Understanding of "appreciating ugliness" in contemporary literature

Beauty is a perceptual form containing rationality, which is extremely rich, and beauty is the unspeakable beauty of human beings. Since ancient times, countless aestheticians have defined beauty: either beauty is the harmony of form (classicism), or beauty is perfection (rationalism), or beauty is the attribute of God (neo-Platonism), or beauty is pleasure (empiricism), or beauty is relationship (enlightenment), or beauty is the perceptual presentation of ideas (German classical aesthetics), and so on. Generally speaking, we can use philosophical words: beauty is the objectification of human nature, the humanization of nature, the unity of purpose and regularity, the unity of truth, goodness and beauty, and the form of freedom. The expression of beauty must be a perceptual image, and the object of beauty has a harmonious aesthetic feeling in form. Beauty is a positive value attribute beneficial to human beings and the highest goodness, which can satisfy the active pursuit of our human spirit. This is the objectification of the beautiful essence of human beings. Because beauty is a perceptual existence, it is endless, and beauty is infinitely rich.

From the perspective of research and learning methods, in order to understand the aesthetics of literary images, we must first understand what is beauty, and then aesthetics, so as to grasp the significance of aesthetics.

Aesthetic "trial" means observation → feeling → judgment, which is an active, free and positive psychological and cultural activity carried out by aesthetic subjects by using aesthetic attention, aesthetic perception, aesthetic experience, aesthetic imagination, aesthetic emotion and aesthetic sentiment. Literature is an aesthetic activity of human beings, and the creation of writers and the appreciation of works by readers are both aesthetic activities.

Aesthetics is the essence of aesthetics. The ancient writers in China said that poetry is based on emotion, and literature has flavor, rhyme, ethereal spirit, artistic conception and interest, which are the same as Mikel Dufrenne's aesthetic elements and Plato's poem's ecstasy, and all mean that literature has aesthetic nature. (2) Literary aesthetics and appreciation of ugliness.

Generally speaking, fairy tales are beautiful and fables are ugly. Comparing the two can help us understand the aesthetic essence of literature from different angles. Aesthetic "beauty" refers to the object of beauty presented in real life, nature, literature and art, which needs careful analysis here. Traditional aesthetics only recognizes the beauty of aesthetics as the object of beauty. When the study of aesthetics and art is extended to face a large number of ugly objects, one school thinks that the beauty of aesthetics is not only beauty, but also ugliness, as well as sublimity, humbleness, sadness and joy, so aesthetics includes both aesthetics (beauty of beauty and beauty) and ugliness and sublimity. . Another school thinks that modern art has put ugliness in a dominant position, and aesthetics can no longer cover the perceptual field alone. The field of sensibility includes both beauty and ugliness, and the combination of aesthetics and ugliness forms a complete sensibility. The general view in the history of traditional western philosophy is that appreciating ugliness is only an ornament of aesthetics, and it is biased to think that appreciating ugliness has been included in aesthetic activities. Aesthetics is "aesthetics", and appreciating ugliness should be another item. Luan Dong: The Development of Perception-the Combination of Aesthetics and Ugliness Appreciation, Beijing, Commercial Press, 1999. What is judging ugliness? Luan Dong believes that ugliness appreciation refers to viewing human ugliness appreciation activities from the perspective of the unity of subject and object. As far as the subject is concerned, the so-called appreciation of ugliness refers to the sum of the individual's ability to judge, judge, appreciate, criticize, tolerate and reform ugliness. From the object, appreciating ugliness refers to grasping the essence of ugliness and its morphological evolution in social history, including appreciating ugliness itself as an objective object.

When expounding the two topics of aesthetics and ugliness appreciation, we must introduce an important concept: aesthetic ideal. Traditional aesthetics regards aesthetic ideal as the purpose and norm of creating artistic image, which includes two aspects: one is about aesthetic concept; The first is the aesthetic paradigm. The so-called aesthetic ideal refers to the concept scale and paradigm of beauty formed by people in their own national aesthetic culture atmosphere and affirmed by personal aesthetic experience and personality realm. On the one hand, it has the characteristics of individuals and nations, and at the same time it has the nature of all mankind. "Conceptual scale" is a variety of standards about beauty set by people subconsciously; "Model mode" is a form of perception that meets the above criteria. The artistic forms of literary images, such as typicality, artistic conception and symbolic image, are the concrete embodiment of the "model mode" of this aesthetic ideal, such as bold, diluted, elegant, elegant and implicit literary styles, such as the poems of Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei and Li Shangyin, the poems of Su Shi and Xin Qiji, and the literary models of Zhuge Liang and Cao Cao. Aesthetic ideal affects and restricts the aesthetic practice and artistic creation of the whole nation and even mankind, and becomes the purpose and norm of literary image.

