Appreciation of Izu Dancer's Works

With picturesque scenery as the background, Yasunari Kawabata shows the sad love story of Izu dancers: "Beautiful Tiancheng Mountain, dense Woods, clear and sweet spring water, rich autumn colors, curling kitchen smoke-""The weather in South Izu is sunny, spotless and crystal clear, which is really beautiful. Bathed in the warm sunshine, the river flows under the bath. " The colors of the mountains and the sky make people feel the scenery in the south. "The rain stopped and the moon came out. The autumn night washed by rain is particularly bright and wrapped in silver. " Kawabata Yasunari puts the protagonist in the autumn scenery of Izu, which makes the characters and natural scenery blend with each other and complement each other. Exquisite and elegant landscape description, let us be there and appreciate the charming scenery of simple Izu. At the same time, let us deeply feel the fresh and elegant sadness. Kawabata Yasunari constructed the aesthetic thought of "the unity of things and me" through the organic combination of natural beauty and personal feelings.

Looking at the whole novel, it is not difficult to find that this novel, like other works of Kawabata Yasunari, has a melancholy and sad mood, but there is a warmth in it. This warmth is not indifferent because of the disparity in identity. It is this disparity in identity that makes each other's companionship and trust precious. Although the journey is short, it is enough for me to remember and warm my future life. The touching thing of the novel lies in the delicate description of the subtle emotional waves between "I" and young dancers. The dancer's innocence is like a clear spring, which purifies my depressed and gloomy mind and fills this lonely journey of Izu with the throb of youth and the romance of first love. Through the research method of close reading of the text, this paper aims to clarify the melancholy atmosphere shrouded in The Dancer of Izu, highlighting the warmth and romance brought to me by this journey with touring artists.

"Sorrow over things" was first summarized by Japanese sinologist Ben Juhong in the Edo period when commenting on The Tale of Genji. heian period's aesthetic theory is "Sorrow over things". "Sorrow over things" can not only mean sadness, sadness and distress, but also be interpreted as sympathy, pity and touching. "Sorrow" is equivalent to "beauty" in Japanese, and the aesthetic view that sorrow is beauty is a unique phenomenon in Japanese national culture. The aesthetic tradition of "mourning for the beauty of things" has been inherited and developed by later writers, becoming a concept of Japanese literature and the keynote of Japanese literature beauty.

The sadness of things is the combination of sadness and beauty, and the Dancer of Izu is filled with a kind of sadness from beginning to end. The winding mountain road, the flowing water and the intermittent autumn rain are all filled with elegant sadness. Sorrow is calmer than sorrow, calmer to silence, idleness and emptiness. After the student "I" and the dancer Xun met in the novel, they never poured out a word of love to each other from beginning to end, and their feelings were between seemingly knowing and seemingly ignorant. Kawabata Yasunari consciously played down the emotional tone of seemingly loving but not loving, and made things sad, so that the hero met farewell and farewell. The intersection of implicit sadness and real beauty creates a lyrical world of sad beauty, which embodies the aesthetic view of "things are like me" and "the integration of things and mind" in Chuanduan literature. "Sampan shaking badly, dancers still tight lips, staring at one direction. It was not until the boat went away that the dancer began to wave the white thing in her hand. "Sorrow over things" expresses beautiful and sad feelings. The consciousness of mourning for beauty has penetrated into the emotional world of the Japanese. The waning moon, the fallen cherry blossoms, and even "Where Are You Going?" all contain poor sadness, which will increase the aesthetic feeling. This sense of sadness and beauty has influenced the Japanese way of life and become an aesthetic consciousness.

