Speech at Symposium for Human Realm

Liu Jiming  October 15, 2016)

I have attended symposia on my own work more than once before, but rarely have I witnessed such frank and open exchange and collision of different views as today. This is what a literary discussion should be — yet for many years, such occasions have been rare indeed. Often the topics publicly discussed are hollow and beside the point, while fundamental questions are deliberately sidestepped. The atmosphere today, then, feels long overdue.

In the Afterword I mentioned that the final completion of The Human Realm took nearly twenty years and is inseparable from my own personal experience — it is first and foremost the spiritual history of growth of one person from youth to middle age. When I say in the Afterword that this work is important to me, that is the sense in which I mean it. Some say this is a novel about the construction of the new countryside; others say it is a novel about the "rural reconstruction" movement; and various interpretations have been offered from these angles. But for me, the narrative impulse that determined the entire work's tone and character was the desire to use the personal fate and growth of Ma La to refract the enormous transformations, crises, and hopes that this country has experienced over more than thirty years. Beyond this, over the long twenty-year process of writing, the reason I repeatedly stopped and put the work aside — even nearly gave it up entirely — was, apart from the circumstances of my personal life, primarily certain "hard problems" I had not encountered in earlier writing: questions of how to address real problems and historical experience through literary means, and what Chen Fumin called the "artistic risks" — Li Yunlei expressed the same idea when he used the word "transgression." As everyone knows, the mainstream literary system built since the 1980s has formed a fairly complete set of aesthetic and value norms, which in the minds of many writers have become a kind of "collective unconscious." One is made acutely aware of their pressure at every moment — a pressure that sometimes presents itself in the guise of temptation, and for many has become an unquestionable authority and a standard that must be followed. As Brother Yuhai just said: many critics evaluate writers and works in the manner of marking school essays, and any heterogeneous kind of writing can easily be dismissed and marginalized, dissolved into nothingness. If you do not want to be dismissed and dissolved, you must make concessions, even capitulate — otherwise you will bear that invisible and visible pressure, even risk. This is also why I have gradually grown weary of the literary scene. The truth is, I am not the steadfast person in spirit that some friends have suggested; I am often contradictory, hesitant, pessimistic. Like Ma La in the novel — his thinking and spirit are also full of contradiction throughout, including his reflections on death — all of this is in fact an expression of my own psychological state. From the late 1990s to the present day, my relationship with the mainstream literary world and with prevailing literary tastes has been one of ambivalent attraction and mutual rejection. I have grown accustomed to this state. The reason I persisted in finishing The Human Realm was largely that I wanted to bring a certain reckoning and accounting to myself and to the era I have lived through — to bid farewell through this work to years that have passed.

What is gratifying is that here today, everyone has analyzed The Human Realm from different angles — from within literature and from without, from history and from the present — and put forward many valuable insights, whose significance extends beyond the assessment of a single work. I find myself suddenly feeling that my writing perhaps should not end here after all: first, because the story of The Human Realm has not truly ended; and second, because I still hold out hope for this world.

(Proceedings of the 65th Young Arts Forum of the China National Academy of Arts, October 15, 2016)