What are the two branches of family narrative in the 1980s?

"Leave" and "Return" have completely different flow directions.

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As a cultural carrier, family keeps pace with the times and has experienced all the ups and downs of human beings. It is a precious specimen to understand human progress. Therefore, family novels have always been a very flexible and rich narrative of the complex historical and humanistic world in Chinese and foreign literature. In the relatively complex cultural context of the transition period, writers have shown great enthusiasm for cutting into historical narrative from the perspective of family/blood relationship. These texts not only get rid of the grand historical narrative mode, but also change the narrative mode of China's traditional family novels. Taking the family as the story hub and cultural carrier, it is deeply rooted in the origin of human spirit, and takes this as the starting point to examine, which reflects the author's comprehensive thinking on China's modern history and even contemporary history. From this, we can experience a kind of determination, determination, hardship and pain in cultural reconstruction to escape from the shadow of history. Therefore, radical enthusiasm and tragic desolation constitute the difference in aesthetic style between novels in the second half of 1980s and novels at the turn of the century when describing family history, which actually shows a spiritual track of contemporary writers in China in the process of national modernization.

Home is an eternal theme in the history of literature. Since the May 4th Movement, narratives about home have emerged one after another. Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, Ba Jin's Home, Lao She's Four Generations under One Roof, Lu Ling's Son of the Rich Man, Cao Yu's Thunderstorm and Peking Man have become classics in the history of modern literature.

In the mid-1980s, following Mo Yan's Red Sorghum Family, there was another upsurge of family themes, including Zhang Wei's Ancient Boat and Family, Su Tong's Flying Over the Poplar Series, Li's Li Family, Chen's White Deer Plain and Wang Xufeng's There is a Beautiful Wood in the South, Alai. These two narratives reflect two completely different flows of "leaving" and "returning".

1August, 978 1 1 day, Lu Xinhua's Scar, as an important source of scar literature, was published in Shanghai Wen Wei Po. Scar has also become an important turning point from "running away" to "returning" in the twentieth century. The first half of the novel tells a story of "running away": the protagonist Wang Xiaohua is a "Lin Daojing" figure. In order to keep the purity and advancement of the revolution, he broke with his family and drew a clear line with his mother, a "Dai Yu" figure. The second half of the novel is a story of "going home". In my mother's letter, I mentioned twice: "Son, come back early." Although, when Wang Xiaohua finally came back, his mother died of illness, at the end of the story, Wang Xiaohua still found her old boyfriend and her old feelings, and found the way home. This is the most obvious sign of the return of modern revolutionary ethics to traditional consanguineous family ethics. However, as people usually comment on "scar literature", it focuses on exposing and thinking about the political harm caused by the "Cultural Revolution", which is a kind of political "set things right". Therefore, the "going home" of Scar is not a return in the cultural sense.

Red Sorghum published by Mo Yan 1986 is a pioneering work of contemporary family novels. The declaration of Red Sorghum is to "set up a monument for my family" and save historical narrative from the control of "state" and "revolution". Su Tong wrote in "Escape from Kloc-0/934", "I have been to the old bamboo ware city in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and visited the ruins of Chen Ji's bamboo ware shop along the decaying old city wall", looking for "my days of our lives". With the help of the trend of "root-seeking literature" and the "explosive" atmosphere of magic realism literature in South America, they found and established their own new writing direction. Different from the conquest of "folk" and the incorporation of "home" by revolutionary culture in Lin Yuan and Red Flag Spectrum, Red Sorghum re-released the complex connotation of "folk": "I want to raise the banner of" Gaomi Northeast Township "and find land, climate, rivers, trees, crops, flowers, birds, insects and fish there. [1] So Huang Ziping said that "Red Sorghum" represents the literary history of "a heroic bastard" finally returning to the rivers and lakes "[2]. Red Sorghum has become the intersection of "root-seeking literature" and "family novel". At the same time, it is worth noting that the background of the whole family legend in the novel is a primitive and wild wilderness, not a traditional and moral "home". My Grandpa and My Grandma are full of rebellious factors. "My grandfather and grandmother are not only heroes of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, but also pioneers of personality liberation and models of women's self-reliance" [3]. My grandma is a pioneer of personality liberation, which is composed of two sets of different language symbols. My grandma stands for family blood and patriarchal culture, while personality liberation is a modern language and a westernized concept. In Red Sorghum, two narrative streams, national discourse and family discourse, big narrative and small narrative, national official history and folk unofficial history, are intertwined and inextricably linked. Therefore, the author's attitude here is ambiguous, including "seeking the roots"-the pursuit of family history and blood relationship, and "rebellion"-the rebellious spirit against modern romanticism and individualism, and taking "modernity" as "unfinished enlightenment". It can be said that Red Sorghum, which was born in the new enlightenment spirit in the 1980s, is not really "going home".