When dealing with the complex relationship between aesthetics and ugliness appreciation, the popular view is to balance the conflict between them with aesthetic ideals. It is believed that aesthetics leads to aesthetic feeling, ugliness leads to disgust, loftiness leads to admiration, inferiority leads to contempt, sadness leads to pity, and joy leads to silence. All these different feelings are based on emotion, understanding, imagination and perception to evaluate aesthetic objects. There are various forms of aesthetic feeling, but they are all unified under the purpose of aesthetic ideal. It is roughly discussed like this:

(1) When appreciating beauty, the beauty in life is condensed, exaggerated and sublimated into ideal beauty and processed into a literary image that embodies aesthetic ideals. For example, Xiaoying and Minghai in Wang Zengqi's Empress Dowager Cixi and the girl image in A Dream of Red Mansions mentioned earlier.

(2) When judging ugliness, it is to transform ugliness in life into artistic beauty and literary image that can bring aesthetic enjoyment from the perspective of aesthetic ideal. This kind of aesthetic enjoyment is called "the pleasure of appreciating ugliness", which is a reflection of negative things in life in content and a beautiful structural arrangement of color, line, rhythm and language in form. Ugliness causes aesthetic pleasure because the judgment of ugliness is presided over by the ideal of beauty. The Soviet aesthetician Stonovich pointed out: "The ugly phenomenon itself does not make people happy. There is no pleasure in associating with despicable guys. But condemning him is a pleasure! ..... This is a condemnation of ugliness, dazzling it in the ideal light of beauty and exposing ugly misdeeds to beauty. The judgment of ugliness is presided over by the ideal of beauty Won't all this produce special pleasure and enjoyment? " [Su] Stonovich: The Essence of Aesthetic Value, 23 1 page, Beijing, China Social Sciences Press.

Some people may ask, does the absurd and ugly artistic image of modernism also reflect the aesthetic ideal? The answer is yes, but this is not a positive reflection, but a reflection for readers, which resonates and finds the loss of beauty. They expressed the pain and anxiety of losing their beauty. These feelings are the result of the writer's examination of life from the height of aesthetic ideal. The image of the big beetle in Kafka's Metamorphosis expresses the writer's protest against the alienation of human nature. Beckett's Waiting for Godot reveals the hopeless living environment of human beings. Yunescu's Bald Singer laments the gap in modern interpersonal relationships. These ugly images reflect the writer's aesthetic ideal.

(3) There are often images of the insulted and the injured in literary works. Their ugliness is the crime of the strong and the crime of society. The writer calls for human sympathy and the pursuit of goodness and beauty with a shocking image. These images indirectly criticize the ugliness of society, and so do their aesthetics.

(4) Modern art is the art of appreciating ugliness, but it does not show ugliness naked, but reveals the ugly and absurd nature of social life through exaggeration, deformation and symbol, which is the "depth mode" behind the phenomenon of concern and the interpretation of metaphysical philosophy. This is actually an "aesthetic sublimation". Generally speaking, this question is rather vague. A better explanation is that ugliness can reveal the inner truth better than beauty, and can stimulate profound aesthetic feeling. Because beauty is too moving, too bright, too harmonious, too ostentatious of its external part, and does not show its inner profound essence. When readers see the image of beauty, they are too intoxicated and enjoy the superficial pleasure too smoothly, while ignoring the investigation of the deep inner meaning. The external form of ugly things is resistant to aesthetic senses, but it leads people to pursue the deepest essence of the world, so we can gain profound aesthetic feeling by appreciating ugliness. Rodin also believes that ugly objects can reveal their "character" better than beautiful objects, and this "character" has inherent real strength beauty.

(5) when judging ugliness, it is vivid, realistic and beautiful in the form of beautiful art, which is a kind of "description of beauty" and different from "description of beauty". This will give readers a mixed feeling of disgust and pleasure, that is, there is joy in disgust and disgust in pleasure. Because form has conquered content, ugliness has become beauty and real aesthetic feeling.

