In some dramas, what is directly presented in front of the audience is mainly negative emotions and wills, such as Molière's comedy "The Miser", "The Hypocrite", and "The Noble Fan", Gogol's "The Minister", and China's Fujian's Gaojia drama "Three Levels in a Row". For such a play, the audience's emotional experience has great particularity. Of course, the audience will not have emotional integration with these funny and ugly characters on stage, and if the audience is also mixed with real misers, hypocrites, noble fans, and liars, they will not have emotional identification with their kind on the stage. This is because these images on the stage are treated so strictly by the dramatist that even the real misers will resent and ridicule them. The weapon with which the dramatist deals with it is the normal human emotion and will. Thus, in these ugly and comical images, the emotions and wills of the dramatists have been deposited, and the triumph of this affirmative emotion and will over the negative emotion and will is embodied.

Gaojia drama "Three Levels in a Row"

Ugly and funny, it is the result of this victory, like a captive captured by a dramatist. The captives themselves may still be the embodiment of evil, but in them there is the power of good to overcome them. Martyrs are the embodiment of good, but they are swallowed up by evil. In this sense, the captives embody the triumph of the good more than the martyrs. Why do the audience laugh so much in a theater where comedy is performed? Because they stood in the position of the victors, calmly admiring their spiritual captives.

For the funny and ugly protagonists, in order to thoroughly reveal their negative emotions, dramatists often set them up with a not too weak volitional action, so that they stubbornly pursue a certain desire. However, their desires and emotions do not need to be experienced by the audience, so they do not have to sort out every logical itinerary of their emotional development. The French philosopher Bergson once pointed out that comedy writers often have to prevent the audience from getting close to the emotions of the people in the play. Take "The Miser" as an example, Abagon, who loves money as much as his life, is a loan shark who harms people, and when he meets the lender, he finds that it is his son standing in front of him. In such a situation, the dramatist, if he were to follow common sense, would have written about the inner conflict between his miserliness and his father's love, and made him bitterly complain that he was at this age, and that all his miserliness was not for the sake of this unworthy son...... And this kind of appeal is obviously in line with his psychological logic at the time. But Molière cautiously avoided it, and deliberately did a very rough treatment, because if he did not avoid it, it might cause the audience to be emotionally close to the people in the play, and it would become a serious drama. If the audience's emotions are close to those of the ugly protagonist, it will hinder the grasp of positive emotions.

Molière's play "The Noble Man"

There are times when the audience's emotions are lost. In some plays, the emotional tone of the protagonist is originally positive, but the dramatist uses comical techniques to deal with it, banter, ridicule, and confusion, which can make the audience's likes and dislikes inverted for a while. Later, after slowly observing and savoring it, I realized that the harlequin is not ugly. On the contrary, there is another kind of play, where the emotional tone of the protagonist is negative, but this negativity is not clearly manifested for a while, and it will also cause the audience to have emotional misplacement. Whatever kind of misplacement, most of them are deliberately arranged by dramatists in order to have a deep rebellious effect.

To complicate matters further, the audience's psychological orientation goes against the dramatist's preconceived arrangements, and the reason for this is not an artistic omission. British writer Ross' film adaptation of Forsyth's novel of the same name, The Day of the Jackal (directed by Fred Zenerman) shows an assassin known as "The Jackal" who is hired by a secret organization to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. To kill a well-respected politician for money, the emotional basis for the action of the will should of course be denied. However, due to the detailed depiction of the Assassin's meticulous planning, ingenuity, and tenacity, many viewers hoped that he would succeed and regretted that he was finally captured. This can be said to be the reaction of a strong volitional action to the emotional basis. This peculiar aesthetic psychological phenomenon has attracted the attention of film artists, see a conversation between Japanese journalist Yoshiko Hamada and the film's director, Fred Zinnerman:

Hamada: After watching this film, some viewers regretted that the jackal's bullet did not hit de Gaulle's head at the end. Because the audience has the mentality that if they are so well prepared, and they have been able to get rid of the police and go smoothly according to the plan, they want to be successful.

Zenerman: yes. The jackal is indeed different from ordinary people, and in order to achieve his goal, he has wittily made foolproof preparations. The approach he took was very interesting and highly specialized, so to speak. But what was his motive? It's not for some kind of belief, it's for money, so at the end of the day it's hard for me to sympathize with jackals.

The director's emotional inclination is clearer than the audience's, but he can't stop the viewer's confusion on the way to watching. Whether this is a flaw in this film, or whether it is a special charm of this film, is a debatable question.

In most cases, the drama needs to attract and involve the emotions of the audience, and it is difficult to discard the principle of emotional purification. The purification of emotions is the stabilization of the emotional basis and emotional goals, as well as the clarification of the volitional actions to be taken in order to achieve the emotional goals.

The Norwegian critic Elser Hirst once analyzed one of the secrets of the success of Ibsen's famous play A Doll's House: "What underpins the whole play is an emotion that concentrates on one person and bursts out of her alone. For this reason, Nala has become a traditional character in the European repertoire, with the world's best actors constantly testing their talents in this role. "It makes sense. It is difficult for the audience to fall in love with a play with ambiguous emotional tones and changes from time to time. Schiller once said, "It is impossible for two very different feelings to exist in the same mind at the same time." Sasai was more specific about this. He believes that in real life, people's psychological changes can be rapid: you cry, okay; You're laughing again, listen. You laugh when you should cry, you cry when you laugh, it's your own business, it's irrelevant to everyone. However, the audience in the theater is a large and ever-changing collective, and it is not easy to change emotions. He said:

Yes, the 1,200 spectators were in pain, and at this moment they would not believe that there was joy in the world, that they did not think in this direction, and they did not want to think in this direction. They weren't happy that someone was pulling them out of their hallucinations and making them look at the other side of the same thing.

