A friend asked him, "if you want to be an elegant person, why do you want to be in your expensive business?" Why is it different from the people in some schools? " He said, "I don't want to be an elegant person either, and I just want to be similar in temperament, so I often learn." As for our cheap business, it was left over by my grandfather. Don't you defile yourself by reading and writing and becoming a tailor? Besides, those friends at school, who have other insights, are not willing to get along with us! Now I find six or seven cents of silver every day. I have to play the piano and write when I am full, and everything is up to me. Do not covet people's wealth, and do not serve people's faces; If the sky doesn't accept it, it will be happy if the ground doesn't care. This remark is really groundbreaking. Wu Jingzi realized that behind personality independence is economic independence. In the Confucian forest covered by the power network, there are only vassals like climbing vines and independents like pine on Yuanyan. Street people run a profession despised by the literati, but they have gained real economic independence in this profession. What a "everything is up to me"! Even if scholars climb to the highest position like Zaifu, they are afraid to say such big words. Wu Jingzi broke through the traditional moral judgment and revealed the economic basis of "strange man". No one realized this before.
Wang Mian appeared at the beginning, four grandfathers in the middle and four strange men at the end, which was carefully arranged by the author. They are all ordinary people who have no social status and are outside the ruling order. Their simplicity, enthusiasm, and indifference are in sharp contrast with the ugly Confucian scholars and officialdom. As Hu Shi said in "A Review of Wu Jingzi", "If you don't do it for your official, it is the only way for an autocratic monarch to trap talents. There is only one way to resist this vicious cage: to advocate a new social psychology, so that people can know the ugliness of the industry and the ugliness of the officials; People feel that' people' are more valuable than' officials', and personality is more valuable than wealth. If you develop this kind of psychology in society, you will not be afraid of the emperor's poisonous means of "not doing it for your official." The intention of a "Scholars" is only to develop this social psychology. "
however, this kind of social psychology is hard to cultivate after all. Wu Jingzi, the upright black sheep of embedded battery, is lonely, and so are the strange people in his works. Jing Yuan played the piano for his bosom friend. "After playing for a while, he suddenly made a change of emblem, and it was so sad that the old man couldn't help crying when he heard the deep place." When readers read this, they hide their thoughts and fear that they will "shed tears"!
Yu Qiuyu!
There is nothing to hide, and there is something to praise or criticize in the heart —— The Scholars
advocates a new social psychology, so that people can know the ugliness of the career and the ugliness of the officials; People feel that "people" are more valuable than "officials", and personality is more valuable than wealth. If you develop this kind of psychology in society, you will not be afraid of the emperor's poisonous means of "not giving you an official job."
-Hu Shi's A Review of Wu Jingzi
Among China's classical novels, there are only two books promised by Lu Xun with the word "great", one of which is Wu Jingzi's The Scholars. The Scholars is about the literati class. In ancient China, the so-called scholar-bureaucrat was not only the world of intellectuals, but also the officialdom. This is a book that criticizes intellectuals, and it can also be said that it is a book that exposes the dullness of officialdom. In this way, in contemporary China, it is really necessary to reread The Scholars.
the author Wu Jingzi (171-1754) grew up in a big family of "famous families" in Quanjiao County, Anhui Province on the north bank of the Yangtze River. Great-grandfather and grandfather were prosperous in their official career. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there was a period of 5 years of "family prosperity". But his own grandfather had little fame among his peers and died young; Since he was a child, he was given an heir to the eldest room, Wu Linqi, who was his adoptive father. Wu Linqi only served as a county magistrate for a few years, and later lost his official position because of offending his boss, and died of depression. Wu Jingzi lost his mother at the age of 13 and his father at the age of 23. He was not enthusiastic about fame and wealth, but also despised money. He squandered freely and generously. In a few years, he squandered very little of the property left by the previous generation, resulting in "selling all the land" and "the slaves fled and scattered", and at one time "the village was handed down as a warning to the children" ("Reduced word Magnolia Geng Xu's New Year's Eve guests"). Coupled with the failure of the examination room, the stimulation is very heavy. "Do you have to temporarily open your eyebrows?" After returning to his hometown, he moved to Nanjing in the eleventh year of Yongzheng because of the unbearable cold reception. From this time until he died in Yangzhou at the age of 54, he mainly lived by selling articles and giving alms to his friends. It was also during this period that he completed the masterpiece The Scholars.
Wu Jingzi has been living in a noble social environment since childhood, but the family he grew up in has been declining, and then suddenly fell into poverty after middle age. In the process of his family's decline from "gradual" to "sudden" in his life, he lived in Quanjiao County, his hometown, Ganyu County, northern Jiangsu Province (where his father worked), Nanjing, and visited Yangzhou, Anqing, Wuhu and other cities. Judging from several generations of clan relations and his own interpersonal relationship, he contacted a wide range of literati classes and knew and knew a lot of people. The face he saw, the warmth and coldness he received, the personnel he experienced and the world he experienced were all extremely rich and profound. This cultivated his keen sense of justice and sober mind of observing reality, enabling him to see through the depravity and shamelessness of the literati class under the dark rule of the Qing Dynasty, and to see through the political evils and social corruption. It is this life experience that has become the direct source of Wu Jingzi's serious realistic spirit.
