Wu Jiayan | The Spiritual Growth of Ma La and His Kind, and the Human Predicament
— Reading Liu Jiming's Full-Length Novel The Human Realm
Published in: Yangtze Literature and Art Review, November 3, 2016
Liu Jiming is undoubtedly drawn to writing that carries intellectual force and broad social reach. At a writers' gathering held by the Yangtze Literature and Art journal, when the topic of "the power of literature" came up, he argued that in this fragmented contemporary world the human condition and the question of human meaning have both been narrowed — that people are becoming more and more what Marcuse called "one-dimensional" — and that literature, by dwelling on individual bodily and emotional experience, has severed its complex connections to society, history, and culture. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he maintains that literature must possess comprehensive thinking and a broad vision; it must take a fresh look, then move in the opposite direction, in order to find its own bearings and its own power. His full-length novel The Human Realm — composed in fits and starts over many years — is the embodiment of this conviction. Set against the backdrop of China's social transformation since the 1960s, it employs traditional realist technique to create the character of Ma La, a figure whose individual fate is inseparable from the fate of his era. Ma La's spiritual growth, his personal experiences, his ideals and predicaments, all become the deep incision through which Liu Jiming invests his own individual experience and social ambitions, thinking through this complex and multifaceted age — carrying a certain quality of spiritual autobiography. As he himself has avowed, Ma La is a living character for him, accompanying thirty-odd years of life's traces and historical process since his own youth. Ma La's experiences are those he has lived through and those he has lived through in imagination; they cannot be set aside — like another life of his own. It is precisely because of this long and intricate spiritual bond between Liu Jiming and The Human Realm, I think, that he has proclaimed it "the most important work of my life."
Many people regard The Human Realm as the culminating achievement of Liu Jiming's transformation from his earlier avant-garde fiction to traditional realism — a summative work. This change is less a conscious transformation than a slowly accumulating return. Many avant-garde writers have subsequently chosen to return to the realist path — partly because of the congenital hollowness of avant-garde fiction itself, and partly because of the writer's accumulated experience and changed state of mind: a sense of having watched ten thousand sails pass, of having been washed clean of all ornament. When you first read The Human Realm, you have a feeling of encountering something from another era entirely: Liu Jiming is quite deliberately using a very old-fashioned and plain-spoken style of writing to depict the Chinese countryside since the turn of the twenty-first century — slow-motion, panoramic scanning, the years drifting quietly, Shenhuangzhou changing its colors serenely through the turning of the seasons, while Ma La, a middle-aged man who has weathered the storms of life and returned to his home place, slowly feels his way along the road of rural reform and construction on this ancestral soil. This kind of narration embodies an enormous patience on the author's part; in creative style it is relatively close to the realist tradition of the literature of the Seventeen Years. This is writing that moves in reverse, writing that returns — and it is Liu Jiming's deliberate choice. Not only in his creative technique, but in multiple passages within the novel, he pays explicit homage to socialist realist classics such as A History of Entrepreneurship and An Ordinary World: from specific details — going to the city to buy rice seed (in A History of Entrepreneurship it is Liang Shengbao going to Guo County to buy rice seed; in The Human Realm it is Ma La going to Changsha) — to the naming of the countryside itself (Liu Qing's setting is Huangfu Village; Ma La's is Shenhuangzhou), a thousand threads connect them. One might say that Liu Jiming is consciously continuing the writing of that period: continuing its style, and even more continuing its spiritual resources, then setting out anew from this foundation of return.
