The era is no longer special - Han Dong's "Era Trilogy"

Lin Zhou

Han Dong's novels "Roots", "The Indy-Step Of the Good Man in a Small Town", and "The Metamorphosis of Zhiqing" were recently published under the name of "Chronological Trilogy". It is very meaningful to take the name of "age", which superimposes the age of story, the age of writing and the age of reading, contains the interaction, entanglement and construction between historical memory, literary creation and current experience, and finally completes an abstraction in a literary sense. Of course, this abstract era imagery is supported by concrete stories, and Han Dong was sent to northern Jiangsu with his parents and spent his childhood and adolescence in the countryside, which is the main source of story material.

The first " Rooted " is the most autobiographical. Xiao Tao's family was demoted from the city of Nanjing to the countryside, from obvious discomfort to gradual integration, through the perspective of the young Xiao Tao, the narrative of the novel gradually shows the most common trivial daily life and life, old age, illness and death in a corner of the countryside, building a house, raising dogs, talking about love, watching movies, family short, neighborhood relations, family gaps, etc., all of which are intertwined with the labor reform of that era, class struggle and changes in the situation or loose or tight, but even if it involves persecution events (such as Xiao Tao's mother Su Qun was isolated and censored, Uncle Hou's life in prison, Lao Tao was expelled from the party), and it seems that it has not changed the daily rhythm of life, but it seems to have only added some excitement. Now people often lament that "a grain of ash of the times is a mountain when it falls on an individual's head", but in "Rooted", you will find that the weight of the times has become floating dust in the daily life of life.

If "Rooted" is a genre painting, then "The Good Man of the Small Town" is a heroic legend. Zhu Hongjun is a figure who fights with electricity, he goes to the execution ground to see the killing, he stands up for his friends to level the "fierce people" in the county town, he lies quietly in the snow at night to "hunt", he leads his comrades-in-arms to raid the "enemy army"... He dreamed of fighting in the army, dying on the battlefield, eliminating harm for the people, sacrificing his life for the country, and treating death as a homecoming. This dream carries the unique imprint of that era, but it is not born at the right time, and as the world changes, it gradually decays, ferments, deteriorates, and eventually leads to self-destruction, and the particularly simple and permanent thing in the depths of the characters reflects the changes in current events and highlights the fragile and confused aspects of life. In particular, in the last few chapters, Zhu Hongjun's severance of relations with "I" pervades a feeling that is both detached and sad.

Among the three novels, in comparison, the story of "Zhiqing Metamorphosis" is the most absurd. This story is only a little bit of a hint in "Rooted" - Xiao Tao occasionally sees a notice issued by the Ministry of Human Resources on the street, and a Zhiqing is convicted of raping the cows of the production team and sabotaging spring ploughing production. Now that the seedling had grown into a big tree, Zhiqing had the name Luo Xiaofei. Just when Luo Xiaofei was facing being shot for the above crimes, a miraculous thing happened, the village elders made a decision, the production captain operated, so that Luo Xiaofei in the dark served as Fan Weiguo, and the dead Fan Weiguo was regarded as a counter-revolutionary Luo Xiaofei who cut himself off from the people. Luo Xiaofei thus became Fan Weiguo and lived a family life with the widow of the latter, gradually becoming an authentic farmer from a city. This change of identity is obviously involuntary, but the subsequent outcome is completely self-selected - he had the opportunity to change back to identity, leave the countryside and return to the city, but finally gave up and really "took root" in the countryside.

Of course, these stories can be said to belong to the special era of the past, which is a history that should not be forgotten, but in fact this history has been and is being forgotten by more and more people. Faithfully telling this history is the responsibility of historical writing and the expectation of historiography. Literature, far more than historical writing, has reproduced this particular epoch enough. For more than forty years, in fictional or non-fiction literary writing, countless people have written about it, and concepts such as "intellectual youth themes", "scar novels" and "reflective literature" related to this era have been written into the literary history curriculum. So is Han Dong's novel a brick and tile in order to join the existing genealogy? In my opinion, the purpose of the "era trilogy" is not here. As Benjamin put it, "Turning what exists into rubble, not for the sake of the rubble itself, but for the sake of the road through the rubble", Han Dong's kind of writing is a destructive expression, without sadness or nostalgia, no intention of accusation or reflection, and no commitment to restoration or witness, but more concerned with whether and how we can and how to experience and feel that special era, and ultimately regard it as the era in which each of us is in. In other words, these stories are not only about the past, but also about telling and reading them in the present moment.

In the reading of these novels, we can find that the relationship between the fate of the characters and a particular era is not treated as a causal, reproduced relationship, but constitutes a symbolic and metaphorical relationship. Of course, Han Dong does not start from the concept to achieve this kind of novel method, but in a long-experienced, mature and charming language, with a narrative that has neither the intention of showing off nor the traces of axe chisels, brings us into the twists and turns of the story, so that we can feel the daily life or impermanence of the individual in the calmness of the life individual in the calmness of the cow like The Ding Ding, or the wind. Of course, they are all imprinted with the imprints of the times, but when these imprints are inscribed on the flesh and blood of the story and it is difficult to separate them, when we perceive and identify these imprints with carefully set focal points that are connected to the characters, the contradictions between the individual and the collective, memory and forgetting, the past and the present, the concrete and the abstract, the sadness and the coldness are highlighted. The narrative of the chronological trilogy does not attempt to dissolve these contradictions, but instead forms a narrative tension, constituting an emotional pattern that supports the narrative at the bottom, like Han Dong's "Gentle Part", which begins: "I have had a lonely rural life / It has formed a gentle part of my life", and after a concrete unfolding, the end arrives with another emotion: "There is always some real sorrow here / Like a farmer crying for his crops.".

On an intuitive level, these novels patiently endeavor in small things. For example, even if Luo Xiaofei's life is such a major change, the key moment of his fate is from the vague, confused, and embarrassing perception that he was in the hut at the time and was taken off by his wife who was serving the country, little by little. But this does not mean that the novel pursues trivial and pure objectivity; on the contrary, it is too subjective in a sense, and it wants us to return to that particular age from another path— the road through the rubble. In a calm and even indifferent tone, in extremely frugal and precise speech, it is a direct manifestation of external visual phenomena. This may make people feel dry for a while, but when you follow the guidance of details, touch its texture and texture, you will perceive the small and uninterrupted conflict in human existence, glimpse the emotional and psychological activity of people, and the dullness will be swept away unexpectedly, even the most daily and "low-level" trivia, which also has the power to shock and move.

The stories of ordinary people in Han Dong's novels, those precise details, of course, are related to the overall existence of history, and are specific and microscopic projections of that particular era; however, their telling and portrayal are not intended to reproduce a period of history, nor are they partially subverting the whole, rather, it is transforming the special era of history into a special "era" of literature with the narrative of the novel, an honest and hard world constructed with its own density. There is a concept in geology called metamorphic structure, which refers to the original rock structure in metamorphic rocks that are still preserved due to incomplete recrystallization, so it is of great significance for identifying the type of proto rock of metamorphic rocks. I think that Han Dong's novel narrative about that special era is such a "residual structure", and looking at and touching it can activate the perception, imagination and reconstruction of that era, so that that special era becomes the era of all readers, casting a metaphorical masterpiece, releasing its energy and light to all time and space.

Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua