Before carrying out this group of comparison, a common sense problem has to be made clear. Art comes from life and is superior to life. This shows two stages of artistic creation. The first stage is expression, and the second stage is sublimation. Changes of art are also shown in these two aspects: How to express and how to sublimate. I believe that the period between the mid and late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century is a watershed of the most obvious chanes in art. Before that, the key words of art were scale, coordination, balance and symmetry. After that, the key words became subconsciousness, sense of impact and imagination, etc. Traditional art stressed the objective existence of matrix. Beauty was beauty, and ugliness was ugliness. The painter could exaggerate to a certain degree, but certain customary rules had to be fulfilled. For people like Magritte, Doussan and Boyce, everything enforced was unbearable, and art needed to be conspicuously subjective. Not only so, viewpoints shall be updated through materials and techniques.
Semiotic Viewpoints
To explain with semiotic viewpoints: Art becomes a signifying activity and dispels the signified through such activities. If you still fail to know much about semiotics, we will attempt to make it more easily comprehensible. First of all, artwork shall have an object like a flower, a historic figure and a kind of emotional impulse so that we can paint out a painting, carve out a piece of sculpture and compose a song. Real objects can be taken as the signified, while works become the signifiers. Do signifiers necessarily correspond to the signified? It seems to go without saying, anyway, artistic creation can’t be deliberate misrepresentation. But with the enrichment of creation techniques and materials, the traditional traces of artistic creation become elusive. It becomes rather a painstaking representation of the authors’ idea and emotional postures through an artistic form. It is most appropriate to interpret it with the words of Lyotard: “Our responsibility is not to provide reality, but to create imaginable indication for things that ‘can be perceived by intuition’. Let us fight against unified entirety and become witnesses to the unspeakable.”
René Magritte:
“This is Not a Pipe”
This is Not a Pipe” painted by René Magritte (1898-1967), a surrealistic painter in Belgium. Isn’t it interesting? He should have painted a pipe, but claimed that it wasn’t a pipe. It was true. The pipe in the painting wasn’t real. It couldn’t be smoked. As a representative figure from pure expression to abstract mode at the time, Magritte explained the secrets about the relationship between symbols and objects and depict the sharp conflicts between symbols and facts in the clearest manner.
“Two Myths”
Let’s look at the upgraded version of this painting: “Two Myths”. The foreground of the painting is “This is not a pipe”. Now we know that symbols are different from pipes. Then let’s turn to the “pipe” backwards that seemed to be floating. You may have a delusion that this is real. But obviously you are still wrong. When you see the floor below and the walls at the back (not displayed on the painting), you will imagine yourself entering a room, so as to mistaken the painting for reality. To overcome this error, you can only warn yourself that this is only a painting, and all you can see is some colors and shapes. Most ironically, when you think in this way, the information in this painting will destroy itself in “Godel’s style”.
Liar’s paradox
To understand self-destruction in “Godel’s way”, first of all, we should know “liar’s paradox”, or “Epimanitis paradox”. Epimanritis was born in Crete. He said, “All people in Crete are liars.” This formed a vicious circle: If what he said was true, then he was lying; if he was lying, then he was telling the truth. Statements kept referring to another self, then the meaning of statements was dispelled in this process. If numbers were used to represent the statement, then it would become Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
For each recursive class K with consistent , there is a corresponding class mark V, so that vGenv or Neg (vGeny) don’t belong to Fig (K) (where v is a free variable of v).
Well, I guess only math majors can solve this definition that is originally in German, and I don’t understand it, either… I would rather make it simpler: All consistent systems taking axiomatic forms in number theory contain propositions that can’t be determined, or rather, for any formal system, it is impossible to be “free of contradictions” and “complete”.
The following sentence is false.
The sentence above is true.
These two sentences alone would be plain, but there will be paradoxes when they are put together. Is there anything wrong with the sentences themselves? No. The problem lies on such “coreferential” relationship. So, can paintings and literature inherit such concepts, in other words, I don’t think the key lies in the quality of paintings, or how touching the sentences are written, I pursue the structural relationship between the materials I use.
Maurits Cornelis Escher
In Escher’s “Hand Paints Hand”, “co-reference” can not only destroy information, but also keep information winding, leading to the illusion of changed dimensions. In order to overcome the illusion, you can reach out your pen and point at the picture in front of your cellphone to decode. Let’s look at the writing features of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). He was against the imitation of reality in a “vivid” way, since there was no vivid imitation in the world, and any author would be imitate reality in a distorted way. He openly announced that his novels were a derogatory imitation, and “in the depth of derogatory imitation there is true poetry”.
“Hand Paints Hand”
Taking his early work “Despair” as an example, the protagonist found a lounger who looked like him, so he conspired a plan of swindling insurance. He tricked the lounger to going to the forest, and changed clothes with him. Then he cruelly beat the lounger to death. After that, he feigned that the corpse of the lounger was his own, put his certificates into the pocket of the lounger and fled to France, waiting for her wife to gather with him in Paris after taking death benefits. However, unexpectedly, the police determined that the corpse wasn’t his according to the traces they found. The death benefit wasn’t granted, and his plan fell out completely. He felt annoyed and fooled, so he started to write a manuscript in defense of his crime, while waiting for the police to arrest him at home. This novel full of colors of black comedy experimented with intertexuality and broke the novel down into parts that corroborate each other.
“Despair”
His later work titled “Pale Fire” was divided into three parts. The first part is “Preface”, a confession and explanation of the narrator himself. The second part is a long poem, and the third part is the annotation of this long poem, forming complicated structure and polysemous content. The novel told the story of a king of a fictional kingdom in East Europe. The king renamed himself as “King” after being dethroned in a revolution. He fled to an American university, and told another poet and scholar named Prof. Sid about his life story, since he wished that Sid could write his experience into a poem. Prof. Sid was killed later on, and only left a long poem of 999 lines. Such structure of the novel determined that the playfulness of the work and the text set off each other by contrast. Reading it is like playing an intelligent game instead of reading a story.
Italo Calvino
Now let’s talk about a contemporary Italian author that was most influential in the world named Italo Calvino (1923-1985). Most of his early works were realistic ones. Later on, he started to create fantasy novels and fables, with strong surrealistic and post-modernist styles. In his famous work, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies”, each story was to tap into a logical structure again, while each of the author’s ideas was shown in the intertextual narration at the begging of each story. Copying the original work was not returning to the starting point of the original narration, but to reproduce it at a seemingly higher level. In an ancient castle of the dense wood, crossing the forest deprived people of the ability to talk. People started to tell stories about each other with 78 tarot cards used to practice divination. The medium of these stories—Tarot cards in the Middle Ages—symbols with the psychology of ethnic psychology and traditional mythological prototypes can be combined in various ways, while these combinations can also be interpreted in different ways according to different rules and imagination.
The work of Carlvino wasn’t creating a set of brand new narration system. His narration was limited by the possibility of card combination and the patterns on the surface of the Tarot cards. First of all, he had to give a basic meaning type to each card turning up in the narration of novels, since this card may be applied again to other story sequences. The combination of these basic narrative elements combined the cultural and psychological symbols in the ancient society with the fate of modern people, making up a complicated system full of metonymies and metaphors. In this system, in the words of Calvino, “Only games following certain rigorous rules are interesting, since each story has to be intersected with other stories.” Such “intersection” meant direction and intertexuality. Meaning was automatically dispelled in the process of repeated application.
Interlinking
Nabokov’s interest lay in the corroboration of paradoxes.
The fun of Calvino lies in the intersection and intertwining of paradoxes.
If those people who have given up on “incomprehensible artistic works” without thinking and even criticize them as garbage can understand what I mean, won’t they feel choked up with emotions for such amazement?
Let’s skip over Cezanne and Flaubert and talk about Ah Amal’s reference to literature in music——counterpoint. In other words, sound corresponds to each other according to certain rules, and different tunes are combined into different melodies in the meantime. They are mutually independent and set off each other. There are usually two ways adopted in counterpoint, namely, imitation and contrast, and its highest form is fugue.
The exposition of fugue is constructed by the theme of music in different parts. The theme is shown in the first part. In the second part, the theme is repeated with different pitches called “answer”. The cooperation between the first part and review of the phrases is called “countersubject”, and the countersubject part usually forms contrast with the original theme. After playing the theme, the second part enters countersubject, and repeats the exposition of the theme,when the first part goes on freely until the complete presentation of the exposition.
