Sun Yang | The Human Realm in the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Realism

— Tolstoy as Method

Published in: Left Review, January 20, 2025

Editor's Preface: In the currents of world literature, the crisis of realism is a universal phenomenon. Tolstoy — an important resource within The Human Realm — once faced the same predicament. This essay attempts to use Tolstoy's creative practice as a point of entry, and through an examination of the control of detail and the writing of "hard problems," to excavate another layer of meaning in The Human Realm: namely, that in the conditions of today's fragmented society and transformed countryside, it seeks to re-establish the legitimacy of collective identification. Or, to put it differently: the class discourse that had been emptied of concrete content in The Legend of the Red Lantern [note: one of the eight "model operas" of the Cultural Revolution] finds its concrete substance again in The Human Realm. In this light, the novel's "withdrawal" carries the significance of rethinking where people are headed — rather than being merely a judgment of despair about the age. The author has authorized publication of this essay; our thanks are due to them.

Introduction

There exists in current assessments of contemporary Chinese literature a rupture-based view — namely, that two literary traditions exist: the first thirty years as "revolutionary history literature," and the second thirty years as "pure literature." The arrangement of The Human Realm into two halves seems formally isomorphic with this division of literary history. Consequently, the novel's drawing on different resources is perhaps inevitably marked by the heterogeneity of this historical divide: the upper half more readily awakens in us the imagination of the interventionist literary mode of the 1950s and 1960s — the A History of Entrepreneurship type — and even its portrayal of the 1980s carries the atmospheric spirit of that broader era; whereas the lower half's depiction of the contemporary intellectual and academic world carries a somewhat flat, "pure literature" quality that has to a certain degree lost its power of historical interpretation since the 1980s. The drawing upon the rich literary resources of the Seventeen Years period therefore makes the characters of the upper half appear more fully rounded, while the portrayal of the modern intellectual in the lower half is comparatively thinner. This disparity in literary effect may be a deliberate choice on the author's part, or it may be a symptomatic expression of something else. But beyond these two traditions, there seems to be yet another lineage — the resonance of nineteenth-century realism as represented by Tolstoy.

The Human Realm's historical span reaches from the 1950s and 1960s down to the new century. A number of critics have already noted that the novel embodies the author's ambition and literary aspiration to totalize this stretch of history. The author himself, in the novel's afterword, speaks of facing a literary situation where "no flashy or dazzling exterior can conceal the pallor and crisis within literature itself" — and the original impulse behind this novel can be understood as a challenge to the existing personalized literary order. The novel contains a large number of representative realist works with which it engages in intertextual dialogue. Among these, the one most repeatedly invoked is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Liu Jiming has also frankly acknowledged that the two writers who have most profoundly influenced him are Lu Xun and Tolstoy. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Tolstoy's writing of the late nineteenth century influences The Human Realm not merely intertextually, but is deeply embedded in the entire novel's unfolding, shaping its distinctive narrative mode — and that this formal distinctiveness enables The Human Realm to open up an imagination and reflection on contemporary China with a particular and charged tension.

Part One

In the currents of world literature, the crisis of realism is a universal phenomenon. Tolstoy — an important resource within The Human Realm — once faced the same predicament. After the general failure of the European revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie of every country was in a condition of complete developmental dominance. The conditions that had allowed the old realism represented by Balzac and Stendhal — the conditions in which the driving force, decisive tendencies, and contradictions of the bourgeois revolution could be directly embodied and concentrated in a figure like Julien Sorel — were gone for good. The "realist" literature of this moment was awash with pallid satirical treatments of life's meaninglessness within bourgeois society, or it sank into imitations of the "impassioned" novels of an earlier era, degenerating into conceptual slogans narrower than the age itself, or it retreated further still into a naturalistic writing that depicted only ordinary characters without any overall grasp of the era — where authors relied increasingly on refined environmental description and fine-grained detail to conceal the thematic inadequacy of their works. The Russian realist writers of the late nineteenth century, of whom Tolstoy is the representative, faced precisely this literary situation.

