Breaking Through Memories: A Short Story Observation for 2021
Huang Ping Li Xiaoqing
This article was originally published in Contemporary Writers Review, No. 1, 2022
One
Today, after experiencing the pause caused by the epidemic, we have realized that we are in an era that requires constant processing of memories and experiences. The problem faced by novel writing is no longer just to construct different aesthetic models in form and content, but how to firmly grasp our lives in a world that is no longer changing and uninhabited, in the ever-changing sensory experience. If the stream of consciousness that constantly switches back and forth between the present and the memory is the spiritual daily life unique to human beings, then transcending the present and breaking through the memory is this daily reflexiveness and the necessary value of literature. While using different narrative techniques to further construct the relationship between self-perception and the real world, the writer consciously creates various "breakthrough" methods to prevent the work from sinking in the accumulation of various experiences.
Pan Xiangli
One of the most direct strategies is to use a single perspective to create a highly stylized modern monologue, exploring possible objective obscurations or subjective escapes in the retrospective of events and experiences of individual characters. For example, Pan Xiangli's "Lotus Ginger" tells the story of Ding Wuyong, the owner of a Japanese restaurant, who witnessed the development of the relationship between the two customers from development to disillusionment. The first sentence of the novel already indicates the one-way feature of the shopkeeper's perspective: "Every time I see the woman, Ding Wuyong has a voice in his heart: he should report the crime." [1] Apparently, at this moment, Ding Wuyong is still caught in the misunderstanding of the "Lotus Ginger" killing lover, the mystery has not yet been revealed, and the author of the truth is in the hands of Xu Xu recounting Ding Wuyong's recollection of this love story. Tens of thousands of urban life has forgotten, nature also has memories, bright and warm female "lotus ginger" is The "insoluble crystal" in Ding Wuyong's memory. The DingWuyong people are, as the name suggests, dedicated themselves to maintaining subtle harmony between themselves and the world. So sophisticated, he is highly confident in his ability to control reality, such as investing in the study of core technologies and becoming the chef of the restaurant to avoid the difficulties that may come with change; in order to get the convenience of spying on guests, he strives to hide himself in the background in silence, "even the smile handed to the guests sitting at the bar is reduced to half-light and half-extinguished". As for the "unsolvable" caused by bystanders, he preferred not to seek an explanation, and secretly decided that they were extramarital, because "he believed that there was really nothing new under the sun". Ding Wuyong remembers "lotus ginger", as he named it "lotus ginger", because she has a very rare taste in her daily life- "delicate appearance, strange and domineering taste" [4]. However, this taste is accused of being the "aura" of Shanghai city girls in his wanderings, which is not without contradiction reveals that the chef's preference for "lotus ginger" is actually a "modern taste". As long as people have a taste choice, an ordinary thing can be regarded as unusual, just like the herb of lotus and ginger, which can be a vegetable or a flower.
Therefore, when the woman desperately tells Ding Wuyong that she killed her lover, it is like detonating explosives in the water, silently and convulsively, the stimulation of "Lotus Ginger" exceeds the preset: "So good-looking, how can it kill?" [5] Ding Wuyong found himself "overconfident", life was not under his control, and the experience brought by this woman was far more than a taste of "sexy" imagination. At this moment, the "Lotus Ginger" broke through the boundaries of aesthetics: "At that moment, Ding Wuyong felt that behind her, there was a large emptiness. [6] The woman's treatment of Ding Wuyong as a confidant was clearly an illusion created by appearances, and the latter was only a tasteful man after all. In Ding Wuyong's vision, he can neither penetrate the truth of the incident, nor can he really penetrate the heart of the "lotus ginger"; in his uneasiness, he confirms the ideal of a peaceful life that has been wavering, and proposes to his girlfriend who has lived together for many years. Even if the confession of "Lotus Ginger" about murder is confirmed as an angry word due to the reappearance of the man in black, for Ding Wuyong, who is floating in his heart, this is still a stirring daydream and a gorgeous adventure, just like a man's spiritual derailment and finally a hasty end. In any case, his restlessness hidden behind the taste—the illusion of danger and charm dies at the end of the event. The truth revealed in "Lotus Ginger" is that people think that familiar daily experiences will explode at a certain time when they reach the border, and the imagination of making mistakes and getting by hides the unreliable rationality of habits and the curiosity of foolishness, just as the man in black, who has always been extraordinary in Ding Wuyong's eyes, only "appears real" when he "withers away" in the face of his ex-wife. When the event returns from the shock to the ordinary, it casts a certain ultimate loss within the character, and the remnants of this shock /daily overflow make Ding Wuyong break through from the remembrance of an unobtainable taste, to some extent calm the regret of giving up on the Japanese enterprise, and truly achieve self-fulfillment in the calm harmony implied by "Wu Yong".