After exposition there comes “episodes”. Namely, all used materials may be new or originate from themes, answers or countersubjects. Interjection appears regularly and at intervals. The theme of fugue enters again between various interjections, but there is no need for repeat the theme in each part. Other different techniques may be used to diversify music. The noun “strett” is the compression and mutual overlapping of the theme of fugue; “Augmentation” is to slow down the theme of fugue to half its original speed, because when other parts are going on quickly, there will be long music notes in the augmented parts; In sharp contrast to “augmentation”, diminution will double the speed of the theme of fugue. It thus follows that counterpoint is the most expressive technique handling complicated themes.
Maybe the stream of consciousness is too obscure, if I have to choose a piece of most work clear and easy to understand and applying counterpoint to literature, I would choose William Faulkner’s “The Wild Palm”. The whole is made up of two parts. The keynote, “The Wild Palm” tells the story of how a couple eloped in pursuit of liberty and love. In the end, the woman died from abortion, and the man was imprisoned; the polyphony, “Old Man River”, tells about how two prisoners were ordered to save people’s lives in floods, gave up the opportunity of freedom and returned to the jail ending up with increased penalty.
If we have a little understanding about counterpoint, we will know that counterpoint in music is rigorous algorithm. There can be one note corresponding to one note, or one note corresponding to many notes. Passing notes and jump consonants, so as to alternate rhythms and expand the pitch interval. This is a way of thinking without a pattern. Likewise, the so-called counterpoint in literature doesn’t rigorously demand one element grasping the other, instead, overall weaving and intertextuality are required. For example, the theme story of “The Wild Palm” contains flashback, while the time line of “Old Man River”is straight. Faulkner made adjustment according to the needs of the plat through narrating time, and adopts synchronous narrative techniques to construct the narrative space of the novel, so that the two stories that could have been independent of each other present a state of limitless weaving, winding and extension.
This widespread photo makes the public in awe of Mr. Dou, then I guess a lot of people believe he is pretending. Then is there any other possibility? In other words, is it feasible to play the musical instrument to the book on the art of drawing? At least he wasn’t the first to do it. Zong Bing, a landscape painter of the Six Dynasties, played zither to landscape paintings, “as if all the mountains were made to roar”, showing that he also found the rhythm of music in landscape paintings. I believe he found it through rhythm. There are large, small, thick and thin shapes in the painting, alternating between dark and light colors and different tunes. The long, medium and close-up shots in the painting are intricate with different meanings, showing pattern and rhythm. The simplest example is “0”. In math, it is zero; in physics, it is vacuum. In philosophy, it is voidness, in painting, it is blankness, and for music, it is an empty beat.
For the ease of comprehension, let’s take a painting as a bar, and the blank space is an empty beat., If the musical cales are divided according to the complexity or importance of the picture, then there can be a 4/4 beat played to the painting in order. Then, let’s process according to the details of the picture:
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You can understand it in your own way. For example, three birds can be turned into three notes, and the duration can be shortened for the notes nearby or the order of pictures can be changed to make different combinations. There is no need to go into details here. The above is an interpretation of fine arts with music. Let’s look at “Fantasia”, an animation completed by Walter Disney in 1940 (thanks to Maowu), it was the first attempt with the great combination of music and fine arts. Generally speaking, in movies, music is a minor role interpreting pictures. It is used to set off atmosphere and puff out plots, but this movie was doing exactly the opposite. The movie was made up of eight sections, and each section interpreted the classic work of a musician master with pictures of different styles. The eight pieces of music work were respectively, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor,BWV 565, Chaykovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in F, Op.68, Ponchielli’s The Dance of Time, Mussorgsky’s A Night on Balk Mountain in Full Score, Shulbert’s Maria Street and Doukas’ The Socerer’s Apprentice.
Then let’s broaden our mind. Such “same feelings” can be found in all rhythmic literary works, including but not limited to poems, film narrations and architecture … Have the Mobius Strip, Klein Bottle and Schrodinger's Cat mentioned here given you “the same feeling”. These knowledge points may seem new to many people, since they are different from common sense and the logic derived from it. In them, strong uncertainty, non-linearity and sense of dislocation. Such feelings are not restricted to one field.