Lukács offered a highly penetrating account of the state of realist development in the nineteenth century and of the distinctive role Tolstoy played within it. He argued that the fundamental cause of this situation lay in the fact that once the European bourgeoisie had consolidated its power, it entered a phase of defending bourgeois ideology. Among the new writers with realist aspirations, although they lamented the corruption of capitalist society, their emotional and attitudinal refusal meant they could no longer truly immerse themselves in bourgeois society. Having thereby severed themselves from the operating dynamics of bourgeois society — and indeed from the continued social transformations following the bourgeois revolution — they became unable to grasp the latent agency contained in the new social forces of peasants, workers, and others. At this point, for any outstanding Western European writer who wished to oppose the capitalist system, "the general scope of their opposition, as well as the opportunities available in literature for expressing that opposition, were determined, constrained, and narrowed by the development of bourgeois society and the changes in bourgeois ideology." [note: quoted from Lukács's Studies in European Realism] Meanwhile, writers of the same era in Russia and Scandinavia — represented by Tolstoy and Ibsen — became the new developers of realism. And the reason this phenomenon occurred lay precisely in the retarded development of capitalism in both regions. The conditions for realism's development that had been lost in Europe found the possibility of growth in these two regions, owing to their different specific circumstances. The "Asiatic" character of Russia's nascent capitalism, and "the tendency not to destroy or uproot the worst features of the autocracy that had long been superseded by historical development, but merely to adapt it to the requirements of capitalist interests" — all of this, compared with the already stable social relations of European society, still contained, within the intensification of social contradictions, space and possibility for character development. And these real conditions profoundly shaped Tolstoy's creative method and formal choices.

This difference in social foundations, combined with the creative vision that sprang from Tolstoy's consciously adopting the standpoint of the peasantry, deeply shaped his novelistic method and forms of expression. And it is this distinctive creative method that is the reason Tolstoy differs both from the old realists of the early nineteenth century and from the new realist tradition of the late nineteenth century. In Lukács's analysis, this is manifested primarily in Tolstoy's handling of the detail of novelistic description.

Among the great realist writers of the early nineteenth century, since the bourgeois revolution was in its ascending phase and social space was sufficiently open, the individual passion of a Julien Sorel — a representative bourgeois figure full of dramatic energy — was in direct connection with the bourgeois revolution. These figures, bearing the vital force of life, participated directly in social transformation; through individual passion for society, they were capable of grasping the direction of social movement and the principal character of its contradictions. In the literary shaping of such characters, this pursued a narrative effect of brisk rhythm and dramatic conflict; through the era's elite figures fashioned by the author, social contradictions could be displayed in the most concentrated form. After the revolution of 1848, this passion of individual force became increasingly unsustainable in a society hardening into class stratification. When the individual could no longer transcend the boundaries of class, it caused large numbers of writers to confine their gaze to the dull and dreary "upper-class life," producing hollow slogans or decadent and weary laments. In literary expression this produced a narrowing of vision, drifting toward a naturalistic depiction of the ordinary and unremarkable flow of trivial life — rendering life through ordinary people in ordinary environments, with writers using refined environmental description and fine-grained detail to conceal the thematic deficiency of their works. Lukács once cited the difficulty Flaubert faced in composing Madame Bovary as an example:

"I have covered fifty pages and yet there is not a single event; it is a continuous painting of bourgeois life and of passive love… The husband I describe loves his wife in much the same way as the lover does — they are two mediocre people in the same environment, but they must nevertheless be different from each other." [note: paraphrased from Lukács's account in Studies in European Realism]

At this point, landscape and detail have become little more than refined scenery, incapable of participating in the entire novel's developmental process.

For this kind of change, Lukács describes it as a kind of "epic" retreat. He argued that in ancient Greece, owing to the narrowness of the range of the lived environment, people were capable of achieving a harmonious compatibility with nature, and could directly grasp both nature and society. In Balzac and Stendhal, this compatibility of the human and the social was embodied through individual passion and the creation of typical characters. But by the late nineteenth century, the transformation of the bourgeois posture had deprived European realism of the foundation for directly grasping society, and in the novel characters gradually became stiff, ordinary, utterly lacking in capacity — static figures. And this literary predicament was precisely the problem Tolstoy was principally concerned with addressing.

