Zhang Huiyu | How Do We Understand 

The Human Realm?

Published March 14, 2017

Liu Jiming's The Human Realm is an extraordinarily important and distinctive book. As Mr. Chen Fumin said at the symposium on The Human Realm: for New Era literature, it makes a great difference whether this book exists or not. With it, New Era literature is considerably richer; without it, considerably more monotonous.

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: 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.

I wish to understand The Human Realm from three angles: its theme, its structure, and its style.

Part One: What Is the "Human Realm"?

The title The Human Realm [人境] is borrowed from the poem by the Eastern Jin pastoral poet Tao Yuanming: "I built my thatched hut within the human realm, yet hear no clatter of carriages and horses. You ask me how this can be so? When the heart is far, the place grows distant of itself. Beneath the eastern hedge I pick chrysanthemums; in the distance, unhurried, I behold the southern mountain." "The human realm" refers to a state of unhurried ease that is at once within the world of humanity and free of its "clatter of carriages and horses" — it is also an inquiry into a certain quality of human existence, or into the condition of the human world. This brings to mind the discussions of human nature and humanism in the early 1980s — works such as Dai Houying's Oh, Humanity! and Lu Yao's Life. This novel is revisiting the humanist questions of the early 1980s, which are also fundamental questions of the Chinese revolution and of Chinese modernity: the question of what kind of person, what kind of human nature, what kind of character, is to be shaped. As the novel's protagonist Ma La quotes from Levin in Anna Karenina: "Without knowing what I am and why I am here, it is impossible for me to live. Yet I cannot know this, and therefore I cannot live." [note: Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part VIII] The reason for this perplexity is that Ma La — having seen his business fail and found himself abruptly imprisoned — has come to doubt the cultural spirit that had guided him since the 1980s. This forces the released Ma La to return to his home of Shenhuangzhou; and Murong Qiu — university professor and former first love of his elder brother Ma Ke — ultimately also returns to this place.

Ma La and Murong Qiu are the central characters of The Human Realm; the entire story unfolds around them. Near the novel's ending there is this passage: "After that great fire, dear Sister Murong collapsed as if struck by lightning; for a long time her face was ashen and her spirit extinguished. I had a premonition that at the same time she lost her love, we too would lose her. This was an inescapable fate — so for an individual, and so for the whole of Shenhuangzhou. Two months later, Chairman Mao passed away. Every villager and every child wept… That year, my mind and my body seemed to stop developing and growing. I became a child who would never grow up." [note: the novel, quoted] His brother's death and Chairman Mao's death cause Ma La to be forever arrested in that moment, refusing to grow up. Immediately below this passage, Murong Qiu looks at his brother's grave and says: "Please forgive me for coming only now. All these years, I never had the courage to face this gravestone. Because it has buried not only my first love, but an entire era." His brother's death also causes Murong Qiu to remain stranded in that era. Just as Ma La has remained adolescent — never married — so too Murong Qiu: after her divorce, she has never remarried. To preserve their spiritual purity, they both carry a certain quality of "asceticism." This book is a spiritual history and a social history of these two people who have "never forgotten their original heart" — who have forever remained in the era of youth.

Part Two: The Novel's Structure

The Human Realm is divided into upper and lower halves: the upper half is Ma La's story, the lower half is Murong Qiu's. On the surface they appear to be two parallel stories — the former about new countryside construction in the new century, the latter about a woman professor's academic self-reflection. Yet these two stories have an inner connection. First, the elder brother Ma Ke is the shared spiritual idol of both Ma La and Murong Qiu: Ma Ke was a Communist warrior, a grass-roots cadre in the rural People's Commune. Second, the new rural cooperative that Ma La operates and the state enterprise reform that Murong Qiu concerns herself with are both connected to Gu Chaoyang — their common enemy, the agent of domestic and foreign capital. In my view, these two stories of countryside and city are designed to respond to the mainstream narratives of countryside and city that have prevailed since the 1980s.

