Dialogue,rebirth,and Folk Standpoint

The carnivalization theory of Russian scholar Bakhtin achieved the convergence of cultural poetics and genre poetics.As a special cultural representation,carnival is nurtured from the folk spirit,with transformation and rebirth as its main focus,and has the historical initiative to step out of festival squares.As Bakhtin said,the special historical period of cultural transformation is a time when the will of the people to showcase themselves,and also a time when the spirit of carnival is fully unleashed.At this time,folk culture nurtured and influenced literary creation with its thriving passion and strong vitality,leaving a true imprint on the spirit of carnival at the textual level.Since Bakhtin’s research on carnivalization is built on the rich soil of folk culture,and the phenomenon of literary carnivalization is closely related to the special historical period of cultural transformation,based on the common deep collective psychology of humanity and similar cultural development context,its theoretical achievements have universal value.The development of Chinese classical culture underwent drastic changes in the mid to late Ming Dynasty.The Yang Ming School of Mind and the leftist Wang School led a social and ideological transformation,with a large number of cultural factors experiencing fragmentation and rebirth.Folk discourse also gained a vast space for self expression.Facing the bottom-up transformation in the mid to late Ming Dynasty,the most timely and comprehensive reflection of social reality,as well as the most accurate and profound capture of new qualitative ideas,undoubtedly belongs to The Plum in the Golden Vase.This article attempts to explore the carnival factors in The Plum in the Golden Vase from a cross-cultural perspective,combined with Bakhtin’s theoretical system.In terms of genre and language,as the first independent vernacular novel created by literati,The Plum in the Golden Vase creatively uses the novel genre as a written carrier of folk discourse resources and completes the artistic organization of social miscellaneous language.The artistic creation of replacing classical Chinese with vernacular is a manifestation of the game between centrifugal force and centripetal force of language.In terms of character images and their value implications,the restoration and presentation of secular group images in The Plum in the Golden Vase is the result of the influence of folk positions,and throughout it is a carnival like world feeling.At this time,the official value standards lose their consistent binding force,and the hierarchy and order in character relationships are no longer stable or rigid.The banter and satire in the novel contain dialectical folk wisdom,conveying the people’s survival ideals in a tortuous manner.In terms of plot and narrative,the liberation of desire has become the core driving force for the development of the plot in The Plum in the Golden Vase.The author openly places the "lower parts of the body" and the "materiality principle of the body" at the center of artistic expression.The blurred and unclear boundaries of carnival spirit itself,as well as the potential irrational trend of folk will,formed inevitable cause of this extreme result.