Lu Min
Also narrated from a restrictive perspective is Lu Min's "Sweet and Bitter". The novel switches back and forth between the husband and wife's perspective: Xu Lei believes that his recently absent-minded wife has cheated on him, and in order to avoid letting his son repeat his experience of losing his mother, he chooses to endure humiliation and burden to barely maintain the marriage; at the other end, Jin Wen's 130,000 private money is swept away in a fraud. When she participated in the collective action of the debt collection group of the bitter lord, she met the old exhibition of raising her daughter Shuangquan with cerebral palsy alone, and the three of them developed a friendship of "mutual affection". Jin Wen experienced the sense of condensation that was gradually lost in family life, and gradually could not see Xu Lei's "tolerant and confused look": "Every time she immersed herself in the situation of debt collection and troublemaking, she felt that she was completely integrated with Lao Zhan, Shuangquan, and wheelchair, and it was the binding of the whole child, and the kind of thorough delivery made her relax." Instead, back at home, around Xu Lei and Xiao Lei, half-hearted, people split into several petals, very uncomfortable. [7] The common personalities, encounters, and goals of Jin Wen, Lao Zhan, and Shuang Quan have stimulated "affinity" within the same social class, and countless small setbacks have combined into a continuous and perceptible life situation: "This time, can it be regarded as a special blow, and it cannot be talked about." It's always been a matter of repeated defeats. ...... She herself may not have realized that her speech speed was like a mudslide, with the momentum of disaster, and the laughter in the mudslide was really a bit deaf. ”[8]
Whether it's Xu Lei casting a net, Xiao Lei flying a kite, or Jin Wen making desire a "flashy petty bourgeois list", they always have a way to create a vision and pass their lives. Curious, Shuang quan was happy to listen to How Jin Wen detailed how the 130,000 were gradually accumulated in bits and pieces of algorithms and delayed satisfaction, and the aunt found a cemetery for herself. Life's mudslides are not only overwhelmed, but also have other kinds of stubborn resistance. From another perspective, Xu Lei, who was worried about self-harm, hoped that Jin Wen remembered the memories of the two of them knowing each other in the ward, but it was not a chance, but the loss of empathy caused by them to unite: "The beginning of her and Xu Lei's is not because both of them have just cut off their appendixes." She and Lao Zhan were cut off far more than just the useless little meat sausage. People will sink together because of loss. [9] At first, Xu Lei's adoptive mother and Aunt Jin Wen were also "really not close". After retiring, she wandered around the city, and once happened to bump into Jin Wen and Shuang Quan collecting debts in the square, she broke the misunderstanding of Jin Wen's "pride and pride" in the past. Not only did the aunt not pursue Jin Wenzang's private money, but she also "seemed to be suddenly enlightened" and enthusiastically discussed with them the luxurious life listed in the "list". At the end of the story, she offered to Jin Wen that she wanted to "join the company": "Add an old lady, the effect will definitely be better".[10] A wonderful emotional force replaces blood ties, establishing a bond between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, even closer than her relationship with her adopted son. Just like the title of the novel, "Sweet and Bitter", the characters are wandering around in the world's difficulties and cannot get out, but these experiences are like drinking Chinese medicine, slightly bitter but sweet. Under the interweaving of the urgency of "present sex" and the pursuit of "present sex", the end of the novel is firmly stopped in the trivial daily description, and the author finally does not eliminate the conflict and diaphragm implied between the two perspectives of husband and wife, but through the intervention of the aunt as an intermediary, and the emotional community formed by her and Jin Wen and Lao Zhan's father and daughter, the novel completes the "stitching" of the inner cracks of the dual perspectives [11].
