When will our new generation of writers stop their “running” pace and get their souls safe? Let\\u0027s use the meaning of the pseudonym “Dongxi” to answer these questions. Dongxi said that he took the pseudonym to mean “, looking around while running east and west, and draw paint everywhere while looking around.” While Zhu Wen wrote in Younger Brother\\u0027s Performance: No one is chasing me, only myself is running forward desperately. I am with my bloody heart, rushing forward in mid-air forever, in front of a flying bullet, before a bullet catches me. I seem to know this is the last time I will be over run. This is my last run! I will use up all my love, all my hate, all my ideals and all the emptiness in these last few meters, and then fall down in response, and fall into the valley of death in a whirlpool, but why do I always feel like I am floating? (Zhu Wen: Enjoy Carnival, Younger Brother\\u0027s Performance, p. 218.)
4. The Dusk of Human Nature —The limitations of the creation of the new generation
The bar serves as a cultural code. “In a bar he found the familiar warm and meaningless smell” (Wei Hui, The Virgin in the Water). “In DD\\u0027S, people\\u0027s eyes are empty and expressionless. I see myself on their faces. People who work tightly and unarmed come here, what are they doing here? Let\\u0027s search together, and we find out the answer in sweat and music” (Mian Mian, The Beautiful Lamb). Zhu Wen\\u0027s new novel What is Rubbish and What is Love starts from the bar, “Xiao Ding sits at the narrow wooden table with a handful of cigarette butts on it... The light in the small bar is dim, and several waiters with blue faces gather around at the bar not far behind him”. The author also ends with the narration at the bar. Having sent away Yu Yang, Xiao Ding felt that there was nowhere to go but to the bar. “Xiao Ding was sitting at the narrow wooden table with a handful of cigarette butts on it... The light in the small bar is dim, and several waiters with blue faces gather around at the bar not far behind him.” Life is a kind of reciprocating circle, a circle-like cycle, and when did this circle become a bar? This seems to be a symbol. Bar, this code came into the Chinese novels in the 1990s. Mental symptoms of the 90s: hippies, drug culture, club system, alternative methods, new gypsies, sensibility-based... are performed in this cultural code. Novelists at the end of the century have constructed such a cultural space: a dim, decadent, sensory, shaken, and unsustainable space, where all the beautiful things outside have lost its luster: everything under the dim artificial light in the bar and the sun (sunlight, ideals, responsibility, reason, belief...) seems vulnerable—it is a place of artificial modification, concocted seduction, exaggerated temptation, deliberate illusion; it is a place that avoids sunshine, a place in which faith has found its enemy, and a place takes the hostile form of classical ideals.
The dusk of human nature. Wei Hui\\u0027s The Virgin in the Water is about a painter waiting for his model in a bar. This novel happens to coincide with Zhu Wen\\u0027s What is Rubbish and What is Love. They both start in the bar and end in the bar. The novel tells us that in the background of the bar, it is impossible to look for a kind of innocence and “virgin” beauty of art. Hard and reliable characters have disappeared. Most of the characters here are pathological, they were trapped in lust, weak in temperament and unable to selfdetermine. They have no power in reality, and they live in a blind self-compassion, infinitely self-consuming and realize their self-centeredness in a narcissistic way. They just sit alone in the bar, meditating or venting, weaving subjective fantasy from their stomachs like spiders spinning silk, showing off a kind of excessive sensitivity, and asking people in the world to accept this kind of physical self-pity unconditionally. If others fail to do it, they will be disheartened and their entire humanity will go to smash. This is not the character that our time needs. How can we expect something solid in them?
“Body” issues. In What is Rubbish and What is Love, Zhu Wen wrote: “All physical problems are problems in life.” In the novels of Chen Ran, Lin Bai, and Zhu Wen, there is an impulse to enlarge body infinitely and take body as a means to resist ideology. This impulse does not discover the body in the true sense and return to the body. It does not find the meaning of the body in the ontology of existence, instead, it kills the body. With the deepening of my reading of the history of western philosophy, I am increasingly convinced that existence is equal to body, and “body” contains all the meanings and mysteries of existence. But I also oppose the practice of equating the body with feelings and lust. In a truly free and open society, neither does morality use sex as a means of repression, nor does freedom use sex as a tool of resistance. Sex means “nature”. People have a relaxed attitude towards sex. However, in Han Dong\\u0027s The Obstacle, Zhu Wen\\u0027s I Love Dollar, Lin Bai\\u0027s Juice and other novels are nervous about sex. What I am trying to say is that, when they oppose other people\\u0027s sexual tension, they are also nervous about their own sex. They exaggerated the anti-ideological ability of sex, and at the same time reduced the meaning of body writing. The opposite is another way. Wei Wei wrote in Sexual Consciousness of an Age: “They... are still sexually fierce and desperate. Instead, we are women, dead, and honest.” Here the author is indifferent and unmoved. There is no sense of direction and behavior to face sex. In As Crazy as Wei Hui (Wei Hui), the author said when he wrote about sexual pleasure: “At that moment, except for happiness, it is happiness. Isn\\u0027t the so-called happiness also the forgetting of pain and troubles?” “While I was still young Passion, I\\u0027m would say yes!” This kind of direct identification with pleasure is the opposite of the way that “sex” is used as a means of resisting depression and despair; however, in reality, the result is the out of control of pleasure. The question now is to what extent our reading is confused by this out-of-control pleasure. We regard things that are prone to confusion, dysfunction, chorea, out of control, and trembling as aesthetics.