In Lukács's view, Tolstoy's literary method presents at least two points of difference from both old and new realist traditions. The first lies in the fact that Tolstoy does not primarily choose dramatic conflict to represent characters directly, but instead, through fashioning characters' "dissatisfaction with life," and through the conflict between this subjective longing and reality, he expresses a "tendency toward extreme possibilities." Tolstoy selects typical characters from each class — characters loyal to their own class, neither capable of nor desiring to reach the point of breaking with it. Such characters, therefore, though they will waver when confronting the contradictions of life, still cannot leap out of their own enclosure. Once a "tendency toward extreme possibility" begins to emerge, the character will think seriously and prepare to act — but before taking the decisive step, the contrary tendency appears: a tendency that is "partly only a further development of the same contradiction at a higher stage, partly the particular quirks that drag the protagonist back to a compromise with reality." [note: from Lukács's Studies in European Realism] Through this movement, one continuously excavates "the echo of social conflict at the most concealed depths of personal life." The second point is that the details Tolstoy handles are not free-floating outside the development of the plot — his details profoundly exert an overall driving force on the unfolding of the narrative. For example, the horse-race episode in Anna Karenina is not a simple isolated incident, but foreshadows the emotional relationship among Vronsky, Anna, and Karenin that is about to spin out of control. And all the detail-painting points toward the central problem that at every moment envelops and drives the plot forward. Within the "extreme possibilities," a vortex continuously forms around this central problem; everything the protagonist thinks, all their hesitation, retreat, and vacillation, consistently expresses their subjective domination by this central problem.

Part Two

We can see that the realist difficulties faced by nineteenth-century Europe bear a certain formal similarity to the predicament of "pure literature" since the 1990s. And Liu Jiming's consciously drawn-upon influences make the handling of detail in The Human Realm carry the quality of Tolstoy's realist method. Yet this formal handling, owing to the different era-conditions and social contradictions within which The Human Realm is situated, generates its own distinctive narrative tension.

In one interview, the author mentioned that he intended, through the dialogue between a figure like Ma La and characters from different social strata, to display before the reader images of those different strata and to present the modern predicament of social fracture.

"Faced with the ever-widening cracks between different eras and within social communities, the task of literature is not to enlarge and deepen them, but to diminish and bridge them as far as possible — to provide the spiritual and emotional impetus for people to clarify where they came from and where they are going. It is precisely on this point that 'dialogue' becomes more important than at any other time. Dialogue can occur within a novel's interior, or in the exterior: between different historical ruptures, different values, different strata, different people — all require dialogue. Dialogue can also take the form of questioning, disputation, critique; or it can be exploration, searching, summoning." [note: from Liu Jiming's interview]

Other critics have treated the form of dialogue as a novelistic writing mode — inaugurated as far back as Liang Qichao's era — for continually opening up the text. The Human Realm uses a dailylife-grounded interior perspective, presenting the collision of different strata in general life situations. Both perspectives treat this form as a narrative method for unfolding the novel.

But if we shift our angle, we can discover another narrative significance in dialogue — that is, beyond serving as a display of collision between characters of different strata, to explore what effect these conversations have on the characters' "growth." In this sense, the figure of Guyu is a typical case. His growth is in large measure brought about by several conversations with Ma La. From his initial sense that Ma La makes sense and his repeated turning things over in his mind, through his middle period of finding the dignity of being a human being after receiving his wife's care and deciding to remain, to finally becoming the cooperative's second-in-command — everything seems to proceed naturally. The "conversations" seem to have completed their task satisfactorily. But just when we think a figure of the Zhao Yulin type [note: a model peasant character in A History of Entrepreneurship] has appeared again, Guyu at the conclusion of the upper half, faced with the choice between family and ideals, chooses to leave Shenhuangzhou. This sudden fall of the ending expresses a kind of author's "helplessness" — but this is precisely a performance of an "extreme possibility." When we see the various cultural symbols of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s appearing in the text and think the author is about to sketch another utopia, the novel instead, through its faithful observation, returns the character to the social domain that was always originally his own.

