Xiang Jing: The Human Realm: Withdrawal and Reconstruction

Originally published in: Selected Full-Length Fiction, Issue 4, 2016 

Editor's Note: A few days ago, Baoma's "Daily Book" recommendation featured the novel The Human Realm. Today we present "The Human Realm: Withdrawal and Reconstruction," a critical essay on the novel. The author argues that The Human Realm, setting out from a reflection on the broad currents of history, attempts to rebuild a world through a mode of "withdrawal" — something of rare value for a contemporary literature long fragmented. The essay was originally published in Selected Full-Length Fiction, Issue 4, 2016. Author: Xiang Jing.

Within Liu Jiming's writing and intellectual lineage, the appearance of The Human Realm was entirely to be expected. It brings to mind Lu Yao's ambition, after Life, to write "the largest-scale book" he could — Lu Yao chose the broad social life of China's cities and countryside between 1975 and 1985 as his subject; Liu Jiming's The Human Realm chooses a still longer span of contemporary history, from the founding of the People's Republic to the present day. The upper half depicts Ma La's return to Shenhuangzhou after prison to begin again from nothing; the lower half depicts Murong Qiu's life in the university and the intellectual world. Woven through both halves are key scenes of transformation: in the countryside (the hollowing-out of the village and the emergence of the Tongxin Cooperative) and in the factory (the Chufeng Group pollution incident and the restructuring of the Changjiang Electrical and Mechanical Plant); the divergences in thought among members of the same generation; the steadfastness and helplessness of the older generation; and the growth and wounds of the new. The novel scans in panoramic sweep across village and city, gathering together peasants, workers, intellectuals, the new moneyed class, and government officials as individuals, each of them positioned before the screen of contemporary China's most important problems, each responding and choosing according to their own origins, experiences, understanding, and reflection.

Engaging with and participating in the process of China's contemporary development through the medium of literature is one important feature of socialist realist writing. Having recently reread A History of Entrepreneurship and An Ordinary World, my greatest perplexity was this: we can use literature to lend support to rural cooperativization, and we can equally use literature to tell stories endorsing individual household farming and the division of land. The same kind of literature seems to be capable of self-sufficient coherence under two entirely different historical logics — so what is it that constitutes literature's own legitimacy? This is a question that must be answered when rereading works of this kind. How does one transcend the limitations of a historical moment through a distinctive artistic integrity?

One of the governing ideas of The Human Realm is the rebuilding of rural subjectivity through the farmers' professional cooperative. This is the choice Ma La makes after the great setback of his life; it is the intellectual resource of the scholar He Wei; it is also the direction of Murong Qiu's thinking after her return. For China's countryside to free itself from the isolated small-peasant production model and build professional farmers' cooperatives is both the necessary road toward rural modernization and a new pathway for new rural construction — logically coherent, and with practical precedents to draw on. How to render this in literary form while avoiding the trap of hollow abstraction is a formidable challenge. How, within a work of epic scale, to preserve the texture of daily life — without obscuring the near-average level of knowledge, thought, and belief that characterizes people's actual lives — while allowing knowledge, thought, and belief to serve as guides without forsaking the questioning of one's own "correctness": these are the inherent companions of this novel, born alongside it from the start.

The novel uses Ma La to thread together two eras, two choices (heading to the city versus returning to the countryside), and two idols (Ma Ke, the hero of the collectivization period, and Lü Yongjia, the strongman of the 1980s). After his time in prison, Ma La returns to Shenhuangzhou, returning to the unfinished rural construction work of his first idol Ma Ke, returning to the ideal of building a beautiful home through the reform of the land. To return to Shenhuangzhou is to return to a passion for the soil — to return to a social morality and ideal that history and mainstream narrative have long since discarded — to return to the cooperative, to draw from it new vitality and spirit. In Ma La's world, the countryside is not a burden on the rest of society but a new point of growth, spiritual and material alike.

The novel spans across seventeen years of rural cooperativization and the commune system, the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the household contract responsibility system of the 1980s, the great wave of migrant labor since the 1990s, and the outflow of rural population and resources. Compared with An Ordinary World and A History of Entrepreneurship, it has indeed taken on far more of what the passage of time has accumulated, making it impossible for this work to achieve a simple purity — though this too is a privilege conferred on it by its era. It can no longer return to the uncomplicated world of A History of Entrepreneurship.

