Not long ago, from the symposium on "Literature in the Thirty Years of Reform and Opening-up" held in Shanghai, it was said that "traditional literature has lost its spiritual home" and "contemporary writers are like lost dogs". 1 This reminds me of the great discussion on "humanistic spirit" initiated in Shanghai fifteen years ago. At that time, some scholars and critics warned of the loss of humanistic spirit in view of the common phenomenon of poor aesthetic imagination of writers and deterioration of aesthetic ability of readers. In this regard, the writer Wang Meng wrote an article to discuss. He believes that in the history of China, the European humanistic spirit has never been established. "How can something you never had be lost?" ○2 Although Wang Meng's point of view has caused a heated debate, it is only talk so far, but in my opinion, it can still be used as a reference for us to understand and grasp the spiritual home problem.
As we all know, the spiritual home that China people often talk about is actually a concept transplanted from the West. Its original meaning is a religious existence, and its prototype points directly to the Garden of Eden in the Bible. The so-called search for home is the efforts made by human beings who have been expelled from the Garden of Eden to return to the original heaven. There is no doubt that such a spiritual home is linked with European and Russian writers with religious backgrounds, and it is easy to become the support of their souls and the destination of their lives; As for the modern and contemporary writers in China who are atheists as a whole, they are unfamiliar, alienated and even absent all the time. Of course, we can also make a broader understanding of the spiritual home, saying that it is an idealized and objective blueprint for the soul. Regrettably, since modern times, China society has experienced many violent political turmoil and rare historical twists and turns, and an era atmosphere full of confusion and anxiety has prevented such a spiritual home from truly entering the hearts of China writers and transforming it into a conscious belief in life. Therefore, on the literary journey of China writers, it is almost a historical fate that the spiritual home hangs in the air. It is not necessarily related to the reform and opening up, so it cannot be a reason for us to criticize its literary situation.
In fact, losing or not having a spiritual home is not necessarily a bad thing, because it can in turn urge and motivate people to pursue and rebuild their spiritual home. In this respect, although China's literati and writers are not unique, they have their own origins. For example, Qu Yuan's "Tian Wen", Li Bai's "Seeking Immortals" and Lu Xun's "Passers-by" are all the expansion and closeness of the subject of life to the unknown world, and they all reflect an effort to find a rest garden for the soul. China writers who bid farewell to the ten-year catastrophe and entered the era of change inherited and continued this spiritual dimension. In the past 30 years, literature has experienced many ups and downs, from complaining about "scars" to "reflecting" history, from calling for reform to confronting problems, from social criticism to cultural roots, from advocating the subject to fearing nature, from the rise of modernism to the return of realism, from praising the elite to paying attention to the bottom, from the sudden advance of "social modernity" to the rebound of "cultural modernity". This kind of exploration may not have a satisfactory result for the time being, or even never find a fixed answer. However, as long as this kind of exploration exists, China's literature will not lack solid bones and steady weights, and there will inevitably be an inner vitality and soul appeal, so we will not be too sad and disappointed about the present and future of literature.
De-elitism of literature
Popularization or de-elitism is another new change or feature of China literature since 1990s. This new change or feature is accompanied by the era of electronic media and consumerism in China society, and its intuitive situation can be described by the poet Ye Kuangzheng's somewhat exaggerated blog post: "Literature is dead! The era of interactive characters is coming! There is no literary rank, no literary genre, no sense of identity between poets and writers, no history of literature ... "Many scholars and critics have expressed deep concern about this sudden change in literary order and even literary concepts. They believe that writing that completely abandons constraints and restrictions will not guarantee the strength and quality that literature must have; At the same time, vulgar literary works can only cultivate vulgar reading interest, and vulgar reading interest will inevitably lead to more vulgar literary works, which is a vicious circle from bad to worse.
It cannot be said that academic colleagues are alarmist. In fact, publishing has no threshold, and the good and the bad are mixed, which has a negative and negative impact on the general literary level of the whole society and even the quality of discourse. This is obvious. However, just as many things in the world are inevitably mixed with gains and losses, the popularization and de-elitism of literature bring some problems, but it also contains reasonable and positive factors. At least two of them can not be ignored.
