About the Author丨.
Lv Jin is a second-level professor and doctoral supervisor of Southwest University, and a national expert with outstanding contributions. He has been a judge of the National Literature Award and the Lu Xun Literature Award for many years. He was a member of the 6th and 7th National Committees of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and the chairman of the first Chongqing Municipal Federation of Literary and Art Circles. He has 43 books and more than 100 academic articles. He was awarded the 7th World Poetry Championship by the World Poetry Research Association (Korea), the "Centennial New Poetry Contribution Award and Theoretical Contribution Award" by the National Poetry Newspaper Alliance, and the "Gold Medal of Chinese Contemporary Poetry and Poetry Soul" by the International Chinese Poets PEN Association.
The eye of the poem (the outer two).
Chinese poets have a saying about the state of writing poetry that "the naked eye is closed but the heart is open", and Western poets say that it is "the eye of the soul". This is all about the aesthetic point of view of poetry, which is the lifeblood of poetry.
The so-called aesthetic viewpoint is the aesthetic relationship between the poet and reality, and further, the reflection relationship between the poet and reality, or in other words, the psychological way in which the poet feels reality aesthetically. It can be seen that the aesthetic viewpoints of different types of art and different genres of literature (language arts) are different. Generally speaking, from an aesthetic point of view, literature can be divided into two categories: one is literature from an external point of view, that is, non-poetic literature (especially drama); One is the literature of the inner point of view, that is, poetry and other lyrical genres (especially lyric poetry). Literature from the outer perspective narrates the world, and literature experiences the world from the inner perspective; External perspective literature has a strong function of historical reflection, and internal perspective literature proves its superiority with its emotional reflection of the world. Literature from the outer perspective shows the richness of the objective world, while literature from the inner perspective reveals the subtleties of the spiritual world. The Japanese refer to the inner viewpoint as God's viewpoint, emphasizing the metaphysical nature of the inner viewpoint. The internal perspective determines the degree to which a work belongs to the poem. The German aesthete Lessing even talked about the value of "blindness" to poets in his famous book "Laocoon", that is, emphasizing the need to close the external point of view when writing poetry.
The place where the feeling of the external world ends in prose (voluntary termination, helpless termination, etc.) is the territory of poetry. Poetry reveals its value in places where prose is unreachable, unfinished, unfinished, and unfelt: it is the internalization, experience, subjectivity, and modality of the external world. The external point of view of prose has great freedom beyond time and space and the phenomena of life, but its sensitivity in the life of the mind is not ideal. If prose explores the "outer universe", poetry explores the "inner universe"; If prose seeks external deepening, poetry seeks internal deepening; If prose lingers in the outer world, poetry wanders in the inner world. Prose is a dialogue between the writer and the world, and the reader listens to the prose; A poem is a poet's monologue in the world of the mind, and the reader eavesdrops on the poem.
The difference between the "eyes" of poetry and prose has led to their divergence in aesthetic objects, aesthetic methods, aesthetic experiences, aesthetic expressions, and aesthetic functions. From an aesthetic point of view, poetry can only be an itch in the boot. In the West, the so-called Homeric and Biblical styles are actually literature from the outer perspective and literature from the inner point of view, and different aesthetic perspectives bring different stylistic possibilities. The inner viewpoint is the spiritual viewpoint.
The inner point of view takes the person to an unexpected place, to the world of poetry. Here, the external world is decomposed and reconstituted in the process of spiritualization, and both physical time and physical space lose their meaning. Here the poet acquires a sixth sense. People have five senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and mouth, so they have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The sixth consciousness given to the poet by the inner perspective is the mental awareness, which communicates with and transcends the five senses. The poet "sees the invisible and hears the silent", capturing "the formless form, the image of nothing". He listens to sound and shape, and in the realm of the five senses, the senses communicate with each other. One senses resonate, and the other senses resonate. The inner perspective gives the poet the color of the mountains, the taste of the water, and the light of the flowers. This is really a bit like what Lao Tzu said in "Tao Te Ching, Chapter 21": "The Tao is a thing, but it is in a trance." In a trance, there is an elephant in it, and in a trance, there is something in it. ”
Constrained by aesthetic perspectives, poetry does not need, does not allow, and is not long enough to depict a wide range of external realities. It is not the work of the poet to look at the world with the eyes of prose, and then to decorate this "gaze" with poetry, but the path of a pseudo-poet. In the external reality, the poet's inner perspective looks for his own object. Prose is generally a point in time and a plane in space, and poetry is the opposite of this, a point in space and a plane in time. Poetry often seeks a simple and concise "point", and then expresses its emotions in time. A color, a bit of light, a little sound can become a poem. The main reason why this kind of material cannot be valued by external point of view literature is that point of view literature follows the principle of plot first, while lyric poetry adheres to the norm of experience first. Every literature can only prosper and be glorious when it pursues its own unique beauty.
