Chapter 73 Section 3 The Poetic Deconstruction of Daily Life: "Chicken Feathers All Over the Place"

The novella [6] was published in early 1991.In this work, Liu Zhenyun narrates the extremely ordinary and trivial situations of contemporary daily life with a very cold and slightly ironic style of writing. "A catty of tofu from Xiaolin's family has turned rancid." This is the first sentence at the beginning of the novel, and it is also the beginning of the plot of the novel.Of course, this is a seemingly insignificant and ordinary daily chore, but it is such daily chores that make up Xiaolin's entire life: quarreling with his wife, his wife's job transfer, the child's admission to nursery, queuing up to buy Chinese cabbage, pulling briquettes, and Going to and from work every day, eating and sleeping, the narration of all these trivial matters constitute the entire plot of this novel. The symbolic meaning of the title "a place of chicken feathers" is directly expressed through a dream of Xiaolin at the end of the novel: Xiaolin "dreamed that he was sleeping, covered with a pile of chicken feathers, and covered with skin scraps dropped by many people. , soft and comfortable, living days like years. I also dreamed that the dark crowds surged forward together and turned into groups of ants praying for rain.” This is obviously not the kind of symbol that pursues profundity, but is described in a very superficial sense It reveals the truth of existence as understood by the author: life is an arbitrary collection of all kinds of trivial things, which make every real person unable to break free with endless entanglement, and wear away everything in their personalities with great erosion The edges and corners make them lose their spiritual consciousness in a drowsy state.This is what the author said in a creative talk: "Life is severe, and the severity does not mean that you have to go up the mountain of swords and down into the sea of ​​fire. It is not serious. What is serious is that day after day, year after year, One year’s daily chores.” [7] Examining the spiritual development trajectory of the character Kobayashi, we can see the severity of this life and its effect on personal spiritual wear and tear.Xiaolin was originally a character written by Liu Zhenyun in "The Unit". In that novel, he gradually realized the importance of life itself due to various practical problems in life, such as not having a house after marriage, and his salary income not keeping up with the soaring prices. In order to solve the problem, he had to seek to raise the salary of the prefect in the unit, and in this way, he had to change the free temper of the former college student, and bow to the people and things under the secular relationship that he hated in the past.The final result is that "Xiaolin looks like a different person" in the work unit, and has become a well-behaved little civil servant with no personal characteristics.Basically, it continues this line of thought and continues to write about the spiritual tempering and changes Kobayashi experienced in his family life.If "Unit" is about life forcing Xiaolin to give up his personal pursuit in the public living space (that is, the workplace), and in the novel, the austerity and erosive force of this life permeate into his private living space, On a more personal level, he must completely abandon self-consciousness.

For example, someone came to Xiaolin's hometown, and he was a teacher who was kind to him and hadn't seen him in more than ten years, but Xiaolin was hindered by his family's economic conditions. This humble living situation determined that he had to give up Serve the teacher's heart.Another example is that when Xiao Lin’s child was admitted to nursery school, he only entered the ideal kindergarten with the help of his neighbors. Later, he found out that he was serving as a companion for the neighbor’s children. Let the child continue to go to that kindergarten.Another example is that Xiaolin was dragged by an old classmate who sold ducks to help collect the bills. At first he felt very embarrassed and thought it was a shameful thing, but after a few days, he made money easily, and he got used to it naturally. In the novel, he described his state of mind: "Xiao Lin felt as if he was a prostitute. He was always afraid and ashamed to pick up customers for the first time. After a long time, his attitude became generous, and it was the same for everyone." Later he wrote that Xiao Lin loved watching football games. Woke up in the middle of the night to watch the World Cup broadcast on TV, but scolded his wife and asked him to get up early tomorrow to pull briquettes. As a result, Xiao Lin didn’t fall asleep all night. Although he was very reluctant, it seemed that he finally figured it out. Watching football is much more important.After being educated and tempered by countless daily trivial matters, Xiaolin's spiritual world has been greatly improved.At the end of the novel, he wrote that he had a big discussion with his wife, saying, "In fact, things in the world are also very simple. As long as you understand one truth and act according to the truth, life is like running water, and you can live comfortably every day. Comfortable world, global colleagues This is cool and hot." The last sentence is ironic, but the reason derived from it is that no matter what you do, you can't let your own will. The most important thing in life is to eat, drink and sleep. Only material requirements affect people's desires. With every move, all the rest of the spiritual content such as the relationship between teachers and students, the feeling of dirtyness, shame and even personal hobbies can be put aside; it is all trivial things that create life, not any romantic ideals or spiritual pursuits , it is obvious that even the most private living space cannot accommodate a real "I".Kobayashi's spiritual development trajectory is the process of his spiritual world gradually being emptied and his personality gradually fading: he is under the heavy pressure of survival, and in the uninterrupted ups and downs of survival, it is difficult for him to have the opportunity to calmly obey his orders. At the same time, he is doomed to completely lose the possibility of developing himself again, or changing this living situation.Allowing one's spiritual world to become more and more mediocre and barren, the process of life means the process of losing oneself.

The whole can be regarded as a faithful record of this process.Liu Zhenyun has shown his true calm and objective realism skills: he always narrates all kinds of things Xiaolin encountered in a calm and calm tone. This narrative seems to be like real life itself, which almost completely excludes the feelings and judgments of the creative subject. Logic, which presents various trivial events in sequence.There is very little direct addition of conceptual meaning, and it weakens the conveyance of the subject's emotions to the point of passing by (for example, the word "bitterness" often appears in novels, which should be the subject's feelings, but it is always followed by "don't take It’s in my heart”, so this bitter emotional experience is intentionally let go), the narrator’s voice is covered up to the greatest extent, or narrated in a stylized tone and sentence pattern, or even a little bit of feeling is also suppressed. Confused with the character's consciousness, does not show a tendency to judge independently.At the same time, the experiential events are described with trivial details and repeated psychological revelations tirelessly, and the phenomenon itself is given a cumbersome description with sufficient texture to make people feel like they are in it.As for the content he narrates, it comes entirely from real experience. What Xiao Lin experienced was the most common events in Chinese social life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and some events that almost every ordinary family had encountered.In this way, Liu Zhenyun truly wrote a world in which everyone agrees and feels helpless in social life.

Understood in this way, it seems easy to come to the conclusion that Liu Zhenyun used the mundane narrative (or the "grassman" narrative), that is, he identified with the mundane mentality.This can be seen as the oppression of the individual spiritual world by the real situation in society, and it is also a proof of the weakness of the intellectuals' subjective consciousness and the existence of huge imperfections and uncertainties.But the problem may go a step further.Liu Zhenyun's calm narration makes readers feel all these (including the sad situation of existence, the inevitable trend of losing the main body spirit, etc.), in fact, it effectively reflects his humanistic intentions.Here we should see clearly that in addition to the calm and objective realistic style of the narrative, compared with the general new realistic novels, there is also a sharp ironic spirit faintly shining: all the things described in the text are real, but all of them are exposed as worthless, and it is this worthlessness that itself constitutes the heaviness of life, and this heaviness seems utterly irrational and absurd.The existence of this ironic spirit is actually dominated by the humanistic tradition of intellectuals contained in the text, which "comes from the despair of an intellectual with a sense of social responsibility for the principles of life on which he lives and lives"[8], fundamentally This is the great tragedy of social life.Although the narration is so low-key and bland, the mood of despair is conveyed with twists and turns, which means that this novel is difficult to maintain the position of intellectuals. This situation reveals the absurdity of this situation, which reflects the critical position of reality that is generally believed to be lacking in new realistic novels.