Math—In the 1920s, on the basis of continuous development of set theory, Hilbert, a great mathematician threw out a grand plan to the mathematicians in the whole world. The general intention was to set up a group of axioms, so that the truthfulness of all mathematical propositions can be judged accordingly through finite steps. This is called the “completeness” of axiom systems; Hilbert also demanded the “independency” of the axiom system (Namely all the axioms are independent of each other, so as to keep the greatest simplicity of the axiom system) and “non-contradiction”(namely, compatibility, since no axioms can be self-contradictory). But Godel broke such a beautiful dream of math. He proved two points: firstly, whichever (correct) mathematical axiom was chosen, there would be many (correct) propositions that can’t be proved; secondly, math itself couldn’t be used to prove its internal consistency. In other words, as long as statements of elementary arithmetics, there must be a proposition whose truthfulness can’t be determined with this group of axioms.
We know that math is the foundation of everything. The great shock brought by this axiom is not limited to basic subjects, and would undoubtedly be expanded to applied subjects like computer science. According to Godel’s theorem, there would be propositions that can’t be solved by computer even for simple axiom systems containing whole numbers. As the procedures that computers rely on for work are instruction sets, which correspond to the fixed rules in the process of formalization and axiomatization. But people’s mind is not restricted in this way. They will make judgement of a proposition that can’t be proved through the content expressed by this proposition and comparison of relevant facts . Therefore, artificial intelligence can’t attain the height of human brains in this theory. In order to testify it, Turing invented imitation game. Now we all know that no conclusion has been drawn concerning the effect tested by Turing.
In 1859, Le Verrier, a French astronomer discovered through multiple observation that the precessional motion value of Mercury at its perihelion is 38s/century faster than the theoretical value calculated according to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. In 1915, Einstein concluded that the gap calculated according to the principle of general gravity was 43"03s/century, totally matched with the observation value, so as to interpret the abnormal precessional motion of Mercury at its perihelion. Human beings entered the world of the theory of relativity, our time-space viewpoint can jump out from the square Euclid space and enter Riemann space that is full of convex and concave.
Along the guidance of the theory of gravity, theoretical physics started to become more and more mysterious, there are constantly new discoveries adding fuel to the flame and worsening the stability of the world constantly. In 1927, uncertainty principle was put forward by Heisenberg. In 1935, Schrodinger proposed a cat that is the superposition of life and death… On the basis of the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics started to be carried forward.
It is not necessary to discuss other disciplines. With the development of civilization, physics taking math as the main tool has long been the foundation of the way we understand the world. It is also being permeated to the humanities including sociology, culture, psyhology and economics. Newton’s creative viewpoints in physics can also be broadly applied to various disciplines such as ethics, politics and economics. Galileo laid the foundation for a mechanical view of nature. Thomas Hobbes described countries as a machine (“Leviathan”), La Mettrie generalized human soul as the gear transmission settings of automats, Physiocratie designed their economic models against the mechanical background of Descartes. Lavoisier testified mass conservation with scales. These typical viewpoints of certainty were unprecedentedly consolidated under the mechanical system of Newton. An important symbol for human society entering modern society is the establishment of the capitalist market system. Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” put forward the concept of market economy and the well-known “invisible hand” directively.
This was derived from the same origin as the theory of universal gravitation in terms of philosophical stance. Induced by Laplace’s eloquence, human beings’ firm belief in the theory of determinism expanded to the entire universe. They believed optimistically that as long as science was developed to a certain level, all unfathomable mysterious phenomena can be restored to common facts. Alvin Toffler even believed that such mechanical viewpoints of the world affected the founding fathers of American Constitution, and made laws like a balanced pendulum. It is true that when Metternich was busy building a balanced Europe, there was a book by Laplace in his backpack. Balance, balance, balance. People are constantly looking for the golden mean of truth in all fields such as politics, economics, culture and philosophy, so as to make the world more balanced, regular and entertaining.
Now that we are talking about the similarity of literary works, why would we take such great pains talking about irrelvant things like math and physics? If you are careful, you may have noticed that these viewpoints were roughly updated between mid- and late-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, which happened to be a watershed of tremendous changes in literature and art. Therefore, I marked the era of authors analogized expressly.
Maybe writers and artists stand aloof from worldly strifes, they may care nothing about the new theories put forward in other fields, and invention of new viewpoints. But they can’t be totally cut off from reality. God is dead, the early capitalism was filled with evils. Communism emerged, and anarchist emotion was spread. The conflicts in Europe caused a world war. Changes in the world, the surging of the waves of the time kept immersing themselves in every corner of human society silently. When Chirico was painting The Mstery and Melancholy of a Street, his mind was filled with horror of wars. When Kafka was creating “Castle”, he also suffered from the mental torture of the disorderly political values on intellectuals. The coffee cups on the table of literary and artistic creators may be still, but their mind was filled with raging waves. Their works were like the so-called mirrors and lights of Abrams, reflecting the tastes and feelings brought about by life on the one hand, and creating imaginatively from inside out on the other hand.