Two
Memory is much more than just a representation of past events. In the form of verbs, it "constructs" the form of a real experience, and at the same time the true origin of transcendent experience. The two novels "Lotus Ginger" and "Sweet and Bitter" present how the process of reality breaks through from the established memory or cognition of the characters, and uses the obscuration of perspective to break through the obscuration of cognitive appearances and describe the specific truth of life. In today's era, writers demand to break through from the superficial experience, not only the dissatisfaction of the creative level with low-level realism, but also the resistance to the "urban identity writing" assembled by designer bags, cafes, glass buildings, etc., but also to break free from a fragmented experience of shallow taste, penetrate the hidden veil in the pursuit of past history and current experience, and integrate a complete self. Since avant-garde writing, new history/new realism, the "new generation" and youth literature have been depressed one by one in literary history, the run-in between literary forms and practical experiences has been stumbling. When the recollection of experience refuses to sink into the accumulation of the appearances of a particular consciousness, it is not utterly useless, but rather it brings us closer to a more primitive consciousness. In this way, reminiscence as a dynamic exploration, integrated into the structure of the story, and even dissolved into the structure itself and detached from it. In this year's selection of novels, "Synopsis of Trance", "The Sound of Drinking Soup", "Snow Mountain Master", and "Between the Sea and the Desert" all mention the new crown epidemic that has broken out globally since 2020. In the rapid flow of time before the epidemic, the rapid development of science and technology has led to a futuristic world picture, which is reflected in the heated discussion of artificial intelligence and cyborg. Writers also try to integrate existing history with future narratives, for example, in Hao Jingfang's novel "2050 Murders", the narrative of detective novels originated by American writer Edgar Poe interestingly relies on the theoretical deduction of future AI technology. But today, the pandemic has slowed down the flow of human time. This event not only makes reality fall out of experience, but also makes reality break through on another level, and personal time and space feelings have changed and brought about a new reflection: "People are actually not as nostalgic as they think, and the memory of the past will always be covered or even replaced by new things, no matter what kind of stones and minerals are buried in the depths, people only see the floating dust and dead leaves on the surface." That is man's most important perception of life"[12], and at the same time, it forms a barrier between man and historical time, becoming a new frame of reference for people to face real life and even the entire civilization.
In the distant Heilongjiang River, when diners raise their wine glasses, "the colorful masks are a bit like birds breaking free of the cage and rushing upwards". In the time and space coordinates of the post-epidemic situation, "The Sound of Drinking Soup", a legendary story about the century-old history of ethnic minorities on the banks of the Ussuri River, has been given a strange historical meaning by "the present". While the "ferryman" tells this legend to "I", the legendary Harappo and his father and grandparents continue to tell this love-hate story to their contemporaries. At the cost of gritting their teeth, they almost stubbornly preserved the memory of this family. Until the beacon of history came to hand, people were tired of hearing this story, and even the cows would not be able to produce milk after listening to the story he told. The death of the epic is the inevitable of every historical stage, in the same way, Harapo has no descendants to pass on the story, just like the teeth inscribed a person's life, the family history of Harapo generations with the disease of teeth is destined to be "full of ruins and broken walls", is the historical ruins of "no posterity". The only thing that was sustained was the sound of this toothless tribesman drinking soup, which was transformed into a life force that "will take all the worlds into the belly" and was absorbed into the strong winds and waters of the Ussuri River. And now "my" lover is swept away by the flash flood, and the loss suffered by the Harappo people is superimposed in this unstoppable stream of life. Only the "ferryman" conveys the story of mankind in the name of nature, confirming to us who are experiencing the aftershocks of the epidemic: people's lives and souls are finally connected with the blood of mountains and rivers, and the tree of life is evergreen.
"Snow Mountain Master" presents an individual's other understanding of historical changes. In the famous footballer D's perception of history, the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on life is less real and profound than the loss caused by a small fire a few years later, which burned everything in the home related to East German memory, including the Buddha statue brought back from China by his great-grandfather. Because of this sincerity, D regarded his later career as an art: he preferred to play the classical front waist gracefully and calmly than the fast-paced and high-intensity modern football, although this style of play was ornamental and not conducive to victory or defeat. Like D enjoying the touch of the ball and his feet, his therapist Herman was able to make diagnoses based on hearing alone, and his honesty and sensitivity to inner feelings made them appreciate each other. However, the ultimate external experience is accompanied by the same loss of life, and D eventually struggles to get rid of the emotional excitement of his career, giving up on himself in the pressure of losing the game and the long recuperation after serious injuries: "eager to escape from himself, to escape from this messy script". Inspired by the statue of The Snow Mountain and the legend of Shakyamuni, D once unleashed his self-consciousness and followed the heron out of the green background of the football field, but this detachment was nothing more than a kind of hypocritical solution, "limited to when things didn't go well". In the second struggle with nothingness, D imitates Herman lowering his head to listen to his knees, and at the "bottom of the hydroceped lake" he hears a slowly rising "om", which is the sound of redemption heard by Shakyamuni Shakyamuni, who has tasted the love of the world and is deep in nothingness, before committing suicide.