If, whether they want to or not, they are forced to watch it, and force them to switch from crying to laughing at once, and let the latter feeling prevail, then they will also die in this converted feeling, and it is almost impossible to return to the original feeling. In life, a few minutes is not a big deal, and people have plenty of time to prepare for the transition from one emotion to another. In the theatre, however, one has only four hours at most to accommodate the sequence of events that make up the plot, and the transformation must take a swift movement, one might even say on the spot. Such a rapid movement is too much for a single person to resist, and the audience has even more reason to resist.

If the poet wants the feeling to be strong and persistent, the feeling must be singular.

This passage of Sasse is contrary to the claims of the Enlightenment Lessing, Diderot, and the Romantic Hugo. The Enlightenment and Romantics advocated a mixture of tragic and joyful factors, and advocated that the emotional pigment of drama should be as brilliant and colorful as life, and never monotonous. These ideas are of great positive significance for breaking through the confines of classicism, and Sasai does not want to bring the problem back to classicism. He only wanted to distinguish drama from real life, and to examine the emotional component of drama within the psychological limits of what a large group could bear. However, he underestimated the psychological capacity of the audience and underestimated the flexibility of the audience's emotional transformation.

At the beginning of the Peking Opera "Yangmen Female General", the Yangmen Mansion in Tianbo Mansion celebrated her birthday and was full of joy, but suddenly reported that the front line was full of murder, and great joy became great sorrow, and Shoutang suddenly became a mourning hall. Since then, the female generals of the Yang Sect have stepped forward and shouldered the destiny of the nation with flexible shoulders, and they are full of heroism. In the short performance time, the three emotional experiences of joy, sorrow, and strength change sharply, but they do not make people feel unbearable, and the audience's emotions can be effectively attracted and integrated with the plot. This is because several transformations follow the same path: from joy to sorrow, with sorrow as the mainstay, making sorrow more sad; From sorrow to strength, still not from sorrow, so that the strong and moving.

"Yang Gate Female General"

The emotional transformation of the Dian drama "Niu Gao's Will" is very large, but the audience not only does not feel the pain of moodiness, but instead sticks their emotions closer and closer in the transformation. After Yue Feiqu's death, his comrade-in-arms Niu Gao occupied the mountain as the king in the attack of the Song court and the Jin soldiers, and his sworn brother Lu Wenliang went up the mountain to convey the imperial court's holy decree to him to resist the Jin. At the beginning, Niu Gao, who was in a dangerous situation, heard that there was a red-robed official who went up the mountain, and the bad luck was unpredictable, and the atmosphere on the stage was shocked; After listening to the call outside the gate of the village, Niu Gao turned angry; saw that the person who came was the sworn brother Lu Wenliang, and immediately turned anger into joy; Brotherhood, reunion in the barren mountains, Niu Gao naturally wants to tell Yue Fei about being wronged, and joy has become resentment; Unexpectedly, the sworn brother came to be a lobbyist for the court of his resentment today, Niu Gao suddenly woke up, from resentment to annoyance; Lu Wenliang saw that the holy decree was ripped off, and his words were broken, and he casually said in his chagrin that he had visited Yuejia Village, which made Niu Gao's attitude change greatly, and ordered the chair to pour tea, and quickly turned his annoyance into respect; Hearing that Lu Wenliang still had Mrs. Yue's letter, he hurriedly set up an incense case to worship, and he walked with an old step, supported by someone and kowtowed, showing infinite respect; After reading the letter, Niu Gao was determined to listen to the persuasion, went to the righteousness, and went out of the mountains to fight against gold.

In just one scene, the emotional flow on the stage is so tortuous and changeable, but the audience can completely keep up. The audience will not be willing to "die" in a certain emotional state, as Sasai said, and is unwilling to follow the plot. Because behind these frequent emotional changes, Niu Gao's basic emotions are still simple and in the same direction.

The emotions of the audience and the emotions of the works are loosened and dissipated by the blind rush, and twisted more and more tightly because of the ups and downs in the same direction.

In this regard, Western modernist literature and art have made epoch-making contributions. They often prevent the individual experiential nature of emotions, and splice different emotional pigments into a "mutually consuming structure", which is actually a "reciprocal structure", which is opposite, contradictory and mutually reinforcing, and completely integrated, and there is no longer a trace of space for Sasai to worry about.

This state can be compared to a real-life example: a disabled Vietnam veteran in the United States decided to commit suicide by throwing himself into a river, but he did not realize that his prosthetic leg was wooden and could not sink at all. Is this scene of struggle that wants to sink but does not sink in front of everyone's eyes, is it pathetic or funny? When you think of this end, there is a deeper end at the same time, that is, the more pathetic the more funny, and the more funny the more pathetic. This kind of emotional mode is colliding with the intensity of the two levels into flatness, but the bland is even stronger than the intensity.

The German drama "The Butcher" is exemplary in this regard, full of incompatible paradoxes, combined into the great absurdity of history and life. Classical emotions are gone, and an ironic mood pervades the play, allowing the audience to sink into a complex overall experience. This is a cutting-edge form of aesthetic emotion, showing the major evolution and profound return of human beings from life to art. It is more likely that the emotional presentation mode and reading method that have been stereotyped in the past are relatively false in the first place. People should be open to their truths.

The ironic combination of complex emotional factors must lead to an indescribable philosophy of life. Since this philosophy of life is beyond words, it can only be applied to one experience, and emotion is the way to introduce experience. Complex emotions introduce complex experiences, and ironic emotions introduce ironic experiences. Since the emotional form assembled by the artist is closer to the truth than the traditional purified emotional form, there is no fundamental obstacle for the audience to experience it, but it may be that they are not accustomed to it for a while because they have been adapting to traditional aesthetics for a long time.