What is "judging ugliness"?

In the concept family of China's literary criticism in the 20th century, "appreciating ugliness" is a new member. People use it to describe and criticize the large-scale ugliness appreciation in literary creation since the 1980s. The General Principles of Aesthetics generally defines ugliness appreciation as follows: as an aesthetic concept, ugliness appreciation and beauty opposition refer to a negative relationship between people and objective things formed in history in social practice. Ugliness is a special aesthetic object, which generally exists in the fields of nature, society and art. It evokes a negative aesthetic experience. This understanding has existed since ancient times. However, due to the long-term influence of Confucian neutralization aesthetics, China's ancient literary theory paid insufficient attention to ugliness. Zhou said: "In the mid-Ming Dynasty, with the germination of capitalism, the rise of folk forces, the rise of modern enlightenment and romanticism, beauty and ugliness were increasingly sharply opposed, and ugliness gradually attracted people's attention." [1] His judgment is based on Wang Guowei's textual research on the history of China opera. Wang once said: "Ugliness began in the Ming Dynasty". Although Gu You is ugly in appearance, he is kind and intelligent in heart, and "after the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, the drama mainly responded with late Dan or raw Dan, and among all the masters, how beautiful, how evil and how dirty it is, everyone noticed that it was ugly." Because it is a role, it also means a lot of good and evil. Indeed, after the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the sublime, ugly and grotesque expressions in literature and art increased greatly. After the May 4th New Culture Movement, the problem of ugliness became more and more prominent, which was more obvious in Xu Zhimo, who was influenced by western modernism:' My thoughts are vicious, because the world is vicious, my soul is dark, because the sun has lost its luster, and my voice is like a owl in the grave, because in the world. Since it is an era when harmony is destroyed, poets will certainly sing discordant and anti-harmonious songs and write discordant and ugly art [2]. In a broad sense, this view is not wrong. The conflict between disharmony and anti-harmony is indeed a major spiritual feature of modern literature. The description of ugliness also shows a more obvious upward trend in modern works. However, Lu Xun also said, "There are people in the world who can't write novels. If you go in and realize it, the novel will be ruined. " "For example, a painter paints snakes, crocodiles, turtles, shells, wastebaskets and garbage dumps, but no one paints caterpillars, boils, snot and stools. This is a truth." [3] This shows that the description of ugliness by May 4th writers is still limited. It is true that appreciating ugliness is an important theme of literature in this period, and A Q's stuttering once carried the social and cultural significance of Lu Xun's criticism of national character. However, in modern literary theory, "appreciating ugliness" has not become a universal concept. Modern literary criticism has more important work to do, such as realism, revolution, popularization and the combination of revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism. For a long time, literature has been characterized by sublimity, heroism and sadness, giving people lofty aesthetic feeling and spiritual baptism. Before 1980' s, people only knew aesthetics and aesthetic concepts, and there was no ugliness appreciation theory. This is the reason why the appearance of "appreciating ugliness" and "appreciating ugliness" in the mid-1980s is amazing. The enthusiasm for expressing ugliness in literary creation in the new period and the appearance of the concept of "appreciating ugliness" in literary criticism have their special historical background: 1, the Cultural Revolution destroyed people's once simple and bright beliefs and exposed the ugly side of human nature and politics; 2. The description and expression of ugliness in western modernist literature and art, and the theory of appreciating ugliness in western aesthetics and literary theory inevitably stimulated and influenced China's literary creation and criticism; 3. The secularization of society makes the expression of ugliness gain some legitimacy and independence, and "appreciating ugliness" as opposed to "aesthetics" is sometimes even a way for some people to oppose or avoid sublimity. On the one hand, the description of ugliness is a part of people's emotional liberation; On the other hand, ugly exhibitions strongly stimulate people's senses and can satisfy people's curiosity, especially the strange demand for grotesque interests, thus producing