What are the characteristics of traditional novels

I'm a little bit hesitant to use the concept of "modernity", because I can't explain it clearly at all.

But if I don't use this concept, I really don't have any other concepts to use.

The so-called concept, I think, of course, to use, but there is no need to draw the line too clearly, because the difference between things often does not lie in the nature of the dichotomy, but lies in the degree of the slow transition, if we just stubbornly use the past that kind of distinctive analytical methods, we will not be able to properly deal with the vast and ambiguous transition zone, the result will only be The result will only be the logic of "no revolution is counter-revolution".

Taking the concept of "modernity" as an example, we might as well understand it more broadly. According to Husserl and Heidegger, "Modernity means that the world of life is forgotten, as a result of the recent scientific worldview." Kundera, in The Art of Fiction, says that this assertion is only half right, and I think it may be less than half right, because the concept of "modernity" is so large that it is futile to try to summarize it in a single sentence, even if it is done in the most brilliant way. Many people have talked about the signs or characteristics of modernity, including loneliness, rupture, drift, the loss of the "center of reason" (Cahill), "unity" (Benjamin) and "totality" (Lukács). " (Lukács), and so on, and Ihab Hassan even makes a list of the characteristics of modernism as a contrast to postmodernism, which in turn includes purpose, form, premeditation, here-and-now, logos, combinations of utterances, metaphor, transcendence, and so on, all of which we can regard as part of the connotations of modernity but not all of them, because we can never grasp the full connotation of a concept.

Possibly, this explanation is still too abstract, and I prefer Benjamin's approach in comparison. In Benjamin's eyes, "modernity" is not attached to abstract and difficult-to-understand concepts, but is manifested through some concrete experience of existence, which permeates the busy air of the Rue de l'Arc in Paris, from the conversion of the street lamps to electric lamps, to the decrease of nightwalkers, the circulation of newspapers, and the capture of the moment by the camera, all of which are impregnated with certain qualities of modernity. Some of the qualities of modernity. Later, Li Ou-fan, a Chinese scholar who taught at Harvard, also attempted to use this approach to analyze Chinese society's transition to modernity, and in his book Shanghai Moderne - A New Urban Culture in China, he paints a picture of Shanghai as the vanguard of China's modernization during the first half of the twentieth century that includes the buildings on the Bund, the department stores, the cafes, dance halls, parks and racecourses, life in the "pavilions", the city and the loafers, and then extends to broader areas such as "print culture and the construction of modernity", "the urban context of Shanghai cinema", and so on. "There may be another premise here. Lee seems to be inclined to understand modernization as the formation of what Habermas calls the "public sphere", and once the "public sphere" is formed, newspapers and media circulate, and society is no longer closed. Once the "public sphere" is formed, newspapers and media circulate, and society is no longer closed.

The latter part of Shanghai Modernity deals with the modernity embodied in Shanghai literature, such as the grotesqueness of Shi Jincun, the modernity of Liu Naou and Mu Shiying, the decadence and frivolity of Shao Xunmei and Ye Lingfeng, and the bleakness of Zhang Eiling, which clearly shows that the modernity factor in literature is rooted in the modernization of society. Although modernist literature shows a more "internal" tendency than traditional literature, the cause of modernism still lies in the change of social environment.

The question is, what is the difference between literature rich in modernity, or modernism, and traditional literature? In other words, what are the important manifestations of modernity in literature? The content here is of course very broad, and it is impossible to grasp it in general, and it is useless to talk about it in too much detail. My feeling is that, in addition to the personalization of writing, there are three other important features:

One is the ambiguity and lack of distinctiveness of the overall characteristics. On the one hand, it is the ambiguity of the characters in the novel, we can no longer divide them into two diametrically opposed categories such as good and bad people, and the specific personalities of the characters are no longer as distinct and consistent as in traditional literature, with many more uncertainties; on the other hand, it is the ambiguity of the factors of ethics and morality, and the writers of modernism, while endeavoring to get rid of the heavy dogma of the old ethics, try to create a new type of ethics, which is more liberal than the traditional ethics. Ethics is more free and less rigid than traditional ethics, and thus can be applied to some special situations. For example, Kundera has been emphasizing the relativity of ethics, which is no longer an absolutized sacred thing that falls from the sky to the ground, and Kieslowski's films, such as the Red, White, and Blue Trilogy and The Ten Commandments, which also explore this issue in great depth.

