Chapter 72 Section 2 Classic Text of Contemporary Survival Consciousness: "Landscape"

Fang Fang's novella "Landscape"[5] and Chi Li's novella "Landscape"[5] were both published in 1987. They are two pioneering works of new realistic novels. An astonishing spirit of exploration.This novel is about the experience of a poor family in the bottom society of Wuhan over the past few decades: the father is a dock worker with a rough and fierce personality, and the mother is very coquettish and vulgar. Of the ten children, except for the youngest who died shortly after birth, the other nine grew up like wild plants in the wild.The main line of the plot is the story of the parents and the seventh brother, which in turn links up the experiences of the other eight children, such as the eldest brother having a relationship with the neighbor's wife, and the second brother longing to get rid of the rough family life, but in the end he paid the price with his life , and the third brother's hatred of women, the dull and self-sufficient marriage between the fourth dumb brother and a blind girl, the desperate struggle of the fifth and sixth brothers in the business field, and the ordinary or wild family life of the two sisters, Daxiang and Xiaoxiang; As for the story of Seventh Brother, it is written in more detail: he has never received the slightest family warmth since he was a child, was abused and beaten wantonly by his father and brothers and sisters, and lived like a wild dog. He hated his family and left home to go to the countryside, and was recommended to go to university in Beijing completely by accident. From then on, he began to seize every opportunity to change his destiny, and finally embarked on an official career smoothly, becoming a member of this poor family. The first "big man" in the novel. The narration of each story in the novel focuses on the depiction of the living scene, and all the characters are tightly bound by their living conditions. Ledu is born from the friction and conflict between their most basic desire for survival and their circumstances.

The narrator of this novel is set as a dead person, that is, the young son who died young.Before the main text of the novel, Baudelaire’s poem is quoted as the inscription “Behind the vast background of existence, in the darkest part of the abyss, I clearly see those strange worlds”. This witty arrangement makes the living landscape in the work look unusually indifferent and cruel.The conclusion drawn from the observation of the deceased is that it is extremely difficult and miserable to live in this world: "I watched my brothers and sisters live and grow in peace. Struggling in distress and fighting among each other.  … I really shudder at their world." This existence is full of worthless destruction: a worker who died in a weapon fight was sunk to the bottom of a river, a cute girl was suddenly run over by a train, a couple in despair during the "Cultural Revolution" He committed suicide by drowning himself in the water, and the cargo box on the truck fell for no reason, smashing people's brains everywhere; the living situation was too cramped: all eleven people were crowded in a dirty and humble room with only thirteen square meters. Living in a house with slab walls, Seventh Brother could only sleep under the dark and wet bed since he was a child. Hunger and poverty plagued them, and their hearts were squeezed to survive; An extremely barbaric, cruel and inhumane scene: while the father took pleasure in beating his own children for no reason, the mother sat aside as if nothing had happened and cut off the skin of her feet; All the cheap life force is consumed in the catharsis of natural instincts.There is no trace of civilization and reason in this state of existence.The perspective of the dead more or less produces a narrative effect of "defamiliarization", which makes "Landscape" restore the naked truth of existence for us in an extremely strengthened way, because this restoration discards the previous ideological content occlusion, which makes the whole narrative full of astonishing novelty and realistic feeling.

Obviously, all the pen and ink in "Landscape" are used to highlight the meaning of existence itself.The novel makes the meaning of existence unambiguously revealed by describing the way characters respond to their living situation.Except for the second brother and the seventh brother, the rest of the family members are all tired of coping with the heavy pressure of the status quo. They naturally accepted the arrangement of fate and only realized their humble desires in the established situation.There are no ideals in their lives, and survival itself is their entire world.But the second elder brother is an exception in the family. Because he met the young girl Yang Lang's family, he knew that there is another beautiful and civilized way of life, so he planted the ideal of pursuing civilization and beauty in his heart.The second brother became a sincere idealist, but in fact that kind of civilization also has a very cruel and ruthless side in survival, and his passionate ideal was finally shattered, so that he could no longer find a reason to live , his suicide symbolizes the failure of idealism in real living situations.Different from the second brother, although the seventh brother also has the ideal of changing his own destiny, this ideal is born from the root of evil in existence. His survival philosophy is: do things that can change your destiny, don't choose the means and way.In Qi Ge’s mind, there is no room for goodness and beauty, or civilization and rationality. All his human principles have only one basis, which is survival itself: “Life is like leaves, which come and go in a hurry. The sprouts in spring are for the fall in autumn Different roads lead to the same goal, so why care about whether you rob others of nutrition and make yourself fat and green?" Seventh Brother can be said to have consciously realized the meaning of survival, so he has become more and more active Survivalist, And his change of fate from humbleness to wealth seems to have verified the meaning of this survival philosophy: in the survival situation, there is no possibility of transcendence at all.

Fang Fang did not show any obvious tendency to criticize concepts in this novel, whether it is the above-mentioned cold living scene or the Seventh Brother's survivalism, which undoubtedly reveals a certain kind of inconsistency in contemporary literature. It is still fresh creation information. "Landscape" uses purely objective narration to record various truths in ordinary life and reveal the meaning of existence itself. Here, the conceptual moral standards and emotional identification in the past are obviously abandoned, and the concept of existence, or It is said that a kind of folk value orientation really stands out. (In fact, only on the folk scale with survival as the core, the understanding of Qige-style survivalism and the living conditions of shantytowns is really possible and has real meaning).In a certain sense, "Landscape" opened up a new space for writing, that is, the living world of urban folk at the bottom of society.This kind of pioneering writing changed our understanding of reality, and correspondingly led to the adjustment of the relationship between the subject and reality.According to folk standards, intellectuals should first reflect on the reality of subject consciousness. Facing the severity of existence itself, any ideology that transcends it will often show its emptiness and weakness. Based on this understanding, promote People must return to a more fundamental reality-seeking.In this regard, the cultural significance of "Landscape" is precisely to restore our due vigilance and thinking about existence itself.

"Landscape" is the work closest to naturalism among the new realistic novels.Describing ordinary life and portraying the vulgar, ugly, brutal and cruel living scenes are actually the basic characteristics of Zola's naturalistic literature. "Landscape" has a strong Zola flavor in these aspects.Based on this formal coincidence, we may be able to explore the restoration of reality in new realistic novels on a deeper artistic level, that is, Zola-style naturalism, which provides a new aesthetic experience for contemporary Chinese literature .Judging from the response and wide recognition aroused by this aesthetic experience in people's hearts, "Landscape" has successfully added a new quality to the art of fiction, thus enriching the artistic form of contemporary Chinese literature.