Chen Fumin | The Human Realm: Writing That Bears Witness for Histor

April, 14, 2024

The efforts and ambitions that Liu Jiming's writing — and The Human Realm in particular — has put on display have attracted attention, and to a considerable degree have won the support of many fellow travelers who share his artistic vision or his intellectual orientation. This represents an important force within the current diversity of Chinese culture. There is no need to put it so circuitously: whether in relation to the left-wing movement or to this kind of expression of modern and contemporary Chinese history, within the capitalist relations of production that have prevailed in recent years, such expression has long been suppressed. Yet within that suppression, there has still been stubborn expression and growth of the kind that Liu Jiming represents — and this is a truly remarkable thing. One can genuinely invoke a common saying here: regardless of success or failure, this expression itself bears witness for history. Fifty years from now, when we revisit this historical period, if this kind of expression and this kind of voice are absent, then this stretch of history will be a disgrace. In this sense, I feel that Liu Jiming's The Human Realm is internally connected — with Chinese socialist literature, with the communist movement as a whole, and with the socialist movement. Whether the expression is good or not, whether it succeeds or not, or to what degree it succeeds — none of this is the most important thing. What is most important is that he wrote this work, and that in itself is remarkable. This is my overall view of the novel.

I received the novel relatively early, and though my reading was not especially meticulous, I read it through to the end and have some notes. Let me speak in general terms.

Just now I was exchanging views with Yunlei outside, and Yunlei put forward the concept of "new socialist literature." A concept of this kind actually requires two conditions, in the literary dimension. The first is that the writing must have the capacity and the desire to handle things panoramically — that is, this kind of text must be panoramic in nature. Yunlei and I discussed whether a shorter form might also be possible; I am not certain, but I myself am inclined to think that handling history of this kind calls for something essentially panoramic in scale. By today's standards this may be a "backward" literary method — the word deserves quotation marks — yet even so, given the ambitions expressed by the text and the content it addresses, the internal demands of a full-length text of this kind are necessarily panoramic. The second condition is that the perspective must be omniscient. Reading works of modern and contemporary Chinese literature — Midnight, A History of Entrepreneurship, Great Changes in a Mountain Village, A Bright Sunny Sky — not one of them fails to possess this quality. In doing what he does today, Liu Jiming has borne certain artistic costs, or taken certain artistic risks. I would not go so far as to say that many contemporary writers are opportunists, but we do see many works kept to between 180,000 and 200,000 characters — an easy length for publishers to sell and handle. I have one regret: given the historical content Liu Jiming addresses in The Human Realm and his literary ambitions, this book is written too short — it ought to be at least a trilogy. Yet by the standards of contemporary novel structure and reading habits, it is also written too long. I feel he has led us into a reading dilemma: for a full-length novel exceeding 300,000 characters, readers generally run out of patience — that is the difficulty of reading full-length fiction today.

Looking purely at the novel's structure and textual organization, I can also appreciate the difficulties Liu Jiming faced in his handling. His afterword makes it clear: this novel was started twice, with interruptions and reconsiderations along the way. As things stand, the text we have presents its upper and lower halves as structurally quite separate. Although Ma La's thread is reflected upon from the side in the lower half, the lower half is entirely a different story. If I were to be critical — purely from the perspective of novelistic narration — the novel's structure is not ideal. The upper half is clearly a history of Ma La's growth: the death of his brother, his seven years in prison in another's place, his return to the countryside, his return to Shenhuangzhou, his confrontation with Zhao Guangfu, his history of starting over again in the face of many people's doubts. The upper half, in this sense, reads like a history of entrepreneurship for the new socialist era. Then the lower half abruptly shifts to Murong Qiu — a contemporary intellectual, a university professor — her life, the social relationships that unfold around her. In my view, the organic connection between this and the upper half is not especially clear; though Tang Caor appears later, and through Tang Caor's relationship with Murong Qiu the family story is reconnected and Ma La and Murong Qiu are brought into closer contact. The structural difficulty manifests as a problem of novelistic art, but in my personal view it is fundamentally a problem of the difficulty of handling history. What truly generates this problem is what the author wants to address. Liu Jiming has seized upon two great core problems of China's modern history: the collapse and reconstruction of the Chinese countryside and its relationship with contemporary capitalist production — these are the most important content of our contemporary lives. Having been bound by both, the structure takes on a somewhat fractured quality. It is not that Liu Jiming lacks the artistic capacity; it is rather that in handling the historical connection between these two things, he has not made that relationship entirely clear. I remarked to Yunlei below: this novel raises many questions worth discussing.