Wen wakes up and dreams of poetry, and Wen Qing is drunk
Flaubert praised Shakespeare's plays for their sacred objectivity, which undermined the aesthetic nature of prose. To paraphrase Flaubert's sentence structure, then the subjectivity of the divine is a feature of lyric poetry that is not easy to find. Objectivity is an essential characteristic of prose writing. Dramatic literature, for example, must be dramatized. The so-called dramatization is to turn into the intuitive actions of the characters in the play. The soul of drama is dramatic conflict (the conflict between different characters, the inner conflict of a certain character, and the conflict between the character and the external environment - the social environment and the natural environment). Dramatic conflict is the dramatization of various contradictions in real life. A play is to capture the audience with dramatic conflict, and a script is to capture the reader with dramatic conflict, showing the beginning, development, climax and ending of the conflict. Once the dramatic conflict is resolved, the audience and readers lose their attention to the play or the script due to the loss of suspense. And without subjectivity, there is no poetry. To belittle and eliminate the role of subjective factors in the creation of poetry and beauty is to fundamentally weaken or destroy poetry. Poetry is a subjective experience, which is different from the ordinary experience of ordinary people, and the experience of poetry is a subjective transcendence. It is not only the communication between subject and object, but also the creation of both.
Subjectivity inevitably leads to dreaminess. Wen wakes up poetry dreams. There are two main characteristics of dreams: first, although they come from reality, they are insulated from reality; Second, get rid of the shackles of physical time and space. In these two respects, poetry and dreams, poets and dreamers are very similar. The poet walks in a trance-like dream, and the poet lives in the inner time and space. If you are too sober, there will be no poetry. It can be seen that the dreamy color of poetry is actually the most sober and profound connection between poetry and the world. From the point of view of dreaminess, it should be admitted that poetry is a "dream" of joy recognized by the waking reader; A good poet is a "daydreamer" who is respected and loved by the whole society.
Subjectivity inevitably brings non-logic. Wen Qingshi is drunk. The prose narrates the world, and in the process of concretization, it pays attention to the logic of life and thinking that we are accustomed to. Poetry is inherently illogical. The ancients called "unreasonable and wonderful", "unreasonable" is the elimination of the logic of habitual understanding, "wonderful" is the stronger emotion, deeper experience, more thorough subjective brewing shown by "unreasonable", in a word, more mellow poetry. More precisely, poetry has its own unique and wonderful "irrational" logic, that is, the logic of experience, the logic of lyricism. Stepping out of the logic of habit and entering the logic of poetry, this is the poet's adjustment to the conventional psychological structure. Following the logic of the poem, the poem is more beautiful and more true, because "there are also those who can't wake up when they are drunk".
The subjectivity of poetry requires the poet to be imaginative and synaesthetic. Imagination is the mental process of creating a new image based on an existing appearance or experience, and imagination is this mental ability. Any imagination is based on the more detailed decomposition of the original appearance, the better, and the more harmonious the synthesis of the new appearance, the better. Good at meticulous disassembly, good at harmonious assembly, is the imagination of the poet. Synaesthesia, also known as "mental sense", communicates and intersects the five senses, which is the poet's synaesthesia, which is good at expressing intuition, illusion, hallucination and other subtle and indescribable feelings. The American poet Pound made a "lucky mistake": when he saw that the Japanese word for "smell" was heard from "ear", he interpreted "smell" as "to hear incense", and thus praised the Chinese character. Pound only knew that "smell" has the meaning of "hear", but did not know the meaning of "smell" and "smell", which was his mistake.
But he realized synaesthesia from mistakes, and this is his luck: he sees the image from the sound and tastes the taste from the image. With imagination and synaesthesia, the poet drifts into the subjective world. He listened with the eyes of poetry, listened with the ears of poetry, and telepathized with poetry, so a wonderful and dreamy world flowed out of his pen.
Mental image: Standing image with all your heart
The second point of view characteristic of lyric poetry is imagery. The poet turns the external reality into subjective feelings, and then needs to turn the subjective feelings into images, and then convey this image to the reader through a special medium. The aesthetic image of the external reality produces the aesthetic object, and the aesthetic image of the aesthetic object produces the image (which can also be translated as the mental image). There are two reasons why subjective emotions must be transformed into images. The first reason is that abstract sentiments can only have the artistic validity of poetry if they are transformed into concrete images. Direct catharsis of feelings does not constitute art, nor does it constitute poetry, and the greatest artistic failure of the poet is to directly say the name of feelings. The second reason is that only imagery can be fulfilled. "Zhou Yi Zhi Ci Shang" said that "the book is not full of words, and the words are not full of meaning", and then said "the image is full of intentions". The poet will not be satisfied with the inherent form of reality, he "blows" into his own "meaning" from the external reality, so that the image of reality becomes an image, which appears vibrant, full of connotation, and full of poetry. The imagery eliminates the conflict between mind and object, and realizes the unity of the virtual and the real, and the unity of heaven and man.
The image, of course, is a residual representation of sensations, which in its basic characteristics are connected to external reality. Similar but not similar, not similar but similar, the image is full, so that "the husband is the image, the one who is out of the image" and "the intention is not like the image".
Stars Poetry Theory, 2023, Issue 12.