Lu Taiuang:
Rebuilding "The Mirror of the World"
— The Inspiration and Significance of Liu Jiming's Novel
The Human Realm
Editor's Note: Baoma has previously recommended the novel The Human Realm, its Afterword, and Xiang Jing's critical essay "The Human Realm: Retreat and Reconstruction." Today we present "Rebuilding 'The Mirror of the World' — The Inspiration and Significance of Liu Jiming's Novel The Human Realm," a critical essay by Lu Taiuang. The author argues that from the mid-1980s onward, as modernism and postmodernism rose to dominance, literature turned relentlessly "inward," producing works with almost nothing but interior psychology and no exterior world. The precise, realistic descriptions of flora and of Dalin and Xiaolin (the hedgehogs) in The Human Realm represent the return of environment to literary works — restoring the one-dimensional and flattened literary space while also enriching human feeling. Through an analysis of characters such as Ma La and Murong Qiu, the author argues that the novel reveals a kind of vivid, profound individuality rooted in reality. Works of realist literature like The Human Realm hold up a mirror for us, and carry far-reaching significance for the development of contemporary literature.
Part One
The flowers of the Chinese milk vetch are pink, growing in clusters like grapes; at the height of their bloom they are more dazzling than the morning glow, more resplendent than flame. In a farmer's eyes, the milk vetch is a true treasure: it can be used as green manure, fed to cattle and pigs, and it is a ravishing sight, a delight to the eye…
Strange as it may sound even to myself, what first seized my attention in The Human Realm — Liu Jiming's ambitious new novel, years in the making, running to more than half a million characters — was precisely this passage of description about a plant.
On a cursory reading, there seems nothing remarkable about it. The author has simply used a plain, realistic hand to bring before our eyes a flower common to the Hubei plains in the past, rarely seen today yet here reappeared — the Chinese milk vetch. In other words, the author has painted a picture: a picture of a southern village and countryside, a picture of the flowers and plants of that southern village. Yet read more carefully, and especially when set against the literary landscape of the new century, this passage reveals itself to be not merely unremarkable — rather, it becomes something fresh and even uncommon. Indeed, to put it strongly: within the writing climate of modernism and postmodernism — whether genuine or counterfeit modernism and postmodernism, that is another question worth discussing — that has prevailed since the new century began, we seem to have forgotten some plain and useful techniques of realist writing. And it is not only those so-called modernist and postmodernist writers who see no one and nothing in the world besides themselves; even writers who pride themselves on being realists seem to have lost the capacity for description. As a result, in the vast ocean of literary works, we can scarcely find a decent passage of description, scarcely a moving landscape. What we most often encounter is a novel's characters — who are in many cases simply the author himself — wallowing in self-pity, self-congratulation, and self-dissolution. And on the rare occasions when we do come across something purporting to be a landscape or a scene, it is almost invariably rendered in the most vaporous abstraction. Write flowers blooming, and you get "flowers of every color all bloomed"; write birdsong, and you get "all the birds began to call"; write a crowd, and you get "countless people." In this kind of "abstraction," the writer seems to have set every variety of flower before our eyes, sent every kind of bird singing into our ears, placed an innumerable host of people at our side — yet confronted with "every kind," "all," and "countless," we see no flowers blooming, hear no birds singing, see no individual people. Everything is here; the totality is here — and yet there is nothing here at all.
This is one reason why I was so struck by the milk vetch in The Human Realm — what a concrete, specific plant it is! Yes, I have grown weary of those endlessly murmuring interiors, those vague and vaporous so-called descriptions. Or rather, I had long been waiting for precisely this kind of precise, tangible description — long been waiting for a landscape this specific and unadorned. What made those "vast stretches of milk vetch as brilliant as morning clouds" on the Hubei plains such a surprise was, more importantly, the sense that perhaps they signaled the recovery of a literary space that had vanished long ago. Unlike the one-dimensional, flattened space that so many novels of the new century have presented to us, The Human Realm gives us a multi-dimensional, three-dimensional space. Its most direct sign is that "environment" — long absent from fiction — has returned, rendered with bold and generous strokes.
