Many people have been concerned about the crisis of "contemporary literature". The crisis of "contemporary literature" stems from the serious problems facing contemporary culture and politics. Zhang Yiwu, Chen Xiaoming, and many others have been talking about the hegemony and suppression of "modern literature" over the discipline of "contemporary literature". However, their understanding of history is problematic. They believe that "contemporary literature" was separated and derived from the study of "modern literature" in the "new period," and that the "new period" formed the basis for the study of "contemporary literature. The "New Period" created a great disciplinary superiority of "Modern Literature" over "Contemporary Literature", so that "Contemporary Literature" was relegated to the status of a "secondary discipline". The "New Period" created a great disciplinary superiority of "Modern Literature" over "Contemporary Literature", so that "Contemporary Literature" was relegated to the status of "inferior discipline". However, in fact, "contemporary literature" lost its hegemony and centrality in the 1980s when "New Enlightenment" became the hegemony and "rewrote the history of literature". They mistook the process of crisis, failure and collapse of "contemporary literature" as the occurrence of "contemporary literature" instead. As a result of the victory of the discourses of "New Enlightenment" and "modernization" in the "New Age," "Modern Literature" and "Contemporary Literature" have become more and more important. As a result of the victory of the discourses of "New Enlightenment" and "Modernization" in the "New Period", the disciplinary hierarchy and hegemony of "Modern Literature" and "Contemporary Literature" were reversed, the evaluation criteria of "Modern Literature" were transferred to the study and evaluation of "Contemporary Literature", and the class conflict was converted into The class conflict was transformed into a "conflict between civilization and ignorance". Hong Zicheng points out through the study of intellectual genealogy that "contemporary literature" was actively constructed in the 1950s. The vision of "contemporary literature" in the 1950s was a completely different picture of "literary modernization" from that of "modern literature" in the "New Period". "Mao Zedong's Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium was regarded as a new historical beginning for literature and art, and the literature of the liberated areas and the "literature of the workers, peasants, and soldiers" were regarded as "the direction of literature and art in new China". Literature of the liberated areas and "literature of the workers, peasants and soldiers" were regarded as "the direction of new Chinese literature and art". "Contemporary literature was regarded as a higher stage of development of modern literature, and as overcoming and transcending the limitations of modern literature. However, the historical construction and discursive hegemony of "contemporary literature" underwent a crisis and collapsed under the impact of the "New Enlightenment" and "modernization" discourse in the 1980s. The story of the progress of the "revolution" and the creation of a new type of modern nation-state with workers and peasants as the main body was told in the narrative of the "New Enlightenment" of the 1980s as "salvation overrides enlightenment" and "ignorance overrides enlightenment". The story of "salvation over enlightenment" and "ignorance over civilization" or even "restoration of feudalism" was told in the narrative of the "New Enlightenment" in the 1980s. It is the hegemony of the discourse of "New Enlightenment" and "modernization" that, in the process of "rewriting literary history" in the 1980s, "contemporary literature" was denied and subverted. Contemporary Literature" was negated and subverted. At the same time, the status and disciplinary hierarchy of "modern literature" and "contemporary literature" were reversed, and "contemporary literature" was dissolved in the story of "modern literature". Contemporary Literature" was dissolved in the story of "Modern Literature". The "New Chinese Literature", which was split into "Modern Literature" and "Contemporary Literature" in the 1950s, has been dissolved in the story of "Modern Literature" and "Human Literature". The "New Chinese Literature", which had been split into "Modern Literature" and "Contemporary Literature" in the 1950s, was reintegrated on the basis of "Modern Literature" and "Human Literature", and became the unified world of "Modern Literature". Twentieth-century Chinese literature is told in the story of the "enlightenment" of the "conflict between civilization and ignorance". It is also in this story of "enlightenment" that the May 4th and the "New Period" were placed back on the starting point and the high ground of history. In the process of constructing "contemporary literature", "new literature" was once split into "modern literature" and "contemporary literature" due to the birth of "contemporary literature". "and Contemporary Literature. However, it was at the time of the collapse of "contemporary literature" that the "holistic view of new Chinese literature" and the "twentieth-century Chinese literature", with "enlightenment" as its theme and destiny, were born. "Twentieth Century Chinese Literature". Therefore, according to the discourse of "New Enlightenment" and "modernization," or the "clash of civilization and ignorance" of "modern literature," the evaluation standard of "modern literature" is "the clash of civilization and ignorance" and "the clash of civilization and ignorance. It has become necessary to "rewrite the history of literature" according to the discourse of "New Enlightenment" and "modernization" or the "clash of civilization and ignorance" in "modern literature". However, it is precisely because of his strong sense of discursive conflict that Wang Yao, as the mentor of Qian