But looking at the whole text, we can find that dancers are more sad than "I", which also leads to another problem. This sadness is reflected in the social background where the story happened. Although the real age of the heroine "Xunzi" is only 14 years old, in order to make a living, she carries drums and drum stands heavier than schoolbags all the year round and climbs mountains to engage in art, regardless of the heat and cold. The works depict the cold feeling of the world through the cruel words of the old lady on the top of Tiancheng Mountain, the nausea of the bird shop merchants and the contemptuous attitude of the paper merchants and female shopkeepers in Tang Ye Inn to the artists. A sign was put up at every village entrance, which said: Beggars and itinerant artists are forbidden to enter the village. The cold eyes of the world make the works run through a melancholy and sad atmosphere from beginning to end. Premature bear the burden of life, bear the pressure of life beyond her age, bear the displacement, but also force a smile in people's discrimination. This kind of social injustice gives people an invisible pressure. The ruthless reality is in sharp contrast with the pure ideal of 14-year-old girl, and it also exudes sad beauty.

This kind of sadness is also reflected in the unequal status of the hero and heroine. The emotional development between "I" and the dancer "Xunzi" is a main thread running through the whole work. In The Dancer of Izu, the hero "I" is a student in an old high school and a high-ranking figure in society at that time, while the heroine is a dancer at the bottom of society. In the course of the story, this inequality has been accompanied. The student "I" always looks down on this humble but pure and beautiful girl from a superior perspective. When Xunzi first spoke to me, she "whispered a little nervously" and then "blushed". These words show the shyness of the dancer and the superiority of the protagonist. When "I" and the dancers walked together on the rugged country road, the dancers always followed "I" and kept a distance of less than two meters. This two-meter space is a hint of the status gap between male and female protagonists. After discovering the spring water, the girls all stood around the spring water, letting "I" drink clean water without being muddied first, and "I" accepted it calmly. The dancer knelt on the ground, bent down to dust me off and let me sit with bated breath; When going down the mountain, the dancer ran to get the word "I" bamboo as a crutch, so she almost fell on the ridge of the field; When "I" wanted to leave the room, the dancer went to the door first and put the clogs away for me. This series of detailed descriptions implies the inequality between the two protagonists. It also laid the groundwork for the fruitless love story of the two. As a social elite, "I" and dancers who are Jianghu artists love each other, regardless of rank differences. When the sweet love reaches its peak step by step, it has to be separated. I sympathize with these discriminated artists at the bottom of society, including poor Rongji, Chiyoko, whose children died prematurely on the way because of vagrancy, and Xunzi, who was forced to dance for a living. This is what the novel can reflect on the other hand. narrate

The Dancer of Izu was written by Yasunari Kawabata through artistic processing of his experience of having sex with a dancer during his journey. The first-person narrative is undoubtedly consistent with the autobiographical nature of Izu Dancer, and the novel adopts the narrative mode in which the first-person narrator "I" and the focuser overlap, that is, the fixed internal focus. Many of the stories told by the first-person focus people are carried out by recalling the past, including recalling the past that happened many years ago. Of course, the first-person narrator "I" in the works is not equal to the author in real life, but to the fictional author of the protagonist. The narrator's narrative is retrospective. In this case, there are often two different selves, namely, the "narrative self" standing in the narrative current time and the "experience self" involved in the past. These two egos represent different perspectives and both play a role in the narrative process. It can be seen that there is an alternation of two horizons in The Dancer of Izu: the vision of the narrator "I" recalling the past (that is, the vision of "telling myself") and the vision of "I" being recalled when traveling in Tangdao (that is, the vision of "experiencing myself"). The opening of the novel makes people feel the switching between these two focusing methods. At the beginning of the novel, the author wrote:

The mountain road becomes winding. It's almost tiancheng ridge. At this time, the shower was brightly covered with dense Chinese fir forest and swept towards me from the foothills. This is from the perspective of "experiencing self" to describe the scenery in the journey at that time. Soon, the novel became the "narrative self" afterwards:

"I was twenty years old that year, wearing a college hat. Wearing a jacket and trousers with navy blue and white patterns, and carrying a student bag on his shoulder. This is the fourth day of my solo trip to Izu ... autumn is here. It's really dizzying. " This narrative is also an introduction to the background of the story, and the next part, the author wrote:

However, my heart is beating violently. Because a hope is urging me to hurry up. At this time. Heavy raindrops began to hit me. This description is obviously from the perspective of "experiencing myself", describing the feeling that "I" was eager to meet the artist at that time.