special commercial effects. In the early 1980s, there appeared some articles discussing ugliness, such as Zie Cai's Farewell to Ugliness with a Smile and Yang Maolin's Dialectics of Beauty and Ugliness. What deserves people's attention is Liu Zaifu's evaluation of Lu Xun's "ugliness appreciation": "Lu Xun is a firm advocate of exposing ugliness in life and mercilessly tearing up ugly masks in artistic practice. He is also a master of ugliness, and he has a profound appreciation of ugliness. He not only opposes covering up ugliness, advocates facing ugliness squarely and exposing ugliness, but also acknowledges some limitations and differences when ugliness is the theme. " [4] By 1986, critics began to introduce western ugliness appreciation theory and tried to practice contemporary literary criticism with the concept of "ugliness appreciation". Dong Liu's Western Aesthetics of Ugliness summarizes the development history of Western Aesthetics of Ugliness: from the rule that Greeks are not allowed to express ugliness to Goethe's Creation by the Devil, from Hugo's Ugliness by Beauty to modern Venus with Drawer, modernist aesthetics of ugliness has gradually become the mainstream. Perception is no longer a science that specializes in beauty, but a discipline that specializes in ugliness. [5] Although the concept of "ugliness" has existed for a long time in the history of China criticism in the 20th century, such as Zhou Muzhai's article "Ugliness" published in 1936 September's Writer magazine, Dong Liu's introduction aroused people's extensive interest, and the word "ugliness" really began to spread in the literary and art circles. The author reminds people to return to the original name of aesthetics, that is, "aesthetics" and rethink the problem of "ugliness". Ugliness, like beauty, belongs to the category of human sensibility and is the research object of sensibility. Dong Liu found the position of ugliness and the legitimacy of literary expression of ugliness in the framework of perceptual science and the appeal of perceptual pluralism. From 65438 to 0987, the concept of ugliness appreciation was used in Dong's "Ugliness is second only to beauty ―― literary ugliness appreciation" and Ma Yixin's "Ugliness appreciation of novels in the new period". Although their understanding of "appreciation of ugliness" basically copied Hugo's romanticism, they reminded people to pay attention to the appreciation of ugliness in literature and preliminarily analyzed the appreciation of ugliness in novels in the new period. Ma Yixin divided ugliness in literature in the new period into three stages: 1, historical ugliness, represented by the class teacher; 2. Reality is ugly, represented by heavy wings; 3. The ugliness of people is represented by Chen Huansheng Series and Greening Tree, and it is believed that appreciating ugliness expands the connotation of novels such as Daddy Daddy. [6] This reflects the level of understanding and historical limitations of people's appreciation of ugliness in literature during that period. After the 1990s, people's thinking about the phenomenon and theoretical problems of appreciating ugliness in literature is obviously deeper, and some differences inevitably arise. In "Appreciation of Ugliness and Judgment of Literary Value", Zhang Delin proposed that the western ugliness appreciation theory should not be copied, because "the philosophy of this ugliness appreciation theory has the anti-social nature of suspecting everything and denying everything." He reiterated the propositions that "appreciating ugliness cannot replace aesthetics" and "turning ugliness into beauty", that is, turning ugliness in life into beauty in art, and the key to "turning ugliness into beauty" lies in the aesthetic orientation of the creative subject. [7] This view is quite common. In the past, people often used the concept of "naturalism" to criticize the ugliness in literature, which is the current debate. Dong Xiaoyu's "ugliness appreciation in avant-garde literary creation" is obviously a copy of Zhang Delin's viewpoint. This paper lists various "ugliness paradigms" in avant-garde novels: 1, dirty display of characters' activity environment, 2, morbid description of characters' body and spirit, 3, special display of violence and bloodshed, 4, decorative nudity of sex, and 5, ridicule of ancestors. He believes that the avant-garde writers' view of ugliness has the characteristics of denying everything and doubting everything. "The author pays attention to the darkness and cruelty of human nature with indifference, and endlessly shows off ugliness, tastes ugliness and appreciates ugliness, which easily leads people to nothingness and despair. "In his view, literature must go out of the quagmire of judging ugliness and return to the aesthetic world to explore the brilliance of human nature.