The active choice to move from early avant-garde writing to a return to realism reflects Liu Jiming's responsiveness to the changes of the era and the evolution of his thinking. As he writes in the afterword to The Human Realm: "Literature is the same — after being washed over by so many dazzling new terms and new currents, it seems to have returned to its original starting point. No amount of flashy and bewildering outer garments can conceal the pallor and crisis within literature." This can be understood as a basic motive force behind his return to realism: to engage with grand themes, and to restore literature's vitality. On one hand he has reduced or abandoned certain technical elements — textual form and narrative mode, for instance; on the other he has deliberately intensified the quality of social investigation and intellectual reflection. This creative approach shows Liu Jiming's conscious inheritance of the realist literary lineage represented by Liu Qing and Lu Yao — bringing literature's social function into play, thinking about questions such as "what is to be done" or "where are we going," and concentrating these through the personal struggle of a passionate young man like Ma La. Liu Jiming's return to and continuation of realist literature has universal significance — after all, the historical moment the writer inhabits, the writer's direct personal sense of the world and the human heart, is an existence in which one is engaged every day and from which there is no fundamental escape. But his desire to use literature's "outward turn" as a way to rescue the internal crisis of literature is, like Ma La's efforts to give back to the countryside, full of paradoxes and helplessness.
The Spiritual Growth of a Generation
In The Human Realm, Liu Jiming has created the complex character of Ma La. "Complex" here means complex in experience, and difficult to categorize under the principle of "birds of a feather flock together." Ma La grows up in a water-country landscape; after graduating from the Yanhe County Normal College he is first assigned to teach at Hekou Middle School, then plunges into commerce with his teacher Lü Yongjia and ends up spending seven years at a labor reform farm for involvement in a smuggling case; after his release, Ma La returns alone to his home of Shenhuangzhou and undertakes a series of rural construction initiatives. Teacher? Private entrepreneur? New-style farmer? Intellectual? Ma La's life undergoes several transformations of identity, yet never truly belongs to any single role. This perhaps reveals the writerly ambition concealed behind Liu Jiming's slow narrative of more than 500,000 characters: the desire to create an entirely new kind of character — to write a unique and complex "this one" — upon whom are inscribed half a century of China's social transformation, bearing the profound life experience and spiritual growth of a whole generation.
The traumas and shadows of childhood directly influence Ma La's personality, psychology, and life choices. Ma La loses his father in infancy, wanders with his elder brother Ma Ke and his mother in search of sustenance, and settles at Shenhuangzhou at the age of three. Just as he is beginning to understand the world, his mother dies in an accident; when he is fourteen, his brother dies in a fire while rescuing collective property. One by one, those close to him leave in the course of his growing up, until he becomes an orphan. Then comes the death of Teacher Lü, who had given him paternal love. "He was like a fish, isolated and helpless, living at every moment in the shadow of death." That sense of rootless drifting from his earliest years, those experiences and reflections on death, that loneliness and fear, become the nightmare of his life, forming his introverted, melancholy character and his wavering, uncertain spiritual disposition. This character and disposition run in a continuous thread with his later understanding of society and life, and with the choices and aspirations he arrives at. One might say that it is precisely because of this growth environment of unceasing deprivation of love and absence of security that Ma La so intensely longs for a life-mentor to guide him, and so urgently seeks to establish and build connections with the world around him.
Liu Jiming draws on an enormous range of Chinese and foreign realist classics throughout The Human Realm — the accumulated reading of Ma La's youth and adolescence. The box of books that Murong Qiu brings when she comes to the countryside as an educated youth; Teacher Lü's library during his years at the Normal College; the library when he is teaching; the library at the labor reform farm — all become treasure houses from which Ma La draws knowledge, and important spiritual mentors. The novel quotes from Zhang Chengzhi's The River in the North: "A young person at the crossroads of life needs a mentor — one who will guide his life with careful deliberation." For Ma La's personality and disposition, this kind of concrete life guidance is all the more urgent. He therefore experiences the two most important mentors of his life: his elder brother Ma Ke, and Teacher Lü. That two people of entirely opposite character and life aspiration can both be received by and leave their mark on Ma La without any sense of incongruity is itself something worth pondering deeply.