Liu Jiming has said this is the most important work he has written to date — important because it is a work in which history and thought are fused. The historical dimension speaks for itself: the time spanned, and the historical events before our eyes throughout. As for the dimension of "thought": we can find in the work almost every theme Chinese literature has debated since the founding of the People's Republic — collectivism versus individualism, the educated youth and the countryside, the memory of youth, the memory of reading, reflections on a China rooted in the land, the restructuring of state enterprises, the grassroots, social justice and fairness, land reform, new-style cooperatives, the responsibility of intellectuals, old cadres and their second generation, the operations of capital and the function of government — all the problems of contemporary China, strung together by the figure of Ma La, a character deeply imbued with the sensibility of the literary intellectual, and by the unfolding of his story. Not every character serves to drive the plot forward; some passages are the expression of feeling and sentiment, some are necessary background information, some are required by the demands of character introduction. Looking back across more than half a century of contemporary history — time flying past, these themes rocking back and forth like small boats on the turbulent waters of contemporary history — the work carries an enormous weight.

The most striking quality of The Human Realm is its deeply unfashionable utopian sentiment: within the dominant narrative of rural decline, the author uses this sentiment to rebuild a "cooperative," to call capital and political power to account for justice, to establish the subjectivity of the countryside. As the peasant Guyu puts it in the novel: "What Teacher Ma worries about is not just the Tongxin Cooperative and Shenhuangzhou — it is the whole of China." The tone and vocabulary of the novel — even those social visions and moral stances toward characters that so readily invite association — are these not themselves, by the standards of today's literature, by the standards of today's refined and enervated atmosphere, a kind of utopia?

This novel is populated by an unusually large number of idealist and positive characters. They are all spiritual descendants of Ma Ke — the educated-youth-era lover whom Murong Qiu cherishes in memory — "selfless, rich in ideals." The characters in the novel are all stirred by a spirit of aesthetic devotion and idealism that leaves one uncertain whether it is reality or dream. All the stories and plots may well be real — they can be verified against life as it is actually being lived today. But the characters themselves often cause the reader's attention to drift; the life paths they traverse with apparent ease — Ma La's reading, his entrepreneurship — may represent chasms that the characters of An Ordinary World could not cross in a lifetime. These elites, gifted from the outset with exceptional intelligence and emotional capacity, always manage to overcome defeat and setback; their idealism seems not to have grown up from the soil they love, but to have descended from some divine gift or fate.

The novel's spiritual temper inherits both the tradition of socialist realism and critical realism, and also absorbs the essence of classical humanism. Lü Yongjia, Ma La, Murong Qiu, He Wei, Lulu, Kuang Xibei, and even their admirers are all in their own way utopians, social elites, idealists — though their intellectual resources, spiritual temperaments, and personal types differ: Lü Yongjia dreams of an "ideal republic" of universal equality, free from ideology, unconstrained; He Wei seeks to rebuild a China rooted in the land; Murong Qiu wants to return to the village; Ma La enacts it with his own body; Lulu and Kuang Xibei protect the environment and resist capital. This is a hymn to a China rooted in the land, a grand carnival of idealists.

Surrounding the idealists, characters like Ding Youpeng seem to exist primarily as a structural device — a contrasting foil — rather than as the necessary outgrowth of their own character development. Ding Youpeng has a father of such principled steadfastness and an enlightenment-liberal teacher of such influence, yet he himself is so thoroughly self-serving — this development of character arrives abruptly, almost arbitrarily, and may be a side effect of fiction written with burning feeling, where human nature easily collapses into one of two poles. And yet, since one is building one's "thatched hut within the human realm," the world is inevitably one where moderate, ordinary people make up the majority — and it is often precisely the ordinary world that allows us to see most clearly how ideals are possible, and how they are not.

Alain Finkielkraut placed literature in a position of contention with both God and history: "However hard we try, however much we imagine him arranging his time to the full and persuade ourselves he will take active part, he abandons us to our fate. If this appeal is to have any chance of being realized, what we must do is turn neither directly to God, nor to history — that modern incarnation of theodicy — but to literature." [note: paraphrased from Finkielkraut's The Defeat of the Mind] But it is perhaps only literature that can accomplish a solid and grounded settling of vibrant and living life-trajectories, and profoundly constrain and soothe the spiritual murmurings that well up from the deepest places within us.

The Human Realm places the contemplation of history's broad currents in the foreground, and takes the reconstruction of a world as its vision — accomplished, moreover, through a mode of "withdrawal." In this sense, I regard The Human Realm as a surprising and generous gift that Liu Jiming has offered to a contemporary Chinese literature long fragmented into pieces.