What is even more interesting is that compared to the first religious spiritual exodus, the sound of "yo" does not originate from transcendence: "it is not so much a spiritual encounter as a physiological experience".[16] It comes from D's listening to inner life, from the real voice of the body that "only you can hear." In Heidegger's sense, it is the voice of existence or the sound of absolutes, not a language. [17] D no longer regards the wear and tear of physical scars as conditions and consequences required by the external order, but as a trace of one's own life. Just as Meursault of The Outsider, before his death, recalls every scratch in the furniture, which is a trace of life, a history of a person, without any utilitarian suspense. D has emptied the burden of the profession, broken through the enduring external burdens, and returned to the original blankness, thus having the possibility of opening up to the vast unknown space: "All pleasure is fresh, as ignorant and joyful as a child". When he gives up becoming an "actor", he is no longer divorced from his "background" and no longer faces the danger of the degradation of his own value image. It can also be said that D is already a person without a "social background", as "I" state at the beginning of the story that "I did not recognize D at a glance, perhaps because of the background": "He is comfortably trapped in a soft chair in the corner, not in the midst of a verdant green and mountain tsunami as I used to know." ”[19]
Tracing the source of life from the sublime of nature, or lurking in inner experience to find a way out, literature transcends memory in the reflexive imagination—emerging from the continuity of history and watching its flow itself. This is the highest level of recourse to memory that is unique to man. Li Hongwei's "Fantastic Five" cuts through the flow of time and edits it into a harmonious cosmic movement, with time jumping back and forth between life retrospection and current reality, small thoughts and overall thinking. For the first time, he invites her to his dorm room and watches a Marvel movie, The Fantastic Four, in which the narrative is interspersed with fragments of their lives that are vaguely related to the experience, but are subordinate to the fragments of their lives for the next fifty-eight years, and the present and history intersect in the frequent switching of scenes: "The subsequent time period..." "It is there to jump backwards to..." "The scene jumps continuously to..." [20] Here, his past and future are not linearly developed, but are structured in a three-dimensional way in the romantic imagination. When the Fantastic Four acquire various superpowers during a cloud acceleration, she asks him what kind of superpowers he wants to have, and he comes up with the idea of traveling through time — just looking through time to see if he has her in his future. Despite his immersion in the present life, he sometimes couldn't see the face of time and space, and even accidentally "forgot about her sitting next to him" and "reduced her to anyone who could be sitting next to her". But in the protagonist's imagination, "the cosmic flow is so powerful, the speed of the clouds is so fast",[22] and time will be reflected in every moment (peach blossom) he "blooms" towards her, and finally condenses into a red rose with infinite cascading space.
Between the Sea and the Desert combines shattered reality and poetic imagination to open up the overall vision of the post-pandemic world from dreams/reality/fables. The American protagonist lost his left leg in the war in Afghanistan and had to face the void end of the war. Then the outbreak of the epidemic, the protagonist put on a prosthesis to adapt to the isolation of life, and middle-eastern men, Russian Slavic women utopian cohabitation in the center of the northern coastal city of the United States. The world moves under the shadow of empire, war and plague, and the constant "lost" life has long been fragmented, and the protagonist regains the dream of a cartoonist and creates "My Left Leg": in the desert of another parallel world, the left leg, the landmine, and the starfish reconcile with each other and form a friendly alliance to escape from the desert. They look forward to returning to the southern sea, where starfish can grow back to their original form; where fragments of mines can spawn shovels to dig up soil and plant flowers; and that left leg will be reinvented as a human at the New Year's Ball in the South China Sea in the protagonist's dream. As starfish says, the stars in the sky have their own seas but have dried up, "the earth is also a star, but the lucky earth star also has a sea". In the novel, the "ocean" becomes the Promised Land, where hope lies, a romantic allegory of peace. After people are driven out of the water, the world experiences all kinds of pain, so when the protagonist looks from the top floor, the city is always unfamiliar, "above the river into the sea, there are steel bridges connecting each other". But between the scaffolding and the seawater, what is hidden is not only the desire and encroachment of the structure, but also the last love for life and the hope of breaking through.