In my view, the return of "environment" through The Human Realm carries an enormously significant meaning for the development of contemporary literature, and especially of realist literature. In the writing climate of modernism and postmodernism that gradually took hold from the mid-1980s onward, writers declared themselves answerable only to the inner life, only to human nature, or even only to sensation and desire — and so the "inward turn" became the paramount literary direction, psychological portraiture became the dominant literary technique, and the external world — of which environment is the most essential constituent — fell into neglect. Objectively speaking, the "inward turn" has indeed provided us with an important literary dimension and produced works of considerable psychological depth. But the problem is that a long and unreflective commitment to that inward turn has caused us to forget that literature is simultaneously both the "rotation" of the writer's inner world and the "revolution" of the external world — and that the finest literary works are most often the product of a perfect alignment achieved only after the writer's inner "rotation" and the outer world's "revolution" have met in repeated friction and collision. What this means is that, in the course of their long inward rotation, our writers have too often become lost in the world of their own sensations, forgetting that without the impact of the external world, the inner rotation must eventually lose its driving force. They have forgotten that the external world is also an important stage on which humanity, the human heart, and human nature are revealed; that "environment" is the crucial space in which characters act and in which the human heart unfolds.
The passage about the milk vetch cited above is a fine illustration of precisely this point. If we consider the matter from Tang Caor's perspective, we realize that without the beautiful pastoral landscape set off by those cloudlike, radiant fields of milk vetch, without the "field of hope" jointly created by Ma La and the members of the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative, without the atmosphere of that simple yet happy home built by Ma La and Xiaoguai — a lone bachelor and an orphan — it is difficult to imagine how this young woman, so steeped in the flashy and mercenary culture of the city that she had become dissolute and drifting, could have achieved her twofold reversal of soul and life, transforming herself from a despairing, drug-addicted girl who knew only hatred and grabbing into the pure-as-hibiscus, grateful and giving administrator of a music school for children. From this angle, we can say that it was precisely the beautiful milk vetch that opened the door to Tang Caor's transformation.
This tells us: as the real literary space is restored, our emotional lives will be restored with it.
On this point, the novel's portrayal of Dalin and Xiaolin offers an even more compelling demonstration.
Part Two
One morning, while Ma La was earthing up the kiwifruit trees in the peach garden on the outer bank — trees half-drowned and dying from the floodwaters — a familiar squeaking sound reached his ears. He spun around and saw two little hedgehogs that had appeared from out of nowhere, suddenly right in front of him. His eyes lit up — he recognized them: it was Dalin and Xiaolin. They had been missing for so long that he had assumed they'd been drowned by the flood long ago. Now, at the sight of their small pointed snouts and their bright, darting little eyes, his heart surged with warmth. He crouched down and gathered them both into his arms.
Even without reading the whole novel, even from this quoted passage alone, we can see that here the author has invested far more feeling than in the milk vetch passage. Or rather, through this passage, we see that as the novel's space continues to expand, so too does its emotional depth. But all of this begins with the origins and fortunes of these two uninvited guests, Dalin and Xiaolin.
After settling in Shenhuangzhou, Ma La had planted a kiwifruit orchard on the desolate outer bank. A full three years later, the kiwifruit trees finally bore fruit. "In early summer, every time he saw the tiny young kiwis no bigger than a thumbnail trembling and swaying at the ends of the branches — like the faces of infants sleeping soundly in their swaddling — Ma La would involuntarily slow his steps, afraid of disturbing these beloved 'children.'" In order to tend these beloved "children," Ma La and Xiaoguai, the orphan he had taken in, took turns keeping night watch over the orchard. One night, when it was Xiaoguai's turn, a fit of coughing broke out as midnight drew near, jolting him half-awake. He searched everywhere and found nothing. The following night, led by Ma La, both Xiaoguai and the reader finally discovered the truth:
That night, Ma La stayed in the orchard with Xiaoguai. As midnight approached, the coughing started up again. Ma La gave Xiaoguai a look, picked up the flashlight, and Xiaoguai grabbed the spade; the two of them went into the orchard one behind the other.
Beneath one of the kiwifruit trees, Ma La directed the beam of the flashlight at a fuzzy mass at the base of the trunk. At first, Xiaoguai took it for a heap of weeds — but after the light had shone on it for only a moment, the heap of weeds suddenly stirred, then thrust out a small pink face, a pair of mung-bean-sized eyes rolling about alertly; and when it opened its chubby little mouth, the sound it made was identical to the coughing Xiaoguai had heard.
A small pink face, bright darting eyes, a chubby little mouth — what vivid description, what an enchanting scene. Reading this, we cannot help but join Xiaoguai in his cry of astonishment: "A hedgehog! So it was this little creature doing the coughing!"
