The artistic achievement of Yu Hua's Living?

Since 1990s, the text experiments of avant-garde novels have more embodied a postmodern text feature: "daily experience" and "indifferent narration". The narrative language of the novel is becoming more and more indifferent, the involvement of the narrator is getting weaker and weaker, and the narrative is becoming more and more common and "folk". The representative works of this novel experiment are Yu Hua's Living and Xu Sanguan's Selling Blood. "To Be Alive" tells a story of "can't live" which is completely opposite to its title: Fu Gui, an old man who lives by farming, has died seven times in a family of eight for decades, leaving only him and his old cow, suffering the limit. The old man lives an ordinary life, and sometimes he is extremely down and out, but he always thinks that "it is better to be a normal person, fight for this and that, and fight for his own life." This "worthless" attitude towards life is a reversal of the romantic outlook on life of "living elsewhere" and the emotional feelings of modern people wandering on the road. The story and the characters in the story are very ordinary, and the whole narrative style is even more quiet and old-fashioned. With its simple and repetitive narrative skills, the novel induces people to pay attention to and think about "being alive" and human existence. To be exact, Living is a modern fable full of narrative tension.

There are obvious differences between Yu Hua's creation in 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s, Yu Hua had a soft spot for violence, suffering, death and killing. From the tension with reality, his novels, such as A Reality, April 3rd Incident and Smoke, are full of accurate and calm descriptions of violence and death. In the narrative process, these novels often use the "outsider" narrative perspective, quiet narrative posture, delicate and even gorgeous narrative language to describe bloody scenes and cruel behaviors in great detail from a long distance. What Yu Hua's novels evoke at this time is obviously people's fear and trembling about a certain existence and a certain realistic order; At the same time, it also embodies its unique significance and value in the field of avant-garde experimental novel creation in the 1980s. After 1990s, Yu Hua's writing completed a new transformation. During this period, Yu Hua's creation was mainly novels, which told more about the suffering and fate of ordinary people, their suffering and struggle against fate, and the power of "living together" forged in ordinary life. Narrative style also tends to be plain and simple, and gentle and humorous. Hula Mao Mao rain, living, Xu Sanguan selling blood, and so on. If the aesthetic value of Yu Hua's novels in the 1980s lies in fundamentally subverting the traditional novel writing mode and aesthetic inertia, and making the avant-garde experimental novels reach a new height, then Yu Hua's novels in the 1990s have led another historic breakthrough of avant-garde novels: from subverting the traditional novel writing mode and aesthetic inertia to subverting the overly artificial narrative mechanism and emotional expression of modern novels. Perhaps, from a historical point of view, Yu Hua may be a link between the past and the future in China's contemporary novel writing, especially in the pioneering experimental novel writing in the 1980s and 1990s. When writing Yu, the experimental significance of the text is reflected in his extreme concern about "what to say" and "what to be told". However, the writing of "Hou Yuhua" embodies a plain and calm civilian position, and dispels the heavy self-expression and metaphorical symbols of modernism with the daily experience and indifferent narration of "postmodernism".

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See: Editor-in-Chief Wu Xiuming. Fifty years of contemporary literature in China. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 1 Edition, September 2004.