Ma La's conversations with Guyu undoubtedly generate spiritual and emotional momentum for him — but the effect of these conversations is washed away when the "flood" arrives. In the countryside, the only one who is truly moved by Ma La and stays behind is Xiaoguai. This choice of character carries a visible inevitability. If the intellectuals like Kuang Xibei and Lulu who commit themselves to the countryside represent a self-choice made after intellectual "enlightenment," then within the interior of the countryside this choice more unmistakably points toward a recognition rooted in lived experience. This recognition is expressed differently in Guyu and in Xiaoguai, but the difference in their choices brings with it another dialectic of character. Guyu, compared with Xiaoguai, has considerably more options — and so he can find his emotional belonging and place in family and town, and in his helplessness choose to leave Ma La. But this very multiplicity of choices, in action, points toward the predetermined social position of people like Guyu; this multiplicity of choice paradoxically brings the poverty of class entrenchment, with the character existing in only a single extreme state of possibility.

Xiaoguai, compared with Guyu, has far fewer choices — whether in family or in finding his way through society — and so staying at Ma La's side is undoubtedly better for him than drifting alone. But as the conclusion of the entire novel, in Xiaoguai — with his very low "optionality" — a future uncertainty is gestating. Li Ling, reflecting on the revolutionary history of the twentieth century, once remarked that "revolution is forced out of people, not thought up by them." [note: Li Ling, historian and classicist] It is precisely when social options are reduced to nothing — when there is nowhere left to retreat — that young people like Xiaoguai possess the possibility of breaking through their cage. Here the novel completes a transformation: from Xiaoguai's original status as a subject to be rescued, he becomes instead the vessel of infinite future possibility. Here it is as if history returns once again to the period before the revolutionary era. Xiaoguai may not yet possess that "self-aware" subjective consciousness — he still has a long road to walk. But here Liu Jiming has already completed a task to a significant degree: re-anchoring in life, through Xiaoguai's experiential choices, the legitimacy and reasonableness that revolution once brought — finding once more the possibility of meaning. And this is embodied in the novel to the fullest extent by that temporary family of the Red Lantern type, on which more below.

Alongside the portrait of characters through the details of dialogue, another dimension — the description of landscape and environment — carries a distinctive significance in the text. By contrast with the modernist and postmodernist literary currents from the 1980s onward, which focused only on the writer's "inward turn" and ignored the "orbital movement" of external space, the meticulous and concrete landscape description in this novel allows us to see the long-missed restoration of the literary "environment" — the external world — and of emotional connection with it. It is in this sense that the critic Lu Taiuang reads the novel's detailed descriptions of the Chinese milk vetch and of Dalin and Xiaolin:

"Or rather, I had long been waiting for this kind of precise, concrete description — had long been waiting for this kind of specific, unadorned landscape. In fact, the reason this 'vast expanse of milk vetch as brilliant as clouds and mist' on the Hubei plain surprised and delighted me is, more importantly, that it perhaps signals the recovery of a literary space that had long been lost. Unlike so much fiction since the new century, which presents us with a unidimensional, flattened space, what The Human Realm presents is a multidimensional, three-dimensional space — the most direct expression of which is that the 'environment,' long absent from fiction, reappears with full and vivid force." [note: from Lu Taiuang's critical essay on the novel]

This kind of landscape description is not merely a painting of scenery — it participates in the transformation of characters and the driving of plot. It is in this "field of hope" that Tang Caor completes her own baptism. When she "retreats into a media environment of entertainment-unto-death, trying through this effacement to erase the gulf between the individual self and society, to overcome the feelings of loneliness and powerlessness" [note: paraphrased in the original], it is the animate vitality of nature that rekindles in her a hope for life. But this is only one of the novel's meanings in its environmental description; the other function of environmental setting carries the metaphor of irresistible forces within the novel. Most important of all is the "flood" that recurs throughout the text.

