Chapter 34 Section 3 Family novels broaden the horizons of diverse artistic pursuits

Contemporary family literature, like many other works in the contemporary literary world, has undergone great changes in artistic creation methods.If we make a macroscopic examination of this, we can find that its basic clues are pure realism, the combination of realism and modernism, and the mutual fusion of various artistic techniques.As far as specific rhetorical methods are concerned, narration, discussion, lyricism, description, symbolism, exaggeration, personification, synaesthesia and other techniques have shown their respective roles, making family writing a great success in many aspects.Let's start from the linear time and briefly sort out the creation methods of contemporary family novels.

As mentioned earlier, the family literature of the "Seventeen Years Period" mainly includes "Red Flag Spectrum", "Three Family Alley", "The History of Entrepreneurship" and so on.They were produced shortly after the founding of New China, and retain the character of the literary works of the entire "seventeen years period".The style of these works can be summarized as high-pitched tone, passionate narrative, clear and distinct class consciousness, and bold and passionate political passion.The main trend of literature and art in this era is dominated by the obvious realism creation method.Because throughout the "seventeen years", the Chinese literary world advocated and respected the creative principle of "socialist realism", and people's conscious pursuit when creating texts is to truly reflect social reality and reveal the essence of social and historical development and inevitability, carefully portraying typical characters, striving for accuracy and credibility of details, etc.Contemporary family novels in this literary ecological environment are certainly no exception. Whether they establish the theme of the work or create characters with the characteristics of the times, they do not leave the big frame of realism, and use this method to depict the magnificent Moreover, these works also added many new characters with distinctive personalities and strong artistic appeal to the gallery of contemporary literary figures.This is the victory of the traditional realism creation method, and it is the brilliance that the contemporary literary world once had.On the whole, the realism features of the "Seventeen Years Period" family novels are as follows:

First of all, it truly reflects the development process and development trend of social history.As we all know, realism requires writers to take real social existence as the object of reflection, vividly and accurately describe rich historical culture and living phenomena, reveal the essence of social life vividly and concretely, and reveal the internal laws and principles of historical development. In this way, it reflects the turbulent changes of the times, shows the historical destiny, mentality and spiritual outlook of the characters, and shapes the national character.This point is clearly reflected in contemporary family novels.

"Red Flag Spectrum" reflects the difficulties and twists and turns of the Chinese people's revolutionary struggle with an epic writing pursuit, shows the party's promotion of peasants' revolutionary awareness and promotion of peasants' spirit of struggle, and reveals the theme of "class struggle". A history of the growth of Chinese farmers.It shows the true scene of the modern Chinese revolution with fine brushwork and vivid images, presents the twists and turns and difficulties, bloodshed and sacrifice of the revolutionary struggle, and shows the history of the people's armed forces led by the Communist Party will definitely overthrow the Kuomintang regime with fearless heroic spirit The inevitable, the shock is huge. "Three Houses Alley" is set in Guangzhou, the birthplace of the first civil revolutionary war. It shows the repeated contests between revolutionary forces and counter-revolutionary forces in urban China in the 1920s and the changes in the power of various classes. The historical process of revolutionary struggles such as the tragedy and the Guangzhou Uprising.Through the development and evolution of the three families of Zhou, Chen, and He under the historical background at that time, the work meticulously depicts the true nature of individuals who are strong and brave, fragile, hesitant, shaken, and lingering in the fierce revolutionary struggle. conditions, so that people can deeply feel the complicated, subtle, complex, and cruel social life scenes during the Great Revolution, as well as the mental outlook and psychological state of people from different classes.It can be said that this work is closely related to the objective reality of the Chinese revolution in terms of material selection, structure, characters, theme disclosure, and scene description. The final direction and pursuit of the characters in it all reflect a historical necessity.