And so the two hedgehogs took up residence in the orchard, becoming members of the somewhat solitary household that Ma La and Xiaoguai had formed. They were later given the names Dalin and Xiaolin [Big Grove and Little Grove], and not only made Ma La and Xiaoguai's home no longer lonely but filled it with delight — going on to become the "goodwill ambassadors" of the orchard, giving every visitor who came there a taste of ineffable childlike wonder. Then, when Shenhuangzhou was inundated by a combination of natural disaster and man-made calamity, the villagers scattered, and even the members of the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative were forced to accept government resettlement and leave. Only Ma La remained, keeping solitary watch over Shenhuangzhou, keeping solitary watch over the kiwifruit orchard, keeping solitary watch in his flood-ravaged home. And it was at this very moment that the long-vanished Dalin and Xiaolin quietly reappeared — returning to Shenhuangzhou, returning to the kiwifruit orchard, returning to Ma La's side.
We also notice that Xiaoguai returned to Ma La's side after Dalin and Xiaolin. This arrangement, this combination, this scene — at once desolate and warm — is extraordinarily suggestive. The reason lies in the novel's several vivid scenes of description centered on the hedgehogs — let us keep calling them Dalin and Xiaolin — which further restore the novel's space and further restore our emotional life. At this point, the author wishes to add a remark that may not be entirely superfluous: there is a currently popular genre called the environmental novel. He naturally supports this kind of fiction, full of goodwill and respect for the natural world. But in truth, from the fundamental standpoint of literature, if we can bring to life in a novel one plant, one animal, one landscape, one environment — as Liu Jiming does in The Human Realm — that may well be more valuable than writing several so-called environmental novels. For the flowers, birds, insects, and fish that come alive in a literary work — and, by the same token, the objects and people that come alive alongside them — may exert an influence far greater than that of any purely genre-based literature. Though this is also because, in the realm of environmental literature, we still have much thunder and very little rain; good works are few.
But the significance of the descriptions of Dalin and Xiaolin in The Human Realm is by no means so simple.
If we read those passages carefully, we discover that it is precisely Dalin and Xiaolin who gradually deepen and enrich the emotional lives of several related characters. First there is Xiaoguai: orphaned early, this child seized by suffering almost before he began, had scarcely any childhood at all — and even under Ma La's care, what he absorbed and learned was mostly the serious business of survival, with little of the playfulness of childhood. It was precisely the timely appearance of Dalin and Xiaolin that awakened the child's eye and heart within him, giving him the joy and happiness of a childhood — and thinking of it this way, what a valuable childhood experience that fit of coughing that gave him such a fright must have been! The same is no less true for Ma La himself. Surveying the whole novel, we find that Ma La's life is essentially heavy, serious, and austere. We might even say that due to the peculiar circumstances of his era and his family, he stepped into the adult world almost in childhood — and after entering that adult world, what awaited him were even weightier and more serious questions of life. The weight of it nearly crushed the breath from him, so that he struggled hard to "grow up," to "mature" — seen from another angle, how desperately he must have wanted to be naive and carefree just once. It is precisely the arrival of Dalin and Xiaolin that goes some way toward filling this void — consider that even the names Dalin and Xiaolin were ones Ma La found in a fairy tale. Of course, the significance of Dalin and Xiaolin to Ma La is still richer and more varied: beyond childlike delight, they also represent a broader sense of responsibility and duty. For the bond of feeling between Ma La and Dalin and Xiaolin is a sentiment of great breadth and generosity, and it is only on the foundation of this kind of feeling that the stories between Ma La and Xiaoguai, Tang Caor, and the elders of Shenhuangzhou can feel truly real and fully realized. And the timely return of Dalin and Xiaolin after the flood further warms and steadies Ma La, giving him greater resolve and composure as he continues on his path of reflection and seeking. Then there is Tang Caor: we have already spoken above of what the milk vetch means to her, and in fact Dalin and Xiaolin mean no less to her than the milk vetch — otherwise she would not, upon hearing Xiaoguai's account of Ma La and the two hedgehogs, have exclaimed: "This is itself a fairy tale." In truth, it was precisely the "fairy tale" jointly woven by Ma La, Xiaoguai, the milk vetch, and Dalin and Xiaolin that drew her, step by step, back from her wrong path and toward her original nature — and that is another "fairy tale" altogether.