Two, the break between the individual and the outside world. Modernist writers often intentionally place themselves in a position of complete opposition to the external environment when they write, such as the kind of fear and avoidance of the outside world shown by Kafka in The Hole in the Ground, or the kind of confrontation between the inside and the outside world, memories and reality in Proust's Memories of Watery Years, all of which are the case. In this case, the content and value of the individual is no longer embedded in his utility to the collective and his identity as one of the members of the collective, but is manifested through his confrontation with the outside world as an individual.

Third, the dissolution of meaning. Traditional literature is used to hang a supreme significance in it, and this significance is usually some big problems of morality, such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Water Margin", "loyalty" and "righteousness" are always like the sun hanging above the characters' heads, and most of the characters are just like the sun. And most of the characters somehow made the greatest sacrifice for this illusory "meaning", Liang Shan heroes were recruited that is the best example. To the "Dream of Red Mansions" inside, this meaning is almost gone, the whole novel seems to be extremely complex and obscure, why until today there are so many people like to read, like to study "Dream of Red Mansions"? I think this may be a big reason. Not all classics are suitable for re-reading, Aesop's Fables is quite childish when you look at it today.

There is one thing that must be stated - the above three characteristics are just a personal summary, which represents nothing, and there may be some modernist literature that does not have these characteristics, or there may be some traditional works that already have these characteristics (e.g., Kundera's statement about the relativity of ethics and morality, which is reflected in the Zhuangzi). . My aim is to use these three points as a rough yardstick against which to measure the novel that is the subject of this essay, Polish author Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's Fame and Glory.

Written in the aftermath of World War II, Prestige and Glory is voluminous, with a large cast of characters, and deals with the situation in Poland at the time of World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression. The novel, formally speaking, is not a work of modernism, and it is similar to War and Peace, with the main thread of the rise and fall of three families, and with a clear and complete background of the times, characters, and plot, etc. It is important to note that, how to dig out the connotations of modernity from underneath such a conventional form The important thing is how to dig out the connotation of modernity from under this traditional form, so as to prove that modernity, as a universal characteristic, is widely present in twentieth-century novels.

Mr. Zhang Zhenhui, the author of "History of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature", said about "Prestige and Glory" that the novel "reflects the era in which the characters live from the side through their difficult and tortuous life experiences, and displays their different states of mind in the social events by means of reminiscence, dream, and stream of consciousness, therefore, it is a novel that combines realism and modernism. Therefore, it is a successful work that synthesizes various expressive techniques of realism and modernism". This viewpoint mainly discusses modernity in the sense of creative techniques or forms, but the so-called "modernism" in literature is certainly not only creative techniques and skills such as stream of consciousness, but also has the connotation of "spirituality" (ethos), that is to say, in the sense of leaving aside the "modernism" in literature. It has an ethos, that is to say, after putting aside the form, we can distinguish it from traditional literature by its inner qualities.

In order to find out the modernity of "Fame and Glory" in terms of "spirituality", we might as well compare it with "War and Peace", to see what the differences are, the same epic work, the same great work, the same involvement in war, peace, love and the rise and fall of the family, one written in the nineteenth century, the other in the twentieth century. One was written in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth century, so there must be strong comparisons.