"Floods" and similar natural disasters have a functional role in fiction. In the "main melody" novels [note: 主旋律, officially promoted patriotic fiction] of a certain period, whenever the contradictions among different forces in the novel intensified beyond resolution, a natural disaster would arrive, and the tight external unity of all parties against the outside threat would resolve the existing contradictions. Žižek, analyzing the film The Birds, treats the birds' unexplained attacks on people as the manifestation of the barbaric maternal superego within the film: whenever the mother-son relationship or the conflict between the mother and the male protagonist's girlfriend escalates, the birds appear. "The terrifying image of the birds is in fact the embodiment of the 'real of conflict' — the embodiment of unresolved tension in intersubjective relations." [note: paraphrased from Žižek] But this conflict is never fully resolved — it only recedes or is deferred in another form. By the film's end, the mother has finally accepted the girlfriend as daughter-in-law, and it seems the birds' mission is accomplished. But in Hitchcock's preferred alternative ending, vast flocks of birds still gather darkly, as if waiting to return at any moment. In The Human Realm, the flood seems to carry a similar narrative effect; the trajectory of the protagonist Ma La's life is altered precisely through several floods.

There are three particularly important floods in the novel. The first affects the fate of Ma La and his family: his father perishes in a great flood in the 1960s, and it is only after this that the story of the Ma brothers and their mother fleeing to Shenhuangzhou unfolds. The second is the great flood of the 1990s mentioned at the novel's opening, in which "even Hekou People's Square, once the town's tallest structure, was submerged until only half the flagpole showed above water." The third is the flood that finally destroys Shenhuangzhou entirely, washing away all the efforts of Ma La and the villagers. These floods all function in ways somewhat different from those described above. If the disasters in "main melody" fiction serve to bridge existing contradictions, the floods in this novel are presented as the concrete materialization of the structural force of politics or capital — the submersion of the "People's Square." Behind this concretization lurks something that cannot be named, just as the "9,800 omitted characters" in the novel — always there as the Jingjiang River alongside Shenhuangzhou, dormant and ready to move. In 1998, alongside the nationwide flood, there also occurred large-scale state enterprise reform and the layoff of tens of millions of state enterprise workers — referred to in the lower half of the novel in the passages about the restructuring of the Changjiang Electrical and Mechanical Plant:

"For Gu Chaoyang, scenes like this were nothing new. In the several state enterprise acquisitions he had participated in, there had scarcely been one without workers' protest. Some were gentle, some fierce, some even escalating into violent resistance. But the outcome of these protests was without exception the workers' defeat. From Gu Chaoyang's observation, the secret lay in the fact that state enterprise reform was a decision made by the highest central leadership — an irresistible expression of state will. Reform and opening-up had from the beginning been a top-down process; the protests of workers, as the lower stratum of society, could secure for themselves some short-term interests but could not in the slightest affect the entire course of reform."

The final flood is the most direct destruction of Shenhuangzhou — the result of official-business collusion. From this it is not difficult to see that in the novel, accompanying every flood is the constant presence of a real "hard problem." This dual depiction — sometimes concealed, sometimes visible — together continuously drives the novel's development forward. As stated above, in contrast to the impassioned and elevated spiritual bearing with which Balzac's and Stendhal's characters confront the hard problems of life, Tolstoy's literature maintains a persistent central problem, and the novel's characters struggle within the vortex this problem generates. Levin's self-reflection, his vacillation — though within his horizon he still cannot find the answer to the problem — shows him at every moment thinking about the central problem of the peasantry. In The Human Realm, one can say, the "flood" and the question of where people go amid the flood constitute this novel's central problem. The actions of Ma La, Murong Qiu, Gu Chaoyang, and every other character all struggle within the vortex of this problem. In this sense, Liu Jiming's The Human Realm undoubtedly inherits Tolstoy's literary model; Ma La's preference for Levin, as well as Murong Qiu's feeling that Ma La has the temperament of "those Russian Populist intellectuals of the late nineteenth century," are not merely symbolic borrowings, but internalized into the novel's very narration.