Ma Ke lives in an era of the selfless "we": simple, passionate, brimming with youth, willing to sacrifice the individual self for the nation and the collective — a tragic heroic figure whose song of youth, whose love and life, are all consumed in the fire that breaks out while he is saving the production team's rice seed. From that moment on, Ma La also loses the kin who could have sheltered him both in life and in spirit, becoming an orphan in a double sense — until he meets Teacher Lü at school. Teacher Lü is a romantically ungovernable man of intense individuality: an aspiration toward spiritual perfection fused with a dissolute personal life. His idealism and his rich intellectual world, his powerful spiritual presence, deeply attract and captivate Ma La. And so when Teacher Lü, reading the situation, proposes that Ma La resign and go into commerce with him, Ma La responds "like a person who has found no way out in the dark of night, greeting the dawn" — agreeing without hesitation. But these two mentors of different life phases will sometimes abruptly appear in Ma La's mind together, quarreling: in the moment when, after his release from prison, Ma La buries half of Lü Yongjia's ashes beside his brother's grave; in the dazed dreams he has after his rural construction hopes have come to nothing — his brother and Teacher Lü engage in fierce argument and debate. Is it the great divergence between individual and collective, between ideal and reality, between life and value? This also reflects the deep contradictions in Ma La's psychology. On one hand, the anxious instability of his character means he needs a life-mentor to give his life direction; on the other, within this anxious instability there is also a certain openness, allowing two entirely different mentors to both leave their mark on his life and to deepen this ambiguous, composite foundation. This reliance on and dependence upon mentors is the search, within a traumatized psychology, for security and a sense of existing. Each time a mentor departs, Ma La is plunged into intense confusion and difficulty. It is only after Teacher Lü's death, after seven years in prison and his return to his home in middle age, that he truly begins to be "weaned" — truly becomes self-reliant, feeling his way along life's road and toward rural construction. And in the process of seeking, finding, and losing his mentors, Ma La undergoes an enormous and protracted spiritual trial and growth of the heart.
This is precisely what crystallizes the spiritual temperament of a whole generation. Ma La's inner journey therefore holds the value of a sample for that generation. Liu Jiming has candidly acknowledged that he, like Ma La, has never been spiritually resolute — has always been wavering and uncertain — even in the idealism-inflamed 1980s. Perhaps for those born in the 1960s who were still young in the 1980s, what was felt was more an atmosphere than anything else; no clear intellectual convictions or value positions had yet formed, nor did they possess the clear intellectual self-awareness and powerful spiritual presence of those born in the 1950s. This vague and irresolute spiritual quality determined the groping character of their life journey: like Ma La, they begin without a clear direction or goal, able only to move forward while watching for signs, or to rely on life-mentors. On one hand, the absence of security drives them urgently to find their life coordinates — searching above and below, wanting to establish connections with others and with the world; on the other, the very vagueness of their spiritual foundations prevents them from making clear-cut life choices, and when confronted with the difficulties of reality they lack creativity and the capacity to solve problems on their own — able only to draw on life-mentors or the nourishment of history. This is why Ma La and those like him must retreat and rebuild: in their rural construction and reform, they must reach upward to connect with the spiritual resources of the 1950s while reaching downward to reconstruct a spiritual utopia; they want to break through to connect the cause they are devoted to with the past and with the future. They are like what Lu Xun called the "intermediate thing" — on the chain of time, carrying the past forward, grasping the present, facing the future with equanimity — and in doing so they seek intellectual and theoretical support for the rural construction and reform they are undertaking, along with the demonstration of its legitimacy and the strengthening of its persuasive force. In this lies both the complexity and the richness of the image of Ma La, and here too lies the full weight of his sense of failure and his tragedy.
