The Narrative Technique of Lefu

The Lefu poems of the two Han dynasties contain both narrative and lyrical poems, and the achievements of narrative poems are more prominent. The Book of Songs and the Chu Rhetoric are basically lyrical poems, with narrative interspersed in the lyrical process from time to time, but the narrative is subordinate to the lyric. The emergence of narrative poetry in the two Han dynasties marked the maturity of narrative poetry in ancient China. The two Han Lefu poems are all about feelings and sorrows, and the creative subject is good at finding poetic shots and taking them into the picture in a timely manner when choosing a narrative object.

The hotel is a lively place where people come and go, and food service has been the window industry of the society since ancient times, especially the hostesses of the hotel are more eye-catching objects, and many stories have happened to them. There are two pieces of poems in the two Han dynasties that feature hotel women as protagonists, one of them is "Longxi Xing", which is included in the Xianghe Song Dictionary, and the other one is Xin Yannian's "Yu Lin Lang". The Longxi Xing recreates the scene of a healthy woman holding a gateway, while the Hulin Lang recounts the story of a beautiful woman in a shop who resists rape. By depicting their interactions with customers and the behavior of various characters, they artfully display the cityscape of the Han Dynasty. Kyoto was the most prosperous place, and Chang'an and Luoyang in the two Han dynasties were full of dignitaries whose houses were often built in deep alleys. Deep alleys and narrow roads, high vehicles and horses, often the phenomenon of road congestion, traffic jams. Because of the refusal to give way to the road to grab the road in the Han Dynasty happened from time to time, and some eventually led to cases of human life. In order to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings and conflicts, it is necessary to clarify each other's identity when meeting on narrow roads. In "Running into Each Other" and "Chang'an with Narrowly Sloping Row", the close-up shots of "asking for your family's home" are chosen to reveal the wealth and luxury of the owner of the car through the other party's bragging. In addition, "Stranger's Mulberry" uses the spring mulberry picking as the background, and "Yan Ge Xing" chooses the plot of the hostess mending the clothes for the son who travels to another country, which arouses the husband's suspicion, all of which are common and interesting images into the poem, and the poet has found the best point of view.

The authors of the two Han dynasty poems had a good eye for choosing common episodes of life, and they were also very creative in capturing accidental and sudden events. In real life, the chance for an abandoned woman to meet her late husband is usually rare and often intentionally avoided. The poem "Picking Gracilaria on the Mountain" (上山采蘼芜), which is included in the category of ancient poems, is actually a poem of Lefu, which is written about the encounter between a deserted woman and her late husband. Through the man's narration, the conclusion is drawn that "the new man is not as good as the old one". Whether their separation was due to the man's heartlessness or external pressure, the story is thought-provoking. The Song of Xianghe (相和歌) uses a swan as a metaphor for a man, writing about a sudden event. Husband and wife were traveling together, the wife suddenly fell ill, and the two had to part in the middle of the journey, miserable and tearful. The strong artistic impact of these two poems owes much to chance and the nature of the unexpected event itself.

The authors of the two Han dynasty poems showed a clear tendency to be strange in their choice of narrative subjects. The poets always searched with astonishment for those fresh things from foreign lands, discovered them, and wrote about them with great interest. Li Guangli, the general of the two divisions, was awarded the sweat-blooded horse from Dawan, so there was a poem "Heavenly Horse" in the Song of the Suburbs and Temples to recount the incident, and Zhang Qian introduced alfalfa after he passed through the Western Regions, and the Song of the Songs and Songs "Butterfly Row" specially mentioned this plant. Longxi Xing" has the words "sitting guests felt rug", the guests sit on the woolen rug, the hotel interior decoration with the products of the West. Miscellaneous Songs and Rhymes "Lefu" directly stated that the Hu merchants and the goods they carried: "Where did the traveling Hu come from? What are the countries holding? Rug? The five wood incense, rosemary Aina and Du Liang." These exotic items from the western regions were an eye-opener for the people of China and brought exotic colors to the poems. In addition, those poems of welcoming the gods and seeking immortality are the embodiment of reverence for the exotic.

Most of the poems of the two Han dynasties have a complete plot, not limited to one or two slices of life, and those representative works tell a story with a beginning, an end, and a continuous plot. The Row of the Sick Woman" has scenes such as entrusting an orphan to a dying man, begging along the street, and the orphan crying for help, with many details interspersed in the middle. The "Row of the Orphan" highlights the orphans' plight through the many labors such as walking in a jar, drawing water, collecting melons, and transporting melons. The poem "Fifteen Years' Journey from the Army," also a musical poem, narrates the return of an 80-year-old retired veteran to his deserted homeland. There are three scenes, namely, the conversation with the villagers in the middle of the journey, the cooking of food after returning home, and the difficulty of eating alone after the food is cooked, which are coherent and connected, with twists and turns in the middle of the poem. The storyline of the full-length narrative poem "Southeast Peacock Flight" is even more dramatic and heart-wrenching. The conflict in the poem is not a single thread, but two threads that unfold simultaneously and intertwine with each other. One thread is the conflict between Lanzhi and her mother-in-law and elder brother. First, Lanzhi is sent back to her mother-in-law, then her elder brother forces her to agree to the marriage proposal of the governor's residence, and finally Lanzhi and Zhongqing commit suicide, resulting in a tragedy. One thread is the growing sympathy and understanding between Lanzhi and Zhongqing. It begins with a conversation in the bedroom, indicating that they will not forget each other. Then comes the junction to separate and make a vow of **** about dying together, which goes further than the promise in the bedroom. Finally, they go to the water to hang the tree and kill themselves one after the other, their love is sublimated to the peak, and the story is basically over. Precisely because the two clues are entangled together, the plot unfolds with ups and downs, making people pay attention to the development of the conflict and the fate of the hero and heroine at times.