Liqun and Chen Pingyuan, the leading figures in "twentieth-century Chinese literature" and the "rewriting of literary history," pointed out sharply from the very beginning that "twentieth-century Chinese literature" and the "rewriting of literary history" had become a necessity. Wang Yao pointed out the repressive nature of twentieth-century Chinese literature and the rewriting of literary history: "Why do you talk about the twentieth century without talking about the disintegration of colonial empires, the rise of the Third World, the influence of Marxism, the ****production movement, Russia and Russian literature, and so on? movement, Russia and the influence of Russian literature?" In other words, the "rewriting of literary history" modeled on Xia Zhiqing's History of the Modern Chinese Novel, while reaffirming the legitimacy of "modern literature" and "human literature," has from the very beginning consciously or unconsciously suppressed the legitimacy of "modern literature" and "human literature. The "rewriting of literary history", modeled after the "modern literature" and "people's literature", while reaffirming the legitimacy of "modern literature" and "people's literature", has from the very beginning, consciously or unconsciously suppressed the legitimacy and rationality of "contemporary literature" and "people's literature".
The crisis of "contemporary literature" comes from the predicament of "people's literature" and "workers', peasants' and soldiers' literature" in the new historical environment, and from the theoretical challenges faced by the Address. Theoretical Challenges. On the eve of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the "New Literature Anthology Series" edited by Mao Dun and the "People's Literature and Art Series" edited by Zhou Yang made a conscious and clear distinction between "New Literature" and "Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Literature". The "People's Literary Arts Series" edited by Zhou Yang and "New Literature" consciously and explicitly differentiated between them. In fact, the "People's Literature and Art Series" and the "People's Literature and Art Series" edited by Zhou Yang made a conscious and clear distinction between "new literature" and "modern literature". "The "People's Literature and Art Series" represented the "future of literature and art in new China," embodied the imagination and planning of new Chinese literature, and constituted the prototype of "contemporary literature. Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium" is regarded as an important origin of the new literary practice, and as an important symbol of the emergence of "contemporary literature". Just as Hu Shih's Ruminations on Literary Improvement and Zhou Zuoren's The Literature of Man had their origins in the May Fourth Literary Revolution, Mao's Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium has been given the same originating significance. Zhou Yang said, "If the May Fourth Movement was the first literary revolution in modern Chinese literary history, then the publication of the Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium and the changes it caused in the literary enterprise can be said to be the second, greater and more important revolution after the May Fourth Movement. ' after the second greater and more profound literary revolution." The publication of Mao Zedong's Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium meant the birth of "people's literature" and "literature for workers, peasants, and soldiers," and gradually replaced "human literature" to occupy the mainstream position. In a sense, it meant that "people's literature" and "literature for workers, peasants and soldiers" were born. In a sense, it meant the end of "modern literature" and the birth of "contemporary literature".
Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium" is a theoretical summary and development of the history of China's left-wing literary movement, and we must understand and realize Mao's thought on literature and art from the historical development of modern literature and art since the May Fourth Movement, and in particular, from the historical development of the left-wing literary movement since the 1930s. The question of what people are served by literature and art, pointedly raised by Mao Zedong in his "Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium," is not isolated, but closely linked to the social and historical practices of politics, economy and culture. The people in the liberated areas have undergone fundamental changes in their political, economic and cultural status; "when we arrive at the revolutionary bases, we have arrived at an era when the masses of the people are in power, unprecedented in China for thousands of years," and "we must therefore combine with the new masses." In the new historical era, the workers and peasants rose to become the subjects of history, and thus the protagonists of the new literature and art. Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium" explicitly put forward the idea of literature serving the workers, peasants and soldiers, advancing the literary movement to a new stage. He Qifang said, "From the point of view of the development of literature itself, Comrade Mao Zedong's advocacy of the representation of the workers, peasants, and soldiers precisely enlarged the world of literature, and by no means narrowed the scope of its depictions." For a long time, princes and aristocrats occupied the center of the literary stage, and it was not until the civic comedies of the Age of Enlightenment that the bourgeoisie belatedly took the stage, and it was not until Zola's naturalistic novels that the working class entered the field of vision of literature with a distorted appearance. Therefore, the emergence of the concept of "people's literature", with the workers, peasants and soldiers as the main body, was an important historical moment and event.
