Chapter 27 Section 1 Multi-Ethnic Literature Entering the Chinese-speaking World

China is a multi-ethnic country. Apart from the Han nationality, other non-Han nationalities also have rich and splendid folk literature traditions.They are closely related to the history, life, cultural traditions, local conditions and customs of the nation.In many respects, its achievements even surpassed that of Han literature, and thus became an extremely important part of Chinese literature.The collection, collation and translation of minority literature and the creation of minority writers are very important contents of Chinese literature after 1949. The work of collecting, sorting out and translating non-Han ethnic literature has allowed people to see a rich and colorful world of ethnic literature, and has further broadened the theoretical horizon of studying Chinese literature.For example, the focus on non-Han ethnic literature and folk literature broke the long-standing prejudice that Chinese literature lacked mythological and epic elements.As far as epics are concerned, both creation epics and heroic epics have rich reserves in the literature of various nations.According to the survey, including the Han nationality, at least 30 ethnic groups in China have creation epics, among which the "Genesis" by the Naxi nationality, "Meige" by the Yi nationality, and "Axi's Ancestor" by the Axi people, a branch of the Yi nationality, are prominent. Ji", Buyi's "Opening the World" and so on.The heroic epics include the Tibetan "King Gesar", the Mongolian "Janger" and the Kirgiz "Manas" three epics, the Uyghur "Ogus Biography" and the Dai "Xiangmeng". , "Langa Xihe" and so on.Epics are the crystallization of a nation's spirit and have a sacred status in the nation, but due to various reasons, they are on the verge of being lost. Under such circumstances, it is of great significance to collect them.It is difficult for us to conclude that national epics belong entirely to the category of "folk" on the fringes of power. In fact, many epics are difficult to be separated from the thoughts of the religious class and ruling class of the nation.However, since epics are the collective creations of the people accumulated in the long river of history, they still naturally contain rich folk elements—they are full of the innocent and free poetic imagination and folk poetry unique to the "childhood of human society". A beautiful ideal of a happy life.Take the "Genesis" of the Naxi nationality as an example. This epic is recorded in the religious classics "Dongba Jing" of this nation. Contains a strong religious belief, but at the same time shows a rich folk imagination.For example, it is written that everything in the world was created in chaos, the sun and the moon transformed into good and evil gods, the good god turned into a white hen and hatched the gods of heaven and earth, and the nine brothers and seven sisters who created the world, and the evil god turned into a black hen to give birth to the gods. Demons and ghosts, etc., have a strange and magnificent imagination. Compared with the creation myth of the Western Semites, it emphasizes the universe view of the transformation of all things and does not take "creationism" as the first principle. It has a typical oriental folk imagination. features.Another example is that the heroic image in heroic epics is often the expression of the ideals and wishes of the nation and the incarnation of the national spirit. At the same time, it is often based on certain historical events and reflects the important historical process of the nation.The three heroic epics express the people's yearning for a happy life respectively. "The Biography of King Gesar" depicts that King Gesar is the reincarnation of a god and man in the sky, born in the Ling Kingdom, with great supernatural powers, unpredictable prophets, changeable, intelligent and knowledgeable, becoming a lion king, dispelling disasters in the world, subduing demons, Defeating powerful enemies, leading the people to live a good life, and returning to heaven after death, has strong Tibetan characteristics and Buddhist overtones."Janger", which was circulated among the Oirat Mongols in Xinjiang, narrates the story of twelve "lion" heroes headed by Jianger and 6,000 warriors fighting various enemies. It creates an ideal country "Baomuba", where there is no difference between rich and poor, and everyone is as young as twenty-five years old, reflecting the characteristics of typical folk imagination.

The collation of folk narrative poems and lyric poems has enabled us to discover a richer literary treasure full of folk spirit.Among the folk narrative poems, the most abundant is the marriage and love narrative poems.They are simple and concentrated manifestations of the folk views on marriage and love of various ethnic groups, and typically express the folk's yearning and pursuit for a free life and free love.Among them, the famous ones are "Ashima" by the Sani people of the Yi nationality, "Ebin and Sangluo" by the Dai nationality, "Zhaoshutun", "Yangasha" by the Miao nationality, and "Gadoumei and Mawu" by the Hui nationality. "Brother", Zhuang's "Singing Lian--"Long Song" No. 5" and so on.In addition, there are a considerable number of heroic narrative songs, such as "Man and Dragon" by the Naxi nationality, "Gada Meilin" by the Mongolian nationality, "The Song of Zhang Xiumei" by the Miao nationality, etc., which are generally sung orally among the people. Formed cumulatively.It is worth noting that these narrative poems often contain some factors that cannot be tolerated by orthodox literature, and retain the original folk experience that cannot be reduced by ideology.For example, in the Hui nationality's long poem "Ga Doumei and Ma Wuge", it is written that when the child bride-in-law Ga Doumei and Ma Wuge were having a tryst, she accidentally woke up her young husband, and she killed him in a panic.But the narrator of the long poem does not condemn Gadoumei morally, but still pours his sympathy on this poor couple who are "difficult to get married with a lover".Another example is the plot created by the folks in "Gada Meilin", where Peony kills her daughter and burns her house, determined to destroy her family and revolt. It sings and sighs three times to express the inner contradiction of motherhood when faced with a tragic choice.This kind of extreme state beyond the scope of morality and ethics puts the characters in order to convey a certain intense situation and emotion of the oppressed, which is often a typical feature of folk imagination, and it is also what is particularly real and touching.Relatively speaking, the literature of the Han nationality is difficult to face directly, and even deliberately avoids these aspects of life.In addition, a lot of folk songs, folk lyric poems and a large number of folk stories of various ethnic groups were collected at that time.Such as the famous Zhuang long poem "The Song of Tehua", the Uyghur folklore "The Story of Avanti" and so on.

