Generally speaking, contemporary literature is an empty subject concept, which refers to the literature of China people in the period of China. Contemporary literature is usually divided into two parts: seventeen-year literature, cultural revolution literature/new period literature. The concept of "contemporary literature" I use here is not an empty and pure concept of time, but has a special qualitative stipulation, that is, "contemporary literature" is socialist literature, literature of workers, peasants and soldiers or literature of the people. The fundamental feature of literary practice in this period is the establishment of socialist cultural hegemony and socialist cultural legitimacy. Contemporary literature is constructed in opposition and difference with modern literature, and it is its responsibility to transcend and overcome the limitations of modern literature. Relative "modern literature" belongs to "human literature". Although "new period literature" and "modern literature" belong to different periods, they have the same qualitative stipulation and both belong to the category of "human literature". "Literature in the new period" regards the practice of "contemporary literature" as a failure and holds high the banner of "returning to the May 4th Movement". "Literature in the new period" is essentially a return to "modern literature" and "human literature". "Literature in the new period" can also be called "scar literature". "Scar literature" is not only a short-lived literary phenomenon that started "new period literature" after the Cultural Revolution. In fact, "scar literature" has gone beyond that narrow scope and can be used to summarize the whole "new period literature" different from "contemporary literature" The reason why I collectively refer to "new period literature" as "scar literature" is because the whole "new period literature" consciously takes "contemporary literature" as the object of its negation and digestion. Whether it is the narrow sense of "scar literature", "reflection literature", "reform literature" and "educated youth literature" directly aimed at the Cultural Revolution, or the narrative of "avant-garde literature", "new realistic novel", "new historical novel", "personalized writing" and even "daily life", it has lost the clue of understanding. The Cultural Revolution constitutes the tradition and background of the whole "new period literature" writing.

Many people have been concerned about the crisis of "contemporary literature". The crisis of "contemporary literature" comes from the serious problems faced by contemporary culture and politics. Many people, such as Zhang Yiwu and Chen Xiaoming, have been talking about the hegemony and oppression of "modern literature" on "contemporary literature". However, their understanding of history is problematic. They believe that "contemporary literature" is derived from the study of "modern literature" in the "new period", which has formed a great disciplinary advantage over "contemporary literature" and reduced "contemporary literature" to "inferior discipline". However, in fact, in the process of "new enlightenment" becoming hegemony and "rewriting the history of literature" in the 1980s, "contemporary literature" lost its discourse hegemony and central position. They mistake the process of crisis, failure and collapse of "contemporary literature" for the occurrence of "contemporary literature". Due to the victory of "new enlightenment" and "modernization" in the new era, the discipline level and hegemony of "modern literature" and "contemporary literature" have been reversed, the evaluation standard of "modern literature" has shifted to the study and evaluation of "contemporary literature", and the class conflict has turned into "the conflict between civilization and ignorance". Through the study of knowledge pedigree, Hong Zicheng pointed out that the 1950s was a period of active construction of "contemporary literature". The vision of "contemporary literature" in 1950s is completely different from that of "literary modernization" in the new period. Mao Zedong's speech at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art is regarded as a new historical beginning of literature and art, while the literature of liberated areas and the literature of workers, peasants and soldiers are regarded as the direction of literature and art in new China. Contemporary literature is regarded as a higher development stage of modern literature, and it is the overcoming and surpassing of its limitations. However, under the impact of "new enlightenment" and "modernization" discourse in the 1980s, the historical construction and discourse hegemony of this kind of "contemporary literature" appeared crisis and collapse. The story of the progress of revolution and the creation of a modern new nation-state with workers and peasants as the main body was described as the story of "saving the nation over enlightenment", "ignorance over civilization" and even "feudal restoration" in the narrative of "New Enlightenment" in the 1980s, while it was the "New Enlightenment" and "modernization" that were denied and subverted in the process of rewriting the history of literature in the 1980s. At the same time, the status and subject level of "modern literature" and "contemporary literature" are reversed, and "contemporary literature" is dissolved in the story of "modern literature". China's new literature, which was split into modern literature and contemporary literature in 1950s, re-integrated on the basis of modern literature and humanistic literature and became the unity of modern literature. China literature in the 20th century was told in the "Enlightenment" story of "the conflict between civilization and ignorance". It is also in this story of "enlightenment" that the May 4th Movement and the "new period" were re-placed at the starting point and commanding heights of history. In the process of constructing "contemporary literature", "new literature" is divided into "modern literature" and "contemporary literature" because of the birth of "contemporary literature". However, it was at the time of the collapse of "contemporary literature" that, in turn, "China's new literature holism" and "China literature in the 20th century" with "enlightenment" as their theme and destiny came into being. Therefore, it is necessary to rewrite the history of literature according to the evaluation criteria of "new enlightenment", "modernization" or "conflict between civilization and ignorance" of "modern literature". However, it is precisely because of a strong sense of discourse conflict that Yao Yao, as the mentor of Qian Liqun and Chen Pingyuan, the leading figures in China literature and rewriting literature history in the 20th century, pointedly pointed out the repression of China literature and rewriting literature history itself in the 20th century: "Why not talk about the disintegration of the colonial empire and the rise of the third world in the 20th century, and Marxism (or talk less about it, or just talk in reverse)? That is to say, rewriting the history of literature, imitating Xia Zhiqing's History of Modern Novels in China, while reaffirming the legitimacy of modern literature and human literature, has suppressed the legitimacy and rationality of contemporary literature and people's literature intentionally or unintentionally from the beginning.