"The History of Entrepreneurship" is a family novel based on the real land reform process.It shows the twists and turns and difficulties of Chinese farmers in the process of transforming from individual private ownership to collective public ownership with extremely detailed brushstrokes, and truly shows the vicissitudes of the early days of agricultural socialism in our country, as well as the spiritual changes and struggles of various characters in this torrent. psychological condition.As the author Liu Qing himself said when talking about the theme of the work, "This novel has no other theme, but one, the process, method and psychology of farmers abandoning private ownership and accepting public ownership." [9] This is also an epic The work of nature also shows the firm confidence, tenacious will and passion of the new generation of farmers represented by Liang Shengbao to obey the party's call and lead the farmers to take the socialist road through complex and delicate plots and vivid and sensible images. Strong sense of the times and artistic generalization.At the same time, the road represented by Liang Shengbao was also the road that the peasants had to choose under the historical conditions at that time, so everything written in the works reflects a historical necessity.In short, these three family novels of the "seventeen years period" faithfully "reproduce" history to a certain extent, and can make readers feel the real atmosphere and inner requirements of the times. The influence of ideology on literary creation embodies the essential connotation of the creative method of socialist realism, that is, although the artistic object is different from the real world, in order to attract readers and conquer society in a true and reasonable form, it must be derived from the real world. The life of the art world is sublimated from the real laws.Only in this way can literary works unify realistic truth and artistic truth, and dedicate to readers fine works of art with profound themes, reasonable structure, vivid characters, and full of characteristics of the times.

Secondly, many typical characters in typical environments are created.The typical requirement comes from Engels' classic discussion about realism: "In my opinion, realism means, in addition to the truth of details, but also the true reproduction of typical characters in a typical environment." [10] Follow With this creative theme, many writers in the "Seventeen Years Period" took creating typical models as their own responsibility, and presented a large number of works centered on typical characters, revealing themes, and reflecting social life.Such as "Red Rock", "Lin Haixueyuan", "Red Sun", "Song of Youth", "Wild Fire Spring Wind Fighting Ancient City" and so on.As the contemporary family novels of the "seventeen years period" at the same level of artistic conception, this creative method is used without exception to create many vivid and typical characters, which perfectly present the basic characteristics of realism. The typical character in "Red Flag Spectrum" is Zhu Laozhong. All his behaviors reflect the inner character of the peasants at that time.For example, hate evil like hatred, upright and righteous, bold and righteous, distinguish between love and hate, brave and tenacious, pursue progress, etc.Zhu Laozhong was a representative of thousands of peasants in China at that time. His growth experience reflected the growth process of many Chinese peasants. They were the backbone of the Chinese revolution and the fundamental guarantee for the victory of the Chinese revolution.However, Zhu Laozhong has his own unique experience and personality. The generation of his revolutionary passion and revolutionary will is not only caused by his own living environment and class status, but also has the blood feud of his father's generation.He is a real revolutionary, a successful figure with full flesh and blood and distinctive personality. A Bing in "Three Houses Alley" is also typical.He grew up in a family that relied on manual labor for survival. He once worked as a blacksmith, shoemaker, and apprentice in a pharmacy. And other excellent quality.He bravely participated in the anti-imperialist revolution, supported the Northern Expedition, and fought bloody battles in the Guangzhou Uprising, which showed the fighting character of a revolutionary. However, he also had the weaknesses of intellectuals, such as pessimism and despair when encountering difficulties. , Blind credulity, confusion and anxiety.His complex character traits of "two internal factors developing in the struggle of contradictions" [11] make him more intimate and credible.He allows us to see the pain and hardship experienced by intellectuals including Lin Daojing in the melting pot of revolution, reflecting the twists and turns and complexity of the Chinese revolution, which is very in line with the deep meaning of "realism" required by the realistic creative method. The old man Liang San in "The History of Entrepreneurship" is also a typical character. His life pursuit and life aspirations reflect the mentality and thoughts of many unenlightened farmers in the early days of liberation. The protagonist gets rich and gets rid of the misery that the old society brought to his family; he doesn't want to care about other people's affairs, for fear of causing trouble for himself;However, in the face of convincing facts, he finally understood his son's approach, and understood the significance of taking the road of cooperation from the depths of his mind. He became his son's spiritual support, and embarked on true socialism with other farmers the way.The value of Liang San’s literary history lies in the fact that he made people feel the hardships and difficulties of the socialist transformation in the countryside at that time, the difficulty and length of improving the peasant spirit, and the huge price that every step forward in history needs to pay.In addition, these family novels also show the typical environment in which typical characters are born with rich style of the times, convey a very distinct ideological tendency, and show the inherent requirements of realistic creative methods from many aspects.