In the 1980s, in the course of the transition from revolution to Enlightenment and modernization, two kinds of rural narrative emerged. One depicted the countryside as a place of ignorance, backwardness, and stasis — a place awaiting modernization. The countryside reverted from the organized, collectively economic People's Commune to the state of a natural economy; the peasants became the Ah-Q and Runtu of the May Fourth era. This became the most mainstream rural narrative of the 1980s — and, it is true, the countryside really did become an abandoned space in the urban reforms launched in the mid-1980s and the modernization drive of the 1990s. The second rural narrative depicted the countryside as poetic, sacred, wild, epic, abstract, and aestheticized — visible in some of the root-seeking literature and educated-youth literature, which transformed frontier regions and rustication destinations into "my distant Qingping Bay"; [note: a reference to Shi Tiesheng's celebrated 1983 work] the most typical example is Haizi's poetry, in which Haizi's writing about the land and the wheat fields accomplished the epification and de-historicization of the countryside.

These two rural narratives share one thing in common: both are de-revolutionized and de-historicized countrysides — non-modern, non-industrialized countrysides. Put differently, they are two kinds of rural narrative within a modernity-centered horizon: one is the benighted pre-modern; the other is nostalgia, pastoral poetry, and spiritual homeland. On one hand this rural narrative accomplished the disenchantment and de-historicization of the countryside; on the other it accomplished its re-mythologization, abstraction, and mystification. This self-sufficient rural space then evolved into two kinds of rural history. One turned the countryside into a relatively independent village space with a Confucian tradition and folk beliefs — with bandits, warlords, the Nationalists, and the Communists all treated as outsiders who would eventually leave, leaving only the fixed village order unchanged, as in Chen Zhongshi's White Deer Plain. The second was a cyclical view of history with no real change: only when "the Japanese come," as in Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, does the countryside enter history — or as Liu Zhenyun's early novella The Village Chief depicts, a village history of the township head becoming the neighborhood chief and the neighborhood chief becoming the Party secretary, round and round in circles.

The Human Realm differs from this 1980s rural narrative. When the newly released Ma La returns to Shenhuangzhou in 2000, in the novel's upper half, he finds a withered and declining countryside — whereupon he begins his experiment in using cooperativization to achieve rural self-rescue. This rural narrative continues the tradition of socialist realist rural subject matter: it is a mode of narration with the countryside as its subject. Ma La's experiment in professional peasant cooperativization carries several layers of meaning.

First, cooperativization is a process of transforming people — of endowing people with the value and dignity of living. In the face of the rural depopulation and land abandonment of the 1990s, Ma La leads the elderly, weak, sick, and disabled to organize themselves again. Guyu, for example, is a returned migrant worker injured on the job; after joining the cooperative he says: "In the city, he was nothing more than a migrant worker lighter than a blade of straw — barely different from an ant or a dog; even if he died no one would bother to look. Only in Huixiang's eyes was he a man of substance. This gave him a small measure of human dignity — and this human dignity could only be obtained on this land that had given birth to him and raised him." [note: the novel, quoted] Then there is the adoption of Xiaoguai, who is taught to farm and begins a new life; and Lü Yongjia's daughter Tang Caor, who also kicks her drug habit within the cooperative. The cooperative, in other words, is a place that rescues people.

Second, the cooperative reconstructs the collapsed village relationships and social relationships, restoring vitality to a countryside hollowed out by urbanization — solving problems of irrigation systems and drinking water through cooperative loans, organizing dragon dances and lion dances at New Year, restoring rural culture. The cooperative, that is to say, is not only a solver of economic problems but a rebuilder of political and cultural order.

Third, the competition between Ma La's organic rice cooperative and Zhao Guangfu's genetically modified cotton represents the opposition of two development paths in today's countryside: one is organic farming and environmental protection, but dependent on urban consumers; the other relies on large capital and foreign capital to develop the countryside.

Fourth, the professional agricultural planting and sales cooperative that Ma La operates is an economic and commercial cooperative — different from the political cooperative of the Mao era. The latter embodied the socialist and communist ideal of building a modern, collectivized, exploitation-free countryside; the former is more like a self-rescue action for an abandoned countryside, and is therefore also doomed to fail.

In the story of Murong Qiu in the lower half, The Human Realm enters into dialogue with two kinds of urban narrative. The first is a reflection on the "thick-black art" [note: 厚黑学, the doctrine of unscrupulous cunning], power-struggle style of official-world fiction — which understands politics as a power struggle and carries no political meaning in the proper sense. The Human Realm instead presents the entangled interests between officials at various levels, the second generation of revolutionaries, and foreign capital; this official-business-academic interest community (government attracting investment, foreign capital providing support, academia cheering it on) is the fundamental cause of state enterprise worker layoffs and corporate pollution. The second is a reflection on the family-history style of novel associated with Yan Geling and Wang Anyi. The story of Murong Qiu and Lü Yongjia's fathers also has a Republican-era quality — but The Human Realm has Tang Caor transform the concubine's Western-style villa into an education center rather than making her the inheritor of Republican-era elegance.

