Chapter 30 Section 4: The excavation of the hidden spirit of the individual by private daily writing

The mainstream daily life novels in the 1980s and 1990s wrote about the life experience shared by most of us, almost without exception, in terms of narrative and story composition, they reproduced the cycle of daily life day after day and year after year. As the writer said: "I think it is not difficult for a professional writer to write works that imitate life so realistically. But it is enough for everyone to look directly at life. This is not how novels affect life. The most fundamental function. Compared with those works full of imagination, this kind of works are also inferior in artistic spirituality and artistic realm." (Liu Zhenyun) From the end of the last century to the beginning of this century, younger writers tried to jump out of this A fixed model, trying to make the more personal, even completely tearing up the "face" that ordinary people are reluctant to discard, and writing about the mediocrity, desire, emptiness, despair, and truthfulness of life in a straightforward, rough but true way. It expresses the state of human existence in modern day-to-day life.

Poet-turned-writer Zhu Wen has published such works as "Pounds, Ounces, and Meat," "Knocking the Poor All Out," and "Do People Need Saunas?" since the end of the last century, and have attracted the attention of many critics.Some have called him "one of the purest literary men of our time" because "he had an astonishing knack for touching, kneading, and striking the dullest of life in the most interesting ways. In other words, he always Can grasp the critical state of all clichés, and make the old routines present an alternative dazzling light. He is unscrupulous, without any scruples, and the carnival-like secular tendency is hard to match even today's younger generations of the literary world. And in this This kind of spiritual origin exposed in the vulgar, or a kind of anti-moral morality, I am afraid that even his seniors in the literary world have rarely achieved it. Zhu Wen approached our life in a very realistic way. It is the most emptiness and the most authentic field.” (Yan Feng) Someone also compared him with his former colleagues: “Zhu Wen never described people’s psychological process abstractly, but he described a kind of life that is very close to the ground of life. Mental activities are grasped accurately and maturely... It is different from the modernist novels of the 1980s that emphasized human spiritual activities, and even described the spiritual world abstractly out of the life situation; but it is different from the new realistic novels of the 90s that completely exclude people Spiritual activities are also different from dissolving the spirit into the trivialities of daily life. He wrote about the flight of the human spirit, but it is also a kind of low-profile (that is, entangled with the true nature of life) spiritual activities.” (Chen Sihe ) In short, Zhu Wen selected even the most bland but surprising material from his unpoetic daily life, and used his direct, sharp, and aggressive language to "narrate one after another bland and Stories that are entangled with magic, normality and absurdity, relaxation and solidity, truth and fantasy", he is different from mainstream works of daily life, and strives to "break through the surface of life phenomena, appealing to rich possibilities and inner authenticity. "Zhu Wen's "alternativeness" lies in the fact that he unabashedly expresses the true thoughts in life that make us "disgusted" but are tacit to each other. In the book, he wrote: "Happiness is never a rare thing, as long as you If you have money, you can make one for you if you don’t have anything.” “So, we must respect money. It corrupts us but is not born to corrupt us. It makes us proud but it doesn’t encourage us to be arrogant. It makes us Inferiority is to make us self-improvement, and it makes us shameless so that we can realize that we are so shameless." Because this novel wrote that "I" as a son actually encouraged his father to go whoring, and even wanted to call him in the end. The story of one's girlfriend helping to accomplish this in a devotional way is considered by some to be a "bad influence" novel.What is shocking is obviously not the "father" wanting to sleep with a woman, but the son's instigation to his father. This "ridiculous" father-son story has obviously gone beyond the moral scope of ordinary people, and has surpassed and stabbed readers' long-standing habits. However, we cannot deny that it truly expresses the uneasiness, restlessness, division and rebellion that gather in the depths of human spirit in modern life.The most prominent feature of alternative novels is nothing more than breaking the inherent narrative mode or the inherent content themes. On the spiritual level, what Zhu Wen narrates for us is an unobstructed modern mediocre life, which is ruthlessly peeled off and draped on modern people. Disguise, revealing the truest side of human nature.This kind of boldness comes from the writer's view of writing. Zhu Wen once said that he could not understand or agree with Lu Yao's creative style. "It's as thin as air," he said bluntly: "If any expert wants to teach me absolute value, I will spit in his face without hesitation. If you think I'm a psycho, Madman, megalomaniac, I have nothing to say to you, if you know me to a certain extent and want to persuade me to learn to hide, then I will listen to your words carefully, and then forget your words even more seriously. "It is this attitude of completely breaking with the traditional concept of literary creation that makes Zhu Wen's novels be scolded by others while leaving a deep impression on you.He unabashedly describes people's desires, penetrates the pen into the sensitive "moral forbidden zone", expresses it in the most direct, simplest and most effective way, and opposes the kind of secretive, hesitant, and smirk. Meek words that don't laugh at meat.He "professes himself" as a member of the mediocrity, but at the same time he spares no effort to truly present the desires and demands of the mediocrity. The helplessness, ignorance, and inability to grasp one's own destiny and other characteristics shown in the world also show traces of the blade of criticism.

