Zhang Yuanke | A Sense of Reality, Intellectual Depth, and Rhetorical Choice

— Reading Notes on Liu Jiming's The Human Realm

Author: Associate Research Fellow, Museum of Modern Chinese Literature Originally published in: Contemporary Writer Review, Issue 4, 2017

If one were to tell a writer that their work lacks a "sense of reality," the writer would most likely disagree. They might counter: I live in the present; I am thoroughly familiar with the life of this era; the content and themes of my work are without exception intimately connected to real life — how can you say my work lacks a "sense of reality"? We cannot entirely dismiss this rebuttal; we can only say that divergences in perception of this kind ultimately stem from the different ways writers understand and practice the idea of "a sense of reality." In truth, the sense of reality as a literary experience — or, put differently, as an aesthetic and artistic sense of reality — must first be the aesthetic product of the writer's interpenetration and mutual scrutiny with real life: with people, events, things, and the relationships between them. It is also the artistic crystallization achieved when the writer uses powerful thought to integrate fragmented experience and undergoes repeated immersion in both the subtle depths and the broad expanse of the real world. It is further the product of the writer's genuine feeling threading together all manner of detail, scene, and character, generating from these an artistic achievement of independent and distinctive meaning. And finally, it must manifest as a kind of overall and integral demand: under its illuminating light, history, the present moment, experience, and logic all open at once, presenting an aesthetic world in which one sees both the individual trees and the forest entire.

A sense of reality cannot stand without the support of intellectual depth. A novel unsupported by profound thought is as insipid as water with nothing in it. Thought endows a novel with soul, with texture, with the power to illuminate. The most outstanding feature of Liu Jiming's new full-length novel The Human Realm is its deep excavation and full expression of present-day experience, combined with an attempt to respond to and offer exploratory answers to the many grand questions the age has posed: Where in the world should China's villages go, amid the sweeping transformation of city and countryside? How is the individual fate caught up in the grip of capital and power to find its way across? To what degree can knowledge and ideals stand as autonomous subjects and become the leading force driving the historical process forward? What is the present state and future prospect of idealism in China? To enter a novel with profound thought, and through a synthesizing force to regulate the speech and actions of characters, or to guide the unfolding of plot, or to assist in the overall presentation of the social and historical panorama — this kind of bearing and scale is rarely encountered in full-length fiction since the new century.

From this angle, the appearance of this novel is not only a reconnection with the long-interrupted tradition of grand, social-scientific narrative in the manner of Midnight, but also one of the rare and timely effective practices since the new century of using fiction to carry the exploration of China's contemporary situation and its path of development into genuine depth.

The Human Realm inherits the tradition of the "problem novel" in new Chinese literature. With an integral vision it presents in full-dimensional scope a range of problems that have arisen in the course of China's contemporary development: the ecological problem (the Chufeng Group pollution incident), the economic problem (the restructuring of the Changjiang Electrical and Mechanical Plant), the land problem (the transformation of the land in Shenhuangzhou), and more. These problems involve the broad strata of workers, peasants, intellectuals, officials, and the new moneyed class — the range of attention is by no measure narrow. The author not only discovers and raises these problems but also attempts to address them through the medium of fiction. How then to carry the exploration of "China's problems" into genuine depth, and to bring to light in the literary dimension the presentational modes unique to fiction?

On one hand, The Human Realm treats these problems as background, focusing primarily on the life experience of individuals under particular circumstances, and on the subjective agency of the ideal "human being" in relation to reality within that experience — rather than making the search for solutions to the problems of the age its center of gravity. This is the proper attitude and approach for a novelist — for providing a complete set of solutions is not, in fact, the novelist's task. On the other hand, The Human Realm draws more substantially on the characterization of three representative figures — Lü Yongjia, Ma La, and Murong Qiu — to celebrate and affirm the vital importance of idealism to the historical process. Subjectively, all three possess a powerful spiritual drive to change both themselves and society; objectively, all three are active explorers who do not sit and wait for others to act.