First of all, the popularization or non-elitism of literature is a historical progress. In a long historical stage, literature is not a completely open field, but is related to systems, norms and identities. Do you want to enter the literature system? Then we must first provide enough artistic texts that meet the standards and requirements according to the literary norms determined by this system, so as to obtain the identity of writing, otherwise everything will be impossible. Obviously, this is a great constraint and severe depression for literature which is essentially created by the spirit of human freedom, and the result will not be conducive to the spiritual growth and cultural development of a nation. Because of this, in the May 4th New Culture Movement, when the intellectual elites called for cultural and literary changes, in addition to advocating the use of vernacular Chinese instead of classical Chinese, they also had a core slogan, which was: "Tear down flattering aristocratic literature and build simple and lyrical national literature"; "Pushing down stale and extravagant classical literature and building fresh and sincere realistic literature"; "Push it to the pedantic and difficult mountain literature and build a clean and popular social literature". ○4 In short, we should advocate the popularization of literature. But unfortunately, for a long time, in China society, due to the lag of education popularization and the limited media resources, the pioneering spirit of the May 4th elite basically stayed at the level of ideal design or difficult start, which is an unattainable and beautiful realm. And its real realization is precisely in the era of reform and opening up, which includes the double leap of education and media. To put it more accurately, the 30 years of reform and opening up, especially the unprecedented popularization of education and the rapid development of the Internet, have directly bred and created the trend of popularization and non-elitism of literature, thus unexpectedly implementing the goal of popularization, popularization and popularization of literature put forward by the May 4th New Culture Movement. The positive significance of this mutation to the literary ecology and even the spiritual ecology of Chinese people is likely to gradually emerge in the future. Because of this, we should give dialectical understanding, reasonable affirmation and positive guidance to the phenomenon of popularization and non-elitism in the field of literature, and that kind of blind accusation or even total denial is certainly not an "old-fashioned" mentality.
Secondly, popular or non-elite literary writing contains something worthy of reflection, reference and reference by elite literature. Needless to say, literary works produced in the current state of popularization and non-elitism often lack texture and character because of the lack of necessary professional preparation. However, this does not prevent them from making the choice and pursuit of "what to write" and "how to write" from a specific literary background, relying on the natural interest and intuitive feelings from the people, thus inadvertently forming something of reference value or enlightening significance. For example, from the perspective of "what to write", popular and non-elite writing likes to express people's daily life and personal space, such as fashion sentiment, petty bourgeoisie interest, private psychology, marginal emotion, gender experience, physical essence and so on. At first glance, this seems to deviate from the main idea of literature, and some of them are not very interesting. But when I think about it, all these things, as the composition of human nature, should not be completely divorced from the writer's sight, while China's modern and contemporary literature has paid little attention to or even completely ignored their existence in the past. Because of this, they are popular in the trend of literature popularization and non-elitism, and have a certain degree of "ecological adjustment" significance, which deserves our serious treatment and reasonable composition. Similarly, as far as "how to write" is concerned, the attitude of lowering oneself and being close to life that popular and non-elite writing is good at, the people-oriented style with little restraint, and the fierce, handsome, funny, humorous, natural or alternative language are not the enemies of elite expression. On the contrary, it can become the nourishment and supplement of the latter through selection and sublation.
Contemporary literature garbage theory
Since entering the new century, there have been many negative comments on literary creation. Among them, there are highly generalized and relatively abstract comprehensive negation, such as what German sinologist Gu Bin called the "garbage theory" of contemporary literature; Scholars such as Morrow, Ding Dong and Fu Guoyong asserted that the literature in the new period was abandoned by the elite. ○5 At the same time, there are also criticisms in some places that point to clarity and focus on firepower. For example, Zhang Zonggang thinks that the prose creation in the new millennium is full of "spiritual retrogression, lack of conscience, and lack of morality", which means "fallen leaves are not swept all over the street"; ○6 More than one critic pointed out that in recent years, there are a large number of novels with worrying quality, and more than half of them have no readers, thus becoming a simple process of "papermaking" and then quickly becoming garbage.
