Chapter 67 Section 1 The Cultural Background and Cultural Significance of Pioneer Novels

The source of the avant-garde spirit in contemporary Chinese literature can be traced back to the exploration of poetry and novels by the younger generation during the Cultural Revolution, but it was not until the mid-1980s that radical experiments in literature formed a strong lineup and momentum.The so-called avant-garde spirit means exploring the possibility of existence and the possibility of art related to it with an avant-garde attitude. It forms a strong impact on the common name of literature with an attitude that does not avoid extremes. The rise of Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Can Xue and others in the mid-1980s was a major event in the history of avant-garde novels. In a sense, it can even be regarded as the real beginning of avant-garde novels.This beginning is carried out simultaneously on three levels: narrative revolution, language experiment and living state.Ma Yuan is a representative figure of the narrative revolution, and for this reason he is called a "formalist" by some critics. The Temptation of , "No Sailboat on the West Sea", "Fiction", "Walls Painted with Weird Patterns" and other works.In these novels, the use of meta-narrative techniques2 further confuses the boundary between reality and fiction after breaking the novel's "illusion of plausibility"3; Referencing further strengthens this effect; setting up many stories with beginnings and endings and connecting them with fragmentary plot structure seems to imply the fragmentation of experience and the unknowability of reality, resulting in a narrative effect that seems real and unreal; as A narrative revolutionist, Ma Yuan maintains his hobby and exploration of mystery, which is serious but inattentive—these explorations often have no beginning and no end, which further strengthens this unknowability and uncertainty... These narrative explorations of Ma Yuan form the The famous "Ma Yuan's Narrative Trap" 4 , and dispelled the illusion of reality caused by the familiar realism techniques in an eye-catching way, has become the object of imitation for future writers and the starting point for novel experiments.Compared with Ma Yuan, Mo Yan's achievements are multifaceted. His novels form a personalized world of mythology and language, and because of his unique way of feeling, he makes a striking twist and violation of modern Chinese. , forming a unique personal style.This style of writing is full of subjectivity and sensibility, and in a certain sense it is an attempt to introduce poetic language into the novel.This is especially evident in his novellas such as "Building the Road", ,,, and other novels.Can Xue's "The Cabin on the Mountain" and other novels highlight the oppression of the external world on people by the accumulation of ugly images, as well as the ugliness and hopelessness of people themselves, and raise a personal feeling to an allegory of people's living conditions. levels.Mo Yan and Can Xue showed their avant-garde in terms of form when seeking to express their feelings, which is different from Ma Yuan's formalism innovation, but they do basically contain the basic aspects of the later avant-garde novels bud.

Later than them, You Gefei, Sun Ganlu, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Hong Feng, Beicun and others were also regarded as avant-garde novelists.We focus on introducing Ge Fei, Sun Ganlu and Yu Hua, who represent the exploration and development of pioneer novels in the above three aspects.Ge Fei's novels are also committed to the construction of narrative mazes, but his method is different from Ma Yuan's.Ma Yuan used some juxtaposed story blocks to build some novels that are close to the "Eight Diagrams", and at each intersection he added some indicators that lead people astray; A coiled labyrinth is sequentially constructed—in which there are windings, collisions, and conscious dispersion and short-circuiting.For example, in "Brown Birds", the three encounters between "I" and the woman "chess" seem like a dream. It seems that several different "chess" exist in a synchronic world, but at the diachronic level of the novel , each "chess" plays a role in deconstructing the previous "chess".This marks Ge Fei's doubts about reality, as he said: "Reality is abstract, transcendental, and therefore empty." 5 So he focuses on describing the separation of people and things from each other, "in such a 'dislocation' In the typical scene, the characters seem to have become faint ghosts, and the events they experience are more illusory than the rumors. This is how people have never been confirmed and can never get out of the trap of "similarity" In a hypothetical state." 6 "Qinghuang" can be said to be an allegory of the world image in this situation, what exactly does "Qinghuang" refer to here?Different records and different people have a variety of very different narratives and interpretations, and the narrator can't judge who is right and who is wrong. The uncertainty of this narrative and judgment makes the world of the novel blurred.Another novel "The Lost Boat" narrates that due to an accidental incident, the soldier Xiao died and led to a change in the war situation. Trivial and irrelevant things lead to unexpected endings, thus showing the disordered state of history and reality .Avant-garde novelists attach great importance to the language of novels, but Sun Ganlu's "Letter from the Messenger", "Interviewing Dreamland", "Ask a Woman to Guess the Riddle", and "I Am a Juvenile Wine Jar" are the most extreme in terms of language experiments. .These novels of Sun Ganlu completely cut off the relationship between fiction and reality, and focus on the fiction of illusions and illusions, but these illusions and illusions are just some trivial trivial and clues, which cannot form a coherent fictional world.He focuses on the poetic exploration of making the language of the novel poetic. Words are cut off from the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and are matched in an unexpected way, making the signifier self-referential and mutual-referential.For example, in "Letter from the Messenger", "letter is a pointer of an anxious clock", "letter is the lowered eyelids of the whispering city", "letter is a lonely voyage with an unknown anchorage", etc. There are dozens of poetic and dreamy stories. For the narration of "letter", under each narration, a passage from the letter sent by the courier is excerpted. These passages are equally gorgeous and poetic without any realistic or symbolic meaning.Sun Ganlu’s novel language experiments are actually the closest to surrealist poetry and painting. His novels are ambiguous dreams and poems composed of these linguistic and visual phantoms. Compared with Mo Yan’s focus on expressing his own subjective The language exploration of the world has gone a step further: in Mo Yan, language still has subjective, realistic, and humanistic meanings, while Sun Ganlu has emptied these meanings and left only pure words.Compared with the above two, Yu Hua developed Can Xue's exploration of human existence.His novels describe death, blood and violence in a calm style, and on this basis reveal the cruelty of human nature and the absurdity of existence.In works such as "April 3rd Incident", "Mistakes by the River", and "Doomed Doom", he described the carnage between people in detail, such as "It seems to be talking about the cause and fate of a thing, Although people are hurting and killing each other, the truth of life is so cruel, but human beings still multiply inexplicably." 8 When the narrators in his early novels showed this kind of indifference and cruelty, due to the deliberate stern style This makes the author's attitude seem ambiguous. In fact, Yu Hua's seemingly detached and calm narrative style comes from a tense relationship between the author and reality. Keep your distance on one side.Regardless of good or evil, he must maintain a kind of detachment after understanding, which will generate a kind of compassion, which also led to his style change after entering the 1990s: these novels describe the blood and tears of life at the bottom. Still maintained a calm brushwork, but it is more obvious that the element of compassion has been added.In addition to the above three writers, Beicun's novels such as "The River of Baptism" and "Ma Zhuo's Love" are also worthy of examining the living conditions of human beings without the one-dimensional divinity from the perspective of theological existence. Pay attention to.