What modern daily life itself provides to writers, apart from the external common life that has been almost overwritten by mainstream novelists, is the inner world of human beings, the private domain of human beings.In particular, works about people's private desires emerged in large numbers.This phenomenon is closely related to the characteristics of modern daily life that Chinese people are developing and forming.Modern daily life is the daily life corresponding to modern industrial civilization, which is fundamentally different from traditional daily life. Scholars pointed out that “in the era of agricultural civilization, daily life is still the dominant field of existence of human society, rather than The daily world is relatively small and underdeveloped; however, under the conditions of industrial civilization, the field of social activities with the content of socialized mass production, politics, economy, and social management, and the field of spiritual production with science, art, and philosophy as the main forms develop rapidly , so that the non-daily world rapidly expands and expands, while the daily world retreats into a narrow private domain, becoming the underlying structure and background world of human society.” (41) With the further deepening of China’s reform and opening up, the Chinese people’s Cultural concepts, life concepts, and values ​​continue to change. Especially for the younger generation, the purpose of life is to pursue "happiness", and the slogans about "happiness" in real life are various and colorful. The key In the past, people followed the teachings and often put themselves behind others. It is said that you can only be happy if you make others happy; now it is different. People find that if they cannot be happy, the people around them will not be happy either, let alone Individuals in everyday life are exclusive.Putting "self" first has become the core value concept of young people (at least in cities) in the new century and new era.For the new generation who are engaged in literary writing, being unconventional and showing individuality has become the source of motivation to realize individual "existence".This strong desire to be different from others is prominently manifested in the public tendency of characters' "privacy" in the field of literature.It needs to be clarified that this does not mean that the creator writes and sells his real life privacy, but that the work mainly shows the protagonist's "private life".This type of novel has similarities with the "private novels" that have emerged since the May Fourth Movement, but they are not the same in essence.The "private novels" of the May Fourth period used fixed forms such as letters and diaries to describe the inner fluctuations of small intellectuals in the face of cultural transformation and huge external pressure from historical changes. The spiritual conflict between the era and the little people shows the protagonist's mental journey of anti-feudalism and pursuit of individual liberation.However, the novels describing "private life" from the end of the last century to the beginning of this century express the most "avant-garde" life concept and lifestyle in China at present, especially the vigorous description of physical desires, which is a gentle and elegant literary aesthetic in China. Not only that, the work conveys that the individual can appreciate the pleasure of a completely different life in the anti-traditional moral behavior and words, and can realize a certain self-appreciation and intoxication. It is a challenge to the traditional values ​​of life. "The body is the criterion of everything" (Nietzsche's words) has become the criterion of young writers' creation, and lustful writing is popular for a while.Wei Hui, Mian Mian, and even Mu Zimei, who was making a fuss on the Internet, couldn't go beyond this limit.As a non-daily level literary creation, when dealing with daily life topics, it is often impossible to give up the spiritual care of the characters, so that the author's deep spiritual care for the creative self can still be seen in the works, except for those who are not big In addition to the personal life experience that most people have, it is precisely because of the meaning of writing itself that the creators feel and realize their own uniqueness. Wei Hui said in "I am in love with the 'self' in the novel. ', because in the novel I am smarter than in real life and can see through everything in the world. The connotation of love, lust, hatred, and star shift. And some seeds of dreams are quietly buried between the lines, waiting for the sun to shine before they can germinate, alchemy Art-like work means removing the waste and reserving the essence, smelting the negative and empty reality into essential and meaningful art, and such art can also be smelted into a super commodity that can be sold to anyone who is willing to have fun in a Shanghai garden, In the backlight of the end of the century, the younger generation with beautiful faces, open bodies, and avant-garde thinking." It is not difficult for us to see that this sensitive and delicate urban woman shows an unprecedented narcissistic mentality in the text that flaunts her personality. And this kind of narcissism or dissatisfaction with the surroundings also reflects the spiritual loneliness of modern people. "I am so impetuous, a restless heart is always floating around, never resting for a moment, so tired, so useless, sometimes even writing can't give me a sense of security and satisfaction, there is nothing but sitting Flying around in planes, only insomnia at night, music, alcohol, sex can't save me, lying in the center of darkness like a living dead just can't sleep, I think God will let me marry a kind blind man, because I All I see is darkness." (42) This kind of loneliness and isolation, weakness and powerlessness cannot be solved by relying on material things, and sex and body satisfaction are only temporary anesthesia, and the "privacy" space is the last piece of the individual to compete with the world The position is also becoming more and more cramped and limited.The writer finally had to admit: "Only writing can distinguish me from other mediocre and annoying people, make me different, and let me rise from the ashes of Bohemian roses." (43) About " The topic of "Desired Writing" is discussed in a special chapter in this book, so I won't repeat it here.

