Chapter 41 Section 3 Awareness and Reflection of the Young Generation: "Death"

Chen Cun is a young writer who emerged with the wave of "scar literature".Although he, like other young writers who emerged during this period, also wrote about the life of the educated youth he personally experienced, and exposed the "scars" left by the Cultural Revolution with his own experience, but no matter in the selection of materials or art form, he showed from the very beginning. There are many unique features.He did not deliberately write about the tragic side of the "Cultural Revolution" experience, nor did he take sharp criticism as a conscious pursuit, so compared with the usual "scar literature", it may be difficult to find his obvious fixed characteristics.Judging from his first published novel "Two Generations", to his later works such as "Walking Through the Dadu River" and "Boys and Girls, Seven in All", he can be said to be an erratic "strange gunman". ", not only one theme, but also one style of writing, used to find a different way and stand alone.Another striking feature of these works is that the theme of "death" often appears in them, which is probably related to the writer's special life experience. However, although he is obsessed with death, he does not attempt to achieve the purpose of praising or criticizing through the dead. It is just to express his thoughts on the status quo and meaning of life with a description of daily life.Therefore, it can be said that from the very beginning of his creation, Chen Cun “tried to enter into the meditation, memories, warm feelings he had, and the emotional state of the current real life from different perspectives”9. A certain degree of personality deviation is consciously maintained in the title theme.

But the short story "Death"10 written in 1986 has neither the indifference and normality he used to treat death, nor the pompous irony and humor. Facing the old translator Fu Lei whom he respects very much, he wrote A deep and complicated emotion beyond the previous personality was revealed. Of course, it is full of righteous indignation and pain, but it is also clearly rolling with dreamlike passion and passionate love.The origin of writing this novel is that in order to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, a magazine planned a topic selection and organized writers to write about those literati who were persecuted to death during the movement in the form of novels.The editor of the magazine asked Chen Cun to find someone to write about Fu Lei. After the draft was rejected, he accepted the draft himself.The writer's mood at that time is clearly stated in the work: "I came for his death. His death was so heavy that I felt my own life from this death." This is because he couldn't forget that he once In those cold years, he talked about Fu Lei's death and many deaths, "talking about us who live and our unbearable life"; the writer is determined to use this work to state his confusion to the dead Fu Lei: confusion and generational confusion".There is a nightmare-like atmosphere in the whole work.In the opening paragraph, the author came to visit the former residence of the deceased with "heavy thoughts", and the ordinary scenery around him made him "faintly smell the breath of death". Closing behind him, he sees "a pair of eyes in the dark," and begins a deranged, painful conversation with the undead.The breath of nightmare comes from the vague description of various images and feelings in the text, and fundamentally comes from the author's induction of the soul of the undead.He thus entered a strange time and space. Judging from his confession, it was unfamiliar to him, but the appearance of the undead revived the atmosphere in that time and space. Hollow", that made him extremely terrified, death engulfed everything, "everything from ancient times to the present has disappeared, there is no more east and west. There is no black light. There is no scarlet. Everything is far away, and everything is also near Needless to say, all these scenes are a metaphor for the disaster of an entire era in the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. That era seems to have passed away, and the author cannot directly feel it. It diffused in his heart and dragged him to that era.

The nightmarish atmosphere of the whole novel is extracted from this, and the work completes the metaphor and revelation of the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, but the more important meaning it wants to express is not limited to this.The most thrilling thing in the full text is the imaginary dialogue and debate between the author and Fu Lei's undead.As we all know, Fu Lei committed suicide with his wife at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution because he could not bear the humiliation. What the author wants to ask is what is the meaning of death in such a nightmare environment.The author's mood is extremely contradictory: "Your death is heavier than death, and it has accumulated in the hearts of the living. I can no longer be pierced by the sun. I can only find you, in order to get rid of this long-lasting death. The entanglement of qi is for your long-lasting gaze. You died so darkly, so brightly." Facing the still suffering undead, he expressed confusion and even questioned, he could not understand why Mr. "Live" together, why would he have the heart to give up the art that he loves all his life? This confusion and questioning seem to point to himself. In the confusion of his own emotions, he seems to argue with the dead, but he has never been able to get a straightforward answer , The silence of the undead showed a dignity that shocked him.There is no clear clue in the work that can indicate the resolution of this confusion, but it is followed by more and more heavy grief and indignation. The author seems to have witnessed the tragedy process with his own eyes, and his description has become almost incoherent because of the inner excitement: "It is impossible. The sting of containment ensues. Decades of operation and thousands of years of accumulation are waiting to be destroyed. The ideal world is always the ideal that is passing away silently." The death engulfed not only an era, but The more ancient ideals and the brilliance of personality that accompany civilization.The author seems to have experienced death with the undead in the end, and he finally understood the meaning of death, which is the eternal tombstone set up by Mr. for his ideal and personality, and it is also a most special form of resistance and bravery.Although the author still did not give up his doubts about the value of this death, he couldn't help expressing his sincere praise for Mr.'s death: "Mr. bleak." It can be said that Chen Cun's "Death" expressed his reflection on the Cultural Revolution in a very personal way.The whole story is a surreal dream without depicting a real story, but it strongly highlights the blood and crimes of the Cultural Revolution disaster with abstracted subjective feelings, and also communicates with the victims of the Cultural Revolution through this subjective feeling. Emotions with the new generation of youth.After this catastrophe, the spiritual inheritance of the latter to the former was interrupted, and it seemed unsustainable. It was through doubts, questioning and sincere thinking from the heart that this inheritance became a potential and real possibility again. .