First, there is the loneliness of man. In his book From Kafka to Kundera, Wu analyzed that "modern capitalism, while infinitely expanding the external world of mankind, has dug a chasm between the human self and the world. This chasm means that the human self is split from the world, that man and the world are no longer in harmony and no longer have oneness." Previously, such a split did not exist; as Lukács says, the spirit of the Homeric era was the wholeness of the human self and the world, and similarly, the ancient Chinese emphasized the "unity of heaven and man". Why is there such a split? According to Benjamin's meaning, the modern world is increasingly showing a tendency of appropriating the human self, especially mechanical reproduction, printing press, camera, phonograph, photographic camera ...... What people see and hear are "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" rather than the things themselves. not the things themselves. Benjamin's insight was obviously brilliant, but he died too young to see the world as it is today. Today, "mechanical reproduction" has expanded to a much wider field - through various forms of media, if a star wears a certain style of dress at a concert, within days, thousands of people will be able to see and hear it. There will be thousands of people wearing the same clothes, people learn from the star's speech, style, by plastic surgery to change the instrumentation and the gap between the stars, so, "personality" is also unlimited copy. There is a more thorough, that is, cloning technology, this technology is the mechanical reproduction of the ultimate results, one day, we will find that there is nothing in the world can not be copied. In order to resist copying, resistance to self, individuality is swallowed, people can only increasingly retreat to the small space of the individual to resist, "the loneliness of the modern man" thus arise, so Benjamin said: "the birthplace of the novel is the lonely individual". Perhaps this sentence is a bit arbitrary, let's change it to "the birthplace of the modernist novel is the lonely individual", it is much more accurate. In this regard, Kafka is the most typical example, from his diary, we can see that he is very contradictory, he is lonely and afraid of loneliness, but at the same time, he is afraid of losing his loneliness, because once he merges with the external world, he will not be able to find a place for himself, not be able to find a personal space for himself, from this point of view, he has been engaged three times and three times to break off the engagement, is not difficult to understand things --He could not tolerate the fact that he had to spend time with a woman, and he wanted to keep his own personal space in order to write (writing was almost equal to his life). If you compare War and Peace with Fame and Glory, you can see the difference from this point on. There is loneliness in War and Peace, and both Pierre and André are often lonely, but this loneliness does not exist as an undercurrent in their lives; it is more important to communicate, or rather, in many cases, there is no barrier to communication, and so even though their lives are full of ups and downs and disappointments, they feel the comfort of happiness at times, and this comfort comes from communication. Fame and Glory is different. Throughout the novel, we can easily find the constant loneliness of individual life and the difficulty of communication between people. There are almost no two people in the novel who can understand each other, including the sister and the brother, the brother and the sister, and even the husband and wife, the father and the son, and the mother and the son, and there is no real understanding between them. Ola was married and lived in a seemingly happy family, her husband was obedient to her, her son was handsome, her daughter was beautiful, but both to her husband and to her son and daughter, she had an inexplicable sense of alienation, so she was lonely and unhappy; Jánusz, who had always lived in loneliness and depression, needless to say; the most typical of all was Edgard, a lonely composer who had never been married all his life, and who by the At the time of his death, he was living away from home, penniless, lying on his bed, remembering his life, trying to find out certain warm colors from it, and finally landed his thoughts on his sister, who, at that time, had a tumor in his throat, and could no longer speak, and dolefully wrote with a pen what was in his heart to his sister to read: "I have loved only you." But his sister, Elzhbeta, read it and just smiled wistfully, and threw the note into the wastepaper basket when she was subsequently tidying up her room, which caused Edgar to feel great pain and disappointment, as written in the book: "Healthy people don't understand that a dying person doesn't joke or believe in what he's saying. Elzhbeta does not understand that something great and important lies beneath every word of the phrase 'I have loved only you'." Often times, it's just so hard to communicate between people, and we're all alone.