However, the use of this purely realistic method also exposed the creation of family novels at that time in many ways such as simplification, patternization, ideology, dual oppositions of peasants-landlords, workers-capitalists, etc. Defects, while expressing the historical rationality and creative consciousness at that time, affected the richness and complexity of literary characters, and at the same time affected the true value of literature.In short, the family novels of the "Seventeen Years Period" represented the "realism" creation method and internal value system with real scenes of modern Chinese revolutionary history and some typical characters, and accumulated valuable experience for the writing of contemporary family literature. Experience has also left many questions worth thinking about.

In the 1980s, earth-shaking changes took place in the Chinese contemporary literary world.During this period, a large number of western literary theories and western modernist works were translated and introduced to China, which provided people with a lot of artistic space for reference. To fully satisfy the rich and complex inner feelings of modern people, literature needs to learn from different aesthetic concepts and writing skills, abandon appearances, and go straight to the essence.As a result, modern novels represented by "stream of consciousness", "absurdism", "black humor", "new sensoryism" and "magic realism" appeared in the contemporary literary world.In contemporary literature, many theoretical issues related to the ontology of literature have once again entered people's field of vision and received new attention and thinking, such as the subject nature of literature, the ontology, subjectivity, and value of literature, and the relationship between realistic literature and modern literature. The relationship between doctrine literature and so on.Through extensive debates and practices, people have deepened their understanding and understanding of these issues, clarified many once confused ideas, broke the shackles of political ideology on literature, and brought literature itself back to the road opened by the "May Fourth Movement" , returning to the track of focusing on society, people's living conditions and inner world, with various techniques and rich themes, thus truly realizing the flourishing of literature and the contention of a hundred schools of thought.The emancipation of ideology led to bold innovations in artistic techniques. For a time, various creative methods competed for excellence and took the lead, bringing unprecedented vitality to the contemporary literary world.Affected by these major literary thoughts and artistic techniques, contemporary family novels also presented a very different look from the past in the 1980s, creating excellent texts with novel ideological connotations, complex characters, and very different artistic features . "Red Sorghum" is one of the representative works.It successfully integrates realism with modernist creative methods characterized by stream of consciousness, symbolism, and synaesthesia, as well as rhetorical techniques such as exaggeration and anthropomorphism. An excellent contemporary family novel with "defamiliarization" effect, which is rich and peculiar, with magnificent and gorgeous pictures, and strange and changeable language.Through the red sorghum swaying everywhere, we see the crystal clear and fragrant wine, the peculiar love between "my grandpa" and "my grandma" who lived in Gaomi Township, Shandong Province, and the love born in the folk world based on secular feelings. The leading attitude towards life shows their tenacious sense of life, their strong love for soil from the heart, and their bloody sacrifices to defend their hometown.They are a free and unrestrained group. Their existence has confirmed the long-lasting vitality of the Chinese nation, the innate fighting spirit of the Chinese nation, and the national character that has supported the Chinese nation to this day.It can be said with certainty that the rich and varied themes presented in "Red Sorghum" are supported by varied artistic techniques. These artistic techniques complement the rich themes of the work, giving the text its unique artistic charm. It made contemporary family novels go out of the single style of realism and showed dazzling brilliance in the 1980s.

