Writer Shuang Xuetao
Text / Huang Ping
Before the emergence of this group of "new northeast writers" dominated by "post-80s" writers, writers from northeast China have repeatedly led the way in the contemporary literary world, such as Chi Zijian won the Seventh Mao Dun Literature Award with "The Right Bank of the Erguna River", and Qi Bangyuan was famous for "Juliu River". But writers are "groups" because they share similar themes and styles. If the "Northeast Writers Group" in the 1930s was set against the background of the "War of Resistance", then the theme of the current "New Northeast Writers Group" is "layoffs". The northeast literature and art embodied in the "New Northeast Writers Group" is not local literature and art, but the nostalgia of the working class hidden in local nostalgia.
This also logically explains that this time the main body of the "New Northeast Writers Group" is the Liaoning Writers Group, or further the Shenyang Writers Group. Without the "layoffs" of the old industrial base in the northeast in the 1990s, there would be no "new northeast writers group" today. We often look forward to understanding local literature in a literal way, and simply localize literature. In the literary sense, "Northeast China" is not a local concept, nor are provinces and cities such as "Shanghai" or "Shaanxi". Just as the modern dilemma of agricultural civilization has made a group of Shaanxi writers; the modern dilemma of industrial civilization has made this group of Liaoning writers.
It's a belated story: The northeast's past in the 1990s, marked by "laid-offs," was told not by a generation of laid-off workers but by the descendants of laid-off workers. This determines that a large number of novels of the "New Northeast Writers Group" start from the perspective of the "sub-generation" and tell the stories of the father's generation, such as Shuang Xuetao's "Master", "Rogue", "Hall of Light", "Aviator", Ban Yu's "Getaway", "Panjin Leopard", "Slaughter", "Air Road" and Zheng Zhi's "Immortal Disease". As Jia Xingjia said: "I have been very paranoid about recording these people, even to the point where they themselves have forgotten themselves." ”
In the past, literary theory discussed the perspective more from the perspective of "internal/external" at the technical level, and ignored the distinction between "internal" and "external" at the cultural level. From the perspective of the community, from the perspective of the sub-generation, the imagination that has long hung over the heads of the workers in the northeast, such as describing the state of a welfare society dominated by heavy industry as rough, lazy, dependent, and eating a large pot of rice, is not a universal "common sense", but only one of the "northeast imaginations" - this neoliberal hegemonic imagination has been in the mainstream since the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, and has even been internalized by northeasterners as self-identification.
Writer Ban Yu
In the pen of writers such as Shuang Xuetao and Ban Yu, the father generation of laid-off workers has an unshirkable dignity under the appearance of its sloppiness and despair. Representative works such as Shuang Xuetao's "Master", the father was laid off at the age of 35, the wife ran away from home, and indulged in playing chess and drinking liquor every day. In this situation, the chess friends of ten years ago came to visit: ten years ago, my father was a warehouse manager in a tractor factory, and now he is a laid-off worker who is drunk all day long and has his home address hanging around his neck; ten years ago, he was a crippled prisoner in the prison next door to the warehouse, and now he is a Yunyou monk without two legs. This game of chess poured into the vicissitudes of two people's lives and a half, and in the eyes of "I", at that moment, the father could rely on it again:
Father also looked up and looked at me, and I put my hand on his shoulder, which I had not relied on for a long time, and I said: Dad, get down. Father said: If your mother is here, what do you say your mother will say? I said: Mom will let you down. The father smiled, looked back at the monk and said, "Come on, I'll play another game of chess."
At the end of the novel, the father shows heroic nobility, cedes the game of chess that could have been won to the monk, and according to the agreement before the fall, let "I" call the monk "Dad". The "father-son" relationship thus overflows with blood ties and transforms into a reconfirmation of the laid-off generation of "I" of the child generation— the narrator of the novel. The same twist also appeared at the end of Ban Yu's "Panjin Leopard", where his father, who had been reclusive for many years, was forced to draw his sword and rise, and the majesty was like a leopard, "and at that moment, he could not see his father's appearance clearly." The bitterness of a generation condensed into the father's last cry:
Sun Xuting raised his head, held his neck up and shouted hard, toward the dust and nothingness, and everything floating in mid-air, the voice was strange and poignant, like a letter, it could also reach far away.
It may be hard to imagine that there is not a heavy sociological and historical work to record the wave of layoffs in northeast China in the 1990s, which affected tens of millions of people, and there are few relevant historical materials. Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, and Zheng Zhi's writing is like a letter sent twenty years late, comforting the parents who have entered the twilight of their lives. Their novels, while re-understanding the losers of their fathers' generation, implicitly criticize the one-dimensional neoliberal modernity.