In the face of such a "fairy tale," how could our hearts not be fully moved?
Yet this emotional richness must find its full nurturing within a restored social space.
Part Three
Watching Lulu so near at hand, close enough to reach out and touch that young face still with traces of immaturity, with a few faint pimples still faintly visible, the fine down on her cheeks almost discernible, Murong Qiu felt that her daughter, like a cloud drifting without anchor, was floating ever further from her. It was true — her daughter had grown up.
Lulu heard Murong Qiu's faint sigh. She quietly raised her face, and met directly a pair of eyes that were gazing at her — a gaze unmistakably a mother's and no other's, carrying within it a sorrow barely perceptible. Lulu caught it — and also noticed that on her mother's broad forehead, a breadth uncommon in women, there had appeared several deep wrinkles, as if freshly ploughed by a ploughshare, or carved in by a sculptor's chisel. And before this, in Lulu's memory, her mother's forehead had always been so smooth and even, almost as round and full as a young person's. A vague unease and guilt crept over Lulu's heart, and she called out instinctively again: "Mum…"
What faces these are! Or rather, what a wealth of meaning is written on these two faces! Yet the author makes no attempt to act as interpreter of those faces — as so many of our "modern" writers would do — but instead, with a sensitive and delicate brush, simply "paints" for us these two faces of such rich implication, each complex and nuanced expression upon them, and even that faint yet deep-drawn sigh.
The author has handed the right of interpretation over to us — and so we must decode it ourselves. Murong Qiu is one of the central characters in the second half of The Human Realm. The author's reason for placing such a figure in the novel is, beyond answering the age's question of "Where is China headed?" in a concealed dialogue with the first half of the novel alongside characters such as Ma La, to serve as our guide into urban space — allowing us to observe the earth-shattering yet all-pervasive transformations in urban society over the past several decades, especially the thirty-odd years since the reform and opening-up. More importantly, the author uses Murong Qiu in her role as intellectual — a social role of supreme importance since the beginning of the new era — to reveal the war without gunfire unfolding within the intellectual world: the divergent perceptions of, and covert as well as open struggles over, China's social transformation. As individuals, intellectuals may not seem particularly conspicuous; but if we regard them as a kind of social personality, their influence cannot be overlooked — least of all today, when power, capital, and knowledge have become the iron triangle of contemporary Chinese society. For the intellectual "drama" playing out in China's knowledge world often amounts to writing the "script" for China's social transformation, or to a "dress rehearsal" of the changes to come. Observing this group, therefore, helps us better understand the evolution of Chinese society. Regrettably, in contemporary literary works, intellectuals have been "overlooked" — either written too small (writers often imagine intellectuals as ineffectual individualists just like themselves, preoccupied with trivial matters and little else), or written too lightly (in some novels, intellectuals have nothing beyond the burden of their heavy flesh, the disorder of the senses, and petty academic rivalries over titles and research grants — a reflection, in some measure, of the writer's own projection). From this angle alone, Liu Jiming's creation in The Human Realm of a group of distinctly different intellectuals — Murong Qiu, He Wei, Kuang Xibei, and others — represents a valuable contribution to and development of contemporary Chinese literature. After all, since at least Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, we have rarely seen intellectuals rendered with any real distinction. Moreover, the author reveals "their" world from a dimension that is wholly original.
That original dimension is the pair of faces we mentioned above — and above all, Murong Qiu's face. That is to say, through a careful tracing of Murong Qiu's emotional journey, the author opens up her inner world and the emotional and spiritual worlds of He Wei, Kuang Xibei, and the rest — pulling back the curtain on the intellectual world's overt and covert debates, and ultimately drawing open the great historical curtain of China's sweeping transformation. In doing so, the author achieves a subtle balance between the interior and the exterior, the weighty and the light, the near and the far.