The so-called "going forward" pioneer writers can only be an ideal, at least in China, and very few writers can maintain an attitude of exploration all the time.By the early 1990s, writers who were regarded as avant-garde at the beginning reduced their exploration efforts and adopted a narrative style that was more acceptable to ordinary readers, and some even combined with commercial culture, which marked the mid-1980s. The end of the avant-garde literary trend since then.Of course, we should believe that the exploration of literature will not stop because of this.When avant-garde literature has passed as a trend of thought, if we look back at the emergence of avant-garde literature in the mid-1980s, we will find that this was not a very abrupt thing in the cultural background at that time.After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese cultural circles introduced a considerable number of modernist and postmodernist literary works, accompanied by modern Western philosophy, art and social thoughts.In the field of literature, psychoanalytic novels, stream of consciousness, magic realism, neo-fiction, and theoretical formalism, narratology, structuralism, and existentialism have become hot spots of concern and debate.Under such circumstances, Chinese writers consciously transplanted the artistic techniques and literary concepts in Western literature since modernism in their creations in the early 1980s.In fact, since the 1980s, neither the mainstream ideology nor the new Enlightenment trend of thought in intellectual circles can form a "common name" covering the whole situation, leaving a little space for writers to explore in thought and art—although this The space was not very large at the beginning, but it was enough to make it possible for Chinese writers to accept modern Western literary concepts and use them to stimulate their own exploration.Avant-garde literature inherently bears traces of the influence of Western literature, such as Ma Yuan, Ge Fei, and Sun Ganlu all acknowledge the influence of Borges.Acknowledging the existence of influence does not mean denying the efforts of pioneer writers, such as Ma Yuan, Ge Fei and others are different from Borges' obsession with the pure fantasy world, bringing a traditional oriental focus on "phenomenon" rather than Emphasis on the difference between "truth" and "illusion" and the color of both real and fantasy (Ma Yuan may also be influenced by Tibetan religious culture); Sun Ganlu's poetic exploration is also based on and focuses on the excavation of the poetic function of modern Chinese, etc. Wait.Taken together, the advancement of avant-garde novels at the three levels of narrative revolution, language experimentation, and survival exploration has a great influence on future literary creation, which should not be underestimated.

On the other hand, we can regard avant-garde literature as an opportunity for the transformation of the literary state in the 1980s to the literary state in the 1990s. Its appearance has changed the existing literary landscape and direction.In the first half of the 1980s, although the Enlightenment and humanitarian thoughts in the cultural circle could not form the absolute and powerful discourses of the May Fourth Movement, they had a tendency to rise to a "quasi-common name".The emergence of avant-garde literature, to some extent, is a suspicion of enlightenment and human nature, breaking the traditional literary norms and making extremely personal writing possible.Take Ma Yuan's "narrative revolution" as an example. The labels of formalism and technocracy that some critics have attached to him are actually inappropriate, because art forms can never be just forms. The destruction of the true illusion and the subsequent subjectivity, fragmentation and uncertainty of experience break the possibility of reintegrating individual experience in any kind of grand narrative, which makes the reality full of individuality and subjectivity stand out .The avant-garde novel is just such an effort to break the unified world image and literary image.Through this approach, literature entered the anonymous state of individual writing and individual narrative in the 1990s.