The music narratives of the two Han dynasties have also made great achievements in the portrayal of characters, creating a number of vivid images, each of which has its own characteristics and is by no means identical. Qin Luoshi and Hu Ji are both women who resisted rape. Luoshi teased the envoy who proposed to her with her witty words, performing a humorous comedy; Hu Ji resisted the molestation of Yu Linlang with her life, having the character of a tragic protagonist. One is clever and wise, the other is fierce and chaste, showing two different temperaments and personalities. As for the group of characters in "Southeast Flight of the Peacock", they are each characterized by their own voices and feelings. Liu Lanzhi's rigidity, Jiao Zhongqing's loyalty, Jiao's mother's brutality, Liu's snobbery, and the arrogance of the emissary from the governor's residence, all of them are portrayed in a perfect way. In portraying the characters, the poet uses personalized dialogues, pays attention to details, and makes good use of the environment or scenery as a backdrop.

The skillful technique of the two Han dynasty's narrative poems is also reflected in the details of the narratives, which are appropriate, simple and complex. What is a detailed narrative? The two Hanfu narrative poetry generally follow the following rules: detailed in the narrative and slightly in the lyric. The authors of narrative poems of the two Han dynasties have a more conscious sense of narrative, and in their creative practice, they try to distinguish narrative poems from lyric poems, so that the forms of the two poems show obvious differences. Many of the famous narrative poems in the Lefu poems of the two Han dynasties have a strong artistic influence because of their detailed narratives. Except for the long narrative poems like "Southeast Flight of the Peacock," in which lyrical lines are occasionally interspersed, the purely lyrical lines in the rest of the poems are extremely rare, and all of them are mainly narratives. The Fifteenth Journey from the Army is a very full rendering of the scene of the deserted homes of the demobilized veterans, and there is also a detailed account of the actions of the veterans after they returned home, except for the fact that there is no need for special words to express their inner sorrow, which is obviously mainly a narrative. The fact that the words are not enough to express the feelings of the people is not enough, and the ancients had a fine evaluation of this.

Spreading out the scene, writing the middle process in detail and skimming the beginning and end. The authors of the two Han dynasty's narrative poems were good at, and happy with, setting the scene. The poem Stranger's Merry-Go-Round is not very long, but there are two scenes in it, one of which is about the crowd watching Luo Xi, and the other is about Luo Xi's boasting about her husband, both of which are written in great detail without skimping on the details. The description of the bride-welcoming scene at the Taishou's house in Southeast Flight of the Peacock is also exaggerated and greatly exaggerated. The narrative poems of the two Han dynasties generally give a detailed account of what happened in the middle of the story, and some of them also have detailed descriptions, but the narratives of the beginning and the end of the story are relatively simple and do not spend too much ink on them. Some of them come abruptly and end abruptly; some of them open the door and end slowly. The beginning and end of "Southeast Flight of the Peacock" adopts the typical sketch writing style, and the rest of the famous narratives are largely the same.

Detailed dress and honor while skimming the surface of the body. In the two Han dynasty, when the narrative poems are stating the story and portraying the characters, the costumes and ceremonies of the people are shown from all aspects, and the detailed writing style is adopted. From Qin Luoshi, Liu Lanzhi to Hu Ji, from Luoshi's "son-in-law", the minister to the Yu Lin Lang, no matter whether they are male or female, they all set off their beauty or wealth by describing their costumes in detail. When describing the suffering of the common people, "The Row of the Sick Woman" and "The Row of the Orphans" also mention the ragged and thin clothes of the orphans. Costume and ceremonial rituals became a common prop in the narrative poems of the two Han dynasties, and they were the objects of detailed writing. On the contrary, the narrative poems of the two Han dynasties usually skimmed over the appearance of human beings, and were as stingy as gold. Except for "Southeast Flight of the Peacock", in which Liu Lanzhi is depicted in such a delicate way as "fingers like peeling onion roots, mouth like containing pearls", other narrative poems seldom show the appearance of the characters directly. This style of writing leaves a wide world for readers to ponder. They can give full play to their imagination and reshape the characters according to their own experiences and interests. Compared with such works, the narrative techniques of the two Han musical poems surpassed the traditional writing style, showing signs of an evolution from focusing on physical resemblance to honoring divine resemblance.

Before the Han Dynasty, although there were many fables in the prose of the pre-Qin sages, fable poems were extremely rare, and only the Poetry Scripture Binfeng Owl can be regarded as a fable poem in the strict sense. There are many allegorical poems in the two Han Lefu, which are an important part of the Han Lefu narrative poems. Narrating in the form of allegory has become a characteristic of the two Han Lefu poems. The allegorical poems of the two Han Lefu can be categorized into two types, one of which is a self-referential narrative in the mouths of plants and animals, to which the drumming and blowing song "Pheasant Class", the harmony song "Wusheng" and "Yuzhang Xing", and the miscellaneous song "Butterfly Xing" all belong. Another type of fable is a dialog between plants and people, in which two characters appear in the poem. Song Zihou's Dong Jiao Yao (Dong Jiao Yao) is a virtual dialog between a peach and plum tree and a woman in Luoyang, complaining about the injustice of branches breaking and flowers falling, and blaming man-made forces for the early death of youth. The themes of the above fables are relatively similar, with various plants and animals recounting their own tragic fates and urging the world to be careful with their bodies and cherish life. These poems are often characterized by strange imagery, with fish, birds, flowers and trees also speaking in a surprising way.