Appreciation of personal experience works

Based on the author's personal experience of living with children with mental retardation and dementia, Personal Experience describes the mental crisis and mental struggle caused by the birth of a disabled baby. But "personal experience" is also the same experience of the protagonist, the author and people, because in the imaginary world created by DJI, he tried to explore his own personal experience and successfully described the pursuit of human beings. This is more fully reflected in his works after he became the father of a disabled child. Pursuing new heights in aesthetics Since ancient times, all literature and art have been based on metaphors. But in contemporary times, the concepts of "small" and "big" have changed dramatically: "small" can be as small as tiny until people are unconscious; How big can "big" be, until even human imagination can't reach the space. Therefore, the standard of measuring the law of figurative art is getting higher and higher, and the difficulty of realizing it is getting bigger and bigger.

Kenzaburo Oe is well aware of this artistic mystery. He pointed out: "focus on small, local things and then promote them around the world. I think the so-called literature is like this. The pain that children feel is related to the pain or bad things that the whole world feels. " In the closed aesthetic pursuit and novel creation practice, he reached a new height of combining the small universe with the big universe. The small universe here can not only refer to the "marginal" small area like Shikoku Forest, but also refer to the inner small world of people. The big universe here can not only refer to the "center" range of Japan and even other countries in the world, but also refer to the veritable space.

Dajiang is a small universe standing in a forest village in Japan, and uses his works to "call" the most urgent and important issues of human survival and world salvation in the global universe, such as disabled children, atomic bomb victims, earth pollution, immigration to a "new earth", human infighting and internal friction, AIDS, induced abortion, war and peace, life and death and so on. At the same time, the great river starts from people's "inner pain" and "personal experience", making the small universe tolerant and calling for the big universe; Everything that happens or is about to happen in the big universe leaves a notch in people's inner world and makes waves. In Dajiang literature, the small universe of human beings (psychological world) and the big universe of things (real world) have reached or approached the realm of "the unity of things and me" and "the unity of man and nature" in Eastern philosophy.

Regarding the work Personal Experience, DJI made it very clear: "The theme of death and rebirth written here is of course based on the death and rebirth of the times and the world, but fundamentally, just like talking about personal feelings here, it is to think about death and rebirth as an individual. So as long as it is related to the image of the novel, I will put it on the level of the protagonist's prayer to complete the realistic performance. I really want to put the regeneration of the times and the world and the regeneration of a single individual together as the most practical topic to think about. First, I put it in my life with my disabled son, which is shown in the plot of the novel, making it a force to support my real life. However, with the dark clouds of nuclear weapons covering the times and the world, the plot of the novel becomes more and more dense and thicker. As an unshakable theme, it has indeed begun to exist in your mind. " It can be seen that DJI, as an artistic magpie, really bases his aesthetic experience on the combination of small universe and big universe. In the aesthetic experience of the great river, the small universe is the starting point and the big universe is the refuge point.

In the mid-1950s, when DJI started writing, Japan had got rid of the ruins at the end of World War II, gained political independence, and achieved rapid economic recovery and development through "blood transfusion" in the Korean War. The abnormal prosperity of Japanese economy has aggravated social contradictions and economic crisis, and social and interpersonal relationships are full of absurdity and ugliness. This change in life has rapidly impacted the minds of a generation of young people, and western concepts have generally replaced Japanese traditional values. With the opening of cultural psychological structure, aesthetic consciousness has also undergone profound changes. As the first post-war existentialist writer engaged in literary activities, Shiina Linsan made it clear at the beginning: "Post-war literature began to make it clear that it was determined to assume the responsibility as a human being. This is very important. As far as Dajiang is concerned, he has just arrived in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo from the quaint forest village of Shikoku, and it is not surprising that the change of life is caused by the creative motivation of existentialist literature. As he said frankly: "The old society entered a period of rapid economic growth. Since then, living in Tokyo, I began to experience another kind of tension. The daily life in Tokyo is a complete stranger to me, and I don't think I can adapt well. Thus, this mythical little universe, which was born in the forest of Shikoku and told by the mouth of a small mountain village, began to show great significance. I find myself in a dilemma between the real life in Tokyo and the myth of a small forest village. In the intense tension, I use language to build my own vibrant little universe. This is my literary career. "Specific to the personal experience of the work, Kenzaburo Oe can better understand this sentence with his own torn social experience and the contradictory and painful family experience of the disabled baby's father:" As a contemporary, I describe the society of this era through novels, and how people in this era survive. Inner pain is my starting point. "DJI has a deeper and more concrete aesthetic experience of the plot and structure of personal experience:" If the novel theory is used, the novelist's imagination, even if it shows the reality, should divide the object into many sections, and each section should grasp its authenticity and summarize it to make the plot and image tips of the article work. The reader's imagination accepts the content of the novel in the same way. When expressing a reality, if we don't divide it in many ways, we can't guarantee the truth of the whole, but as a single writer, we must go beyond the shackles of the individual. There is no other way to achieve the completion of a universal performance except through this generalization. But generally speaking, there should also be a single voice in style, which runs through the whole work. By observing and understanding this typical literature, we can observe and understand the appearance of reality from many aspects.