After the publication of Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium," China's literature and art underwent profound changes, both in terms of content and form. It produced new themes and new characters and, at the same time, created new forms and new languages. Literature and art in the liberated areas reverted from the salons of the feudal aristocracy to the square, to the realm of the masses, from bourgeois individualistic reading to the collective revelry of the masses in the square, from printed culture to oral culture, from long novels and lyrical poems to recited poems and rice-planting operas. The new rice-planting songs were a prominent phenomenon, novel in both content and form. Zhou Yang called it "the people's collective dance, the people's chorus". It is a "new type of square opera" and a "drama of the masses.
The emergence of Zhao Shuli is of historic significance. In Zhao Shuli's works, the people are no longer passive and numb, mute and silent, simple objects of enlightenment and sympathy, but become the real protagonists and the subjects of historical practice. At the same time, Zhao Shuli strikingly created such a form of language art as "Banhua". In the evaluation of Zhao Shuli, we usually overlook the influence of the left-wing literary trend on Zhao Shuli in the 1930s, but in fact, Zhao Shuli was very concerned about the discussion on the popularization of literature and art in the Shanghai "Left League" at that time. Zhao Shuli was not a "peasant writer" who suddenly appeared in the 1940s. In Zhao Shuli, the hierarchical separation between "pure literature" and "popular literature" was broken. Zhao Shuli's "Banhua" and his literature embodied a new "folk" tradition, a new imaginative relationship with the modern nation-state. Zhao Shuli's creations reflect the profound political, economic, social and cultural changes in contemporary China. It is not only a reconstruction of a new literary tradition, but also a reconstruction of a new political, economic, social, cultural and, fundamentally, human being. As two of the most outstanding writers who expressed China's countryside and peasants, Zhao Shuli and Lu Xun constituted two completely different positions and styles and two completely different times and traditions. In Lu Xun's Enlightenment vision of the countryside, the Chinese countryside is as "silent" as Leuntu and as "unconscious" as Ah Q. Only in Zhao Shuli's novels is the Chinese countryside represented as a "silent" countryside, a "unconscious" countryside, a "silent" countryside. Only in Zhao Shuli's novels do the Chinese peasants gain subjectivity and initiative, and become the real protagonists. Zhao Shuli's novels reflect the awakening and changes in the Chinese countryside, forming a new character of the peasants, even though this new character is still in a sense a germ. This change, as Mao Zedong pointed out in his letter to Yang Shaoxuan and Qi Yanming, the authors of Forced to the Liangshan Mountain at that time, "History is created by the people, but on the old theater stage (on all the old literature and old art that left the people) the people became the dregs, and the lords, wives, young masters and young ladies ruled the stage, and this reversal of history is now being reversed again by you, restoring the face of history. the face of history." Only in Zhao Shuli and "People's Literature" did writers really penetrate into the inner world of Chinese peasants from the front. Liu Qing's "History of Entrepreneurship" further created the image of the new socialist peasant and the new hero of the Chinese nation. Liang San Lao Han still has not transcended the literary vision of Enlightenment, and has not broken through Lu Xun's literary world or the typical image of Chinese peasants in the "Age of Q," as Qian Xing puts it. Only the image of Liang Shengbao, the new peasant and the "new socialist man", can truly embody the artistic conception of The History of Entrepreneurship, and construct, unfold, and support the historical imagination of the new socialist countryside in the contemporary era. In the process of constructing "contemporary literature", the creation of "new socialist man" and "socialist heroes" has always been at the center of the narrative, and it is precisely from this that the "new socialist man" and "socialist heroes" are created. It is also in the sense of the creation of the "new socialist man" and "cultural politics", that is, not in terms of isolated characterization, but in terms of the novel's entire theme and conception, that it is a matter of debate as to how to evaluate the creation of the two different typical images of Liang Shengbao and Liang Sanlaohan in The History of Entrepreneurship, and how to evaluate the creation of the two typical images of Liang Shengbao and Liang Sanlaohan. the creation of which is only a matter for debate.