Lü Yongjia, as one who perceives and awakens before others, leaves teaching to go into business. He runs a company and lives personally in a spirit of unrestrained freedom; his enterprise collapses through speculation, and he dies young of illness — yet his ideal, to earn enough money to buy an island and establish his own republic of the ideal, is sincere and far-reaching. His "republic of the ideal" is the republic every one of us longs to see realized. If Lü Yongjia's "ideal republic" remains at the stage of utopian imagination, then Ma La's venture into the countryside — establishing the Tongxin Farmers' Professional Cooperative, pursuing the path of collective endeavor — is a practice close to the ground of actual reality. The Tongxin Cooperative is forced to disband through the intervention of capital and brute power, but the "Ma La road" that has taken root and is bearing fruit is a road verified by practice as consonant with the actual conditions of rural development today. Murong Qiu is the representative of the intellectual; dissatisfied with the vulgar, bureaucratized, out-of-touch academic world, she resolves to commit herself to the countryside and undertake fieldwork. Her path of breaking free tells us at the very least: so long as knowledge does not die and ideals are not extinguished, China still has hope.

Yet their roads are also inevitably fraught with uncertainty. Lü Yongjia — combining liberalism with mercantilism within himself — is defeated in the intricate contest of the marketplace; this is not one man's fault alone. He took a wrong turn; he needed only to turn back — but history gave him no such opportunity. Ma La inherits the spiritual mantle of his teacher and from his brother inherits a deep faith in collectivism, pouring a powerful individual idealist passion into the founding and running of the Tongxin Cooperative — yet even this does not proceed smoothly. His competition with the cotton grower Zhao Guangfu, his maneuvering among various forces of capital, the constantly recurring tensions between the Tongxin Cooperative and the residents of Shenhuangzhou — all of these foretell how genuinely difficult it is to bridge the gulf between ideal and reality. In the end, when the cooperative — painstakingly built and gradually approaching stable footing — is swallowed up by the confluence of natural flood and the flood of power and capital alike, its collapse not only announces the failure of this particular practice but leaves us with a question heavy enough to bear: to what degree can one person's ideals and practice genuinely transform reality? Will Ma La and the Tongxin Cooperative ever rise again? Murong Qiu, keeping herself untainted, has always stood apart from the mainstream academic world, striving to preserve her inner and spiritual independence and self-sufficiency. Yet when she is moved by the actions of Ma La, He Wei, Kuang Xibei, and indeed her own daughter Lulu, and resolves without hesitation to leave the great city and go to the countryside to conduct fieldwork — will the road she sets out upon run smoothly?

The explorer is fated to be lonely. They always fight alone — contending on one side with the visible forces of the wider society, and on the other struggling in the boundless "emptiness where nothing resists." [note: 无物之阵, a phrase from Lu Xun's prose poem "The Shadow's Farewell," evoking a formless, intractable opponent against whom direct combat is impossible] Yet the brave children of spirit, the children of the earth, will surely return after brief confusion and pain — even if the outcome is fated to be the defeat of Sisyphus, they will not flinch. Seen from this angle, the novel's detailed attention to and depiction of the protagonists' subjective agency and spiritual condition within reality in fact draws the narrative's center of gravity toward two dimensions: the relationship between the human being and reality, and the possible conditions of being human within a specific reality; and the relationship between the human being and the self, and the consciousness of life that may be generated when a person looks directly at themselves. This fully demonstrates the author's deep humanist concern for idealism and its practitioners.

The sense of reality is premised on an integral historical cognition — or put differently, if divorced from an integral perspective and background, the writer's perception of reality will tend toward vagueness and fragmentation, rendering the depiction of reality and the revelation of its essential laws meaningless or greatly diminished in value. Writers deeply influenced by nineteenth-century critical realism and twentieth-century socialist realism will probably find this requirement familiar. The reason The Human Realm expresses such a powerful and profound sense of reality lies not only in its integral attention to present-day life, but also in its inseparable connection to the recounting of the educated youth's history in earlier years and the depiction of their lived experience. First, for the novel to panoramically recreate the history of urban and rural life over more than thirty years, the educated youth — as the connecting point between "city" and "countryside" — and their history cannot be ignored or dispatched in a line or two. Second, since the lives, thoughts, and vocational pursuits of the protagonists Ma La and Murong Qiu, and the spiritual forces driving them, are all intimately bound up with this period of history, a detailed accounting of the stories and life experiences of Ma Ke, Murong Qiu, and related characters during the educated-youth years is an indispensable component of the novel.