It is worth noting that, compared with the "experience self", the "narrative self" has stronger cognitive ability and stronger functions of summing up, inducing and evaluating, and it often comments, supplements and evaluates the development of the plot in the narrative process. In the fourth quarter of the novel, when I mentioned the reason why I decided to follow the artists to Oshima's home, the author wrote:

I'm not curious about them. I don't despise them. I completely forgot that they were touring artists. My unusual kindness seems to have penetrated deeply into their hearts.

In the fifth section, after describing the scene where "I" heard the dancer say that she was a good person, the author inserted the following sentence:

I am twenty years old, and I have been strict in introspection again and again, and my character has been distorted by the temperament of an orphan. I couldn't stand the suffocating melancholy, so I traveled to Izu. So according to the general view of society, some people think that I am a good person, and I am really grateful.

Between the lines, it reveals the deep mutual respect and love between "I" and the artist. It can be seen that the retrospective inventory made by the "narrative self" at the right time reveals the theme of the work and allows readers to better understand the connotation of the novel. In this way, the text is interspersed with "scene display" from the perspective of "empirical self" and "supplementary explanation" from the more mature perspective of "narrative self", which further strengthens the drama and readability of the story.

Character image

Plot description and characterization are the two central tasks of narrative works. A work named after a character's identity or name should occupy a very important position in depicting characters, such as Izu's dancer. This novel has no ups and downs. If it is only a simple youth novel, it is impossible to achieve such a high literary status. One of the important factors is that the author described "I" and dancers in detail through various narrative perspectives, and successfully shaped the characters.

Different narrative perspectives will naturally produce different narrative effects. The emotion between "I" and dancers in works is always hazy and opaque. Due to the limitation of the first-person perspective, in The Dancer of Izu, I showed my love for the dancer. The author used the first-person narrative method to describe my actions and psychological activities in a large number of languages, vividly depicting my psychological state. Just like the scene where "I" just arrived at the teahouse to meet the touring artist where the dancer is located, due to the limitation of internal focus narrative, it is impossible to directly describe the dancer's feelings about "I", and it can only be indirectly reflected through the words and actions of others. Throughout the novel, the author shows the dancer's inner activities by describing her external movements and forms. In the reader's view, this young first love is looming and full of uncertainty. In fact, the "I" perspective in The Dancer of Izu represents the male perspective. Therefore, women will always be the "other" in the works. It should be said that this eager dancer's feeling of "I" for high school students is closer to a feeling of admiration and gratitude. At the same time, the author describes his "orphan root" and "beneficiary root" in detail by using skillful narrative skills.

Characters in literary works can not only narrate from the perspective of the first-person narrator, but also evaluate other characters from their own ideological perspective. Each character can express his position from his own perspective, which is closely related to the ideological level and discourse level. In The Dancer of Izu, the author also interspersed the comments of other people in society on the artist. However, in Japanese society at that time, artists had a low social status and were discriminated against. And "I" is a promising high school student. I am regarded as a social elite and respected and treated by others everywhere. The narrative discourse produced by different characters' viewpoints forms contrast, which creates tension in the text and causes readers to think further. Many people understand the affection between "I" and the dancer in the article as a kind of vague love, but the author thinks that this affection is far more complicated than love, which is not only a pure friendship based on equal relations, but also an emotional return, concern and sympathy for the dancer's situation after the dancer pays special attention to and praises "I".

