Chen Ruogu | A Prism: The Return of History and Its Engagement with Reality

— Reading The Human Realm

Author: Doctoral Candidate, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University Originally published on China Writers Network; reprinted in Renjing Yuan

The full-length novel The Human Realm, completed in 2016, narrates nearly forty years of history in the lives of its two protagonists, Ma La and Murong Qiu. Over this long span of time, the forms of human existence and the modes of human thought have undergone enormous shifts: the older generation (Gu Feng, Guo Dawan) passes away in lamentation; the same generation (Murong Qiu, Pan Xiaoping, Chen Guang) has experienced a fission of thought and belief; and the younger generation (Xiaoguai, Tang Caor) bears innocently the sins of those who came before. The novel's principal settings are the countryside (the hollowing-out of rural life) and the factory (industrial pollution and enterprise restructuring). Amid a series of social transformations, the true winners are the comprador capitalists (the transnational forces behind Gu Chaoyang), the academic bureaucrats willing to compromise for personal gain (Secretary Yue of the W University sociology department), the opportunist revolutionary descendant Ding Youpeng, and the all-powerful privileged "red second generation" (the Second Young Master). The author Liu Jiming clearly intends the novel as an effective pathway for participating in contemporary social processes and the spiritual life of the public.

The divided protagonist Ma La is above all a figure who lives within history and society, and so external voices and deep memories constantly occupy his inner world. He returns to Shenhuangzhou bearing the mark of his prison years, only to have the Jingjiang flood wash away entirely the rural enterprise he has only just managed to get underway. At other times Ma La is successful — he grows fruit trees, establishes the Tongxin Cooperative, organizes the villagers to resist the flood, guides and rescues young people, and is deeply respected by the village elders. Yet this warrior-like figure, standing at the historical center of Shenhuangzhou, is perpetually in a state of oscillation — swinging between the obscure margins and the conspicuous center. And the obscure margin is the two figures buried within his heart: his spiritual fathers — his elder brother Ma Ke, and his teacher Lü Yongjia. Ma Ke is a "socialist new person" who grew up in the Mao era; like Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun, he was selfless and gave his life to save collective property. With Ma Ke's "sacrifice," that era of surging momentum came to an end. Lü Yongjia played the role of enlightener at the moment when Ma La was hungrily absorbing all the new knowledge he could; he revered freedom, longed to travel eternally through the realm of liberty — even when his lover was pregnant and the very embodiment of the "beautiful, wealthy, and privileged," he refused the bonds of marriage. He was also a utopian, seeking to establish an "ideal republic" in actual society through enormous wealth; a modern man of talent who combined idealism with practical ability. He was full of the bearing of a strong person, yet fell at the moment of his enterprise's failure. The imprints left on Ma La by these two spiritual fathers overlap and collide, ebbing and flowing by turns, weaving new confusions into his being.

Ma La's return to Shenhuangzhou is necessary because he needs what may be a very long time to digest this fierce internal debate — that is, he needs gradually to work through, within the overall social space of development, the legacy of revolution and revolutionary heroism. His recollections of Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia constitute, in this sense, a retrospective dialogue.

At present, the realist aspiration that takes historical "continuity" as its background frequently leaves writers in an overstretched predicament. For what are in conflict are not merely ideas, but the entire range of social and political forces. "Reform" and "development" were originally meant as substitutes for revolution, yet their promises were originally similar. In the era when Ma Ke was growing up, "labor" as historical practice was transforming the laboring subject while simultaneously transforming the external world; diligent labor and upright wisdom seemed sufficient to move the world, and a better world was being summoned into being. Then the opening of the 1990s made the agency of the lone individual progressively weaker. In the era when Ding Youpeng and Gu Chaoyang move without obstruction, ordinary people become smaller and smaller. The loss between these two moments is an indigestible growth produced in the transition from revolutionary China to developmental China. Contemporary China is already in a condition of severe class fracture and value rupture; divisions are thrown into sharp relief by the ideological contest. The social values of the two periods — the first and second "thirty years" — are different: in the first, the people seized autonomy and the right to self-governance through arduous productive activity; in the second, ordinary people have been retreating and sinking step by step amid increasingly abundant material development. It is precisely this paradox that has caused socialist thought, once silenced, to speak again. One of the most important tasks of the present moment may be to re-sort the threads of history and redefine reality. For this reason, a monolithic narration will not proceed smoothly — it is only through the alternating flickering of two forces that we can more deeply understand the complex Ma La and his era.

