On The Art Of Novels

Francois Cheng is a Chinese French poet, novelist and translator. He has been devoting himself to the Sino-Western cultural intercommunication for a long time. Based on absorbing the excellent culture of China and France, he fuses these two different cultures so well that he has made great achievements. With outstanding contribution made to the Sino-French cultural intercommunication, he was elected as an academician of College France in 2002 as the first Chinese French academician in the college.Francois Cheng’s research involves many fields, including research of Chinese and Western poetry and painting, study of Chinese and western aesthetics and so on. In addition, he writes fiction. With the knowledge accumulation and life inspiration, he finished his first novel, Le Dit De Tianyi, which won the" Prix Femina" in France. The author demonstrates to us human’s pursuit of supreme beauty and dignity when they are in despair in this novel. After that, his second novel L’eternite n’est pas de trop also enjoyed a lot of praise. In this novel, the author shows us his thinking on the theme of beauty and evil, beauty and love through his description of passion between the two main characters. In Francois Cheng’s opinion, compared to other art forms, the novel can express better the rich and complex life. So in the two novels, we can see Francois Cheng’s pursuit of art. Taking two of Francois Cheng’s novels as the main object of study and adopting the method of text analysis, this paper is going to inquire into Francois Cheng’s pursuit of art, especially his understandings of beauty and evil.The first part makes a concrete analysis of the characters in two novels; the second part mainly explores the deep influence of Chinese traditional culture and thoughts on the author; the third part mainly explains the Francois Cheng’s pursuit of life and art through the analysis of the relationship between beauty and evil.