Yu Hua: The Anxiety of Existence

In Western modernist literature, a large number of works show an anti-social tendency. Due to the special historical and cultural situation, this tendency had a great influence on the Chinese literary world in the 1980s, and Yu Hua, who grew up under the cultivation of foreign literature, naturally felt this mentality very y.

In some of Yu Hua's works, he denounced the modern society as a spiritual aristocrat, and expressed the inner spiritual pressure of people under the modern civilization with the life experience of a modern man, and expressed a kind of reflection and anxiety about the modern civilization.

In A Mistake by the River, Yu Hua recounts the story of a madman who kills people. In order to sanction the madman, the police killed the madman, for which the policeman faced the danger of being sanctioned, and he had to pretend to be mad in order to survive.

In the face of the brutal actions of a madman, all modern legal means are actually powerless, which is the paradox of civilization and sadness.

"Human civilization provides us with a set of order, do we feel safe in it? The reproach of safety is the beginning of doubt. Man grows and lives within the order of civilization according to regulations. The rules of order are clearly designed to keep people sane and safe, but is the order unbreakable? The vast order has always proved helpless in the face of the unexpected ...... Thus the safety of our being in the civilized order is no longer real and credible."

"In the face of violence and chaos, civilization is just a slogan and order becomes decoration." This is Yu Hua's query about human civilization, and it also shows his skepticism about the existing order.

The contrast and confrontation between civilization and primitive in Yu Hua's writing makes people doubt the development of civilization in today's era and question the contemporary civilization.

In today's era, although human beings have achieved material fulfillment, the spiritual dimension seems to be lost, and it has become an important issue to pay attention to the increasingly lonely existence of people today.

Through his cold depiction, Yu Hua expresses his subversion of traditional values, with a view to calling for humanism and humanistic rationality in modern civilized society.

Modernist writers are "particularly sensitive to the irrationality of social existence and the meaninglessness of human existence, but they do not want to search for or reveal the profound reasons for them, but are only keen to reveal the lack of causality in the world, and to reveal the world's full of assumptions and contingencies, so as to fallaciously conclude that the life, the society, and the world are absurd. "

Such a hypothesis and contingency is expressed in many of Yu Hua's works.

Noon of the Northwest Wind is a story about how I was inexplicably taken hostage to attend the funeral of a friend with whom I had nothing to do.

In Why I Got Married, I wanted to escape from the housework, so I lied to my parents and told them that my friends were fighting because of a divorce, and that I should mediate with them as their friend, but I never imagined that my lie would become a reality. The first thing you need to do is to get a good deal of money to pay for it.

What's even more incredible is that "I" have to take on the responsibility of marrying my friend's wife, which "I" can only lament helplessly: "I don't even know why I want to get married. The first time I saw this was when I was in the middle of the night.

In fact, this kind of contingency has always been present in Yu Hua's earlier and later creations, showing us all the uncertainties of life and living.

Yu Hua is also a writer who specializes in the depiction of hallucinations, through which he breaks up the logic of normal thinking and expresses a sense of life that seems to be real.

In The April 3rd Incident, I always suspected that people around me were planning to harm me, so I envisioned all kinds of horrible scenarios over and over again in my mind. So, in my mind, "I" envisioned all kinds of horrible scenarios over and over again, and hypothesized about life in my fantasies. "I was in a trance, and my heart was filled with fear and a sense of helplessness.

The skepticism and anxiety about life made me try to verify the hypotheses in my fantasies through reality, and Yu Hua did arrange a lot of coincidences in the text to verify my assumptions. "This has led to the conviction that disaster is imminent, and in order to avoid it, I have to run away in a hurry.

By showing the contingency and assumptions in life and the resulting fear of life, it shows the absurdity of life, society and the world, and also expresses the writer's inner confusion.

After the Tangshan earthquake, he insisted that he and his teacher's seismic monitoring station had detected the earthquake three days earlier, but his firmness was only rewarded by the laughter of his classmates and the indifference of his physics teacher, which also led to his inner pain. The first time I saw this, I was in the middle of an earthquake.

Later, the trust of the director of the county reform committee strengthens his confidence, but an earthquake occurs in his neighborhood when he thinks it won't, and people around him laugh at him and even beat him up, causing Baishi to return to the denial of his self-worth and anxiety.

So he slowly retreats into his inner self, isolating himself in a small space, a space that is also cold and where he has trouble feeling his own significance to the outer world.

Bai Shu can be said to be a manifestation of the spirit of the modern individual, in which we see the worry and anxiety of modern people after feeling the crisis of their own existence, and even uneasiness.

Modern people are always in a kind of walking anxiety, they are constantly searching for their own position, and once they can't find it, they will form a kind of closed spiritual trait, and use it to fight against the external world.

The concern for the spiritual plight of modern people is related to the writer's attitude toward life, as Yu Hua said, "I've never been optimistic about the world, not in the past, and still am. I always see the side that other people don't want to talk about, and I try to hope that I see the side that everyone else is talking about, but I just can't see it, and I'm not at all interested in what they're saying."

Through this keen perspective, through the excavation of the often-neglected side of life, Yu Hua describes to us the extrusion of modern civilization on the spiritual space of human beings, expresses the spiritual anxiety and inner loneliness of modern people, and also gives us enlightenment and reflection.