Why do I say the novel has borne artistic costs in its mode of novelistic writing? The author has worked hard at characterization — and on this point his approach is entirely consonant with my own view of fiction. One reason I am dissatisfied with contemporary fiction is that too many novelists have stopped treating the writing of characters as their mode of work. One reads many novels, reads millions of characters, and remembers very few of the characters encountered. This change has its historical roots, of course. In the past, our classical writers and classical theorists counseled us that we must handle typical characters in typical environments. All the rich information contained in a character of this kind actually corresponds to the historical life-content being expressed; without this correspondence, there is no point in reading characters at all — everything a character conveys, personality, action, intellectual appeal, emotional direction, should all make visible the era being expressed. The requirement in the past to write typical images, typical characters capable of presenting the complexity of the era in its full dimension — the question of whether, within today's conception, a character can still complete this task is genuinely doubtful. Because after modern life arrived, and especially after modernity descended upon China — as was true across the world, European fiction too has no characters — whether the correspondence between character and era can still hold is a question that genuinely deserves to be asked today. The great fracture of life does not split a person into two halves, but into God knows how many halves; living sometimes in a postmodern imagination, a character is compressed into how many segments, representing now this, now that. Many novelists today write only a single facet, extract only a single scene; if we were to "reproach" them, it would be that they have lost the desire and capacity to present the panoramic life of history. Liu Jiming consciously takes this on — it requires considerable courage.

This novel, beyond its questions of characterization, is particularly closely connected to contemporary Chinese history. The first thing I notice is the problem of the Enlightenment — but what is especially worth examining is this: we must be particularly vigilant about the so-called culture of the Chinese wenren [note: the traditional Chinese literatus — a man of letters formed in the classical literary tradition, distinct in Chen Fumin's view from the modern intellectual]. That is to say, when we discuss the Enlightenment, can we clearly distinguish it from the muddled wenren tradition that has long pervaded Chinese classical culture? I find this extremely difficult, because what we can see — and the novel makes it visible — is that the enlightenment of China's rural intellectuals has often been accomplished through the wenren tradition, and accomplished first and foremost through the wenren tradition. In this novel, whether it is Ma La or Lü Yongjia — across a text of more than 500,000 characters, corresponding to the characters themselves — the titles of various novels appear again and again. That is to say, when a Chinese intellectual imagines the world, what constitutes his principal intellectual resource is not a modern intellectual worldview but the wenren tradition. I regard this as an extremely serious problem. This has profoundly shaped — or determined — the type and paradigm of China's modernization.