From the perspective of oriental traditional literature and artistic concepts, Dajiang's aesthetic experience embodies a view of oriental traditional literature based on "realism combining realistic politics with' summoning' literature". On the role of literature, Dajiang first put forward: "If we think about the tragedy of human beings becoming assets on such a large scale in the 20th century, the role of literature will be more obvious." He closely linked the function of literature with the reality and prospect of the times, society and human beings: the process of encouraging universal rejuvenation. Based on existentialism and humanitarianism, he thinks: "We have the spirit of the times, which is terror and hope." "A huge terrorist entity is really in front of us, and the root of terror is completely absurd and explicit and very clumsy. In the near future, mankind will launch the final war at a near primitive beginning-even primitive people may not make such an accident-extremely simple and accidental, destroying the history created by mankind from primitive times to the 20 th century, destroying the civilization created in this whole historical period, and destroying the civilization with great possibility for the future, that is, the hope of mankind! " In the face of the horror that hangs over an era, we must build up the hope of confronting it. If we regard the relationship between the two as something with great power, we can make clear the spirit of the times.

Especially festival sacrifices and literature that embody the spirit of an era. In short, it shows all the horrors and hopes created by contemporary people. ""I think literature must reflect the spirit of the times in some form of terror and hope, or it must be reflected. " DJI treats some young writers who are divorced from reality with this concept, and criticizes: "Recently, it is often seen that new writers have neither war experience nor post-war chaos experience. In short, the son of an era that has no response to society, while the son of this era is giving a speech or prose or thesis, is really remarkable. "Dajiang himself emphasized and affirmed that" Dajiang literature is a summoning literature "when he was interviewed by Hiroshi Hara and answered the question of" the responsibility of literature ". I took political and social actions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My behavior will never have a realistic effect, but if my social behavior can play a summoning role. Because I think the essence of human beings lies in calling. "Personal experience is the creative practice of this literary concept. Based on the author's personal experience, this paper describes that "the focus is on the experience of living with disabled children in the era of nuclear threat that seems to destroy the whole world", that is, the theme of disabled children under the background of nuclear threat is such a major practical political and social issue; It shows that "we are building our survival foundation under such a scale and such a specific terror", and calls for "in the face of the terror hanging over an era, we must build the hope of confronting it", that is, the hero bird will restore its trust, patience and determination to live with disabled babies. However, Dajiang did not confuse literature with politics, but gave full play to the individual specific characteristics and group aesthetic function of literature and skillfully achieved the purpose of "participating" in social politics. " Personal experience vividly depicts the soul hell of a bird as the father of a disabled baby, and the absolute personal experience is limited to me. It exaggerates the "greatest ideal" that I hope and plan to travel to the paradise-like pure land in Africa, thinking that "children's misfortunes can be forgotten during my trip to Africa", but just "an episode in an African writer's novel" is enough for readers to know and believe that the personal experience of a bird is that ghosts expel real fetuses on behalf of the night. As soon as the day of delivery arrives, the ghost that becomes a kind fetus is born. Babies like that will get sick soon. The mother gave the healing things, and the ghost quietly put them in a secret place. The child's illness is incurable. When the last dead child was buried, the ghost returned to its original shape, emerged from the cemetery, carried the property away from the secret place and returned to the robber ghost street. In order to monopolize the mother's love, the ghost made her give everything without stint and became a baby. He was born beautiful. Africans call this baby born for death, but it is a dwarf's baby and very beautiful. This is really a beautiful African myth, but it is also permeated with the bitterness, fear and indignation of all mankind on the issue of disabled children since ancient times! In contrast, the issue of nuclear threat is only written as a foil in the novel, but it also clearly reflects the common aspirations of mankind. Birds and Fire, the hero and heroine of the novel, learned from TV news and radio news on many occasions that "Moscow has conducted another nuclear test and its impact" and was "shocked by the news just now" and commented: "Maybe the nuclear weapons war at the end of the world has begun." The author also added a narrative here: "People all over the world feel that their fate is as bad as it is, and bad luck is forming." Obviously, in the author's view, the protagonist's knowledge and anxiety also represent human knowledge.