Likewise, with changes of the time and culture, literary works keep changing. In 1961, Arnold Toynbee defined a new word in A Study of History, post-modern. Before it, the word had been spread in various fields of the cultural life of human beings with the speed like plague. In architecture, Jencks proposed post-modern architectural language; in poetry, Allen Ginsberg publisher hysteric Howl; in movies, it was the new waves of Godard. In music, it was the 4 minutes and 33 seconds during which Johrr Cage sat silently in front of the piano; in fine arts, it was the action paintings by Pollock; in literature, it was Lolita in Nabokov’s mind; in philosophy, it was deconstructionism, aesthetics of reception, hermeneutics and new ew criticism. Literature and art moved their emphasis from “expression” to “viewpoints” increasingly, requiring creators and admirers to treat works with stronger subjectivity , and the negativistic attitude of creators and admirers. Beuys used to put forward a well-known slogan: “Everyone is an artist”, such attitude attempts to rectify the name of art as a collective creation, so as to blur the boundary between creation and non-creation increasingly. Art and literature originate from social and cultural life, and are closely related to people’s mind. Now that there are transitions in philosophical trends of thoughts and social culture, art and literature can’t be an exception.
Through the analogy analyzed in the former part of this article, it can be found that such possibility of mutual commionality can be the similarity of content, theme or “soul”, or the identity in terms of expressive techniques, creative thinking and physical structure. If such “same feelings” repeteadly mentioned above are to be replaced by one word, then I suggest homogeneity. As a philosophical concept, “homogeneity” originated from Hegel. It describes the relationship between thinking and existence. The homogeneity I discuss is still different from this concept. From the liberal meaning, it can be seen that homogeneity is generally understood s “commonness in essence”. What is “essence”? It is an ultimate posture to pursue the original and most fundamental trait, and can only be discussed to a certain degree. Here, I use this word to describe the nature displayed by objects when they are changing, including but not limited to literary works. How is the homogeneity between things formed? What about the above-mentioned spirit of the times? National emotions? Cultural identity? Philosophical features?Creative thinking? Formal kernel? Collective unconsciousness? These are all superficial. All activities participated by human beings may be generalized as creating and describing changes ultimately, while all the changing processes are: convergence due to the loss of motion and dispersion due to motion in the end. All knowledge and expressions from the entire universe to the inner feelings of human beings can boil down to descriptions of changes.
Language is to be used in description (symbol system in its broad sense). Language can be divided into two aspects of language structure and langue. The former is the sum of the necessary protocol systems in interpersonal communication, and the latter contains the pure individualism and randomness of language.
Language, as a macro concept, includes common word language and other symbolic language, video language and audio language, etc. All the measures through which human beings record eternal information through dense organs can all be included. The first step we know the world is to receive and process information, and then encode information, turn it into knowledge to be tired in human brains. When there is a need for application, knowledge will be expressed through the “recoding” of various languages. If communication is involved, various expressions will be decoded and recoded. “At first we created habits, is later habits make us.” (Oscar), through this series of repeated codification, language shapes the mind, and makes the world methodical, organized and structural naturally.
A large and diverse body of overlapping phenomena are contained between language structure and langue, and languages. Chaos is caused by the mistake of jumping from one category to another. It is not difficult to understand this, since there is infiniteness in the real world. Obviously, finiteness can’t be expressed, and fables and symbolic signs. “I want to express intangible things, but I have to use tangible medium; I want to express the unspeakable, but I have to use diction; I want to express the unconscious, but I have to employ conscious ways”(Isaiah Berlin). Therefore, after peeling off such “same feelings”, only a “mark” is left, which is supposed to vacillate and only shows its meaning when there is an agreement between the expression and content dimensions. Nobody can set up a general system covering the knowledge points of all disciplines and put the so-called homogeneity between literature and art, or literature, art and other disciplines. We can only sense a multidimensional system and a castle with overlapping knowledge and viewpoints through continuous learning.
Let me put an end to the article by quoting Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, but we also see a path when we were all going direct the other way
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