As mentioned earlier, the creation of the "new socialist man" is in fact the establishment of a brand-new socialist cultural value system, which is a brand-new cultural imagination and political identity. The slogan of creating "new heroes" was put forward at the Northeast Literature Conference held in the winter of 1948, and the concept of "new heroes" was later changed into the more explicit "typical image of proletarian workers, peasants and soldiers". Later, the concept of "new heroes" was changed into the more explicit "typical image of proletarian workers and peasants". Zhou Yang once pointed out in "On the Creation of Zhao Shuli" that "the creation of typical positive characters is a great and difficult task in our literary creation." When Zhou Yang talked about the problem of depicting new characters in the new era, he pointed out that writers don't like to write about the working people, but always like to write about the bourgeois petty-bourgeois intellectuals; when they write about workers, peasants, and soldiers, they always like to write about their negative aspects instead of writing about the positive aspects, and write about the working people in the new society as the kind of exploited and oppressed images of weak characters of the past era. As if the only way to write about the working people is to write about them as lying on the ground, and to write about them as standing up is not artistic and is conceptualized.
The classic novels of the 1950s, such as Song of Spring, Spectrum of the Red Flag, and History of a Business, were called "coming-of-age novels. The growth of the protagonists of these novels and the history of the creation of a new nation-state constitute a complete and highly unified narrative. In fact, not only do Lin Daojing, Zhu Laozhong, and Liang Shengbao "grow up" to become "new socialist men," but also Rastigne and Yulian grow up to become "bourgeois heroes" under specific and typical circumstances. "The creation of a typical character is always rich in richness. The creation of a typical character always contains rich artistic fantasies and full historical foresight. Zhou Yang said: "Artistic generalization is sometimes a kind of 'foresight'. The author ingests a hidden undeveloped or in-birth piece of reality, and points it out to people in exaggerated form when they have not yet perceived it, so that the essence of that piece of reality becomes more typical and more obvious." Zhou Yang pointed out that when nihilism had not yet become a major trend in Russian society, Turgenev depicted the typical character of nihilism within Fathers and Sons. Marx also said, "Balzac was not only a contemporary historian of social life, but also a creator. He pre-created the archetypal figure of the Louis Philippe dynasty which was still but in its infancy and did not develop until the Third Napoleonic Era, i.e., after Balzac's death." However, due to the failure of contemporary historical practice and the demonization and stigmatization of utopia, this artistic fantasy was declared "anti-realist", "formulaic", "conceptual", This artistic fantasy was declared "anti-realist", "formulaic", "conceptualized", "false" and lacking in "authenticity", and was even condemned as "the literature of the gods".
Bakhtin's description of the "coming-of-age novel" is as follows: "The changes in the protagonist himself take on a plot significance; in connection with this, the plot of the novel is fundamentally reconceptualized and reconstructed. Time enters into the human being, into the characterization itself, dramatically changing the meaning of the character's destiny and of all the factors in his life. This genre of fiction may be called, in its most general sense, the novel of man's growth." He believes that the element of "man growing up in history" is present in all the great realist novels, and in his discussion of the realist type of coming-of-age novel, he points out that man's growth is no longer his personal affair: "He grows up with the world, and he himself reflects the historical growth of the world itself. ...... He had to become a new kind of man as never before. It is the growth of the new man that is at issue here. So the organizing role that the future plays here is enormous, and this future is certainly not the future of private biography, but the future of history. It is precisely the cornerstones of the world that undergo change, and so one cannot help but change along with them. Obviously, in such a coming-of-age novel, the question of human reality and possibility, the question of freedom and necessity, the question of the primordial spirit, will be pointedly raised. The growing characterization begins to overcome its own private nature (within certain historical limits, of course) and to enter the realm of another very broad historical existence altogether." Thus, according to Bakhtin's theory, such classics of socialist literature as Song of Youth, The Red Flag and The History of Entrepreneurship reached a high level of artistic achievement.