Psychological Experience Stream of Consciousness From an artistic point of view, Dajiang's novels adopt a stream of consciousness method based on "psychological experience combining consciousness with unintentional knowledge". Dajiang is known as an "intuitive writer" in Japanese literary world. He himself bluntly said that when he used novels to describe how people in this era lived, "inner pain is my starting point." In other words, DJI "is driving away the demons in his heart through writing, excavating personal experience in his own imaginary world, and thus successfully depicting what human beings know." This "what human beings know" includes not only the social consciousness and individual consciousness of human beings mainly considered in the realistic literary view, but also the unconsciousness and subconsciousness of human beings mainly considered in the modernist literary view. For the latter, DJI adopted some concepts and skills of Freudian psychoanalysis. Specifically, there are two kinds of psychological experience descriptions in personal experience. The first kind of conscious part mainly refers to how the hero experiences and walks out of spiritual purgatory, and the second kind of unconscious part mainly refers to the hero's sexual psychology and experience. In the description of the first kind of consciousness, the novel focuses on the three stages of the protagonist's consciousness development: "out of hell", "out of purgatory" and "restoring human nature". The protagonist is addicted to depravity and addicted to alcohol: "As soon as the bird opens the lid of the table next to the professor and finds the bottle of high-grade whisky, it grabs it with both hands. The bird's eyes were bloodshot, and he felt twisted joy burning. I have to go to hell. " In fact, even if the bird is not addicted to alcohol, it is like being in hell: when he was a teenager, he was a hooligan. After "experiencing a special life", he "gradually fell in love with the madman's character in the process of looking for the missing madman, and has been enthusiastically insisting on finding the end. The madman thinks that the real world is hell and a ghost disguised as a dog, so he is terrified. " The bird's experience of drunkenness and vomiting is an unspeakable horror and pain. However, the deeper psychological experience of the bird lies in the moment when he faces his disabled baby: "Will the baby grow up with a tumor in the future?" He is out of the brink of death. He can't be easily dissolved by a few tears of mourning. He will live, oppress birds, and attack birds. Wrapped in skin as red as a shrimp scar, now the baby suddenly survived, dragging a heavy tumor hammer. Plants exist? Even so, it is a dangerous cactus-like plant. However, DJI gradually endowed the bird with the belief and sound consciousness that "in the face of the terror that enveloped an era, we must set up the hope to fight against it", so that the bird did not completely lose its rationality, and finally overcame its mental disability and walked out of the purgatory of the soul. In expressing this spiritual journey, DJI uniquely highlighted the decisive role of three images or factors: "baby", "past" and "misfortune".

Babies represent the future of mankind. When the bird, accompanied by Huo Jianzi, was ready to send the baby to the abortion doctor for abandonment, "he looked down at the child's face for the first time" and "the child's cry seemed to contain various meanings". The bird was later able to take on the responsibility of rescuing and raising the child, which showed that he gradually understood the rich meaning contained in the child's crying. The past represents the achievements and glory of mankind. The 27-year-old bird knows that "I am lack of energy, I am terrified, and I want to run away", but his old friend Kubigu inspires him with his past: "The 20-year-old bird is a fearless free man, and I have never seen what he is afraid of". The bird "decided to take the child back to the university hospital for surgery." I stopped running away, and he recovered his "hero" and "self" in the past. Misfortune represents the present trials and tribulations. As Professor Bird's father-in-law said, "You accepted this misfortune from the front and won." At this time, the bird has realized that human beings can only make progress by constantly rising from misfortune, so he replied in a "tone of no sorrow or resentment": "In order to survive in this real life, it is ultimately necessary to obey the orthodox survival rules. Even if you are going to fall into the trap of self-deception, you can only refuse sooner or later. " In this way, the great river symbolically reveals that only by restoring the glory of the past can mankind get rid of the misfortune of the present and hope for the future.