5. Upgrading amidst Limitations —Back to common sense of writing
Beauty lies in noble characters. The characters in the novels of the new generation are mostly weak, without achievements as well as courage and uprightness. The “eternal power” of human nature such as justice, loyalty, devotion, and obligation does not serve as an essence in them. Weakness has become a means to abolish humanity, pleasure has become an excuse to resist beliefs, and people wander in relative realms, lacking due enthusiasm for absolute things. But this is not the essential character picture of people in this era. The only possible explanation here is that the new generation has not yet shaped the character with the general meaning of our era. In our novels, there should be more than just the ignorant and shallow-minded people shown in the novels of He Dun and Qiu Huadong, or the superfluous people described in the novels of Lu Yang and Zhu Wen, or the narcissism shown in the novels of Chen Ran and Lin Bai, or, the neurotic personality in the novels of Wei Hui and Mian Mian...We also need the kind of personality that fully embodies balance and calmness in the personality. The character may have a huge personality fragmentation and contradiction, and may have a strong neurotic tendency; however, he is consciously aware of his historical mission and has assumed the fate of a historical intermediate.
Beauty lies in transcending. The plots of new fictions are all bleak and unrefined, without the shadow of the inevitable historical power and the great ups and downs, so the writing of the new generation lacks a sense of history and no sublime power. The new generation\\u0027s sensibility is much greater than their rationality, and perceptual reality is much greater than logical reality. Without imagination when dealing with objects, they can only use their sensibility to treat sensibility. Here you can see the exaggeration of sensibility, the exaggeration of description, the baroque details, but there is no sign of departure from reality or ascension of reality. The causal connection of the world is emptied, leaving an unreasonable extension of conflict with each other. Things are in unreasonable collisions, happening without warning and ending without experiencing a climax, so that everything seems to fall from the sky and pass by in a flash. There is no eternity and no necessity. Time is no longer the main thread, what is left is only the perfunctory of space. The plots of the novels of the new generation are mostly fragmented, without the grandeur of the historical process, and no one fights against the historical destiny, so there is no real tragedy. The new generation of creation has not reached the high level of aesthetics in the overall aesthetic style: to comprehend not only the impulses and passions of people, but also the independence of things, and to comprehend the integration of material objects and the subject rather than separation. The characters blindly pull themselves out of the world, but fail to put themselves back. Therefore, the characters in the new generation are isolated and lack the power to dominate themselves, because isolation does nothing to the world. The strong sense of loneliness in the writing of the new generation is therefore not supported by the grand background of history. However, “the concept of beauty has such freedom and infinity, and the realm of beauty can make the relativity of finite things enter the absolute realm.” (Schiller) Beauty needs to be transcended.
Beauty is innovating. The new fictions have generated some important works, such as Confucius, Life Without Language, Younger Brother\\u0027s Performance, The Obstacle, Going to the Yellow Village, etc., but technically, the new generation of writing is generally less difficult than the avant-garde, even in terms of the basic skills of description, the overall level is not as high as the new realism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. There are no such people as Ma Yuan and Su Tong in the new generation. Therefore, so far, the contribution of the new generation to novel is still limited. Of course, in the new generation, there are also people who are ambitious about novel technology. Lu Yang is one of them. Lu\\u0027s The Second Half of the Night in 1993 may be one of the best contemporary Chinese novels. Milan Kundera said in The Wisdom of Novels that novels should use all rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative methods on the basis of narration, which can reveal the existence of human beings and make novels become the highest integration of spirit”. The formation of a literary era not only means that literary scholars have provided new ideas for people in this era to know themselves, and reaped good results in the deepening of the human spirit, but also means that literature has gained a new life in expression. This is like the transition from classicism to romanticism, the transition from romanticism to realism, and the transition from realism to modernism. What imprint of the development of literary ontology will the most energetic literary writers of our time leave with us? This is an era that requires a little bit of individual heroism. The unified ideological system is dissolving, the old morality, philosophy, and style credibility are collapsing, and people are being smitten by the apparent humanity distortions (money worship, sensualism), weakness, corruption, and people\\u0027s superficial hopelessness in their mental conditions are suppressed, skepticism and nihilism prevail...Confronted with all of these, the new generation of writing should be aware that the true aesthetic spirit can construct a reasonable and comprehensive picture of the world with a certain amount of details. Literature should definitely engage in a synthesis, and never just be a confluence of detail-- it must look for basic trends, reproduce the understandable causal connections of the world, and engage in a broad bird\\u0027seye view to reflect the great will of the times.