As it happens, in structural terms, the people, events, and relationships of the two eras display the same logic. For example: Ma Ke's diary in relation to Ma La's writing; Ma Ke's relationship with the poor peasants' association chairman Guo Dawan in relation to Ma La's relationship with Guyu; Ma Ke's relationship with educated-youth life in relation to Ma La's relationship with the Tongxin Cooperative and the collective — from these parallels it is clear not only that educated-youth life is revisited and narrated as a spiritual resource, linked to Ma La's era to form a relationship of origin and derivation, but also that this period of history is incorporated as important content of the novel's sense of reality into the entire narrative flow, becoming a crucial point of support for its value system.

The difference lies in this: Ma La's ideals and life in the new century are constrained by the powerful forces of the real world, and his enterprise in Shenhuangzhou ends ultimately in failure. This is the victory of real-world logic over individual logic. And when all the original inhabitants have relocated, what is extinguished is not only the Tongxin Cooperative but Shenhuangzhou itself. This too is an allegory. The seizure of the land, the decline or extinction of the village — this is the final elegy, the dirge, sounded by a China rooted in the soil. Against this background, the road of Ma La and those like him is fated to be unsmooth — yet the enterprise they have pioneered and the direction they have pointed remain consonant with the laws of historical development. In sum, The Human Realm fuses the sense of history and the sense of reality into a single whole — "the sense of reality is the sense of history" — and, taking the principles of classical realism and the pursuit of idealism as its goals, attempts to reconstruct history and reactivate a literary practice that engages with reality. Its value and significance are beyond question far-reaching.

The rhetorical choices of The Human Realm and the cultivation of its sense of reality and intellectual depth are obverse and reverse of the same coin. Because a work of literature is not only the product of the writer's spirit made material — once it enters the field of reading, it must also pass the test of many different forces, and ultimately becomes the product of the reader's reading. How to achieve a harmonious and congenial communicative relationship among writer, text, and reader requires the writer to work with painstaking and concentrated effort on the rhetoric of the novel. "Novelistic rhetoric is the activity in which the novelist selects and employs appropriate methods, techniques, and strategies in order to control the reader's response, 'persuade' the reader to accept the novel's characters and central values, and ultimately bring about a tacit and fitting relationship of communication with the reader."

From the perspective of macro-rhetoric, The Human Realm primarily employs the narrative mode most common to the modern novel — telling [讲述]. We know that telling, as a mode that displays powerful subjectivity and freedom, grants the author enormous authority — but the casual appearance of the "author factor" within the narration can not only suppress or disrupt the agency of the novel's other elements, but may also block the reader's normal reception. Novelists who adopt this mode are therefore particularly cautious about it; one generally would not use this narrative mode in isolation without a great deal of careful artistic cultivation. So how does this full-length novel of more than five hundred thousand characters achieve its effect of clear transparency through "telling"?

The center of gravity of the telling lies in character. "Character" is the basic element of fiction, with several basic functions: as the "actant" of the novel, driving the development of plot; as the "role" of the novel, unfolding the self-fashioning of personality; and as both "actant" and "role" simultaneously, with plot development and self-fashioning proceeding in parallel. The Human Realm primarily employs the self-fashioning function of its "central characters" to display the agency and vital tension of human beings in their real circumstances, while employing the actant function of "minor characters" to drive the transitions and development of the story. Ma La and Murong Qiu are the two protagonists at the center of the novel's concentrated portrayal, and from each of them, threads radiate outward in a crosshatched pattern, drawing in numerous other characters and stories. This creates a web-like structure in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Within this structure, Ma La — as "a typical character in a typical environment" — can be called the newest addition to the gallery of characters in full-length fiction since the new century. One might also say that the primary contribution of The Human Realm is the creation of this character. This is of course intimately related to the author's central positioning and concentrated rendering of the character's "role" function.

The focal point of the telling lies in the "implied author." The Human Realm is a full-length novel of strong subjectivity and intellectual depth. How is the author's clearly directional expression — that is, the "author factor" — made manifest through artistic means? This novel employs omniscient narration: the "narrator" as speaker establishes the historical background, shifts the narrative content, connects the character genealogy, and acts as the author's agent in conveying thought. But the authoritative pronouncements of the "narrator" alone are insufficient to generate the penetrating literary meaning of the work. The setting and cultivation of the novel's "implied author" is especially important as a means of displaying the uniquely literary value of the novel's art of telling. It is precisely in this way that the implied author, as the author's surrogate, acquires its legitimacy of existence within the text. It is evident that Ma La is the author's embodiment — one of the "implied authors." Since Ma La's ideals are the soul of the entire work, the novel, through its detailed depiction of Ma La's image and his life journey, completes the effective agency of the "author factor" within the novel. In this process it is the feeling and judgment of the "implied author" — not the author in person — that supports and constructs the artistic space of the work.