The crisis of "contemporary literature" comes from the predicament of "people's literature" and "literature of workers, peasants and soldiers" in the new historical environment, and from the theoretical challenge faced by "The Speech". On the eve of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mao Dun's Selected Works of New Literature and Zhou Yang's People's Literature Series made a conscious and clear distinction between "new literature". In fact, it masks the hierarchical distinction between "modern literature" and "contemporary literature". "People's Literature Series" represents "the future of new China literature", embodies the imagination and planning of new China literature, and forms the embryonic form of "contemporary literature". Mao Zedong's Speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art is regarded as an important beginning of the practice of new literature and an important symbol of the occurrence of "contemporary literature". Just as Hu Shi's On the Improvement of Literature and Zhou Zuoren's People's Literature had the same original significance in the May 4th literary revolution, Mao Zedong's speech at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art was also endowed with the same original significance. Zhou Yang said: "If the May 4th Movement was the first literary revolution in the history of modern literature in China, then the publication of" Speech at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art "and the changes it caused in literary career can be said to be the second larger and deeper literary revolution after the May 4th Movement. The publication of "Mao Zedong's Speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art" means the birth of "People's Literature" and "Literature of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers", and gradually replaces "People's Literature" to occupy the mainstream position. In a sense, it means the end of "modern literature" and the birth of "contemporary literature".

Mao Zedong's Speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art is a theoretical summary and development of the history of left-wing literature movement in China. We must understand and recognize Mao Zedong's literary thought from the historical development of modern literature and art since the May 4th Movement, especially from the historical development of the left-wing literary movement since the 1930s. Mao Zedong's speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art sharply raised the question of why literature and art should serve the people. This question is not isolated, but closely linked with social and historical practices such as politics, economy and culture. The political, economic and cultural status of the people in the liberated areas has undergone fundamental changes. "When we reached the revolutionary base, we reached the unprecedented era of mass governance in China for thousands of years." "Therefore, we must combine with the new masses." In the new historical era, workers and peasants have become the historical subjects, thus becoming the protagonists of new literature and art. Mao Zedong's speech at the Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art clearly stated that literature should serve the workers, peasants and soldiers, pushing the literary movement to a new stage. He Qifang said: "From the perspective of the development of literature itself, Comrade Mao Zedong advocated the expression of workers, peasants and soldiers, only expanding the world of literature, not narrowing its description scope." For a long time, princes and nobles occupied the center of the literary stage. It was not until the civic comedy in the Enlightenment that the bourgeoisie slowly stepped onto the stage, and it was not until Zola's naturalistic novels that the working class entered the literary field of vision with a distorted face. Therefore, the emergence of the concept of "people's literature" with workers, peasants and soldiers as the main body is an important historical moment and event.

After the publication of Mao Zedong's Speech at Yan 'an Forum on Literature and Art, profound changes have taken place in China's literature and art both in content and form. It has produced new themes and new characters, and also created new forms and new languages. Literature and art in the liberated areas returned to the square from the salon of feudal nobles, to the public sphere, from bourgeois individualism reading to the collective carnival of the people in the square, from printing culture to oral culture, from novel lyrics to recitation and yangko opera. The new yangko is a prominent phenomenon, and its content and form are very novel. Zhou Yang called Yangko "the collective dance of the people and the chorus of the people". It's a "new square musical" and a "mass drama".