The Scholars mercilessly lashed and tearfully criticized the literati class. Mr. Lu Xun once said that "The Scholars" "uphold public interests above all else and criticize the current disadvantages. The direction of the aircraft front, especially in Shilin; His writing is both harmonious and harmonious, and it is more ironic. " By exposing all kinds of absurd phenomena that are inharmonious, contrary to human feelings and common sense, we can inject the description characters with boasting, boasting, being smart, self-defeating, deceiving the world, pretending to be lofty, self-contradictory and so on. As Gogol said, "Our liars, our monsters! ..... Let everyone have a good laugh! Laughter is really great, it doesn't take away life or land, but in front of it, you will bow your head and plead guilty, like a tied rabbit. "
The satirical art of The Scholars has a distinct purpose, that is, "the author's intention is to wake up the world, not to scold it". Although the author tries his best to be sarcastic, he wants to save the satirized group. As the saying goes, "A good person feels the kindness of others; Evil, punish and create people's ambition. " The author described the tragic fate of many scholars under stereotyped writing system with compassion, and then launched a painting of social customs in the feudal imperial examination era, attacking the decay of the system and the darkness of society, making The Scholars a sacred work in China's classical satirical novels.
The Scholars has always been rated as a masterpiece of classical realism, that is, a realistic work, in which many stories and characters come directly from life. Mr. Lu Xun once said in A Brief History of Chinese Novels: "Most of the characters in The Scholars are real people, and their names are implied by pictographic harmony and Yu's argot." "The Scholars" is good at using the brushwork of "Piliyangqiu", that is, "the mouth has nothing to hide, but the heart has something to praise or criticize". The author's views are not directly taken out and forced on readers, but in the shaping of specific images. Zhou Jin and Fan Jin's winning bid, the transformation of Kuang Superman, Du Shaoqing's heroic act and Mr. Ma Er's pedantry all show profound and rich thoughts through specific plots. The author didn't praise or criticize us directly, but each image is full of great power and conveys the author's clear view of justice. We must understand and understand it from the correlation and development of various images in different periods and occasions. This is a realistic narrative style.
Another artistic feature of this book is the sketch and silhouette characters. The Scholars is a novel with a constantly changing protagonist, or a novel made up of countless short stories. It is basically impossible to express the character characteristics and spiritual world of the characters by describing their life experiences in detail and in the tortuous storyline. Therefore, Wu Jingzi focused on the most glaring characteristics of human personality, thus showing a relatively static life in depth and detail. This is like intercepting a fragment from the long history of character development, then turning it around in front of people and magnifying the "this one" here and now. This is an excellent way to sketch satirical characters, which makes the characters' colors bright and clear, and the plots flow quickly, as if the characters' faces were sketched 1%, and this story will come to an end, and it is these exquisite plots that leave a deep impression on readers.
Hu Shi said in "A Review of Wu Jingzi": "If you don't do it for an official, it is the only wonderful way for an autocratic monarch to trap talents. There is only one way to resist this vicious cage: to advocate a new social psychology, so that people can know the ugliness of the industry and the ugliness of the officials; People feel that' people' are more valuable than' officials', and personality is more valuable than wealth. If you develop this kind of psychology in society, you will not be afraid of the emperor's poisonous means of "not doing it for your official." The intention of a "Scholars" is only to develop this social psychology. "
The Scholars was originally only 55 times. According to Cheng Jinfang's Poems of Feeling for People, it can be proved that Wu Jingzi had written the manuscript at the age of 49, but it was not until more than ten years after the author's death that Jin Zhaoyan carved it for him. This engraving has been lost today. At present, there are 56 engravings, the last of which is a forgery by later generations.
The Scholars is an outstanding realistic satire novel in the history of Chinese literature. Mr. Lu Xun rated it as "a collection of broken brocade, which is combined into a post. Although it is not huge, it is different from time to time." Feng Yuanjun and Lu Kanru's "A Brief Compilation of the History of China Literature" hold that "there are big alcohol flaws". Although there is no backbone in the story of the book, there is a center running through it, that is, opposing the poison of the imperial examination system and feudal ethics and satirizing the extremely hypocritical and bad social habits caused by the passion for fame and wealth. Such ideological content undoubtedly had great practical and educational significance at that time. Coupled with its accurate, vivid and refined vernacular language, vivid characterization, beautiful and delicate scenery description and excellent irony, it has also achieved great success in art. At that time, due to the limitations of the times, although the author criticized the dark reality in his book, he pinned his ideals on the scholar-officials who were "excellent in character and learning" and preached ancient rituals and music, but he could not see the real way to change the Confucian scholars and society, which should be criticized.