Next, we make a brief analysis of the artistic techniques presented in "Red Sorghum".At the beginning of the text, the author endows the red sorghum with human character and feelings: "In the late autumn of August, the boundless red sorghum is full of blood, the sorghum is mysterious and brilliant, the sorghum is sad and pleasant, and the sorghum love is stirring." With the unfolding of the storyline, the author endows the inanimate matter with human feeling and mood time and time again: "At that time, the big stone bridge had not yet been built, and the small wooden bridge was exhausted by thousands of feet, trampled by mules and horseshoes for thousands of times. The smell of green shoots from crushed sorghum is soaked in the night rain and becomes more intense in the morning. The sorghum in the field is crying bitterly." "On both sides of the road, the plate-like sorghum is solid and stagnant, connected as one, hugging Crowded and looking at each other, the gray-green sorghum ears are sleepy, one ear is indistinguishable from the other, the sorghum is endless, like a gurgling river.” “The wind is strong and the sorghum pushes forward and back, Wave after wave, the sorghum on the side of the road stretched its head into the middle of the road, bowing down to pay respects to my grandma." "Grandma stared at the red sorghum, and in her hazy eyes, the sorghum were strange, magnificent, and strangely shaped. They moaned Writhing, twisting, howling, entangled, sometimes like devils, sometimes like relatives, they coiled into a snake-like ball in grandma's eyes, and stretched out again, grandma couldn't tell their brilliance They are red, red, green, white, white, black, blue, green, blue, green, they are laughing, they are crying, and the tears they cry are like raindrops on the desolate beach in grandma's heart." "After my grandma threw the bowl, Cry loudly, the cry is full, the emotion is mellow, the water is abundant, the house can't hold it, overflows to the outside of the house, flies to the field, and harmonizes with the bright sound of the fertilized sorghum in late summer." "Look at grandma." Seeing the little donkey staring at him, in the clear eyes of the donkey, the brilliance of intelligence, understanding and understanding of human beings emerged." "Father went into the sorghum field, and several men holding torches followed him. The dense sorghum stalks touched the torches and splashed everywhere The oil, those half-dried sorghum leaves, were oiled and burned aggrievedly. The sorghums hung their heavy heads above the fire, and wept hoarsely." "When the devil retreated, he set fire to all the firewood in the village. The house was on fire, which lasted for a long time and burned half the sky white. The moon that night was originally rich and blood-red, but due to the war, it became pale and thin, like paper-cuts with fading colors. Hanging desolately in the sky." When a Japanese soldier entered the sorghum field, the sorghum's behavior was: "During the violent exercise, the sorghum tassels mercilessly whipped him, rubbed him, tickled him, and even Responding to him disgustingly." "The sorghums in trouble stood silent in the moonlight, and occasionally some sorghum rice fell on the black soil, like the crystal tears of the sorghums." Here, the author Mo Yan is not so much Describing sorghum is more like expressing one's own subjective feelings.These feelings are either realistic and accurate, or illusory and ethereal, which can give people a strange feeling.In addition to sorghum, the author has also anthropomorphized animals such as dogs and fish many times, creating vivid artistic effects. All this makes readers feel the obvious changes in contemporary family novels from content to technique, and feel the touch of realism. Openness, inclusiveness and expansibility also feel the richness and maturity of the creative methods of contemporary Chinese literature.

Although "Ancient Ship" is also a long-form creation based on realism, it also shows the charm of symbolism and personification to a certain extent, such as the pine and cypress in the flames when the old temple is on fire; Sui Yingzhi vomited blood and died on a jujube horse; when the ancient ship was unearthed, the blood was so strong that wild geese hovered in the air; Zhang Wang could predict that there was a long worm in the stomach of the fourth grandfather; the fourth grandfather could not predict his own fate ; the sound of the lame flute can seduce people's soul; Xiaokui's child will never grow up; the "Cultural Revolution" seal is mysteriously lost;These plot descriptions, which make people feel astonished and bewildered, can no longer be summarized and explained by traditional realism or romanticism creation methods, and they clearly present the artistic traces of modernism.In short, the contemporary family novels in the 1980s have undergone great changes from connotation to artistic techniques compared with the "seventeen years period". , It also shows the inherent relationship between literature and society, life and other ecological environment factors.