Part Three

Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has proposed the arrival of a present-day "patrimonialist capitalism" — a society in which social wealth depends increasingly on the inheritance of family property and is becoming increasingly concentrated. The unfairness of social redistribution has fundamentally blocked the possibility of individual "success" in this era. "The one percent versus the ninety-nine percent" is rapidly evolving toward 0.01%. The form of contemporary society is coming more and more to resemble the social conditions of the late nineteenth century, on the eve of world war. And many critics have similarly used a nineteenth-century lens to examine this work, discovering in The Human Realm the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. At one Human Realm symposium, the critic Li Yunlei remarked that The Human Realm engages in fictional form with a number of important social and intellectual questions, incorporating major events into the intellectual agenda and unfolding them amid numerous contradictions — and this is a tradition of nineteenth-century literature. The critic Zhang Huiyu similarly observed:

"Compared with Gu Chaoyang, Ding Youpeng, and Li Haijun, Ma La is a new person — someone with new thought and feeling — but Ma La is also an old person. The years after the revolution have returned to the years before the revolution; Ma La has a nineteenth-century soul. That house with the windmill is in itself unrealistic, and therefore Ma La's failure is inevitable. This kind of organic agricultural cooperative is a form of self-rescue by the weak and marginalized — it cannot resist the force of capital. Perhaps The Human Realm is using precisely this failure to present the despair and powerlessness of this age." [note: from Zhang Huiyu's remarks at the symposium]

The interventionist impulse of The Human Realm itself is beyond question — or to put it differently, rhetoric originating in ancient Greece has possessed a public character from the moment of its creation. Ma La's failure in presenting the individual's despair and powerlessness before the age seems inevitable — yet behind the despair in The Human Realm there is another level being addressed, one more important than "seeing the age clearly."

It was noted above that in The Human Realm, "the flood and the question of where people go amid the flood" can be understood as the novel's central problem. The first thing the novel must address — confronting the desolate Shenhuangzhou just ravaged by floods a few years before — is the reconstruction of the rural community abandoned by modernization. What critics have broadly affirmed in the novel includes The Human Realm's conscious inheritance of the creative ideals of the left-wing literary tradition. The most intense care shown in the novel for the vulnerable and marginalized in the fragmented countryside — one might say, the novel's most extreme borrowing from left-wing resources — is embodied in the temporary family formed by Ma La, Xiaoguai, and Tang Caor. This temporary family with Ma La at its center becomes something like a new utopia beneath the windmill. Xiaoguai, facing family crisis and the complete breakdown of traditional rural politics, finds here the belonging of body and heart. Through learning at Ma La's side, he rekindles hope for life, imagining that one day he too will open up his own kiwifruit orchard. The author unhesitatingly allows Xiaoguai to develop a feeling toward Ma La that belongs to a son's call to a father. Ma La's paternal role here is twofold: on one hand, in the protection and enlightenment of the body and mind of Xiaoguai as a young person; on the other hand, when Xiaoguai kindles the desire to cultivate an orchard, the lost Xiaoguai rediscovers his own imagined place within society. This also carries within it the author's expectation that young people like Xiaoguai — left-behind children produced by the decay of the countryside in the process of modernization — may return to the village.

If Xiaoguai can be seen as a representative of the generation of left-behind rural children, then Tang Caor is a representative figure poisoned by all the negative influences of modern urban culture. Nearly every misfortune we can imagine a modern urban girl enduring has happened to her. Father lost in childhood, near assault by a stepfather, early entry into society making her rebellious and self-reliant, trying to support herself by singing — only to be drugged and violated, and eventually addicted to drugs. Ma La first meets her in a drug rehabilitation center. Tang Caor, who has lost her father, bears equally the dual toxicity — physical and spiritual — that modernity has delivered. Yet this same young person, with Ma La's help, is cleansed in the countryside of the "addiction" caused by modernity and ultimately becomes a music teacher.

Within this narrative relationship, we can find that in The Human Realm, the image of youth has shifted from the socially dynamic collective it was — from the May Fourth movement through the 1950s and 1960s — into a helpless, vulnerable group that needs to be rescued. And the fate of this group is offered in the novel a solution of decidedly romantic hue: it is at the side of Ma La, the rural intellectual, and through the agency of the countryside, that the reconstruction of life's meaning is completed. This family without blood ties — constituted to a significant degree by pure class identification — directly brings to mind The Legend of the Red Lantern. And one of the important points The Legend of the Red Lantern demonstrates is precisely that in an era of extremity, the fragmentation of the biological family is rebuilt by class feeling — and this new kind of family is fundamentally different from the original blood-kinship family.