beautiful

The aesthetic consciousness of the Japanese nation originated from the perception of natural beauty. It can be said that natural beauty is the cornerstone of Japanese culture and the prototype of formal beauty of Japanese culture. Japanese people have a unique and delicate feeling about natural scenery, especially the changes of four seasons, which is also the basic feature of Japanese view of nature. Therefore, as an important part of Japanese culture, one of the characteristics of Japanese classical literature is to pay attention to the description of natural scenery and express the author's own feelings with scenery. For example, the "seasonal theme" appearing in Japanese peace songs is typical. The so-called "seasonal theme" refers to the poems that express the sense of season in chorus. As Chinese scholars Ye and Tang Yuemei said: "The awareness of seasonal topics originated from the feeling of seasons. Without feelings or even feelings about the natural scenery of the four seasons, there will be no awareness of seasonal topics. " Thus, it is one of the characteristics of Japanese classical literature to embody and pay attention to the blending of scenes. For Yasunari Kawabata, who is deeply influenced by him, his literary creation must also have this feature. In The Dancer of Izu, the author shows a sad love story in a picturesque and beautiful background. The beginning is "a shower shines brightly on the dense Chinese fir forest and comes after me from the foot of the mountain", as if even the raindrops are urging me to catch up with the dancers. The tiny raindrops connect me with the dancers, showing that I am eager to see it. In the novel, listening to drums at night is more beautiful and moving. "At dusk, there was a heavy rain. The towering mountains are stained with a shiny color. I can't tell the distance from the level. The river ahead has turned into muddy yellow soup. The sound of water became louder. I'm afraid dancers won't perform in such heavy rain. I thought so in my heart, but I still fidgeted and went to take a shower again and again. ..... The drums stopped, and I couldn't stand it any longer. I was intoxicated by the sound of rain. ..... "The author here through a subtle fragment, with the rain as the background, rendered Xunzi's hazy and lingering feelings for" I ". The sound of rain, drums and noise acted on my ears, which made me spend an unforgettable night in an unprecedented fear. It can be said that a sudden heavy rain has narrowed the distance between me and the dancers. Crystal clear rain, just like the pure friendship between "me" and dancers. With the help of rain, the author fully shows the image of teenagers in Seeds of Love to readers. Rain has become a symbol of lyricism in his works, and it has also become a medium for the author's lyricism. Kawabata Yasunari puts the protagonist "I" in such a scene, which makes the characters and natural scenes blend with each other and complement each other, reaching a perfect realm.

In his works, the author is good at depicting the freshness, quietness and pure beauty of nature with a refined style, and setting off the activities and psychology of characters through natural colors and atmosphere. The work does not describe the scenery in large sections, but at the same time, it depicts the mountains, virgin forests, deep valleys, winding mountain roads and tea houses for people to rest, which sets a most suitable environment for this simple story, so that there is natural peace between the 20-year-old "Me" and the 14-year-old "Dancer". Only by depicting a pure and beautiful background can this pure love be fully reflected; Only the innocence of his feelings can make the pure background vivid and true. Pure feelings and pure and quiet nature blend together and reach a realm beyond the world. For example, when "I" climbed "out of breath" on the mountain road with "fallen leaves all over the floor and steep walls and slippery roads", everyone else fell behind, and only the dancer lifted her skirt and caught up with me in a hurry. She walked behind me and kept a distance of less than two meters. She doesn't want to shorten the interval, and she doesn't want to distance herself. I'll go back and talk to her. She smiled in surprise and stopped to answer me. When the dancer was talking, I waited for her to catch up, but she still stopped. She won't take a step until I start. The road twists and turns and becomes steeper, and the faster I step. The dancer still kept a distance of about two meters behind, burying her head and climbing. The mountains are mountainous and silent. "Here, a quiet and lonely atmosphere is rendered through the description of natural scenery interspersed between the characters' movements. This rugged mountain road and this quiet atmosphere provide the best place for people to communicate with each other. It sets off the subtle shyness of the "dancer" to "I" in "Seeds of Love", showing a looming hazy consciousness. Empty and subtle, with quaint and gentle poetry.