The Human Realm tells a story that is undoubtedly contemporary China's own — and contemporary China is itself fractured, whether in class or in moral terms. Liu Jiming employs two methods to bridge the fracture.

The first is a return to ethics — a moral and emotional clarification of a practical difficulty. For example: Ma La's acceptance of Xiaoguai and Guyu, and his spiritual reclamation of Tang Caor. Even Lü Yongjia's historical debts turn out to be a kind of historical legacy: the daughter he left behind, Tang Caor, gradually sheds her old shadows in this orchard-like paradise and moves toward a healthy and radiant life. The process of Tang Caor's awakening is structurally parallel to the process of Ma La's own spiritual restoration. At the time of the village festivals he is invited from household to household to pound glutinous rice, to organize the dragon dance, to rebuild the traditional and wholesome cultural order. This world also washes away the "shame" that once clung to Ma La and restores his capacity for feeling. Yet before the concreteness of actual existence, ethics prove powerless. The grand agricultural plan is stillborn through natural disaster and human calamity; Guyu, unable to abandon his family's livelihood, cannot continue to follow Ma La. In this sense Ma La has neither father nor son — he is a truly free person, and at the same time a person who has been severed from the social relationship most intimate to the self, namely the family. He is a good man, and a capable one, but he is no longer a socialist new person, still less a new person for the twenty-first century; he exists within each one of us as a frail contemporary. In this age dominated by capital and power, a person of the grassroots and margins like Ma La cannot pierce through the passion of slogans and become a genuine historical subject. Indeed, the moment Lü Yongjia's ideal republic had to rely on the forces of the "red second generation" and capital to advance, we already knew how faint the hope was — and the era proved the point: the smuggling operations of the Antai Group were eventually exposed, and it was the Kunpeng Corporation that was made the scapegoat. The advancement of Ma La's rural productive enterprise was made possible by convenient loans and flexible policy, and even more by the bond of old schoolmates with County Magistrate Ding Youpeng. Ma La cannot reconstruct a collapsed rural subjectivity, nor can he rectify a justice distorted by capital and brute power — and so he can only be a spiritual existence. The historical task itself must still be entrusted to those who possess genuine strength within this structured society: the intellectuals.

This is the author's second approach — grafting the two perspectives onto each other to generate new momentum. Intellectuals are the social elite, and within the three-way structure of government, business, and academia — the apex of genuine productive force and discursive power — they represent a force capable of playing a pivotal and dialectical role. And so, inevitably, Murong Qiu, He Wei, and Kuang Xibei enter the scene.

Murong Qiu is an academic intellectual of literary and artistic temperament. She was born into a broad-minded and cultivated family; her experience of "going up to the mountains and down to the countryside" in her youth gave her emotional roots in the village and among ordinary people; after returning to the city she attended university and has remained in higher education ever since. She is kind and upright, dissatisfied with the vulgar atmosphere of the academic world, sympathetic to the workers progressively losing their factory; she navigates around the impurities of society, striving to remain untainted by the surrounding mud, and she reflects on the progressive value of the intellectual. Her emotional identification with those two young people buried deep in her memory — Ma Ke and Ma La; her admiration for the courageous action of the young intellectual Kuang Xibei in resolutely resisting social injustice; and the fearless idealism of her daughter Lulu — all these converge into a mighty force, leading her to resolve that she "cannot go on staying in the academic circle with its odor of decay," and that she will "return to that village where she once lived and labored, to conduct a genuine fieldwork investigation." This is a spiritual transformation for an academic intellectual — one that also brings about an effective unity of knowledge and action.

The relationship between Murong Qiu and Ma La is in essence the mutual bridging of two activist selves — a structure of mutual summoning. Without this conjunction, neither of them could achieve ultimate maturity, and this gradually hardening and closing social structure would lose all possibility of opening once more. The convergence of Ma La's and Murong Qiu's two narrative threads stems from the emotional bond both share with Ma Ke, and the knot that draws them back together is that copy of Song of Youth from thirty years before. It is Song of Youth that reactivates Murong Qiu's memories of the past, impels her to reflect anew on her own life, and allows her to recognize another channel through which she can genuinely help this society. As an excellent scholar and a principled citizen, she possesses powerful capacity for action; she can connect many social relationships and is an important link between young people and the world; her personal practice will have far-reaching influence on her daughter Lulu's independent spirit and character formation, and will also set an example through word and deed for her own students. It is foreseeable that a group of equally excellent young people will, through Murong Qiu as an important medium, draw closer to the earth and move toward society.