In the description of the second kind of unconscious part, the novel mainly reveals the four-part development process of the hero and heroine's sexual consciousness from "sexual fear, sexual taboo", "sexual self-abuse, sexual metamorphosis" to "returning to normal experience" and "sex helps to restore human nature"

In the predicament of modern people's survival, one of the two most basic production (sex, marriage and reproduction) on which human beings depend for survival and continuation is the most full, especially the distortion of human sexual psychology and consciousness is the most serious. In personal experience, the hero and heroine fell into the dilemma of human nature as soon as they appeared. Birds are well aware of the reasons for their sexual dysfunction: "This is not a technical problem, it is a fear." Since the birth of the disabled baby, both husband and wife are unwilling and afraid to share the same room, and they are very afraid of sex. Therefore, Huo Jianzi hit the nail on the head and pointed out: "You must break your sexual taboos. Otherwise, your sexual world will be distorted. " As a "sex expert", Huo Jianzi's sexual consciousness is also very distorted: "Since he committed suicide, I have no such pure interest in morality. You want to have the most annoying sexual intercourse with me, and I can find the truth from it. " What's more, the hero and heroine once developed to the stage of sexual self-abuse and sexual metamorphosis. Birds are often tempted by sexual self-abuse: "Suddenly, birds feel that if she is a woman with sexual abuse habits, it will be easy.". I will silently endure being beaten and kicked, even if I drink her urine. " Indeed, both the bird and the fire saw that the child was slightly perverted: "The bird listened to her crying in a state of semi-absence." Suddenly, the bird seemed to be unable to restrain his hatred, bit the fire and saw his son's shoulders and feet.

The fire saw the child once again let out a louder cry. The bird opened her eyes and saw a drop of blood dripping from her anemic ear to her cheek. The bird groaned again. This kind of description is only to reveal the alienation and pain of the social life environment in which the characters live more deeply, such as: "The bird wants to have the most anti-social sexual intercourse in that humble and lewd mood, and he wants to have sexual intercourse that exposes his shame." However, with the help of caustic soda, the bird finally resumed its normal sexual experience. At this time, the bird's sexual fear and sexual metamorphosis have been cured and restored with the return of his normal human nature. At the same time, Huo Jianzi's own sexual perversion was cured by birds, and normal sex also helped to restore normal human nature. As Huo Jianzi said to the bird, "My relationship with you was just a simple combination at first, and I was just a sexual emergency when you felt uneasy and humiliated. However, last night, I also saved up my enthusiasm for traveling to Africa. Now we are reunited with the map of Africa, Bird. We have jumped from a purely sexual place to a newer height. " This "update height" is obviously the height of normal and healthy human beings. So far, the hero and heroine and the four-part development of human sexual consciousness they represent have been outlined completely and symbolically. In artistic expression, the author draws lessons from the stream of consciousness method from the content to the form, which can also be seen from the language form of the works. For example, the author's narrative language: "The sunlight reflected from the wet asphalt pavement and the trees covering the sky on both sides is as strong and crystal clear as a frost column, which penetrates into the bird's pupil and revels in the tender feelings of attachment in the dark inside the building. When the cat stood naked in the middle of the living room and reached out a hand to reach New Pants on TV, the bird saw its naked arm and realized that it was naked. " This is described from the perspective of bird's vision and stream of consciousness. Long sentences without punctuation completely conform to the psychological state and behavioral characteristics of characters, such as "complete numbness", "dullness" and "panic and anxiety".

Dajiang broke through his usual first-person technique in this novel and adopted the third-person expression technique, thus effectively expanding the narrative perspective and enriching the artistic capacity of the novel. For example, the description of the hero bird can be carried out from one's own point of view or from another's point of view: "Those three people all smiled casually and stared at the bird. For them, birds are rare monsters, but they are also outsiders who are not worthy of great attention. He was an inexplicable guy who drank for several weeks for no reason and finally left the university. " Artistic Style Modernism From the artistic style, the aesthetic experience of Dajiang's novels is a modernist style of "exaggerated deformation combining serious content with absurd form".

Generally speaking, Dajiang's literary creation is based on realism, characterized by psychological experience, grotesque variation and exaggerated deformation. The overall creative method can be summarized as "grotesque psychological realism". The formation of this modernist artistic style, on the one hand, is deeply influenced by western existentialism philosophy and modernist literary thoughts, on the other hand, the contemporary society and human psychology reflected and expressed in Dajiang have undergone tremendous changes. As the Swedish Academy in the literary world commented: "Being familiar with the western modernist tradition has opened up a new field of postwar Japanese novels and outlined the contemporary life situation with the impact of brushstrokes." The modernist style of Dajiang's novels is mainly manifested in grotesque characters and grotesque plots in artistic form, which contrast and contrast with the seriousness of ideological content.