Were it not for the borrowed eyes of Lulu — a daughter's eyes — we could scarcely see the deep "wrinkles" on Murong Qiu's face, scarcely see that "barely perceptible sorrow" upon her countenance, scarcely see the "scars" inscribed on that face and in that heart. For in the great majority of moments, what she shows the world is the poised, composed, self-contained, and incisive quality of a true intellectual. Fortunately, the author lends us a "daughter's" pair of eyes, allowing us to see what would otherwise remain hidden — and how rich and inexpressible Murong Qiu's emotional world turns out to be: abandoned by Gu Chaoyang, she never remarried after the divorce, living on with her daughter as sole companions through the years; all the while, as emotion was deferred and time flew past and youth faded, she became not only a source of worry for her aging father but also a cause of "guilt" and "unease" in her daughter. And awkward circumstances crowded in one after another: being introduced by her middle-school classmate Pan Xiaoping as a kind of gift to some "old cadre"; being fixed upon and pursued by Old Yue — once "Young Yue," now her working partner, soon to become her superior — his emotional life as ragged and worn-out as a bundle of old wadding, his psychology warped and twisted. Murong Qiu's embarrassment and distress in all of this are beyond easy telling. Yet what humiliates and distresses Murong Qiu goes still deeper. The reason her emotional space has grown increasingly constricted and shadowy is not only personal, but also seems to involve the tricks of the age — or rather, it is because she has been drifting with the current of the times that she now finds herself in this predicament, unable to go forward and unable to go back. On this point, Murong Qiu's own reflection is notably powerful: "The love that had once set her heart pounding and her blood running hot had ended without issue with one person's sudden death and one era's quiet curtain-fall. For all these years she had remained single because she felt she had lost both the capacity and the courage to love."
Indeed, all of this is both a personal desolation and the desolation of an age — and more than that, the desolation of one who has turned her back on youth, on ideals, on the very era she once inhabited. We see that once Murong Qiu becomes conscious of this, she gradually begins to restore her own life and feelings, and seems also to be gradually restoring time itself and the age. This is why she sets aside the instinct of maternal love, agrees to — even encourages — her daughter Lulu, fresh from a prestigious university, to give up the chance to study abroad and a secure career in order to work with Kuang Xibei to found their own venture, "People's Livelihood Network." It is why she consents to the romance between her daughter Lulu and Kuang Xibei — a romance between teacher and student — and why she encourages them to go deep among the people, measuring the earth with their own feet, searching for China's path. For in her daughter's choices she dimly discerns her own youth, her own ideals. And so what Murong Qiu does is at once a transcendent form of maternal love and a form of self-redemption, of self-restoration. More moving still, we see her at the novel's end finally breaking free of the spiderweb that has held her captive, stepping again toward a wider world of reality: "She could no longer go on staying in that 'academic circle' exhaling its odor of decay. A thought suddenly struck her: next semester she would take her graduate students to Yanhe, to Shenhuangzhou, back to that village where she had once lived and labored — to carry out a true fieldwork investigation." Since the beginning of the new era, we have spoken of human nature, taking it as literature's ultimate aim. If that slogan still possessed a certain liberating relevance in the early new era, then from the standpoint of literary practice, in the new century it has become not even a fig leaf for literature. We have so many writers who claim to write about human nature, so many novels said to probe human nature — yet in my view, the sum total of all that human nature spoken of on lips and written on pages is no match for the human nature written on Murong Qiu's face, which is richer, more vivid, more profound. Because, at bottom, divorced from a deep understanding and a careful distillation of reality, all human nature will have nothing to attach itself to, nothing in which to embody itself.
Part Four
Murong Qiu stood on a ridge of earth at the water's edge, gazing out across the river. On the broad surface of the water she could see a figure swimming toward the center of the current. The water ran fast; a boat had just passed, and the waves surged, one crest higher than the last. Between the peaks and troughs the figure appeared and disappeared, as if it might be swallowed at any moment. By now the sun had already dropped in the west, and the last glow of the setting sun had dyed the surface of the river a deep crimson. The figure was like a blazing torch, cutting through wave after wave of rushing current, pressing steadily closer to the sandbar at the center of the river.
As the emotional current of characters like Murong Qiu is gradually restored, expanded, and set flowing freely, the deeper force of the novel begins to make itself felt: beneath this quietly flowing river of feeling, there rushes a torrent of thought. Driven by this torrent, not only is the lost literary space restored, but time itself — nearly vanished from literature — surges back around us like a river in flood, sweeping us into its embrace. Enveloped and carried within it, we see two phases of China — Revolutionary China and Reform China — unfolding before us in fierce collision, clash, and exchange, each revealing its own face and spirit.
