Liu Fusheng | On Liu Jiming's Full-Length Novel The Human Realm

Yangtze Collection Literary Review, March 12, 2017

The Human Realm is undoubtedly one of the most important full-length novels of recent years — and it stands apart above all for the courage and the writerly posture it displays in departing from the prevailing conventions and models of contemporary fiction. With a powerful and abundant narrative energy, the novel establishes between several historical eras a relationship that is simultaneously contradictory and continuous — a relationship of blood — and erects a robust logical framework of story. Within this dramatic situation constituted by historical circumstance, one character after another acquires vivid features and an inner world of surging undercurrents. With a rigor approaching that of classical drama, Liu Jiming has written a spiritual history of contemporary China and a dialectic of its transformations. When Ma La stands before the grave and listens to the fierce imaginary debate between his two spiritual mentors, Liu Jiming raises the novel's internal dramatic power to its peak.

The novel directly confronts the world of the 1980s and the "present" that has followed since the 1990s, while also casting a glance of complex feeling at the dim background of the collectivization era. Of these, the 1980s undeniably occupies the pivotal position. One cannot deny that this was genuinely an era of enormous liberatory force — yet we have generally overlooked one secret source of this liberatory quality: its covert inheritance from the revolutionary ideals of the 1960s. After the movement that had attacked the old order failed, the 1970s devolved into a very mediocre and stifling era, even tending toward an intensified authoritarianism and repression. It was precisely against this historical backdrop that the critique and counter-movement of "Enlightenment thought" arose, drawing its inspiration for the critique of the old historical practice from the intellectual and cultural resources of Western modernity. The "returnees" who had survived from the ruins of history projected their original social ideals onto a distant opposite shore — onto objects such as America or "the West." What Lü Yongjia and those like him pursued was decidedly not genuine American-style life; what they pursued was only a future world symbolized by an imagined "modern West." And this pursuit was itself a transformed continuation of the spiritual legacy of revolution. As the secular phase of the 1980s — that mythological decade — the history of the post-1990s period is simultaneously the presentation of its true historical content, its ultimate fulfillment, and its betrayal and vulgarization. Ma Ke evolves into Lü Yongjia. And this is precisely what gives rise to Murong Qiu's conjecture: what would have happened if Ma Ke had lived?

It is precisely at the moment when the 1980s begin their descent into decadence that the characters' fates begin to diverge. Gu Chaoyang, Ma La, Murong Qiu — their fates in truth represent the multiple possibilities latent within the 1980s, or within Lü Yongjia, and the presentation and unfolding of those possibilities within the new historical context.

By directly confronting major themes of this kind, The Human Realm has returned to the right path of the full-length novel — the passion for grasping history as a whole! Of course, such a claim is bound to attract opposition; let them oppose it. Here Liu Jiming parts ways with the "pure literature" of the present; he has found his way back to the power of literature. Facing history and a reality stranded at the crossroads, Liu Jiming radiates an aesthetic ambition for dialogue with and engagement in that reality — an ambition that causes The Human Realm to flash with the aesthetic bearing of the nineteenth-century full-length novel and an inner quality of heroism.

History at once continues and ruptures, and it is tightly entangled with reality — it is precisely this situation that constitutes the stage for the characters' fates, while human agency also transforms the world, making it into a new "human realm." This point is so vivid that it naturally becomes the center of attention for all the contributors to this volume.

It is against this backdrop that Chen Ruogu analyzes the severe fracture of class and values in contemporary China that the novel presents — a fracture that can also be seen as the quarrel of several eras (the revolutionary era, the 1980s, the post-1990s). "Ma La, torn apart by fracture, returns to Shenhuangzhou village in a brief daze — because he needs what may be a very long time to digest this fierce debate; that is to say, he needs, within the overall social space of development, slowly to digest the legacy of Enlightenment ideals and revolutionary heroism. His various recollections of Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia thus carry out a retrospective dialogue in this sense."

Hu Yifeng has also clearly noticed the pivotal significance of the 1980s in this spiritual history. I broadly concur with his following judgment: "As an era bearing special markings, the 1980s was an era in which the world had changed but the human heart had not yet changed; an era in which people had begun to look toward money, but in which grand principles still had value; an era in which class had already begun to fracture, but in which the Way had not yet fractured across all under heaven. It was precisely in this tearing between spirit and matter, ideal and reality, past and present, that a charismatic spiritual mentor of the type of Lü Yongjia was incubated — while Ma La is a spiritual remnant who grew up drinking the milk of the 1980s." Perhaps Luo Xiaojing too understands Ma La's "solitude" in the sense of "remnant."

In my view, the most economical and apt summary of this novel still comes from Zhang Huiyu, and I cannot resist revealing it: "The Human Realm harbors a very great ambition — to attempt a rewriting of the history since the New Era and a comprehensive assessment of this period. Compared to the full-length novels that have rewritten twentieth-century history or contemporary history since the 1980s, The Human Realm has two outstanding characteristics. The first is a historical sense that reflects critically on history: through a re-reflection on the 1980s rewriting of revolutionary history, it re-narrates the period from the 1950s to the 1970s as the spiritual resource of the New Era. The second is a sense of reality that reflects critically on reality: by drawing on the critique of the new Enlightenment values and developmentalist ideology formed in the 1980s, it reconstructs the social panorama of China from countryside to city in the age of globalization. One might say that The Human Realm employs a realist narrative strategy to attempt a comprehensive response to the contemporary Chinese social crisis and spiritual predicament."

Of course, The Human Realm is rich in meaning and admits of multiple interpretive spaces; in fact, the various contributors to this volume have all read the novel from different angles, and my commentary inevitably oversimplifies and may not always be apt. At most it is offered as a pointer.

I said above that The Human Realm has something of the bearing of the nineteenth-century European full-length novel — perhaps I may add that in certain respects Liu Jiming is somewhat like a Romantic writer. This manifests in that inner passion and feeling, that impulse to send characters plunging into rivers and cleaving through the waves — and also in his passionate enthusiasm for challenging the difficulties of social reality; it even leads him to design overly easy solutions at times, though partial ones, such as the success of Ma La's new cooperative. And the path of healing symbolized by Tang Caor — dissolving the poison of "modernity" — seems to retreat back into an imagination of "organic society," all of which is perhaps too simple and too light.

In a certain sense, however, this can hardly be blamed on Liu Jiming: when reality has not yet revealed alternative possibilities, all he can do, even amid the smog-locked closing of the novel, is add a garland that hints at hope.

Liu Fusheng, born 1970, graduated from the Department of Chinese at Peking University; Doctor of Literature. Currently Professor and Dean of the School of Humanities and Communication at Hainan University; Chairman of the Hainan Provincial Association of Literary and Art Critics; Vice Chairman of the Hainan Provincial Writers' Association; council member of the China Literary and Art Critics Association; member of the Chinese Writers' Association; recipient of a State Council Special Allowance. Former judge for the 8th and 9th sessions of the Mao Dun Literary Prize. Since the mid-1990s, has published over 130 academic papers in journals including Literary Review, Contemporary Writer Review, and Literature and Art Contention, and five academic monographs including The Floating Bridge of History.