The appearance of Zhao Shuli is of historical significance. In Zhao Shuli's works, people are no longer passive, dumb, simply enlightened and sympathized objects, but become real protagonists and subjects of historical practice. At the same time, Zhao Shuli dramatically created the language art form of "Banhua". In the evaluation of Zhao Shuli, we usually ignore the influence of left-wing literary thoughts on Zhao Shuli in the 1930s. In fact, Zhao Shuli was very concerned about the discussion about the popularization of literature and art in Shanghai's "Left League" at that time. Zhao Shuli was not a "peasant writer" who suddenly appeared in the 1940s. Here in Zhao Shuli, the hierarchical segregation between "pure literature" and "popular literature" has been broken. Zhao Shuli's "Banhua" and his literature embody a new "folk" tradition and a new imaginary relationship with the modern nation-state. Zhao Shuli's creation embodies the profound changes in China's contemporary politics, economy, society and culture. This is not only the reconstruction of a new literary tradition, but also the reconstruction of a new political, economic, social, cultural and fundamental new person. As the two most outstanding writers representing rural areas and farmers in China, Zhao Shuli and Lu Xun have formed two completely different positions and styles, two completely different times and traditions. Lu Xun is a rural area in the vision of enlightenment. In his works, the rural areas in China are "silent" like a leap of soil and "unconscious" like A Q. Only in Zhao Shuli's novels can China farmers gain subjectivity and initiative and truly become the protagonists. Zhao Shuli's novels reflect the awakening and changes of rural areas in China, and form a new character of farmers, although this new character is only a bud in a sense. This change is just as Mao Zedong pointed out in his letter to Yang Shaoxuan and Qi Yanming, the authors of "Driving to Liangshan" at that time: "History was created by the people, but in the old drama stage (in all the old literature and art that left the people), the people became scum, and the stage was ruled by ladies and gentlemen. This historical reversal has now been reversed by you, and the face of history has been restored. " Only by Zhao Shuli and People's Literature did the writer really penetrate into the inner world of farmers in China from the front. Liu Qing's entrepreneurial history has further shaped the new heroic image of the new socialist peasants and the Chinese nation. Liang San's "The Old Man" still does not surpass the literary vision of Enlightenment, nor does it break through the literary world of Lu Xun or the typical image of China farmers in the "Ah Q era" as Qian Xing said. Only the image of Liang Shengbao, a new farmer and a "new socialist", can truly reflect the artistic conception of "entrepreneurial history" and construct, expand and support a brand-new and magnificent historical imagination of a new contemporary socialist countryside. In the process of constructing "contemporary literature", the creation of "new socialist" and "socialist hero" is always at the center of narrative. In the sense of "new socialist" creation and "cultural politics", that is, not from the description of isolated characters, but from the whole theme and conception of the novel, how to evaluate the two different typical images of Liang Shengbao and Liang Sanhan in the history of entrepreneurship?

As mentioned above, creating a "new socialist" is actually to establish a brand-new socialist cultural value system, which is a brand-new cultural imagination and political identity. The slogan of creating "new heroes" was put forward at the Northeast Literature Congress held in the winter of 1948. Later, the concept of "new hero" became a more explicit "typical image of proletarian workers, peasants and soldiers". Zhou Yang once pointed out in On Zhao Shuli's Creation: "It is a great and arduous task in our literary creation to create typical positive figures." When talking about describing new figures in the new era, Zhou Yang pointed out that writers do not like to write about working people, but always like to write about bourgeois petty bourgeoisie intellectuals. When writing about workers, peasants and soldiers, they always like to write about their negative aspects, not their positive aspects, and portray the working people in the new society as the weak people who were exploited and oppressed in the past. It seems that the working people write on the ground to be considered art, and the working people stand up to be considered art and conceptualized.

In 1950s, novel classics such as Song of Youth, Red Flag Spectrum and History of Entrepreneurship were called Bildungsroman. In these novels, the growth of the protagonist and the history of the founding of the new nation constitute a complete and highly unified narrative. In fact, not only Zhu Laozhong and Liang Shengbao grew up as "new socialists", but also Rasty Nie and Julien grew up as "bourgeois heroes" in a specific typical environment. Typical creations contain rich artistic fantasies and full historical foresight. Zhou Yang said: "The generalization of art is sometimes simply a kind of' foresight'. The author takes out a hidden undeveloped or germ fragment from reality and shows it to people in an exaggerated form when people don't realize it, so the essence of that fragment is more typical and obvious. " Zhou Yang pointed out that before nihilism became the mainstream of Russian society, Turgenev described the typical figures of nihilism in Father and Son. Marx also said: "Balzac is not only a historian of contemporary social life, but also a creator. He created a typical figure in advance who was still in the embryonic stage of the Louis-Philippe dynasty and did not mature until the third age of Napoleon, that is, after Balzac's death. " However, due to the failure of contemporary historical practice and the demonization and stigma of Utopia, this artistic fantasy has been declared as "anti-realism", "formulaic", "conceptualization", "falsehood" and lack of "authenticity", and even pronounced as "God-making literature".

