Secondary Research On The Tragedy Of Yuan Zaju

Since its introduction to China by Wang Guo Wei, the word "tragedy" has become a conspicuous focal point. The researches haven't reached consensus on whether there exist tragedies in classical Chinese drama or not. They are in a dilemma between the western theories on tragedies and the particularities of classical Chinese tragedies. Although the diversification in the forms of tragedies in Chinese and Western drama, manifested in tragedies is the consistency in the essence, i.e. expressing the feeling of suffering and misfortune, sorrow and sad resentment or grief indignation, the eulogy of the lofty souls of human beings and the resistance spirits in face of sufferings and mishaps. Therefore the existence of tragedies in Classical China drama is an undeniable fact. The author chose tragedies of Yuan Zaju as the study object, and explored the unique scene of classical Chinese tragedies in terms of form and content.The tragedies of Yuan Zaju are the important ingredients of the Chinese classical tragedies。 As a mature shape of tragedies, not only do they take on the general characteristics of the classical tragedy, but also show their own distinctive qualities as far as narrative nature, poetic and lyric characteristics are concerned. The study on the uniqueness of tragedies of Yuan Zaju, however, is far from complete and mature. Therefore the author conducted study on Yuan Zaju, focusing mainly on the expression of tragedy emotion and the creation of artistic conception, and probed into the deep and broad implications of tragedies.Based on the emotion climax of a work and the overall feeling of the readers, 30 tragedies from the Yuan Zaju can be identified. According to the leading character's status, tragedies can be classified as four categories: tragedies on unimportant persons, tragedies on scholars, tragedies on heroes and tragedies onemperors. Taking the tragedians as a carrier of tragic spirits, Yuan Zaju emphasized the expression of grief and sad feeling and displayed the broad tragic scenes. The writers expressed their feelings by creating images of different tragic characters, who impressed readers with different tragic moods. To a great extent as spokesmen for writers to express tragic feelings and carriers of tragic spirits, protagonists convey the writter's perceptual emotion and the rational evaluation. The tenacity of unimportant persons, the loyalty and arrogance of chivalrous and righteous men, the aloofness of scholars, and the final tragic repentance of supreme kings, all embody the distillation of tragedy far beyond the sorrow emotion. The various tragic characters with different status and identities deliver rich tragic experience. Through tragic characters, the writers express depression and indignation, and fighting for miserable situation and injustice. The mixed feelings are far enough to evocate readers' appreciation to the solemn and stirring beauty of Yuan.To "narrate through feeling" and "express feelings through events" are popularly accepted "law and regulation" in drama creation. Significantly different from western tragedies, tragedies of Yuan Zaju focus more on the expression of sorrow feelings rather than tragedy confliction. They have the narrative characteristic, but do not center around the miserable story, which, instead, serves for the expression of tragic feelings. The tragedy event puts particular emphasis on men's acknowledgment, endurance, and experience to tragic situation. Human's demands can be divided into five levels: the physiological needs, the needs for safety, the ownership needs, the needs for respectfulness, and the needs for self-realization and love. In case these needs cannot be satisfied, the human surfers sad resentment or the grief and indignation mood. The tragic works of Yuan Zaju express the intrinsic emotion and external action in lack of the fulfillment of those needs, which include survival difficultly, dream frustration, and experience to entire humanity's tragedy situation, and thus tragedies are the subject pursued in those works.With obvious poetic characteristics, Yuan Zaju made the expression of sad feeling and creation of predicament scene its goal. The creation of predicament scene is a sublimation of the combined tragic images, which include natural images with "fall" as topics and unnatural images with ghosts and nightmare as topics. Their finishing touch role stirs intense resonance among readers. Belonging to the so-called indignant images of "Lisao" type, they are characterized by intense subjectivity which is fitful for expressing resentful sentiment, critique spirit, and anti-neutralization tendency. Different from tragic images in poem, tragic images in drama exhibit the characteristics of two extremes, commotion and presage.Different from classical western tragedies, which put more emphasis on the creation of objective figures and the display of drastic confliction, Yuan Zaju focused more on the creation of artistic conception with sad feeling, an emotion touching tragic scene with vivification as main objective and emphasis on tragic feelings, which includes three elements: tragic protagonists, tragic events and the tragic feelings. The tragic protagonists and tragic events were created to serve for expressing tragic feelings. Tragic protagonists were the acceptor of tragic feelings, while tragic events provided the space for the development of tragic feelings. The expression of tragic feelings was not bound to the limit of "grievance without harm" and " resentment without fury", thus embodied rich aesthetic feelings with "sad indignation", "sorrow complainment", and fears. Compared to the implicit artistic conception with sad feeling in poem, the artistic conception with sad feeling in drama is more incisive and vivid and exibits the beauty of masculinity.With rich spiritual implication, tragedies of Yun Zaju embodied the delightful or depressed mood of a writer, such as the warrior spirit of Guan HanQing, the frustration sentiment of Ma Zhiyuan, and the doubts and reconsideration of Yang Zi, thus reflected the depression and indignation full of the whole Yuan dynasty. All stereotypes in Yuan Zaju that told the story of a wifeabandoned by husband, a good man forsaken by the world, or the war between faithful subordinates and evil traitors, can find their prototypes in traditional Chinese culture, and resonance to daily tragic consciousness, political tragic consciousness, historic tragic consciousness, and natural tragic consciousness in traditional Chinese culture.The tragic spirits of Yuan Zaju originated from the anxiety consciousness of human beings. In traditional Chinese culture, anxiety consciousness includes Confucian's concern about the world, which consists of a country, the monarch and its people, and Buddhism's worries about living creatures, which includes worries about live and death, worries about life quality, and worries about existence condition. Anxiety sentiment contains both worries about the world and worries about the living creatures.Unlike confliction theories in western tragedies, Yuan Zaju tragedies gave first place to express tragedy emotion, and tragedy experience. This characteristic affected the formulation of tragedies of both Ming and Qing dynasties. Tragedies of Ming and Qing focused more on direct description of sad feeling rather than on narration of events by neglecting tragic confliction and plots. Because of the existence of Yuan Zaju and inverse direction effect, tragedy in Ming-Qing Zaju focused more on its elegance and the thorough expression of implications and comprehension to life that came from personal experience. Through Ming-Qing scholars' tenacity to internal life, the meditation to subject and the perplexity to liberalism and socialism, tragedies were promoted to a higher aesthetic level, and conveyed abundant philosophical meaning.All in all,tragedies in Yuan Zaju prevail not in the description of tragedy confliction, but in the direct expression of sad feeling, and the creation of misery scene. The tragedy stereotype that puts more emphasis on feelings than on events opened a unique scene in classical Chinese tragedies, and greatly impacted tragedies of laterages. The peculiarity of tragedies in Yuan Zaju lied in the abundance of tragedy tiers, the ethics of tragedy quality, and the diversity of tragedy style, and thus entitled the special characteristics and merits of tragedies in Yuan Zaju. That tragedies in Yuan Zaju inherited the traditional aesthetics of "poem may contain resentment", yet broke though the limitation of neutralization aesthetics lied in "grievance without harm" and " resentment without angry", pushed tragedy art and tragedy concept to a new stage.