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 ones himself. During his university years, he had written novels, which were in the highly authoritative national journal 《》. Later, one of his novels was selected for 《Fujian Province's Fifty Years of Outstanding Short Stories》 (the anthology only selected less than ten short stories in total). 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 was both self-designed and beyond one's control. By chance, he taught middle school Chinese for a few years before being admitted to my master's program. He seemed to want to try his hand in literary research. In my initial impression, his face was a contradiction: fair skin, a trait of descendants of migrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but his slightly deep-set eyes held a subtle, eagle-like spirit, as if with a small percentage of Arab ancestry. His face was handsome, but he often had a scholarly, vacant smile. My intuition told me that such a talent might be a gem in academia, or to put it more elegantly, a rough jade. Of course, uncarved jade is not a finished piece, but thankfully, he was diligent and devoted to self-improvement. Yet, he always wanted to change his way of life. After finishing his master's degree, he didn't choose to stay in academia and study 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, so 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 still wrote novels, and they had begun to gain some influence. When the province held literary meetings, he was invited to give lectures, which were quite popular, making some young men and women gaze at him in admiration and often quote him in debates as "Teacher Yu, Teacher Yu." 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 at meetings often left people thinking deeply, which didn't surprise me much, as things were meant to be this way. But one time, when Professor Tong Qingbing from Beijing Normal University's Chinese Department came to our place, after hearing his very brief speech, he was particularly impressed and named him to pursue his doctorate. Yet, he didn't go. Why he didn't go, he smiled without answering. To this mystery, there are still some Goldbach-like speculations among my fellow students. One theory is that he was newly married and had just returned from his honeymoon. Later, he successfully passed the exam and joined my doctoral program, specializing in contemporary literature. This field had dual advantages for him. First, he had a deep experience in literary creation, and he was an expert in the subtleties 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 truths, but he had long since grasped them deeply. Second, he had a considerable knowledge of contemporary Western literary theory. For a period, he often mentioned Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Habermas, and others in his conversations. Some graduate students who were quite detached from art often mechanically used the words of Western masters to mask their emptiness in literary sensitivity. The bombardment of new terms since the 1980s has been a major problem in literary theory. If I hadn't known about his long experience in creative writing, 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. The research focuses on red novels from the 1950s and 1960s, especially the novels. Choosing this topic meant challenging two tendencies. On one hand, there were scholars who held traditional views, who sanctified and classicized red novels, revering them with religious devotion. 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 were part of the trend of "rewriting literary history"). His profound theoretical cultivation allowed him to stand at the height of history and examine the literary classics of the time as historical texts with a serene and distant perspective. What he saw was neither family treasures nor a pile of spiritual garbage, but the deep contradictions, transformations, and processes of turning into the opposite within a historical stage. He divided the norms of revolutionary ideology (imposition) into and rational aspects. The macro-level, rational imposition was relatively simple, while the norm was much more complex. He proposed the concepts of "revolutionary pleasure," "revolutionary passion," "revolutionary pain," and their "sanitization" and "purification." These inevitably clashed with the 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 world became increasingly severe, and the space more narrow (as he pointed out, the "enemyization" of intermediate characters). On the other hand, to pursue the maximum effectiveness of literary, it was necessary to repeatedly emphasize the rejection of formulaic and conceptual thinking. This determined that the process would be tortuous, repetitive, painful, and difficult. Sometimes, it was still full of blood and fire, with heroic sacrifices. But, overall, it was a grand and glorious journey toward the purification of heroes, that is, humanity. Moving forward on the path of the abstraction and modelization of. The norms and construction of revolutionary were finally submerged and dissolved by. His training in Western literary theory gave him a macro-perspective with historical and logical foresight, while his long experience in creative writing 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 aspects. When he could freely express himself both macroscopically and microscopically, his writing had a certain momentum. This momentum also came from the fact that he placed 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 discern the overflow of revolutionary and the weakness of revolutionary, 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 relatively limited, and he relied mostly on reading documents. Due to time constraints, his reading volume was not sufficient to fully reconstruct the historical atmosphere of the time, and some chapters inevitably seemed a bit weak. When discussing the romance of revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, his clear tone of argument could not fully conceal the weakness of his foundational documents. Fortunately, he was quite dedicated to this topic, and after completing his doctoral dissertation, he accumulated more knowledge. In this monograph, what we see is already supplemented and rewritten. However, no matter how it is, this topic still leaves considerable space for exploration, both macroscopically and microscopically.