The rhythm of the telling tends toward the leisurely and unhurried. There has been fierce historical debate about the relative merits of telling and showing as two contrasting narrative modes, and in practice two different styles have emerged: one emphasizing the author's intervention, celebrating the dominance of the "author factor" in narration; the other emphasizing the author's voluntary withdrawal, stressing an objective presentation that betrays nothing. In truth, fiction is the art of imitation and expression, and any extreme position or practice in either direction is problematic. In adopting the telling mode, The Human Realm — beyond the various means already described by which it avoids the direct appearance of the "author factor" in the text — also strives to slow the motion of "telling" itself to a leisurely pace. This enables the dynamic world and the static world to achieve an effective fusion. For the world is always in motion, and no subjective "narration" alone can approach its truth without limit; once the telling slows down, a combination of telling and showing is formed — retaining the dynamic qualities of telling while achieving the artistic effect of showing. The Human Realm, through its dense, unhurried narrative rhythm and its plain, direct presentation of people, events, things, and the relationships between them — and especially in its focusing on inner monologue, its description of individual spiritual activity, its rendering of life's fine-grained detail, and its portrayal of natural landscape — presents both interior and exterior experience with extraordinary truth and reliability.

The Human Realm not only handles well the communicative relationship among author, text, and reader, but, within the landscape of full-length fiction since the new century, it also provides numerous effective examples for the development of contemporary literature through its rare quality of engagement with reality, its depth of thought, and its weight of historical feeling.

First, this practice constitutes a powerful refutation of the petty-bourgeois, self-enclosed style of fiction that currently pervades the literary world. Some of our novelists refuse the intervention of thought, regarding it as putting ideas before everything else; they consider excessive attention to intellectual depth a burden, or simply wish it away with the self-serving conviction that expressing thought is not the novelist's task. And so the contemporary literary world has filled up with a large body of works that scratch without drawing blood, floating on the surface of life and pandering to popular taste. These works do depict reality, and are not without a certain truthfulness — but most of them are purely surface-level, physically descriptive experiences of the trifling and trivial kind, not transformed or processed through art; and as such they become, paradoxically, the works most lacking in a sense of reality. And because their depiction of reality is not truth in the artistic sense, they are equally unable to enter the effective channels of literary reception at the psychological and spiritual level. It is against this backdrop — amid the large body of pseudo-realist fiction that has appeared in the new century in forms such as non-fiction, journalistic writing, screenplay-style, lower-body writing, and fragmented writing — that The Human Realm stands apart from its peers through the weight of its sense of reality.

Second, this practice continues and initially displays the magnanimity of spirit and scale of contemporary full-length fiction. To use aesthetic quality, intellectual depth, and integral wholeness as the necessary conditions for defining and measuring the presence or strength of a sense of reality in a work is neither a new nor a demanding standard. Of the classic realist works we know so well — Midnight, Mountain Rain, A History of Entrepreneurship, An Ordinary World — which of them does not embody these qualities? Since the new era, this tradition has gradually dwindled; and since the new century, works capable of displaying a weighty sense of reality have been all but impossible to find. But dwindling or rare does not mean outdated — on the contrary, the mission of realist literature is far from complete. If the artistic heights achieved by Midnight and Mountain Rain in the 1930s, A History of Entrepreneurship in the 1950s, and An Ordinary World in the 1980s were each commensurate with their respective eras, then the appearance of The Human Realm in 2016 is not only a retrospective look at and inheritance of this literary tradition, but also the latest fruit of an initial displaying of the bearing of a major work commensurate with Chinese reality.

In sum, The Human Realm possesses both a sense of reality and intellectual depth, and is a rare powerful work of realism in recent years. Liu Jiming's handling of history, his courageous engagement with reality, his effective inheritance of the literary tradition, his beneficial exploration of the telling form, and his creation of new literary characters will all provide valuable illumination to the increasingly dwindling tradition of realist writing today. The novel also tells us that contemporary Chinese writers, when confronting real life, are fully capable of handling the major themes of the present age. In the afterword to The Human Realm, Liu Jiming writes: "I have written the most important work of my life." I would go further and say: The Human Realm will surely become one of the most important works of the second decade of this century.