Part Three: Realist Style

The Human Realm is a novel in a realist mode, creating typical characters in typical environments. It brings together multiple characters and multiple voices, and is also highly symbolic.

Ma La is like a wanderer: on one hand he returns to Shenhuangzhou in search of history, finding his elder brother Ma Ke's relics — a diary and the novel Song of Youth; on the other he causes one character after another to open their hearts and speak their inner truths. Many characters in the novel are given a brief biography — a history of their origins and circumstances — and in particular the old branch secretary, old revolutionaries, and old rightists who have been suppressed since the 1980s — such as Guo Dawan (father of Guo Dongsheng), Murong Yuntian (Murong Qiu's father), and Ding Changshui (Ding Youpeng's father) — are given voice again to express their dissatisfaction with present reality. There is also the dissenting voice of the state enterprise worker Chen Guang regarding state enterprise reform, and the new generation of university students such as Lulu who plunge into social movements. Among all these numerous characters, however, one character is permanently unable to speak: the dog named "Sheyuan" [note: 社员, literally "commune member"]. This is in itself highly symbolic — the name carries within it the history of the People's Commune. That is to say: with the failure of socialist rural practice, the "commune members" who were its practicing subjects also find it impossible to narrate their own history — reflecting the suppression of revolutionary narrative by the mainstream narrative since the 1980s.

The novel also has a rich social breadth, presenting the economic forces beneath the surface of human relationships — from top to bottom, from the high strata to the bottom — not simply through the moral lens of good people versus bad people, but by placing people within different economic relationships to understand them. The Human Realm expresses the emotional experiences of three generations. The father generation — Guo Dawan, Murong Yuntian, Ding Changshui, Gu Feng, and others — were either participants in the revolution or maintained a sympathetic attitude toward it; while the son generation — Guo Dongsheng, Ding Youpeng, Gu Chaoyang, and others — have become corrupt officials, capitalists, and developmentalist functionaries. The third generation — Xiaoguai, Tang Caor, Lulu, and others — have their own encounters and make their own new choices.

I would argue that the realism of The Human Realm operates on a grander scale than that of A History of Entrepreneurship or A Bright Sunny Sky. This is because socialist realism had an unspoken premise of "political correctness" — the socialist state system and the economic foundation of public ownership — a premise that A History of Entrepreneurship and A Bright Sunny Day had no need to argue for. The Human Realm, by contrast, narrates history against the backdrop of socialism's dissolution and failure, and against the backdrop of China's entry into globalization — within a global structure that connects Chinese villages directly to Wall Street.

Many commentators have treated Ma La as an image of the "new person." But is Ma La truly a new person or an old person? Ma La has flowing within him the dual bloodlines of the Communist warrior Ma Ke and the liberal spiritual mentor Lü Yongjia. If Ma Ke is the martyr, the sufferer, then Teacher Lü is the embodiment of desire, of Nietzsche, and of the merchant: the former is selfless, willing to sacrifice himself for the collective good, the Communist warrior content to be a brick and a tile; the latter is the Faust pursuing freedom, aspiring to become the superman, the strong one — a symbol of capital and power. Ma La wishes simultaneously to inherit the mantle of both, to bury them together — but these two spiritual pillars are in fierce conflict with each other, and so Ma La inevitably carries a dual character and is necessarily contradictory. Relative to Gu Chaoyang, Ding Youpeng, and Li Haijun, Ma La is a new person — someone possessed of new thought and feeling. But Ma La is also an old person: for the post-revolutionary years have reverted to the pre-revolutionary, and Ma La has a nineteenth-century soul. The house with the windmill is itself unrealistic — and so Ma La's failure is also inevitable. This organic farming cooperative is a form of self-rescue by the vulnerable and the marginalized; it cannot resist the flood-force of concentrated power and capital. The Human Realm uses precisely this failure to present the despair and powerlessness of this era.