How do we understand the strong and distinctive political-ideological coloring of "contemporary literature"? Because "contemporary literature" and "people's literature" reflect a new and heterogeneous politics and culture, clearly different from the politics or "daily life" of established capitalism. For us, the politics of socialism is "unfamiliar" and "unnatural" because it has not yet been elevated to a universal "everyday life". The fundamental purpose of "contemporary literature" or socialist narrative literature is precisely to "naturalize" and "actualize" this kind of politics through "narrative," to make it more realistic. realizing" and "everyday life" through "narrative". Because readers at that time did take these novels as "textbooks of life", and took the main characters of the novels, Lin Daojing and Liang Shengbao, as role models for their own lives. We have forgotten the political and class nature of "daily life", just as we usually forget the historical nature of history. Instead of mythologizing "everyday life", we should make "everyday life" itself an object of scrutiny. In fact, the rationalization of today's corruption and the selfishness of "every man for himself, and heaven and earth for himself" is not an inevitable part of "everyday life" and "human nature," but rather a result of neoliberalism. It is the result of neoliberalism.
Contemporary literature has created a new kind of literature, a new kind of humanity, a new kind of ethics, a new kind of culture and a new kind of identity. Just like the "revolutionary family" and "revolutionary ethics" created in "The Tale of the Red Lantern": "It is said that the love of flesh and blood is heavy, but in my opinion, the love of class is heavier than Mount Taishan." "Contemporary literature" or socialist literature embodied Mao's conception of a new kind of modern nation-state and a new kind of relationship between people. Thus, rather than being "anti-human" or "dehumanizing," "contemporary literature" is merely a departure from bourgeois humanity and ethics. At the same time, however, it creates a new proletarian humanity and class feeling. Bourgeois humanity is both "natural" and "unnatural" at the same time, because the bourgeoisie's frantic profit-seeking mentality is not the "natural humanity" or "eternal humanity" that has existed since the beginning of time. "or" eternal human nature ", but after the Renaissance and Enlightenment with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the so-called" third class "and created the desire machine.
According to Yu Hua, in the transition from "contemporary literature" to "new-period literature," typical characters and typical personalities collapsed, and descriptions of desire replaced descriptions of character, and descriptions of endocrinology replaced descriptions of the heart. At the same time, the narrative of desire replaced the pursuit of ideal humanity. Unlike what was claimed at the beginning of "New Period Literature", the conflict between "Contemporary Literature" and "New Period Literature" is a conflict between "human nature" and "non-human nature". The conflict between "contemporary literature" and "new-period literature" is a conflict between "humanity" and "inhumanity", between "humanism" and "anti-humanism", but rather between the bourgeoisie's "everyday life" and the proletariat's "everyday life". It is the conflict between the bourgeois "daily life" and the proletarian vision, the conflict between different human nature. This conflict of different human nature is, in the final analysis, a conflict of different cultures and different cultural politics. It is vulgar and lazy to equate human nature with "natural human nature" or "animal nature". In the final analysis, "everyday life", even the "original ecology" of life claimed by the "new realistic novel", is itself an artistic choice and construction, and the so-called "original ecology" is a kind of "original ecology". The so-called "original" life is never original.
No matter how crude and unsuccessful the critique of the movie "The Legend of Wu Xun" and Hu Shi's bourgeois ideology seems to be today, we have to recognize its arduous efforts to establish the hegemony of socialist culture and to try to replace the hegemony of capitalist culture. And fundamentally, the key to the success of the socialist cause does not lie solely in the success of the socialist economic base and the political and legal superstructure, but also in the establishment of socialist cultural legitimacy and the triumph of socialist ideology. Mao Zedong profoundly recognized the importance of the building of socialist culture, i.e., cultural legitimacy, and that political legitimacy ultimately depended on cultural legitimacy. It was at the height of its political, economic and military power that the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed. The failure to build cultural legitimacy in the USSR led to capitalism's "victory without a fight". We all realize today that beyond "hard power" there is the indispensable "soft power".
I have entitled this booklet "Writing on the Edge of Contemporary Literature" because my professional training at Peking University was in the study of modern Chinese literature. At Peking University, the boundaries between modern and contemporary literature were so strict that no one took a step beyond them. Mao Zedong said that without investigation, there is no right to speak. I am not a contemporary literary research circle, contemporary literature is not allowed to enter the door, so I had to write these rusty commentary and layman's opinion quietly on the side of contemporary literature.