Second, the dissolution of meaning. As in Les Misérables, there is such a supreme meaning in War and Peace, and people pursuing their ideals run their whole lives for this meaning, making all kinds of choices, hard as it is, but at the same time feeling fulfilled and happy for having such a clear meaning of life - not only does it fit the character of that time, but it also This is not only in line with the characteristics of the era, but also in line with Tolstoy's character. In The Resurrection, the role of "meaning" becomes more and more obvious. Fame and Glory" is different, there is no clear meaning hanging over it, so the motives of the characters to do all kinds of things and make all kinds of choices seem to be very blind, for example, Janusz, who grew up in a cold aristocratic family, his sister married into a famous family, his father treats him poorly, and the only love in his life is to fall in love with Ariadne, who is fixed on that moment at the ball of youth -- only to that moment! -- limited to that moment when Ariadna, richly dressed, stood on the stairs reciting a poem by Blok -- that is to say, he fell in love not with the real Ariadna, but only with the illusory, unnatural version of her that belonged to that moment. He was not able to marry Ariadna, though he fought hard for it. As Ariadna betrayed the revolution and fled to France, she was filled with remorse and felt that her life had become so tasteless that she became a nun and then committed suicide. And Janusz gradually felt the alienation between him and Ariadne. After that, Janusz enlists in the army and fights in the war, and marries Zosia, all of these moves are purposeless, he doesn't know why he fights, who he fights with, or why he marries Zosia (he doesn't love her). When he reaches middle age and Zosia dies, he spends day after day wallowing in his memories and traveling around in search of the old days - but what will he do when he finds them? He doesn't know, so that's also aimless. And then there's his death; he could have stayed dead, could have escaped, but instead he rushes himself to the guns of Nazi officers; what was the motive? It's impossible to say, except that it was a senseless death, and later Jadwiga (a woman who loved him), remembering his life, said, "Only twice in his life did he ever hurry up so much, once when he was busy marrying that Zosia, and then again when he was hurrying up to meet those Germans." He has always been conflicted and indecisive, but these only two times he was decisive, he was also blind. The other characters in the novel are in a similar blindness; they don't know what the meaning of life is, so they have to live as if they have no head. There is another way of putting it, in the History of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature, which argues that although the lives of the characters in the book appear to be devoid of meaning, in the end they all find their lives in patriotism. Indeed, whether it's Janusz, Spehava, or El?bieta, or the younger generation of Antek, Andrzej, or Helenka, they all end their novels connected to patriotism and war, and even die in it. However, I have always had a question - is it reasonable to use simple patriotism, youth, blood, and sacrifice as the complex and deep ultimate meaning of life as an individual? Patriotism is admittedly a great festival, but it is no substitute for a rich life, or rather, man will not be free from confusion in his life merely because he has patriotic ideals; that is only a utopian myth. It is just a utopian myth. For people in modern times, it is such myths that need to be dispelled. Living under the oppression of "meaning" for a long time, people are already overburdened, and Wang Zengqi rhetorically asked in an article, "What is the meaning of the 'meaning' that you are talking about? Wang Zengqi rhetorically asked in an essay, "What meaning do you mean by 'meaning'?" Wang Zengqi's rhetorical question in an essay, "What meaning do you mean by 'meaning'?" reflects this mentality of modern people. The supreme meaning leads to another kind of dictatorship, that is, the use of false flags such as patriotism, humanitarianism, idealism, etc., to dominate the life choices and even the lives of others; therefore, in order to be truly free, it is necessary to dismantle the meaning and rebel against the dictatorship. But on the other hand, the dissolution of meaning also brings great disadvantages, that is, as I said earlier, it makes our life become confused and purposeless, which is very similar to what Kundera called "the unbearable lightness of life", without the weight of meaning, we will be at a loss. Also, what will happen if morality, as a kind of "meaning", is dissolved and loses its sacredness? Can an "ethic of relativity" really be established?

With the dissolution of meaning, the meaning of Prestige and Glory becomes more complex, and not just at the level of simple patriotism. From another point of view, that is, the reader's point of view, we can no longer simply and directly take the answers to life from the novel, but must discover what lies beneath the purposeless surface of the potential through our own thinking, which carries with it a certain degree of ambiguity and lack of distinctiveness that characterizes modernist fiction.

Of course, the use of techniques such as stream of consciousness also adds a lot to this novel, such as the section before Edgar's death, the description of his mental activities as he lies on his bed, has a very strong stream of consciousness color. The key is, through these techniques, when we read the whole novel, and then do a holistic recollection of the time, appeared in the mind, is not a simple scene of the plot, but a deep psychological mood, life's loneliness, bewilderment and absurdity has been separated from the concrete facts and as a fuzzy, persistent imagery branded in our minds.