Three
It may be said that all the actions of remembrance face a series of traumatic encounters. In the novel Vaulting Horse, Ah Mao and Fukumoto go to the reeds to avoid the approaching enemy, and the peaceful countryside scenery relieves the tension of the wartime period. Along this rhythm, the novel depicts the folk sentiments of wartime Shanghai that remain in daily life. If it is Sun Li, Wang Zengqi and other writers pastoral war writing, then there is always a harmonious and unified ideological belief behind it, but lu Nei's "Vaulting Horse" exposes people's inner fragmentation under continuous daily situations, revealing casual jokes or rude words as the sequelae of trauma. The routine, bland narrative of the former tends to naturally transition out of unusual empirical information. At the beginning of the story, the identity of the protagonist Ah Mao is unknown, only that he is a native of Shanghai, his family is dead, and he somehow followed the deputy leader of the guerrilla group when begging for food; Ah Mao originally read some books, but he was full of dirty words and hated the Japanese very much; in two conversations with Fu Yuan and Fang Hui, he believed for no reason that when the Japanese bombed, he "would rather dive into the water than hide in the woods", and was ridiculed by Fu Yuan. The truth about this was hidden behind the brisk and harmonious pastoral, and it was not revealed until later: when Japanese warplanes bombed Shanghai, Ah Mao's family followed the crowd into the woods, and the bomb caused a fire in the woods, and people burned into coke. He escaped under the bridge hole, but witnessed everything. In the face of the horrors of war, Ah Mao is both precocious like an adult and the original fear of a child. Therefore, the novel never calls Ah Mao a Mao, but repeatedly reminds the reader that he is a "child". Just as shooting in peacetime is a competition for international honor at the Olympic Games, a daily sport, but in wartime it is a cruel act of killing. The captain of the brigade, who was originally engaged in sports instructors, asked Ah Mao to practice vaulting, hoping that Ah Mao would win Olympic medals in the future. For these two men, vaulting is not so much an expectation of peace as a romanticized self-healing that is one with pastoral life. Through vaulting horses, through pastoral routines, they rehearse and preview peace, temporarily forgetting the distorted human and traumatic memories of wartime and finding the support of their present selves. In the end, the captain died before he could see Ah Mao jump over the wooden box. The poetic narrative with the appearance of the pastoral cannot obscure the hopeless redemption of the present war.
"Mr. Ono" confirms the impossibility of redemption from the side of the perpetrators of the War of Resistance Against Japan. Historian Mr. Ono, led by "I", visits the remnants of puppet Manchukuo, and on the way he tries to find his father's figure in the wall photos, and tells "me" about his father, The old Mr. Ono, as an invader who was full of guilt. In the past, Mr. Ono had been bullied in school, and his father had subdued the bully, but he did not blame him for cowardice as other fathers did. [26] The memory of the massacre during the invasion of China caused his father a long nightmare, believing that neither he nor his comrades deserved to die quietly, so he "erased all traces of his life" before his death. In contrast, the current pseudo-Manchukuo ruins are full of objects that are deliberately "old" to meet the needs of tourism, and the "true" history is covered up by the consumption landscape. The grand history of the War of Resistance Against Japan abruptly withdrew, and only the traumatic experience of the "little people" became living memories and was secretly passed on by future generations: "It is better to restore the things that Mr. Ono eliminated little by little with words and narratives", and "it is better than a void". Mr. Ono's courage to confront and reflect on history is not the unthinking hand-to-hand combat of the gangsters under the lilac flower, but the power to resist oblivion and nothingness. Also exploring the topic of courage, Dong Xia Qingqing's "Auditorium" realistically records the collective life and personal memories of the soldiers of the Sino-Russian border fleet. At the beginning of the novel, the instructor mistakes the meadow for the head of a dead man in horror, and he finds himself "instigated" compared to the captain of the boat who calmly came forward to check. Reflecting on this, he traces his father's experience as an artilleryman on the front line, so as to regain the energy to fight fear. Because the honorary soldiers entering the auditorium require the presence of their families to watch the ceremony, the captain of the boat has not been active in fighting for honor, and he has a past buried in his heart: when the wild bear broke into the house, he left his mother and sister to jump out of the window to survive, and was reprimanded by his mother, and later became a soldier to change the local people's evaluation of his "no long heart". The story of the two soldiers jumps between the memory and the present: even if they are soldiers, the will to face life is not innate. In the repeated return and alignment toward trauma, the ego is constantly struggling, liberating and growing.