Generally speaking, from the mid-1980s to the beginning of this century, writers' attention to daily life has changed over time, resulting in different positions and attitudes. From lamenting with tears to dancing with joy, life once again relies on literature to We showed its complexity and magic.Most of the mainstream writers take the attitude of omniscient and omnipotent narrators who detach themselves from the incident, observe and comment on the daily trivial matters that they are familiar with, and their texts have undoubtedly established a classic daily life text mode for contemporary readers. This model is accepted by most readers because they live in it.Through such works, the writer will lead the readers to understand and think about our common way of life and existence.Although the work itself avoids preaching, it still implies a critique of reality.The narrative attitude of a few alternative writers is obviously different. "I" is always the first protagonist in the text, and the inner confession of the first person is more delicate and full of emotion. As the objectification of the text of the self, the self-narrative nature of the story is greatly strengthened. , and the self-contained tone puts whether readers can accept it or not. The first thing is that "I" wants to express it in this way. As for what the readers think after reading it, it has little to do with the creator.The former still maintains the sense of responsibility in the literary tradition, while the latter strongly resists the social function of literature and strives to turn it into a projection of self and personality.Perhaps, this also reflects from one aspect that literature will usher in a more free and relaxed environment in the new century.

All literary works related to daily life reflect the conflict between the two modern humanistic values, one must live as an ordinary person in a down-to-earth manner, or change the status quo, not only to live, but also to find ways to transcend the mediocre life.As for whether success can be surpassed, it depends on the good fortune that life brings to the individual.It is difficult for us to judge the spiritual level of contemporary daily life works based on traditional life values, because we are in it, and any compromise is always accompanied by our growth.It cannot be denied that people's default attitude and compliance with the prescribed environment can be interpreted as a necessary means of survival on the one hand; but on the other hand, the individual's initiative to criticize and resist reality decreases accordingly.Although individual contemporary works also show a seemingly strengthened "self-awareness", careful exploration reveals that the personality traits displayed by this "self" are still passive development under the survival skills required by the daily world .These works warn us from another angle that we should calm down and seriously think about why people have a "such" daily life, whether there is any unreasonable situation in "such" daily life, and how we can change the unreasonableness in it, instead of Bury all the disappointment and helplessness in life under the banner of "to live".