Ma La's river of memory contains, of course, not only solitude and death, but also the growth of love and emotion. The small, scattered moments of beauty in a difficult life — he will remember these with particular sharpness, and they become the courage and motivation to keep living. His brother, Teacher Lü, Uncle Dawan — all compensate, to varying degrees, for the paternal love Ma La has lacked. His later return to Shenhuangzhou, his search for and rescue of Tang Caor — Teacher Lü's orphaned daughter — and his taking in of the small and vulnerable village orphan Xiaoguai can all be seen as a kind of giving back out of this same feeling. There is also the beauty and sadness of a first love during his years of teaching at the middle school. But what truly shapes the emotional growth of Ma La is Murong Qiu.
The arrival of educated youth in the countryside undoubtedly brought fresh stimulation to the village and to village youth alike. The box of books Murong Qiu brings gives Ma La his cultural awakening — but the pleasant scent of the face cream she wears remains in Ma La's memory as beauty across many years, keeping him always in possession of a childlike heart: simple, kind, full of boyish feeling. When he meets Murong Qiu again in middle age, what he still wants to call out is that warm and bright "Sister Murong" of his childhood. She was his brother's beloved, and also his teacher; Ma La's feelings toward Murong Qiu are themselves ambiguous — something like a boy's admiration, something like a child's attachment to a mother. Whatever the case, this beautiful emotional experience from youth becomes, through the countless hardships and setbacks and solitudes and confusions of his later life, a slender support and consolation; even beside Teacher Lü in his comparatively free and uninhibited private life, Ma La still maintains that boyish heart and the purity of his feelings — in truth a perpetual blankness, an island unto itself. As if waiting for the destined encounter with Murong Qiu, as if waiting for this gifted reunion to fill the blankness and thereby complete his emotional growth. The novel's ending also intimates this beautiful possibility in their convergence at last from different paths.
Murong Qiu can be seen as another Ma La. The educated-youth experience is for her too a form of trial and expansion. The hot, vigorous labor of rural life; Ma Ke's youthful vitality, his passionate idealism, his selfless devotion — all bring Murong Qiu a fervent sense of infection. Her first love for Ma Ke makes this beauty more intense; yet Ma Ke's sacrifice freezes this beauty forever in the form of grief. She cannot foresee that the era Ma Ke embodies will pass together with his death. This is the whole of Ma Ke's fortune and misfortune. It causes Murong Qiu to long treasure and miss this love for Ma Ke — sparing her the various subsequent entanglements and troubles that befell other educated youth — while at the same time becoming a wound she has long been unwilling to face and reopen, until her middle-aged encounter with Ma La at last brings her back to Shenhuangzhou, to stand before Ma Ke's grave and pour out the knot in her heart. The reason Murong Qiu is another Ma La rather than another Ma Ke is that Ma Ke and the spirit of his era were buried together. Murong Qiu has no choice but to live through, like Ma La, the storms of the era and the transformations of reality; the bewilderment, the inability to speak, the entanglement and struggle they feel in the period of social transition are the same. Only Murong Qiu's experience is somewhat simpler: she has always taught in universities, preserving a certain spiritual independence and integrity proper to an intellectual, refusing to go along with the rotting academic world. Under the driving force of social responsibility, she transforms from an aloof, detached intellectual into a sociologist who turns toward reality and goes out to the field. Her convergence with Ma La in the countryside is the meeting of two kindred spirits, two people of similar suffering who encounter another self in each other — two people of practical spirit and real-world concern finding a shared aspiration in the question of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. But little does Murong Qiu know that the Shenhuangzhou she finally decides to return to for field research has already become a vast expanse of water; her desire to change society, like that of Ma La holding out alone on an island in the flood, has both encountered the most crushing disillusionment and predicament that the human world can offer.