The novel's portrayal of Revolutionary China is concentrated principally in the figure of Ma Ke. The author handles this with considerable skill: rather than leaping directly into the river of history to recount the story of Revolutionary China, he works mainly through the memories of Ma La, Murong Qiu, Dawanbo, and others — generating a pair of "retrospective" eyes through which we witness the growth and the untimely death of Ma Ke, this revolutionary youth, in a manner that serves as a metaphor for the growth and the untimely death of Revolutionary China itself. It must be acknowledged that, feeling keenly that the "wound narrative" about Revolutionary China dominant since the beginning of the new era had been carried too far — to the point where people had largely forgotten Revolutionary China's original aspirations — the author lavishes upon Ma Ke, and through him upon Revolutionary China, an abundance of feeling, consistently regarding him through eyes of youthful idealism, of praise and fond remembrance. He therefore barely touches on Revolutionary China's difficulties and setbacks. Yet this treatment, on one hand, does much to restore the balance of historical narrative about China, allowing Revolutionary China to appear for the first time before readers in contemporary literature in a just and upright aspect; and on the other hand, through Ma Ke — this revolutionary youth with his distinctly puritanical coloring — it intimates the difficult circumstances faced by Revolutionary China in pursuing its ideals, while his sudden extinction makes us feel that though the curtain of that era has been drawn, its legacy, and above all its youthful idealism, must not be forgotten — and still less betrayed. And in this, space is left for time to reconnect across its breach.
The novel's portrayal of Reform China is concentrated principally in Lü Yongjia. Toward this embodiment of the reform era, the author seems to adopt a more pronounced critical stance. Yet if we go deeper into the text, we find that as someone who lived through that era, the author, though not without a spirit of self-examination, self-critique, and self-analysis, cannot at bottom help investing in Lü Yongjia — and through him in Reform China — a substantial degree of identification and respect. The author's reflections on Reform China are built on a foundation of genuine recognition and affirmation. This, too, is what sets the author apart from his contemporaries, and especially his fellow writers of that era: lacking the capacity for reflection, many writers who came of age in the reform era have transformed their identification with the age into an unprincipled self-infatuation. Consider even the author's apparent "critique" of Lü Yongjia's dissolute personal life — is he not, in that very act, also "praising" him? His exaggerated virility, beyond being desire, greed, and rapacity, is also vitality, romantic spirit, and "literary quality." Not to mention that the author directly portrays his heroic bearing in the great tide of the market economy, and his observation that "capital is a wild horse that always needs someone to ride it" remains arresting to hear even today. Moreover, his reform, his entrepreneurship, contained still larger ambitions and aspirations. Before he went into business, his conversation with Ma La in the spartan dormitory of Hekou Town Middle School makes this plain:
Ma La said: "Teacher Lü, maybe we can both become remarkable entrepreneurs someday!"
"Entrepreneurs?" Teacher Lü suddenly shot up from his end of the bed, gave a snort through his nose. "Remember this: becoming an entrepreneur is only the first step of our undertaking. Once we've made enough money, we'll buy an island and recruit a thousand young men and women from all over the country — no, from all over the world — to come and live there. I've already decided: the island will be called 'Utopia.' Everyone on the island will be equal, with equal access to education, housing, and healthcare; each person free to choose their own way of life, provided they don't interfere with anyone else's. Neither socialist nor capitalist, bound neither by the state nor by the family — just as More described in News from Nowhere [note: the author refers here to Thomas More's Utopia*, which in this context is rendered in Chinese as* 乌有乡消息*, literally "News from Nowhere"]…"*
Indeed, Lü Yongjia staked everything and threw himself into the sea of commerce because he still harbored ideals — the ideal of a "Utopia." In that Utopia, beyond material abundance, there would be freedom and equality, democracy and civilization — in short, there would still be "news from Nowhere." And this is precisely what moved Ma La most deeply about him. If we connect this to the mainstream discourse of the time — that the first to get rich would lead the rest to common prosperity — we can see that the reform era, at its outset, genuinely harbored a grand ideal; and in one dimension, that ideal was in fact a continuation of the lineage of Revolutionary China. For was it not the utopian/ideal-state quality — shared by both critics and defenders of Revolutionary China alike — that served as their common key word? When all is said and done, both the Chinese Revolution and Chinese reform amounted, for the people, to a kind of "social contract": not only to achieve national wealth, democracy, and civilization, but also to realize the people's freedom, equality, and happiness. It is this "social contract" that links Revolutionary China to Reform China — even if their contents differ considerably. From this angle, the reason Revolutionary China was subjected to reflection and critique by Reform China in the new era was, in part, because of its betrayal of this "social contract." And the reason Reform China is now in turn subjected to a kind of final-flicker reflection and critique from Revolutionary China is equally because it has, to a substantial degree, betrayed its own "Utopia" essence and "social contract" spirit. On this point, the rise and subsequent fall of the Kunpeng Corporation founded by Lü Yongjia and Ma La is a telling illustration.