From this we can see that the problem the novel seeks to address touches on the reconstruction of the meaning of youth in the new era and the possibility of the marginalized class — as a community of mutual support — coming together again. The author hopes, drawing on solutions derived from revolutionary historical fiction, to present this kind of collective identification and thereby to ease the existing contradictions of class fracture. But this formal similarity does not carry the same meaning — because the era in which the story is told has changed.

The broad, history-representing narrative impulse of The Legend of the Red Lantern has, in The Human Realm, been weakened into an emotional bond with the villagers of Shenhuangzhou, with the land itself. In the upper half's climactic scene of collective flood resistance at the close, the reorganized villagers still rely precisely on this emotional bond with the land. The production of this paradox is complex. In the history of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the signification of the imagery of "land" and "nature" has undergone phased changes, constantly given different content as the specific political situation shifts. During the war of resistance against Japan, for example, the external enemy's invasion meant that wartime mobilization inevitably drew on identification with the land — the requisitioning of rural ethics. By the time of A History of Entrepreneurship, and in certain extreme Cultural Revolution novels like Sword River Waves, nature had become an object to be conquered and transformed — reflecting the shift in political thinking brought about by the demands of industrialization and the difficulties of developing productive forces.

The "withdrawal" in The Human Realm's treatment of this problem is a consequence of the change in the political situation: it is no longer possible to generate the surging confidence of "a vast world with great scope for action," and the retreat is more toward a sentiment rooted in the land. Yet the establishment of Ma La's three-person family is not a single-note rural sentiment — it is expressed through the most "revolutionary" of forms. This very tension is itself symptomatic. Zhang Xu-Dong, commenting on Wang Anyi's The Age of Enlightenment, once observed: "The source of the Chinese revolution is contained within its own pre-history, but its actuality — its value-substance — must be concretely established within the life-world created by the revolution." [note: from Zhang Xu-Dong's critical writing] In this sense, the problem The Human Realm addresses moves toward another framework: namely, in the conditions of today's fragmented society and transformed countryside, to re-establish the legitimacy of moving toward collective identification. Or to put it differently: the class discourse that had been emptied of concrete content in The Legend of the Red Lantern finds its concrete substance again in The Human Realm. In this light, The Human Realm's "withdrawal" carries the significance of rethinking where people are headed — rather than being merely a judgment of despair about the age.

Conclusion

Just as Tolstoy poured into Levin an emotion of self-representation, Liu Jiming similarly regards Ma La as a character bearing the nature of a spiritual autobiography. Both writers experienced ruptures in their creative careers, yet both undoubtedly found an appropriate method for displaying historical contradictions. Beyond this, the fleeting appearance of An Ordinary World within the text also traces alongside it the lineage of the Chinese realist tradition running from Liu Qing through Lu Yao. In Lu Yao's fiction, "his 'new person' probes through action the extent to which the 1980s could accommodate and constrain the striving individual, revealing the mutual estrangement between the two worlds of city and countryside" — and Liu Jiming's novel naturally includes sustained reflection on this problem as well.

This essay has attempted, through situating The Human Realm's inheritance of Tolstoy's late-nineteenth-century realist tradition, to articulate — through the novel's writing method and narrative strategy — the internal tension within the work. In this sense, The Human Realm as an echo of the nineteenth-century realist tradition is a success. But there are inevitably some places that are somewhat schematic. For example, the handling of the figure of Murong Qiu — Song of Youth, one of the threads connecting the upper and lower halves, seems to illustrate the point: Murong Qiu is throughout the novel a relatively passive character; like Lin Daojing [note: the protagonist of Song of Youth], she needs another character to guide her. Initially she gravitates toward Ma Ke; after Ma Ke's death, her emotional life falls into stasis. In her work she is also unable to break free of the corrupted academic world; and in the end the true cause that leads her to break from her existing social relations is also the dual impetus of Ma Ke and Ma La. This kind of characterization is somewhat thin. Additionally, the village members who join the cooperative when it is established are at times a little stereotyped. But none of these shortcomings can conceal the important value of The Human Realm as an ambitious realist novel that engages with the present. As one critic has put it: in literary history, it makes a great difference whether this novel exists or does not exist.