Ban Yu
The difference is that the protagonist in Ban Yu's "Slow Step" refuses to deceptively "stitch" the cracks in memory[28] or any form of self-mediation of trauma, and he does not even want to have a "self": "Once people have this consciousness, they are terrible, like the dense forests on the island, rustling and growing, not only endlessly, until they cover all the light and the road, trapped in nightmares for a long time." [29] From the novel itself, the lack of physical filling of "cracks" is spread throughout the protagonist's life, and the narrative thus takes on a mutilated form: the slow-walking platform is "like a cliff on the left, and a silent darkness below it",[30] the inhabitants pulling on the curtain's north window, the white walls, the sea water in the fluorescent screen, the answers floating in the wind, the sign language without sound and the gestures that never get the point, the imagination that suddenly breaks away from the background of the novel, the fairy tale, and the "flock of birds" in it (such as Hitchcock's "Flock of Birds"). Generally full of irrational hostility) tens of thousands of penguins. They are real things—things from the void world, presented by the author on an impenetrable interface. Since only their surface can be captured, these things are bottomless and cannot be reduced to the plane of the real world. The protagonist walks slowly by the abyss, staring into the abyss, the scars that lie within him and the rational world ("a scientific, measurable system"): "This is not a matter of our personal love, of devotion and indebtedness, of fidelity and betrayal, but of the irrelivious rift of life itself, through which anyone who passes through it is bound to fall into a greater suffering, mystery and reality." [31] The metaphor of this loss refers to the ears of Kobayashi and Mumu, who gradually lose the memory of sound as the organic decays. The forgotten voice points to the ultimate loss of reality, and the protagonist draws energy from the chaotic and complete world of the "Rescuer" Mumu, floating in the abyss for a long time.
Understanding the nature of a space-time requires an infinite number of independent frames of reference. With the naked eye, we can only observe the projection of the universe in three dimensions. Slow Step opens up a dark "intermediate dimension" in the projection,[32] inhabited by the uncontrollable human unconscious and countless traumatic results falling from reality. Here, dreams are "real." Just as Zhuang Zhou Mengdi does not lead to a skeptical cognitive program, but rather that people are so passive in the face of the "reality" that contains reality and dreams, they cannot recognize it. The beginning of Guo Shuang's "CanyonSide" makes a reverse attempt. The protagonist of the novel is a surgeon, in order to better understand his deceased father Tao Yong, he uses his "reliable brain" to practice controlling dreams, and successfully substitutes into his father's body to "restore" a memory. Like Inception, this depiction can be said to be a human fable full of technical implications, with characters freely manipulating and taming dreams and clearly aware of the existence of "boundaries". The protagonist is not unaware of the transgressiveness of this act, which is described as a symbolic rebellion against reality: "The dream god is punishing me. I went so far as to use human language and writing to confront it. [33] Importantly, however, the re-enactment of memory in The Canyonside dream is only the beginning of the search for the "truth" about his father. In a graffiti about the power station when "I" was a child, my father plays the role of "dragon", but the protagonist is the "dragon" spewing out a "triangle, green" flame, revealing that my father, as the "generator" of the downstream delta, is embedded in a structural position that cannot be broken. In addition, Peng Yunian, a good friend of his father's who was far away in Singapore, explained to "me" that "I" could not know from the practice of dreams- the repression and release of the times: it was a special period (the novel refers to 1992), and the things that people think and do are closer to madness, but on the contrary, it is the instinct to survive. Otherwise, it's really crazy. [34] Peng Younian believed that Tao Yong stayed where he was to "make up half" on his behalf; accordingly, Tao Yong also felt the "loss" of the other half. It may be said that these two halves are the desire to open up and the innocence of nature, respectively. Even if the dream is rationalized, it cannot restore a total father figure, but can only present a rift in reality, just as "I" do not believe in God, but am shocked by God's projection on the computer, and finally the computer cannot replace God itself. As a result of this quest, "I", who traveled to Australia to fight his father, discovered the father who was inside "me" and the other half of "me".
In the post-pandemic era, literature must not only carry the new information that life constantly sends us, but also "forced" to recollect our history and respond to our needs and problems for understanding the relationship between time and space and the self. The above novels give different answers, they expose different faces of "reality" in the structure of retrospection, and in particular highlight the multiple integration of the narrative into the order of time and space, which is not to escape the continuity of history, but to allow the "real" to return in fiction, showing the multiple dimensions of experience.
This article is the preface to Selected Chinese Novellas in 2021 (liaoning people's publishing house, January 2022).
About the Author
THE WRITER
Huang Ping, Professor, Department of Chinese, East China Normal University;
Li Xiaoqing, born in Guangzhou in 1997, graduated from Sun Yat-sen University with a bachelor's degree, and graduated from the Department of Chinese of East China Normal University in 2022 as a doctoral candidate (master's and doctoral degrees).
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(Public account editor: He Zhuolun, Department of Chinese, East China Normal University)