The Human Predicament From Which There Is No Escape
Liu Jiming is a writer deeply engaged with the world; his attention to and thinking about society frequently overflow the boundaries of literature, and he possesses something of the quality of the intellectual-writer and the sociological scholar. The Human Realm focuses his thinking about social reality on the question of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers — or, one might say, in this complex, pluralistic, and fragmented age, as a strategy of retreat, he wants to treat the countryside as a patch of clean earth and a realm of possibility through which to resist the worst fruits of modernity, seek a social way forward, and rebuild a spiritual homeland. "I built my thatched hut within the human realm, yet hear no clatter of carriages and horses" — in naming the novel The Human Realm, the author has poured into it an endless concern for reality and a beautiful vision of the countryside. This concern and vision come from Liu Jiming's understanding of society and history and from his own rural experience and imagination. And so, whether it is the practical construction efforts of Ma La and his kind in the upper half of the novel, or the intense concern for the "three rural issues" expressed by intellectuals represented by Murong Qiu in the lower half, both give expression from different angles to the author's reflections and explorations rooted in real-world problems, and entrust to them a certain social ideal and ambition. Yet this is, to a degree, wishful thinking. The rural construction undertaken by Ma La and his kind is achieved only through simple emotional attachment to one's home place, through personal experience, through a selective continuation of history, and through a utopian imagination of the countryside. Their rural experiment is therefore inevitably destined to fail; the "human realm" in which they have placed their hopes for beauty encounters instead, more often than not, the predicament of the human world. Yet the warmth of their idealism, their incompatibility with the climate of the age, their revealing of social truth and exposure of its ills — all of this possesses the simplicity and the preciousness of a Don Quixote.
Ma La's choice to return to the countryside is a retreat made under duress. He carries too many traces of the past; seven years of enclosed labor reform life have left him profoundly out of step with a rapidly changing era. He has no heart to continue the commercial competition he had engaged in alongside Teacher Lü; without Teacher Lü, he has also lost his interest in and sense of existing within city life. All he can do is follow the old road back to his home, approaching and handling rural problems according to his past habits of thought and his existing understanding. The novel is therefore saturated with a rich nostalgic atmosphere, and the seeds are laid for the anachronism of Ma La's later rural experiment. "The fields are going to waste — why do I not go back?" — Ma La, returning on the strength of emotional memories from his youth, has no idea that Shenhuangzhou is utterly changed, that everywhere there is abandoned land, that the desolate village is left only with the elderly, the weak, the sick, and the disabled. Through Ma La's eyes, the novel writes out the reality of today's declining countryside. How to bring these neglected fields into use, how to find ways to mobilize farmers' enthusiasm for working the land, how to attract back the young and able-bodied who went to work in the cities with no great results — these are the questions Ma La begins to think through and feel his way toward, one step at a time. He builds a house with a windmill on top, opens up wasteland to grow kiwifruit and strawberries, forms the Tongxin Cooperative with some of the villagers, and cultivates organic ecological rice. Through all of this, Ma La's capacity for independent action begins to manifest: the old pattern of being led by his brother and Teacher Lü gives way to a new pattern of him leading returned migrant workers like Guyu in preparing to accomplish something in the countryside.
Liu Jiming may have wanted to treat the countryside and Ma La's rural construction as a form of retreat and reconstruction — the novel repeatedly invokes Levin's rural reforms and spiritual perplexity in Anna Karenina — but Ma La still encounters one obstacle and predicament after another. The first is Zhao Guangfu, the large-scale farmer of Shenhuangzhou; between him and Ma La there is something like a tug-of-war between reformers and conservatives. Zhao Guangfu is an old farmer with deep feeling for the land — whatever land is his, and whatever land others have abandoned, he plants it all; at busy times he hires help, and has something of the feel of a landlord from the old days. He therefore harbors a degree of hostility when he learns that Ma La has come back intending to farm — feeling that his "business" will be encroached upon, especially since some farmers are taking their land back to work themselves, all of which gives him a sense of threat. But when he eventually sees the new vitality of Ma La's Tongxin Cooperative, he can contain himself no longer and establishes his own cotton planting cooperative, introduces Bt cotton, and achieves a bumper harvest — along with hidden dangers. Under the sweep of capital and technology, neither Zhao Guangfu's trend-following genetically modified crops nor Ma La's organic ecological rice, adhered to in opposition to food contamination, can withstand the tide. Not only are people like Li Haijun engaged in penetrating the countryside with capital and promoting genetically modified seed — the production pollution of the Chufeng Group in the city has caused strange illnesses in the surrounding residents and protest gatherings. The result of the protests is that the company prepares to relocate to Shenhuangzhou. Ma La's grand plans for construction have not yet had the chance to unfold at scale when they are submerged by a sudden flood — a flood that is natural flood, but even more a flood of collusion between capital and power. Against this combined force, the self-rescue Ma La organizes among the villagers is helpless; the entire village evacuates to the town, leaving only Ma La with Xiaoguai and two hedgehogs that have survived the disaster, holding out on an island in a vast expanse of water.