The characters in DJI's works, as a whole, are the images of human beings in survival difficulties; Individually, it is all kinds of images that highlight the weakness of human nature. Both the whole and individual images contain and show the grotesque consciousness of existentialism in the author's creation, which has penetrated into the behavior, habits, personality, psychology, experience and fate of the characters, making them show grotesque characteristics to varying degrees. As the chairman of the Nobel Prize in Literature Jury pointed out in his acceptance speech: "The philosophical elements such as life paradox, unavoidable responsibility and human dignity that Dajiang obtained from Sartre run through the works and form a characteristic of Dajiang literature." The Life of Birds and Fire is the best footnote of The Paradox of Life in spirit. "Birds are ashamed to control their egoism like ants, and they can't help blushing and sweating." Physiologically, this bird is aging before it gets old, becoming "a man of 27 years and 4 months, with only the grip strength and pulling force of a 40-year-old man"; In self-evaluation, "the bird despises his own confusion, and he wants to deny this self". "He knows that he is a cowardly person who cannot be trusted. To society and others, he thinks that" this is all acting. My wife who is furious in bed, my mother-in-law whose eyes are green and dizzy like a showgirl, I am thinking about the relationship between Su Mi and breathing. What everyone is doing is a play, a play! Sometimes he doesn't want to pretend, but he indulges his nothingness. He was "drunk for 700 hours" at a time and became a "drunk Robinson" floating in the sea of alcohol. On another occasion, he went to the podium after drinking, and in front of 100 students, he "knelt down like a frog, groaned and vomited loudly with his fingers on the muddy floor."

The bird craned its neck to vomit, like eating a cat, its internal organs twisted, like a child struggling under Yan's giant claws. Anyway, it's all come to this. The bird tried to spit out a little sense of humor, but it backfired. "What he has done in life is really grotesque and absurd. The same is true of fire seeing children. She also belongs to a female college student who "became an inexplicable monster before graduation." A few percent of their cells are too developed and deformed, and eventually they are dull and dull all day. Moreover, they simply can't adapt to their daily life after graduation. Some people get divorced when they get married, some are fired after graduation, and some people travel without doing anything but encounter some funny and tragic skirmishes. Huo Jianzi married a graduate student before graduation. Although she is not divorced, it is even worse. Her husband committed suicide a year after marriage. "So she lives alone." No matter winter, summer or day, she lies in the dark bedroom thinking about some very mysterious things. Bekaert kept smoking, and the room was filled with artificial fog. She only goes out after dusk. "She said to herself," Anyway, I stay in this universe and bear the painful role of suicide. "As for the grotesque plot, the plot is the history of the formation and development of the character's character, and the grotesque character inevitably requires a corresponding grotesque plot. DJI said that he mainly used the methods of "leading people to many myths" and "blurring reality with fiction" through imagination.

It is worth pointing out that DJI's personal experience shows a complex ideological experience of existentialism and humanitarianism. DJI himself said that he lived with disabled children with mental retardation. "Through him, I discovered human friendship, a new kind of friendship. I also understand how the weak see the world. " Therefore, DJI thinks that "a literary model based on humanitarian imagination must be put forward" in the novel. Humanism and human love are incompatible with egoism, escapism and responsibility. In the novel, as soon as the bird appeared, he looked for and bought an African atlas, because he thought, "I wanted to travel to Africa a long time ago, and when I came back, I would write a travel book, the African sky, which is my greatest ideal." He also said to Huo Jianzi, "I have nothing but a map of Africa." His enthusiasm for Africa was later infected by Huo Jianzi, and the reason why they held this only ideal and hope was because Huo Jianzi made it clear: "You can forget your child's misfortune during your trip to Africa, bird. And I will forget my husband who committed suicide. " It turns out that Africa's ideals and hopes are just to escape from reality, so they are empty. Later, after some ideological struggle, the bird finally realized that this was an escape. I left my child with an abortion doctor and fled here. I fantasized about continuing to escape, taking Africa as the last land to escape. "

At the end of the novel, he regained his sense of responsibility for disabled children and decided to "accept him and raise him"; He operated on the child. During the operation, "in the process of repeated blood transfusion, the bird provided its own blood several times", and he knew that "I must work hard for the child's future life". This new ideal of "living" and "self-rehabilitation" with disabled children is feasible. This is the leading spirit of the times and the hope of mankind. The novel successfully achieved its artistic goal through the expression of this serious content: "The cruel history of the 20th century brought human grief, and the expression of literature was also a process of encouraging the universality of human scale." Dajiang's novel art is loaded with serious ideological content in the absurd form of exaggeration and deformation, thus showing the survival dilemma of modern people more prominently and vividly, calling for universal rehabilitation and human love.

Although the words and deeds of the characters in his works are grotesque and absurd on the surface, they are all struggling to get out of the purgatory of the mind very seriously in the deep layer. What is hidden under the absurd appearance is inner pain, and of course there are many hopes and ideals. This is probably the typical authenticity and artistic charm of the characters in DJI's works as modern people, and also the modernist style as the personal experience of contemporary novels.