To be fair, I am also dissatisfied with today's literary creation. I also think that there have been many works in the field of literature in recent years, and it is not wrong to call some works with low style and mediocre art "garbage" and "fallen leaves". But I don't agree to say that the current literary creation is useless, and then completely deny the literary achievements in the past 30 years of reform and opening up. Here, there is a fact that we must see: in the history of China literature development, literature of any era, including the golden age of literature, is an obvious and indisputable pyramid in terms of the quality composition of its works: a large number of generalized and even mediocre works serve as the base of the tower, while a few excellent works are just the top of the tower. Take Tang poetry as an example. The whole Tang poetry contains more than 2,000 poets and more than 48,900 poems, which are truly widespread and enduring, and only a few can be called famous works. Sun Zhu, a retired scholar in Qing Dynasty, used only 77 people and 3 10 songs to complete a selection of songs that appealed to both refined and popular tastes, which was recognized by history. Even though Yu Guanying and Wang Shuizhao, the authorities of contemporary classical literature research, have a more comprehensive and rational vision and statement, they just said: "There were no fewer than twenty scholars in the Tang Dynasty, which had a far-reaching influence. There are as many as 100 other distinctive poets who have a certain position in the history of literature. " 7. The China classical literature reading series "Selected Readings of Tang Poems" edited by them only received 130 more than 30 poets and more than 630 poems. Compared with the mass of Tang poetry, this is undoubtedly pitiful. The situation of Song Ci is no exception. Tang Guizhang's "Song Ci" has more than 1000 poets and more than 20,000 chapters, but only a few dozen or hundreds of them have been valued and passed down from generation to generation by poets in past dynasties. Today, Hu's Selected Poems of Song Dynasty is almost covered in a very short space. Let's take a look at the Ming and Qing novels that are closer to us. According to Ouyang Jian, editor-in-chief of China Popular Novels, there are116 kinds of ancient popular novels in China. So, how many of these masterpieces are well-known and far-reaching In the Ming Dynasty, it was called "Four Musts", namely "Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin" and "Jin Ping Mei" were taken to the west. Xia Zhiqing, a contemporary American sinologist, slightly expanded the scope of famous works in An Introduction to China's Classical Novels, that is, a Dream of Red Mansions and The Scholars were added in addition to the "four musts", arguing that these six works "opened up a new realm in their respective times, expanded new important fields for China's novels, and profoundly influenced the later development path of China's novels." ○8 We might as well further relax the scale of famous works from the general acceptance and dissemination, and include Sanyan, Erpai, Sui and Tang Dynasties Romance, Jing Hua Yuan and Biography of Flowers on the Sea, but the total number still exceeds 20. Compared with all the popular novels in ancient China, this is really rare. But what needs to be solemnly declared is that these few writers, poets and their works represent the high-end literature of their respective time and space, and condense the literary wisdom and artistic achievements of their time, thus forming one literary peak after another in the history of China literature. Of course, on the other hand, it can also be said that as long as these few but outstanding writers, poets and their works exist, we can't help but be respected and fascinated by Tang poetry, Song poetry and Ming and Qing novels, and we can't help but admit that they are great literary times with unique contributions. Because talented writers, poets and excellent and immortal works are always the fundamental signs of a literary era.
Based on this literary background and literary concept, when we look at the literary creation in the past 30 years of reform and opening up, we can find that as a literary pyramid, although its huge base is muddy and mixed with sand, and even there are many wastes and garbage, the scenery at the top of the tower is still colorful and magnificent. Of course, for the time being, this gorgeous scenery is not the peak of poetry in the Tang Dynasty, nor the giant pine in modern literature, but the perfect combination of several outstanding writers and works, which is a wonderful group effect. This reminds us of a point made by Mr. Bing Xin in the 1980s. Literature in the new period lacks masters, but its overall level is higher than that of modern literature. What kind of lineup does this high-end group have? We may be difficult to determine at the moment, but at least we should include some poems by Shu Ting, Beidao, Xichuan and Changyao, some essays by Shi Tiesheng, Yu, Han Shaogong, Nan Fan, Zhang Chengzhi, some short stories by Wang Zengqi, Tie Ning, Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, Chi Zijian and Su Tong, and some reportage by Xu Chi. Its list can at least list Zhang Wei's Ancient Boat, Wang Meng's Activity Becomes Man, Chen's White Deer Plain, Tie Ning's Stupid Flowers, Lu Yao's Ordinary World, Alai's Dust Settled, Wang Anyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow, Han Shaogong's Hint and Xiong's Zhang. At the same time, more writers and works can be complacent or noisy, which cannot fundamentally affect the literary achievements of an era.