(6) Set off the beauty of beauty with ugliness as the background. Life is characterized by beauty and ugliness, which always develop through comparison and struggle. Hugo put forward the famous poetic principle of the contrast between beauty and ugliness in art in the preface to Cromwell: "Ugliness is close to beauty, deformity is close to beauty, ugliness is hidden behind sublimity, beauty and ugliness coexist, and light and darkness * * *." The deeper point of view is that no matter in comedy or tragedy, we always experience the mixture of pain and happiness, and all the diametrically opposed things such as beauty and ugliness coexist and combine into a most real whole, which is accepted by readers as a complete experience of judging beauty. In all the greatest works such as Shakespeare's plays, Dante's Divine Comedy and Goethe's Faust, we have experienced the whole world of human life and emotion. In the great comedy, we not only experienced a bitter satire on human beings, but also experienced an empathy: accepting all the defects and weaknesses, stupidity and bad habits of human life, so the great comedy is also a tragedy. Thus, we are closer to life, and we become more realistic and keen observers. Aesthetic feeling is sensitive to various forms of dynamic vitality. Ernst Cassirer: On Man, 190 ~ 192, Shanghai, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1985.

The above is a popular view about how ugliness expresses aesthetic feeling, which we can accept as the mainstream theory. But this explanation is not completely convincing, especially in the literature and art of the 20th century. Recently, there is a new view on the study of ugliness. Here is a general introduction, and you can discuss and study it.

Modernist art is a wonderful art that is good at expressing ugliness. There are fewer and fewer artists expressing beauty, and ugliness is independent from aesthetics. One of the secrets of an artist's success is to express ugliness to the extreme. Life is full of bondage, oppression and intrigue. "God is dead" is absurd, human nature is distorted, the soul is out of body experience, the ideal is trampled to pieces, the skeptical world outlook prevails, beauty becomes the embodiment of hypocrisy, beauty is degenerating and beauty is popular. Therefore, artists are experiencing ugliness and deliberately digging ugliness. An alienated world is full of absurdity, depression, madness, despair, lust, murder and nightmare in literature and art; Rotting corpses, sludge, hair, snot, feces, caterpillars, industrial waste and cultural waste all entered the aesthetic hall in the past. So the culture of appreciating ugliness is in the ascendant, from appreciating ugliness to praising ugliness and loving ugliness. Many aestheticians believe that taking ugliness as the aesthetic object is one of the reasons for the confusion between art philosophy, aesthetics and art, which is a theoretical error. Hegel said: "Aesthetics has the nature of liberation. It allows the object to maintain its freedom and infinity, and does not regard it as a tool to benefit limited needs and intentions. Therefore, the object of beauty does not appear to be oppressed and persecuted by us, nor does it appear to be invaded and conquered by other foreign objects. " Aesthetic subject and object are equal, and spiritually they are deeply attached, comforted, enriched and expanded. But the object of appreciating ugliness is only the object of entertainment, the object of satisfying curiosity and animal sexual desire, the object of denunciation, condemnation, fun, understanding and appreciation, not the aesthetic relationship. So ugliness is not an aesthetic object, but an object of understanding and entertainment. Therefore, it is proposed to experience the sense of appreciating ugliness, explore the irrationality of appreciating ugliness and see through the negative aspects of civilization. It is argued that aesthetics and appreciation of ugliness constitute dual thinking, and aesthetics and appreciation of ugliness are two independent epistemology, so there is no need to explain "turning ugliness into beauty" far-fetched. Reference: Ye Zhiqiu: Aesthetics and Appreciation of Ugliness, Literature Review1993 (2); Luan Dong: The Development of Perception-the Combination of Aesthetics and Ugliness Appreciation, Beijing, Commercial Press, 1999.

Throughout the ages, there are many literary masters who write ugliness. In ancient China, Han Yu was the best at writing ugliness, writing ugly things, ugly things and ugly words. Later poets described his poetic style with strange, dangerous, cruel, heavy, hard, rising, crazy and strange words. Some people say that he turned ugliness into beauty, some people say that he overcame ugliness in the form of beauty, and some people say that his ugliness is a failed poem. There are many literary masters who write ugliness in western literature. Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Dostoevsky's novels are all ugly worlds. Modernism is almost an ugly artistic world, and China's contemporary novelists Can Xue and Mo Yan are also ugly writers. In a word, ugliness, a new discipline besides aesthetics, is put forward, which requires people to rethink a theoretical problem: how to judge ugliness?