In fact, the relationship between multi-ethnic literature and folk spirit also includes Han nationality literature.But in contrast to these folk spirits from non-Han literature, the mainstream of Han contemporary literature has a completely different attitude towards folk literature.A large number of so-called "new folk songs" appeared during the Great Leap Forward, and their operation process and basic spirit once again showed the brutal invasion of mainstream ideology on folk forms. In April 1958, "People's Daily" published an editorial "Collection of National Folk Songs on a Large Scale", setting off a nationwide "New Folk Song Movement". The purpose of this movement was not only to collect folk songs, but also to encourage the fabrication of , "created" many pseudo-folk songs, put forward the slogans "the whole party runs literature and art", "every village has poets", and assigned tasks and targets for writing poems to the masses, its quality can be imagined. In 1959, the People's Literature Publishing House published "Red Flag Ballads" selected and edited by Guo Moruo and Zhou Yang, which had a considerable influence at the time and was used as a model for the literary and artistic guidelines of "combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism".Although the collected works are in the form of folk songs, most of them are the products of the wandering style at that time, which are full of exaggerated empty words and big words, such as the song "I'm Coming" in "The Song of the Red Flag". To: "There is no Jade Emperor in the sky, / There is no Dragon King on the ground, / I am the Jade Emperor! / I am the Dragon King! / Order the three mountains and five mountains to clear the way, / I am coming!" What it wants to express is blind optimism under the "Great Leap Forward" policy Spirit, has little to do with true folk spirit.

The adaptation and creation of literati based on folk literature has become a relatively important literary phenomenon since the opera "The White-haired Girl" in the Yan'an period. Thoughts, but there is no mechanism to completely control its narrative", "From a narrative perspective, the plot design of the opera "The White-haired Girl" has a certain non-political operation process", and its characteristics "not only use entertainment as political propaganda , but to a certain extent, the moral logic of a folk daily ethical order is used as the structural principle of the plot" 1. This feature has been retained in similar works after 1949.Take the adaptation of the song and dance drama "Liu Sanjie" as an example. In the adaptation, the ideology of class struggle inevitably dominates the adaptation procedure of the work, but the factors that promote its success are the apparent modern popular literary form and the underlying The folk invisible structure.The legend of Liu Sanjie has been circulated in the Dong area of ​​Guangxi for a long time. For hundreds of years, its content is quite complicated, implying many contradictions and possibilities.The crew of Caitiao drama "Third Sister Liu" followed the literary and artistic policy at that time, and took the theory of class struggle as the basic theme of the script.In the process of selecting materials, those that conformed to the literature and art policy at that time were adopted as "true" and "fine", otherwise they were discarded as "false" and "absurd".For example, there are legends that Liu Sanjie was killed by his brother. The latter saw that she sang all day long and rejected many opportunities to make a fortune. He was very angry and took the opportunity to push her off the cliff.There are also legends that Liu Sanjie and Baihe Xiucai sang against each other for seven days and seven nights regardless of victory or defeat, so they both ascended to heaven and became singers.Song and dance scriptwriters dismissed them as slander against "working people".Judging from its basic plot, it is a metaphor for the mainstream ideology's emphasis on class struggle.The basic plot of the dance drama is that Sanjie Liu uses folk songs as a weapon to expose the plot of the landlord Mo Hairen to occupy the farmer’s tea mountain. The landlord sent a matchmaker to marry Sanjie Liu as a concubine. Agree, but "to get married, you have to set up a karaoke stage first", if you can't sing with her, not only can you not get married, but you can't occupy the tea mountain.The landlord hired three scholars, filled two boats with books to sing antiphonally, was refuted by Liu Sanjie, and left in embarrassment.The landlord then designed to harm Liu Sanjie, but was killed by Maverick who admired Liu Sanjie.Here, folk songs are not pure folk voices, but have become a tool of class struggle; antiphonal songs are no longer a simple folk custom, but directly a close-to-hand and important class struggle; The failure in the song is also a direct metaphor for the spiritual failure of the feudal forces, and the mainstream ideology achieves its purpose of promoting itself with the help of the adaptation of folk literature.However, in this obviously ideological work, folk taste, folk consciousness, and folk voices are still fully preserved no matter on the surface or at the deep level. The libretto is as deep as the invisible "one woman and three men" model of the work, which is also the artistic reason why this work is so popular with the people. The model of "one woman and three men" exists in many folk works. "One woman" is generally a representative of the folk. She is often a character who is pungent, intelligent, and yearning for freedom. Her opponents are always ridiculed. The male role represents the opposite of civil society - the power society and the knowledge society.The former is often a stupid and arrogant powerful person, while the latter is often a cunning and cowardly sour literati; to defeat the former requires courage, and to defeat the latter requires intelligence.This kind of male role can appear in one or two roles in traditional folk literature and art. If you want to express a yearning for freedom and love, you can also have a third male role, that is, a positive image of a man. Brave, handsome folk hero.This kind of role model of one woman and three men can evolve endless stories.The different identities of the three men can be metaphors for different ideological content, but the folk characteristics, folk tastes and folk yearning for a free life embodied in the invisible structure itself are still the underlying reasons why this kind of works are loved.