The "standard people" shaped by neoliberalism are the personality projections of the market, rational, indifferent and calculating; under the pen of the "New Northeast Writers Group", there are too many "deviant people", who are full of ideals but are out of place, and are regarded as crazy or wasted.
Shuang Xuetao's first novel published on the mainland, "My Friend Andrei", records how high school classmates like Andre refused to surrender to an era until they were sent to a mental hospital; and the "I" in "Cold Gun" risked dropping out of school to fight in the dormitory building, because he could not stand someone cheating in a computer game, "shooting young people who could not see him with a sniper rifle."
Wang Dewei once said, "These characters float at the bottom of society, and from any point of view, they are deformed people, losers, criminals, seriously ill patients, or simply rogues." However, Shuang Xuetao had a sense of closeness to them. Interestingly, this is Wang Dewei's discussion of "deformed people" thirty years later. If the "deformity" of the 1980s was the aesthetic grammar of disintegrating the tall and all-red light; then the current "deformity" is a market law that breaks through the survival of the fittest.
For the losers of their fathers and brothers, the generation of Shuang Xuetao and Ban Yu did not stop at sentimentality, but in a literary way, to seek justice for this group of historical victims, such as Shuang Xuetao's "The North Became Nothing", Ban Yu's "Gun Tomb" and Zheng Zhi's "Raw Swallow". In "The North Becomes Nothing", Chinese New Year's Eve night, a young northeastern novelist who "has always used short sentences" and "from the perspective of a first-person child" is pestered by a drunken female publisher to drink at home and is ridiculed that "you can't write anything but childhood".
The publisher mentioned a murder in a novel that the novelist was working on, and mentioned that a freelance manuscript had written the exact same story. The "fictional" aspect of the novel gradually disintegrates, and the novelist displays a bloody collar, tells the publisher that he is the son of the workshop director who was killed in the novel, and makes an appointment with the publisher late at night with the author by phone.
Fictional literature turns into a historical witness, the son of the former workshop director, the sister of the lover of the workshop director at that time, and the narrative perspectives of the two "sub-generations" complement each other, and restore the northeast past in the dialogue: when the workshop director who defended the factory was hired and killed by corrupt elements, the "sister" pursued the murderer for many years, and finally killed the murderer, and will complete the revenge on the corrupt elements of that year one by one. "The North Becomes Nothing" has a meta-fictional character, showing how a narrative that starts from "fiction" eventually moves towards "reality". Such novels communicate the relationship between narrative and justice, completing their own redemption: the novel has once again become a morally responsible genre, rather than a pure narrative game.
The narrative of the "New Northeast Writers' Group", which relies on the perspective of the "sub-generation", can also be classified as "youth literature"; or, furthermore, as the youth narrative of the descendants of this group of laid-off workers surfaces in history, the narrative program of "youth literature" that has dominated youth writing for many years since the new century has come to an end. "Youth" and "literature", two key concepts of 20th-century China, have long been dominated by "youth literature", which starts from the possessive individualism since the 1990s, focuses on inner outpouring, deals with subject matter and language with narcissism, flaunts a de-historical and de-moralized professional writing, and uses the possibility of so-called "narrative" to cover up the inner emptiness and literary poverty.
The literary breakthrough of the "New Northeast Writers Group" group of young writers is, first of all, the breakthrough of language. Specifically, compared with the long sentences and defamiliarization metaphors commonly used in "youth literature" in the past, the novels of Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu and others mostly use short sentences and are full of a large number of daily spoken languages in Northeast China. The difference between the "long" and "short" sentences is implemented in the past when young literary writers mostly used free indirect quotations, while the writers of the "New Northeast Writers Group" used direct quotations in large quantities.
There are obviously two differences in literary views here: free indirect quotations give up the authority of the narrator to a certain extent, and lead to the inner world of the characters from the perspective of the characters; direct quotations do not directly enter the inner world of the characters, but stay in the dialogue of the characters. An extreme example is Ban Yu's "Double River", the first paragraph of the second section of the novel, "I" and Liu Fei, who has an ambiguous relationship, meet in the vegetable market, this short paragraph has twenty-six "says", through "I say" and "Liu Fei says", layer by layer revealing the mutual temptation between "I" and Liu Fei.
Writers who focus on free indirect quotation generally oppose the identity of language and reality, dismantle the "imitation" of literature for reality, and on this basis highlight the uniqueness of the "heart" of the "individual". As Auerbach's analysis of Woolf's novel: "The writer as the narrator of objective things disappears almost completely, and almost everything he says is like a reflection of the consciousness of the characters in the novel." "This is the art of the individual age of disenchantment, which arose in the 20th century with its own historical roots.