In the 1990s, the creation of family novels achieved fruitful results.Whether it is the development of themes, the excavation of themes, the shaping of characters, the depiction of pictures, the presentation of styles, or the highlighting of the writer's gender consciousness, they are all very different from those in the 1980s.Among them, what can best demonstrate his creative achievements is the artistic technique that supports and expresses the connotation of the theme.Of course, from a macro perspective, the main feature of family novels in the 1990s is still realism, but the realism at this time already has a distinctive feature of the times, that is, it is fully integrated with other artistic techniques to show more colorful life content, reveal more complex themes.This change made the family novels in the 1990s present multiple narrative positions, multi-dimensional value orientations, multi-dimensional artistic perspectives, multiple human content, colorful thematic connotations, and diverse cultural characteristics, and finally made contemporary family novels Become a beautiful landscape in the garden of contemporary literature. There’s a reason for the variety in the ways family novels were written in the 90s. The first is the long-term accumulation of literary experience.From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, contemporary literature has experienced the evolution of many literary trends such as "scars", "reflection", "reform", "root seeking", "pioneering" and "realism". In addition to being in-depth and rational, its creative methods have also been continuously matured and perfected in successive literary trends. It can be said that after the literary trend of thought has changed from the "pioneering" skill-oriented practice to the "realistic" return to the common people, the artistic techniques of literary creation From the point of view of integration, it is quite perfect, because we have already experienced the perfect combination of realism and modernism in "Landscape" by the powerful neo-realist writer Fang Fang.In the 1990s, family novels will naturally inherit and use these effective methods to construct their own texts, so that the themes contained in the works can be clearly demonstrated. The second is the change of the living environment of literature.As we all know, literature has super-utilitarian and super-practical characteristics. However, in the 1990s, with the advancement of global economic integration, literature has a tendency to be commercialized. This change makes literary creation and readers' reading process converted into a commodity. The process of production and sales, the operating mechanism of the market economy began to dominate literature.As readers, the lives of the people are all threatened by desires. Almost all people have changed from political people to economic people. People began to pursue novelty and excitement, speed and change.As a result, popular literature has been greatly developed, forming a strong impact on official literature and elite literature. This reality makes most writers realize that purely realistic works are far from meeting the reading needs of contemporary people. Literature needs great innovation in terms of content and techniques, and must cater to the market and the times with novel themes and brand-new characters.To a certain extent, this has stimulated the self-consciousness of many writers to use new creative methods to write, making most of the family novels in the 1990s present a new artistic style.This kind of artistic style is manifested in the perfect fusion of various creative techniques and the complementarity of various creative styles. In order to confirm the achievements of family novels in the 1990s in terms of creative techniques, we take an example to explore their artistic techniques.Since its publication, it has received rave reviews, and people have analyzed and demonstrated its success from different aspects. Most of the commentators believe that it should still be a realistic work in principle, but it clearly shows the author's respect for the novel in subtle ways. On the basis of the successful reference of the modernist creation method, the huge artistic charm of the work is fully publicized.On this point, the author Chen Zhongshi has his own profound insights: "The original model or model of realism should not frame the later writers, realism must develop, and use a new narrative form to applaud the history that the writers are aware of. Content and realistic content, or unique life experience.” [12] The successful use of modernist artistic techniques is manifested in the following aspects: first, the use of irony.Irony is used in many places. For example, at the beginning of the work, the author writes about Bai Jiaxuan's six marriages and six deaths.This is a great irony for Bai Jiaxuan, who abides by the Confucianism of "There are three ways to be unfilial, and having no descendants is the greatest."As the plot of the work unfolded, the author wrote about several farces of the Peasant Association Movement, satirizing the Peasant Revolution, which has always been regarded as a great movement. Finally, the work wrote about the different fates of Bai Ling, Hei Wa and Bai Xiaowen, satirizing It is unclear whether the revolutionary movement is good or bad, and black and white are irrelevant.Second, the brave exploration of sexual description.Reflecting on the previous long-length creations, although with the changes in the literary environment and the breaking of literary taboos, the content of expressing the characters' love and sex has become more and more detailed, but the techniques are all hazy and graceful, but they use A large number of pages vividly describe people's sexual love and behaviors, including the process of sexual activities, sexual characteristics, and the sexual reactions and feelings that accompany sexual activities. It can be said that the description of sex has reached an unprecedented level. Level.As we all know, the description of sex is an important content of modernist literature, and the description and display of sex are undoubtedly borrowed from the creative methods of modernism.However, what needs to be emphasized is that the sex description is basically profound and serious. It combines human nature with its social, historical and cultural characteristics, successfully portrays the character of the characters, and expresses the theme in a novel way. Reasonably deduced the plot development.Without sexual description, the artistic charm of the novel will be greatly reduced.In addition to the above methods, artistic techniques such as legend, symbol (such as the legend of "White Wolf" and the magic of "White Deer"), and image creation have been successfully used to create an atmosphere of mysticism and make the works shocking. , and novel and peculiar artistic effect.In addition, the allegorical narration of the image, the symbolic experience of "The Feathered Serpent", and the illusory images of "Documentary and Fiction", etc., all confirm the actual achievements of many artistic techniques from different aspects.In short, the family novels in the 1990s have made great progress in terms of artistic innovation. It not only makes the family practice present different historical connotations from politics, philosophy, history and ethics, but also reveals many novels to a considerable extent. The possibility of combining these two artistic techniques shows the unique charm of family narrative.