And this is the deeper significance of Ma La's return to Shenhuangzhou. Without this return, there would be no systematic contemplation of these two phases of China; without that contemplation, there would be no future. This is also why Ma La remained mired in protracted perplexity for so long — why, though already well past youth and having accomplished a great deal of effective work in Shenhuangzhou, he still felt he had not truly "grown up," had not stepped out from the shadow of the two "elder brothers" and "mentors" — Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia. It is why Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia would periodically argue and contend within his mind: he needed time and space to digest that fierce inner debate, which is to say, he needed time and space to absorb the legacies left by both Revolutionary China and Reform China. Fortunately, we see that he has gradually managed to bring together the inheritances of these two phases of China with some success — that he has already demonstrated an initial expression of this original aspiration in his ability, honed in the market economy, to ride the wild horse of capital, leading the old, weak, ill, and impoverished villagers of Shenhuangzhou to establish the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative. Finally, guided and inspired by Murong Qiu, he at last overcomes that nameless yet acutely real sense of "shame" long rooted in his heart: "A powerful warm current seemed to surge into Ma La's heart; the body that had been so heavy suddenly lightened, as though he had been reborn — he seemed to have become an entirely new person."
"An entirely new person." Yes — Ma La is a "new person." He is an ideal personality, a personality of the future, distilled, elevated, and created by the author on the basis of history and reality. Through this ideal personality, this personality of the future, the author not only succeeds in connecting the broken threads of history — he also powerfully opens up for us a space that faces the future. This is another of the author's contributions.
We have already noted above that The Human Realm has created a number of distinctive literary figures: intellectuals such as Murong Qiu and He Wei; Gu Chaoyang, that "ambitious and supremely shrewd" new-comprador figure who appears as the enemy of his own people; bureaucratic types such as Ding Youpeng; and new peasant figures such as Guyu. But it is beyond doubt that the most important literary figure in The Human Realm is Ma La — for he is at once the product of a synthesis of Revolutionary China and Reform China, and the necessary embodiment of an opening toward the future. Around him, a new generation — Kuang Xibei, Lulu, and others, the "new people" that the future requires — is already pressing to emerge.
The appearance of these "new people" is of great significance to contemporary Chinese literature.
In 1908, in his essay "The Destruction of Personality," Gorky delivered a sharp indictment of the Russian intellectual and literary world. He wrote: "Whether the modern writer cares about the future of his homeland is a matter open to doubt. Social problems no longer stimulate his creative drive; the poet has become a mediocre man of letters. He has slid from the heights of genius and generalization down to the flat plane of trivial daily incident, groping his way among everyday events. Form has grown increasingly monotonous, words increasingly cold, content increasingly impoverished. Genuine feeling has been extinguished; passion is gone. The writer is no longer the mirror of the world but a tiny shard of broken glass flung into the street dust — incapable, with its fractured surface, of reflecting the great life of the world, able only to reflect fragments of an ignoble existence, splinters of damaged souls." Today, Gorky's words seem tailor-made for contemporary Chinese literature in the new century — so sharp, so accurate, so deeply thought-provoking. For too long, our literature has been mired in the dust and broken glass of every street, having lost its passion and destroyed its individuality. Yet relying on a holistic realist literary vision, relying on a formidable intellectual power, relying on a vigorous sense of responsibility — and of course relying as well on meticulous design and precise, detailed description, and on those "new people," Ma La, Lulu, Kuang Xibei — Liu Jiming, amid the pervasive dust and shards, has erected for us a vast mirror. Once more we can see time, and space, and the ten thousand things growing in the interweaving of time and space; once more we can see the people, the peoples, moving across the stage that time and space have formed together, and their beating hearts — and thus we can once again see the individuality of literature, the individuality of humanity, and even the individuality of China itself. This is what allows The Human Realm to transcend the general meaning of literature, and especially the "pure literature" fashionable today, and to win for itself a wider space of significance.
Perhaps this is a restoration of great importance.
Perhaps this is a beginning of deep significance.
(Originally published in Yangtze Literary Review, Issue 3, 2016)