The real "going home" needs the appearance of family novels "White Deer Plain" and "Old Site" in the 1990s. If White Deer Plain is compared to Home, a classic of modern literature, then the black baby in White Deer Plain is actually Chueh-hui in Home, and Tian Xiaoe is Nora in the May 4th Movement. In White Deer Plain, the author gives the rebels a completely different fate. Heiwa finally knelt in front of the ancestral temple, while Tian Xiaoe's ashes were burned for three days and three nights, under the "six-sided brick tower". Through the reflection and denial of the 20th century revolution, as well as the re-understanding of family ethics and traditional Confucian culture, the family novels in 1990s, which were included in the "new historical novels", have, in a sense, been integrated into the "daily life" trend of "farewell to revolution" in 1990s.

In Li Rui's "The Story of Silver City", the conflict between revolution and family, which was repeatedly written in the 20th century, turned into a new plot and interpretation: "If I were like Ouyang Langyun, I wouldn't have so much concern and pain in the face of being killed." [4] In the former site, the first female party member and revolutionary heroine Li Zihan in Yin Cheng history were actually a great family guardian. The reason and reason for the "revolution" is not "class feelings", but the brotherhood of the family: "Li Naizhi did not expect that after seven years of study and thinking, she made a choice, and her sister made a choice overnight. The next morning, when the two brothers were sitting at the dinner table, Li Zihan resolutely told his younger brother,' Brother, I am also a revolutionary. Go to hell, our flesh and blood will die together! [5] Li Rui's two novels denied the principle and logic of "class struggle" of "revolution", but re-implanted family and ethics into the characters and the motive force of story development. Ouyang Langyun's confession makes "leaving home" meaningless for "revolution". Unlike the modern family narrative Red Flag Spectrum, which turned family revenge into a class struggle and merged into a new modern nation-state, in Zhou Daxin's Act 20, the spirit of rejuvenating the family business runs through the Shangjia family, just as Zhuo Yuan's analysis of her daughter's face in the novel: "This family has deeply immersed the spirit of fighting for that goal in the blood and minds of family members through education handed down from generation to generation, thus achieving that fixed goal. [6] Not the class and nation-state, but the family has once again become the purpose of narrative and history.

Undoubtedly, the rise of family novels in 1990s is related to the ideological history of China's ideological and intellectual circles "farewell to revolution" and return to "daily life". Just as the enlightenment of the New Culture Movement led to the "departure" of modern literature, "Farewell to Revolution" led to the final recognition of family and the return of family in "New Period Literature".

The so-called "running away" is associated with enlightenment discourses such as "personal liberation" and "freedom of marriage". At first, it was not economic or political reasons that put the concept of "running away" into practice, but mostly the issue of marital autonomy, especially young women's rebellion against "parents' orders and matchmakers' words", their pursuit of love freedom and their refusal to run away from marriage. Nora of China, the protagonist of Lu Xun's Regret for the Past, declared that "I am my own, and no one interferes with my power". Her departure constituted the most dazzling and magnificent scene in the 20th century. "Running away" has become the most glorious and striking gesture of modern women's liberation in China. This Nora-like gesture of "leaving" created at the beginning of China's modern history has the same significance as the "appearance" in China's ancient operas. At the beginning of the 20th century, the destruction of traditional ethics that bound women, such as chastity, created a surge of women's liberation in China. In the Revolution of 1911, the May 4th Movement and the National Revolution, the women's liberation movement was first directly manifested as the "liberation" of the "body" by letting go, having a haircut, going to the same school, opening up the society, free love, independent marriage and cohabitation. The "daughters" of the May 4th Movement liberated themselves from their families and clans. This is not a self-disciplined movement, but a movement that obeys the purpose of building a modern nation-state and is attached to the modern nationalist movement. Women's liberation was originally due to the call of the state, that is to say, the state liberated them as "nationals" from the control of "family" and "clan" and the possession of men, and put them directly in their own hands. Whether in China or in the West, it is often because of the needs of the country, especially the needs of national wars, that women leave their families and gain the basic rights of people who were once monopolized by men. As Woolf said: "Strangely speaking, this is due to two wars, one is the Crimean War that liberated florence nightingale from the living room, and the other is the European War about 60 years later, which opened the door for ordinary women. It is for the above reasons that these social drawbacks are gradually improving. " [7] The process of modern women's liberation can be simply summarized as the process of breaking the shackles of "family" with the encouragement and support of the "state" and integrating into the modern "nation-state * * * identity".