If the young writers of the "New Northeast Writers Group" want to transcend this modernist writing program, they must take up the question of what seemed to be a "fatal blow" to realism a hundred years ago: Is the narrator outside the characters credible? The modernist novel thus relies on the narrative separation, and it seems that the characters are returned from the narrator to the characters. More than a decade ago, when the literature of the bottom rose, it also encountered this question: who can "speak" for the bottom? The literary side of the bottom also follows the logic of the other side towards the new workers' literature, and seems to pin its hopes on the voice of the bottom itself.
The writing of the "New Northeast Writers Group" profoundly responds to this difficult problem of literary history. The key point lies in the writing of the "New Northeast Writers Group", which is the writing within the community. The perspective of the "child generation" is a perspective that is both "external" and "internal": because it is "external", it is retrospective many years later, it can review the fate of the community in general and historically, beyond the limited nature of the individual perspective; because it is "internal", the father-son relationship between blood and class makes the moral problem of "endorsement" solved, they naturally have the legitimacy of "endorsement", and the fate of the fathers ultimately falls on the children.
As if the birthmark of history, in many novels by Shuang Xuetao and Ban Yu, the 9,000 yuan of secondary school tuition fees in the 1990s continue to appear, and you can appreciate how this cruel tuition fee became the author's nightmare of the year - tuition fees make the children most personally experience what is "laid-off", and the Korean version of Shuang Xuetao's novel was directly titled "The Children of the Nine Thousand Classes" by the translator. This divergent and identical cultural stance leads to a creative narrative perspective in the novel. It also seems that only in this literary position, the "New Northeast Writers Group" effectively surpassed modernist literature and created a kind of writing within the community, a novel realist writing. Colloquial phrases, relying on dialogue and description, rich details of daily life, almost no use of psychological description, strong storytelling, which is roughly the realist style of the "New Northeast Writers Group".
In his analysis of Ban Yu's Getaway, Li Tuo pointed out that the novels of Ban Yu and others were reviving realism, and emphasized the creativity of realism in the sense of "writing". The revival of realism necessitated the need to cleanse stigmatized stereotypes and "recapture" some of the concepts framed by modernism. For example, in allegorical writing, Ban Yu is an allegorical writer in the Benjamin sense: in a ruined world, Ban Yu transforms fragments into concepts, and concepts into fables. Whether it is "Air Road" or "Winter Swimming" or "Nightingale Lake", the final allegorical flip of the novel is often two consecutive historical times superimposed on top of each other, and the discontinuity of history makes the "reality" in the novel shrouded in a layer of trance and unreality. After all, for Benjamin, "allegory" is a form of expression about salvation.
It is also in this sense that in Ban Yu's famous work "The Getaway": the "I" suffering from uremia is losing everything, and finally recognizes his weakness - the symbolic world corresponding to it is disintegrating, and the characters are waiting in absolute emptiness. The endless irony of the novel surges and beats like a wave, organizing endless highly realistic details and language, and everything is built in the void of irony, and this void contains waiting. The Getaway transcends the dualistic opposition between "realism" and "modernism" and becomes an anti-tragic tragedy.
In short, the novels of the "New Northeast Writers Group" are a call in terms of theme and aesthetic style. Summoning the continuity of history, summoning the moral mission of the novel, summoning true art. At the same time, based on the appropriation of the narrative of the genre novel, and even the sense of storytelling and morality external to the novel, this call can cross the literary field and reach all readers. Literature and reality, technique and ethics, art and the market, everything that is divided is growing into one.
This article is excerpted from Huang Ping's "Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast Writing to the Algorithmic Era", authorized by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House)
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Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast To the Age of Algorithms
Huang Ping
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
December 2021
Like the recurrence of legends in the history of modern literature: a group of young writers from the northeast, with their writings to shake the literary world. The works of Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, and Zheng Zhi remind us that literature is not a "profession" that can be separated, but has always been connected with concrete life. Their writing, like a letter sent twenty years late, comforts the parents who are entering the twilight of their lives.
"Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast Writing to the Algorithm Era" is a young scholar and professor at East China Normal University, Huang Ping, focusing on the research and discussion of the new northeast writer group, the writing of Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu and Zheng Zhi starts from the northeast, continues the literary tradition of northeast writing, reconstructs the connection between literature and life, unfolds the narrative in the continuity of history, defends the true emotions and human nature, and is a call in theme and aesthetic style. Summoning the continuity of history, summoning the moral mission of the novel, summoning true art.
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