The fundamental cause of Ma La's failure lies in the pressure capital and power exert on the countryside, and in the incompatibility of Ma La's idealism with the currents of the age. The novel creates the image of Gu Chaoyang, a comprador capitalist who serves as a link in the collusion between officialdom and business, and is also the direct agent who caused Ma La's life setbacks and the shattering of his ideals. Ma La's life has undergone two great reversals: the first time, at the peak of his life while engaged in business with Teacher Lü, he finds himself abruptly imprisoned — the fundamental cause being that a big deal done in cooperation with Gu Chaoyang goes wrong through a smuggling incident; those like Gu Chaoyang, backed by power connections, emerge unscathed, while Ma La, knowing nothing of the inner workings, effectively becomes the scapegoat. The second time, the rural reform he is undertaking in Shenhuangzhou is aborted by the forceful arrival of the polluting enterprise Chufeng Group — and Gu Chaoyang is precisely the effective controlling shareholder of the restructured Chufeng Group. Shenhuangzhou, because of the natural disaster of the flood, because of the government's selective conduct in the face of disaster, and because of the destructive relocation of a polluting enterprise from the city into the countryside, faces a situation in which Ma La's rural construction is not only powerless before such a powerful onslaught, but the countryside itself will become a wasteland — and he himself faces a predicament with no way out. Gu Chaoyang's smooth success at every turn mirrors Ma La's setbacks at every turn; they represent two different aesthetic sensibilities of the era. "The merchant sets more store by profit than by parting" [note: a line from Bai Juyi's "Ballad of the Pipa"]: Gu Chaoyang concentrates in himself all the qualities this complex era has bestowed on him — opportunistic, realistic, mercenary, sensitive to market movements, casual in emotional attachments. Ma La, by contrast, is moving against the current of the age; his failure lies not only in the fact that the rural reform he is undertaking has been jointly attacked by capital and power, but at its root in the incompatibility of his idealism with the spirit of this era. The windmill on the roof of his house, his lone vigil in the flood — both symbolize the solitude of this incompatibility.
So in The Human Realm, it would be more accurate to say that Liu Jiming has poured into it a deep meditation on the present than a nostalgic backward look at the countryside. He has thrown open the long-standing proposition of "where does the countryside go," and in the lower half of the novel urgently brings onstage a series of intellectuals — somewhat indistinct in feature and somewhat thin in image — to join the discussion: Murong Qiu's research on rural society, Kuang Xibei's founding of the People's Livelihood Network, He Wei's rural social practice — all are explorations of this problem; their mouths are even used to give direct expression to views and positions on rural questions. But they too, like Ma La, can see the social problems and rural predicament of the present, while the paths out and the solutions they choose are not necessarily viable.
What Liu Jiming is pursuing is evidently not limited to literary expression — his personal practice in recent years proves this as well. The Human Realm contains reflection on a great many hot-button social issues and major questions: where does China go after joining the WTO? What problems have arisen after social transformation? How should the small-peasant mode of scattered farming operations be reformed? And so on. This kind of "large" thinking is precisely the confirmation of his expectations for a literature with power, and expresses even more strongly his ambition for a deep engagement with social reality.