Disciplined Passion: On Red Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s

Author: Yu Daizong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: After graduating from university, Yu Daizong could have chosen to study abroad, as his English was good and he met the other necessary conditions. He could also have become a novelist and lived as a romantic intellectual, weaving stories while getting entangled in some himself. During his university years, he had written novels and they were in the highly authoritative national journal 《》. One of his later novels was even selected for 《Fujian Province’s Fifty Years of Outstanding Middle-Length Novels》 (a collection that only chose less than ten middle-length novels). Shi Xiaoyu, the deputy editor of 《Fujian Literature》, once said at a conference that Yu Daizong was one of the most promising novelists in our province. However, fate is both self-designed and beyond one’s control. By chance, he taught middle school Chinese for several years before being admitted to my master’s program. It seemed he wanted to try his hand in literary research. In my initial impression, his face was a contradiction: fair skin, a mark of descendants of immigrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but his slightly deep-set eyes held a subtle, eagle-like sharpness mixed with a touch of gentleness, as if he had a small percentage of Arab ancestry. His face was handsome, but he often had a scholarly,. Based on my intuition, such a talent might be a gem in academia, or to put it more elegantly, a rough jade. Of course, jade needs to be polished to become a masterpiece, and thankfully, he was diligent and devoted to self-improvement. Yet, he always wanted to change his way of life. After completing his master’s degree, he didn’t choose to stay in academia and immerse himself in books. Perhaps to test whether he had undiscovered potential, he worked at a television station for a year. The result was that he gained a bit of weight but achieved little sense of accomplishment. His temperament and cultivation were not compatible with the fast-paced, constantly moving lifestyle of the industry. He finally decided to return to the university campus and start over, beginning as a teaching assistant. This was about seven or eight years after he graduated from university. He continued to write novels, and they began to gain some influence. At provincial literary conferences, he was invited to give lectures, which were quite popular, making some young men and women admire him and his words in debates. However, his main focus seemed to be not on novels. During his master’s studies, he delved into many classics of contemporary Western literary theory. As a teaching assistant, his comments during meetings often sparked deep reflection. This didn’t surprise me much, as things were meant to be this way. But one time, when Tong Qingbing, a professor from Beijing Normal University’s Chinese Department, came to our place, he listened to his very brief speech and was particularly impressed, even naming him as a candidate for his doctoral program. Yet, he didn’t go. Why? He smiled but didn’t answer. This mystery remains unsolved among his peers, with some speculating that he was newly married at the time. Later, he successfully passed the exams and joined my doctoral program, specializing in contemporary literature. This field had dual advantages for him. First, he had deep creative experience in literature, making him an expert in the intricacies of literary images. Many outsiders (including those with doctorates who only knew a lot of Western theories) might take a decade or even a lifetime to understand certain principles he had already grasped deeply. Second, he had a considerable understanding of contemporary Western literary theory. For a period, he often mentioned Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Habermas, and others. Some graduate students who were quite detached from art often mechanically used the words of Western masters to mask their emptiness in literary sensibility. The bombardment of new terms since the 1980s has been a major problem in literary theory. If I hadn’t known about his long creative experience, I might have worried that he would become an dazzlingly dogmatic theorist. The book you are reading now is his doctoral dissertation, which represents his level of knowledge and wisdom. His research focuses on red novels from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the long novels. Choosing this topic meant challenging two tendencies. On one hand, there were scholars who held traditional views, deifying and classicizing red novels, treating them with religious reverence. On the other hand, there were some radical critics who, from today’s perspective, and them (as seen in some articles from the early 1990s that re-wrote literary history). His profound theoretical background allowed him to stand at the pinnacle of history and examine the literary classics of the time as historical texts with a calm, distant perspective. He didn’t see them as family treasures or a pile of mental garbage, but as a deep contradiction, transformation, and process of turning into the opposite within a historical stage. He divided the norms of revolutionary ideology (imposition) into emotional and rational aspects. The macro, rational imposition was relatively simple, while the emotional norm was much more complex. He proposed concepts like "revolutionary pleasure," "revolutionary passion," "revolutionary pain," and their "sanitization" and "purification." These inevitably clashed with the sensibility of literary images, leading to the shrinkage of the elasticity of red love, the dilemma of revolutionary superhumans, and so on. All this inevitably led to the constant intensification of contradictions. On one hand, the norms of the revolutionary emotional world became increasingly severe, and the space more narrow (as he pointed out, the "enemy-like transformation" of intermediate characters). On the other hand, to pursue the maximum effectiveness of literary sensibility, they had to repeatedly emphasize opposing formulaic and conceptual thinking. This determined that the process would be tortuous, repetitive, painful, and difficult, sometimes even filled with blood and fire, and heroic sacrifices. But in general, it was a grandiose move toward the purification of heroes, that is, humanity. The path of abstract and model-like emotionalization continued. The norms and construction of revolutionary sensibility ultimately ended when it was drowned and dissolved by reason. His training in Western literary theory gave him a macro, all-seeing perspective in history and logic. His long creative experience with the art of the novel also allowed him to make original summaries at the micro level. Hong Zitong, a professor at Peking University, praised his dissertation for its "flashes of talent," which roughly referred to these qualities. When he could freely express himself both macroscopically and microscopically, his writing had a certain momentum. This momentum also came from his placing red texts in a broader historical context. Unlike some graduate students who studied red texts in isolation, he compared them with Soviet literature under the same cultural system. This made it even easier for him to reveal the characteristics of Chinese red texts, to see the overflow of revolutionary reason and the weakness of revolutionary sensibility, and to highlight the unique national character in his writing. For a scholar of his age, this cannot be considered uncommon. Of course, he was born in the mid-1960s, so his direct perception of the cultural atmosphere and literary climate of the time was limited, relying mostly on literature. Due to time constraints, his reading volume could not fully reconstruct the historical atmosphere of the era, and some chapters inevitably seemed weak. When discussing the romance of revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, his clear tone couldn’t hide the weakness of his emotional documentary foundation. Fortunately, he was quite dedicated to this topic, and after completing his doctoral dissertation, he continued to accumulate new knowledge. In this monograph, what we see is already a revised and supplemented version. However, no matter how it is, the space left by this topic, whether macro or micro, is still quite broad.