Bakhtin explained the "Bildungsroman" in this way: "The change of the protagonist itself has plot significance; Related to this, the plot of the novel has been fundamentally re-recognized and re-constructed. Time enters people's interior and characters themselves, which greatly changes the fate of characters and the meaning of all factors in life. In the most general sense, this novel type can be called human growth novel. " He believes that "people grow up in history" exists in all great realistic novels. When discussing realistic bildungsroman, he pointed out that man's growth is no longer his personal business: "He grew up with the world, and he reflected the historical growth of the world itself. ..... he must be a new man like never before. What is said here is the growth of new people. Therefore, the organizational role of the future here is enormous. This future is certainly not a private future, but a historical future. It is precisely the cornerstone of the world that has changed, so people have to change with it. Obviously, in such bildungsroman, human reality and possibility, freedom and necessity, and initiative will all be sharply put forward. The growing characters began to overcome their own privacy (of course, within a certain historical scope) and entered a completely different and very broad field of historical existence. " Therefore, according to Bakhtin's theory, the socialist literary classics such as Song of Youth, Red Flag, and History of Entrepreneurship have all made great artistic achievements.

How do we understand the strong and distinctive political ideology of "contemporary literature"? Because "contemporary literature" and "people's literature" reflect a new heterogeneous politics and culture, which is obviously different from the established capitalist politics or "daily life". For us, socialist politics is "strange" and "unnatural" because it has not yet risen to a universal "daily life". The fundamental purpose of "contemporary literature" or socialist narrative literature is to make this kind of politics "natural", "realistic" and "daily life" through "narration". Because the readers at that time really regarded these novels as "life textbooks" and regarded the protagonists Lin Daojing and Liang Shengbao as their own life models. We forget the political and class nature of "daily life", just as we usually forget the historicity of history. Contrary to the myth of "daily life", we should take "daily life" itself as the object of investigation. In fact, the rationalization of corruption today and the selfishness of "every man for himself and the devil takes the hindmost" are not the necessity of "daily life" and "humanity", but the result of neoliberalism.

Contemporary literature has created new literature, new humanity, new ethics, new culture and new identity. As the "revolutionary family" and "revolutionary ethics" portrayed in The Red Lantern: "It is said that the friendship of flesh and blood is more important. In my opinion, the friendship in the class is more important than Mount Tai. " "Contemporary literature" or socialist literature embodies Mao Zedong's conception of a new modern nation-state and new interpersonal relationships. Therefore, "contemporary literature" is not so much "anti-humanity" or "non-humanity" as a departure from bourgeois humanity and ethics. However, it also created new proletarian humanity and class friendship. The bourgeois humanity is both natural and unnatural, because the crazy profit-seeking psychology of the bourgeoisie is not the "natural humanity" or "eternal humanity" that has existed since ancient times, but the desire machine created with the rise of the bourgeoisie, that is, the so-called "third class" after the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Yu Hua believes that in the process of the transformation from "contemporary literature" to "new period literature", typical characters and typical personalities collapse, and the description of desire replaces the description of personality, while the description of endocrine replaces the description of inner heart. At the same time, the narrative of desire replaces the pursuit of ideal human nature. Different from what was said in the early period of literature in the new period, the conflict between "contemporary literature" and "literature in the new period" is the conflict between "humanity" and "inhumanity", "humanitarianism" and "anti-humanitarianism", the conflict between bourgeois "daily life" and proletarian vision, and the conflict between different human natures. In the final analysis, this conflict of different human nature is the conflict between different cultures and cultures and politics. It is vulgar and lazy to equate human nature with "natural human nature" or "animal nature" Moreover, in the final analysis, the "original ecology" of life declared by "daily life" or even "new realistic novels" is itself an artistic choice and structure, and the so-called "original ecology" life has never been original ecology.

No matter how rude and unsuccessful the criticism of the film Wu Xunchuan and Hu Shi's bourgeois ideology is today, we have to admit his hard efforts to establish socialist cultural hegemony and try to replace capitalist cultural hegemony. Moreover, fundamentally speaking, the key to the success of the socialist cause lies not only in the success of the socialist economic foundation and political and legal superstructure, but also in the establishment of the legitimacy of socialist culture and the victory of socialist ideology. Mao Zedong deeply realized the importance of socialist cultural construction, that is, cultural legitimacy, and political legitimacy ultimately depends on cultural legitimacy. The Soviet Union suddenly collapsed at the most powerful time in politics, economy and military affairs. The failure of the Soviet Union's cultural legitimacy construction led to the "victory without fighting" of capitalism. We all realize today that there is an indispensable "soft power" besides the "hard truth".

I named this booklet "Writing on the Edge of Contemporary Literature" because my professional training in Peking University was to study modern China literature. In Peking University, the boundary between modern literature and contemporary literature is strict, and no one has crossed the line. Mao Zedong said that without investigation, there is no right to speak. I am not an insider of contemporary literature research, so I have to quietly write down these strange comments and layman's views on the edge of contemporary literature.