I think one of the particularly valuable aspects of Liu Jiming's novel is that it objectively presents the reality of a generation of Chinese people. Whether Ma La qualifies as an intellectual is worth debating, but he drags behind him the tail of the wenren's imagined world. I do not know whether I am being excessively critical of the wenren, excessively critical of the modern intellectual tradition of the past hundred years — but I have genuinely harbored doubts about this all along. The path through which a rural talent receives enlightenment is literature and the Chinese classical wenren tradition — this is the experience through which our wenren grew up. I have always tried to distinguish between the wenren and the intellectual, and found it extremely difficult. I have always wanted to refuse to recognize the Chinese wenren as an intellectual — a view that has always struck me as a reckless defiance of common opinion. The character relationships that The Human Realm handles, and the intellectual starting point of those characters, very truthfully present the difficulties of Chinese modernity — a point of which Liu Jiming himself may not have been conscious. The path of Chinese modernity, moving through the wenren toward enlightenment, is not inherently problematic — but in the process of this advance, how to overcome step by step this wenren habit of mind and form or establish an intellectual worldview: I regard this as an important marker on China's modern path, and I still regard it as an unsolved problem. Because when I say this to myself, I recognize clearly that I too am not a modern intellectual — I carry so many of the wenren's bad habits, I am far from a clean and clear example myself. This ambiguity is something that must be confronted in the process of China's cultural modernization. When one imagines the modern world through the wenren tradition, one ultimately finds oneself in complete conflict with the modern world. That is to say, from the very starting point, the difficulty of a character like Ma La is already contained within it — there will inevitably be this logical problem. The weapon of criticism and the criticism of weapons are not the same thing. I feel that in The Human Realm — for example, Ma La's starting point, the fashioning of the image of Lü Yongjia, the enlightenment halo assigned to him, which is also a wenren's halo — the question of what this has contributed of benefit to China's modernization project, and what self-contradictions it implicitly contains, deserves serious attention. In truth I have long reflected critically on the Chinese wenren tradition; I have personally suffered its ill effects, and my sense of the difficulty between the wenren tradition and the modern path is particularly acute. This is the first major issue: the relationship between enlightenment and the wenren tradition.

The second particularly important point — one I particularly admire — is that Liu Jiming has written Ma La's history of entrepreneurship. I feel that from the time of Lü Yongjia's death onward, the author engages positively with this history. On the matter of Lü Yongjia's death, my view differs from Huang Deng's: had Lü not died, Ma La's rural enterprise would have had no way to begin. Liu Jiming's letting Lü Yongjia die at that moment was a deliberate act. The character of Ma La — Liu Jiming has written him very truthfully; he has taken the trouble to observe and understand, not relying purely on imagination; he knows this world better than we do. The novel is neither like A History of Entrepreneurship — though it too contains the story of Ma La and Guyu going to buy rice seed — nor like the large-scale land transfers depicted in the Hebei writer Guan Renshan's Wheat River. It is a novel that, precisely when capitalist relations in the new century have expanded to an extreme and the countryside can see no way forward, engages positively with the history of the countryside, and offers its own answer. On this point I genuinely want to congratulate Mr. Liu Jiming: no one has previously engaged positively with this stretch of history; Liu Jiming is the first to do so directly. We see Ma La confronting several relationships: the relationship to the land, the relationship to capitalist relations of production, the relationship to power — which requires going to the city to find his old schoolmate. A character of this kind possesses the qualities of the talented rural youth, yet is also very different: he has plunged into commerce alongside Lü Yongjia, confronted the relationship with power, confronted the relationship with capital, and then returned to earnestly "build the new countryside" — a person who enacts things with his own body. I am encountering a character like this for the first time. This moves me profoundly; I have great respect for this character.

Since the novel is panoramic — or omnisciently perspectival — it ought, whether in language, in narrative mode, or in literary conception, to maintain the spirit of realism throughout. There are occasional places in the novel where the language — some inadvertent expressions — might merit further thought. For example, after Murong Qiu is sexually harassed by Secretary Yue, she is described as flying out like a little bird — for a woman approaching fifty, comparing her to a little bird flying is not entirely apt. Similarly, when the novel refers to the character Lulu, calling her a "sharp little sprite" and so forth — for a work of realism, I feel this kind of elastic and soft characterization is not a good linguistic habit. Realist writing should as much as possible avoid vocabulary of this coloristic softness.

Let me stop here. To summarize: I greatly admire and deeply respect the desire and capacity for panoramic historical expression and for handling complex historical relationships that Mr. Liu Jiming has displayed in The Human Realm.