The Accumulation and Mining of Negation

Chapter Thirty-Two is a blank chapter — "9,800 characters omitted here." The internal logic of the narrative does not allow for the unwritable content of sex and violence at this point, yet sufficient space is left for the reader to create their own version — an apparently superfluous gesture. In reality, Ma La gradually becomes unable to appear directly after the Yanhe uprising; Murong Qiu will walk in his place. The temporary contraction of the protagonist's space of activity precisely displays the predicament of a reality that dominates literature — but this does not impede literary expression; the enormous vacancy is in fact a more precise transmission.

The novel also frequently employs an intertextual, uneven rhetoric. When Ma La takes Guyu to Changsha to buy rice seed, when the cooperative borrows a path through Zhao Guangfu's fields to divert water — passages like these carry the shadows of Liang Shengbao and Gao Daquan [note: protagonist of Hao Ran's The Golden Road]. And throughout the novel we repeatedly encounter works of literature and culture: Capital, A Bright Sunny Sky, An Ordinary World, Anna Karenina, How the Steel Was Tempered, The Eighth Is a Bronze Statue [note: a celebrated novel about the Korean War], and others. The novel also reproduces the spiritual debates of that era around the "Pan Xiao Letter" [note: a famous 1980 letter to a youth magazine asking "Why does life's road get narrower and narrower?", which triggered a national discussion on the meaning of life] and the discussion of the spirit of Lei Feng. The scattering of so many literary symbols throughout the text is precisely the author's deliberate placement of literature within a symbolic context that extends beyond itself.

The Human Realm forms an affirmative, positive intertextual relationship with many texts — An Ordinary World and Anna Karenina, for example — and its self-referential implication is evident. But when Ma La stands before his brother's grave and seems to hear Lü Yongjia's mockery of Ma Ke's heroic act, recalling Ding Youpeng's eloquent elaboration of the distinction between "self and other" in the wake of the "Pan Xiao Letter" debate, this in turn displays a negative intertextual relationship. This deliberately misaligned, asymmetrical patterning can enormously expand the novel's historical depth and spatial breadth. It crosses time and space; the texts within memory are ideal vessels of expansion, transcending crude unidirectional affirmations or negations. As contemporary Chinese literature has arrived at the present day, is it still possible to narrate "the human being" in a positive register? If one finds oneself in an impasse in expressing meaning in the real world, drawing on literary resources once shared by all of society — listening for echoes in the deep valley — is also a way out. Fortunately, the experience of reading tells us: what we cherish and cannot forget will find its resonance.

The repeated flickering into view of these positive figures and vanished ideals is as if many eyes were gazing at the changes of the era. "The past is like a great ship sailing away; the self of the past and the self of the present are taking leave of each other and recognizing each other." The contradictions and moments of suspension within the seams of the narrative precisely present the truth of history — through the path of the negation of the negation, returning ceaselessly to history to settle our historical debts. Ma La has been writing all along a manuscript about his personal growth and reflection; he has never lost his passion for searching out the meaning of life, and through sustained retrospection he persists in fashioning his own subjectivity. At the sociology summit forum held in Yanhe he even submitted a paper — though his presentation never took place owing to the popular uprising. He thus belongs both to the present and to the future: an ordinary person who grows continuously within the historical process. Ordinary, yet still possessing the capacity for growth.

In a time when plans for fairness and justice have been shelved and deferred, when idealism has been abandoned and developmentalism holds sway, the "hollowing-out" of reflection has become a pervasive tendency. The literature of the present has severed not only the relationship between life and thought, but also the connection between the present and the past. Literary production spins noisily in an "empty rotation," unable to touch the genuine problems — while this novel slowly and calmly expands the multidimensional interaction between literature and society and history. Can the literature of the present carry the requirements that the age places on literature? Can it break through "pure literature" and the interiorization of narrative, participate in the imagination of "others" and "ourselves" with respect to our own history and community, and accurately translate the understanding of the age into literary form? As Takeuchi Yoshimi [note: influential Japanese sinologist and cultural critic, 1910–1977] observed: "Literature finds its own reflection in politics, and then shatters that reflection back into politics." In this sense, The Human Realm — projecting the deep lake of literature and the open sky of reality onto each other, drawing the inner and outer into mutual engagement — is literature that belongs to genuine thinkers.