Since 1949, there have been many non-Han writers.Some of them inherit the lyrical tradition of their own nation and sing the praises of the times in their own unique way, such as the Mongolian poet Na.Saiyin Chaoketu, Uighur poet Tieyi Bujiang, Tibetan poet Rao Jiebasang, Dai poet Kang Langying, etc., also wrote some long masterpieces based on the real life of their own nation in the changing times, such as the Yi nationality writer Li Qiao draws materials from "The Laughing Jinsha River" about the struggling life of the Yi people in Liangshan, "The Boundless Grassland" by the Mongolian writer Mala Qinfu, etc.Similar to the Han writers, these writers also accept the guidance of the literary policy established by the mainstream ideology, but their creations after all indicate that the literary writing of ethnic minorities has become an inseparable part of contemporary Chinese literature.Among the works expressing national life, Lao She's unfinished autobiographical novel "Under the Red Flag", together with the drama, returns his artistic talents to his best knowledge of social customs, especially the changes of the social customs. This also mobilizes the writer's real life resources, and uses them to bypass and resolve the historical imagination shrouded in the common name of the times.It is particularly worth noting that Lao She’s previous writings seldom directly expressed the life of his ethnic group, but in this unfinished novel, Lao She described the life customs of all classes of Manchu people in the late Qing Dynasty with excellent artistic skills, and described Therefore, it involves all aspects of Beijing society and the living customs of people of all ethnic groups at that time.In this work of high artistic achievement, Lao She's language art has reached the point of perfection, showing the possibility of entering the folk through "personal memory" and "personal discourse".Mongolian writer Odesir's short story "The Song of Alimas" published in 1962, although it also implies some common elements of the era of class struggle, but its main interest lies in the expression of ethnic customs and folklore , which depicts the unique way of life and hobbies of the grassland people in the process, should also be noted.

The creation of Han writers also draws materials and inspiration from folk literature.Such as poets Ai Qing, Wen Jie, Tang Shi and so on.Among them, the poet Tang Shi's transformation of folk literature materials marks the continued development and inheritance of the romantic and aesthetic narrative long poem tradition since the 1920s in the potential creation after 1949. After Tang Shi was wrongly classified as a rightist in 1957, he searched for creative materials from the folklore of his hometown, Wenzhou, and wrote a group of southern customs poems that achieved high artistic achievements, such as "White Lotus Teaching a Certain", "Song of Zhou Deer in Paddlers", "Waterfall of Tears", "Magic Boy" and so on, in addition to more than a dozen historical narrative poems such as "King of Hailing", "Chile People, the Generation of Tragic Songs", "Tongqin Song" and so on .Wenzhou "in ancient times was a barbaric country of Baiyue, and the witchcraft of 'strange powers and gods' was very strong." Zhoulu, Motong, Tears, etc. are relatively primitive myths and legends, and they were gradually modernized later. up.Based on it and with his own imagination, the author "integrates the description of the customs of the southern seashore, the description of folk life, and the fantasy color of romanticism;...using some new modern techniques on the basis of realism and conception; but still strive for the completeness of Chinese color and style” 2 , and also strive for strictness and conformity to the needs of art in terms of form.This not only shows the pursuit of art that is completely different from the crude atmosphere of the times, but also marks another way to integrate with the folk, that is, the combination of personal feelings, individual imagination and folk imagination that is alienated from the "common name" of the era.Facts have proved that it is precisely such a method that has achieved major literary achievements at the time.