Cultural root-seeking consciousness includes three aspects:
First, re-understand and unscramble the national cultural material in the sense of literary aesthetics, and explore its positive cultural core.
Second, appreciate the heritage of ancient culture in the way that modern people feel the world, and look for the source of life energy.
Third, continue to criticize the ugly cultural factors in contemporary social life, such as the deep excavation of the deep structure of national cultural psychology.
But these aspects are not absolutely separated, and many works comprehensively express the meaning of "seeking roots".
On the whole, the literary proposition of the "root-seeking school" is that it hopes to base itself on China's own national soil, excavate and analyze the national bad habits, carry forward the excellent elements in the cultural tradition, grasp our nation's way of thinking, ideals and value standards from the cultural background, and strive to create literature with a truly national style and style.
First of all, root-seeking literature is a literary trend of thought that seeks for self, which is characterized by seeking for the self of national culture and literature and the writer's personality self. Root-seeking literature completely abandons the creative technique of analyzing life and history on the purely political level, but extends the brush strokes of exploration into the psychological structure of national history and culture, transcending the level of political criticism and reaching the level of historical and cultural reflection at once. From a macro point of view, it shows an inevitable deepening in the process of literature in the realistic period, a profound criticism of traditional culture and a yearning for the rational sky of mankind. More importantly, although root-seeking literature also writes folk customs, it does not stop at the struggle between old and new folk customs; Although he also wrote about the villagers in the mountains, he did not generally praise their simplicity and innocence; Although it also describes the people's bad habits, it does not focus on criticizing feudal ethics. Root-seeking writers' transcendence over their predecessors is reflected in their pursuit of the roots of China's traditional culture, mainly their recognition of Confucian culture and Taoist culture. For example, Jia Pingwa's Shangzhou Series celebrated the glory of Qin and Han Dynasties, Wang Anyi's Zhuang explained the charm of avant-garde culture in Chess King by Ren and Acheng, Li Hangyu's Gechuanjiang Series and Han Shaogong's Seeking Roots. Nature is one of the three major problems (nature, life and tradition) in romantic literature. "Return to nature" has become the slogan and symbol of romantic literature. Many root-seeking literary writers keep returning, looking for individuality, injecting spirituality into nature, and "seeing God in nature, seeing nature in God", thus completing the romantic inquiry. Such as Lu Yao, Jia Pingwa, Chen, Mo Yan and other agricultural urban writers have returned to their hometowns. For example, non-mainstream writers return to tradition, such as Wang Zengqi, Acheng and He Liwei. Wang returned to the Confucian tradition and cultivated his heart and nature; He and A returned to Taoist culture, pursuing inaction and being indifferent to life.
In a word, "root-seeking literature" undoubtedly played a certain role in promoting the inheritance of traditional culture in China. At the same time, many root-seeking writers absorbed modernism and even postmodernism in their creation, which made great contributions to the development of China literature itself. However, root-seeking literature also has a tendency of "retro", which is obviously complicated and obscure in ideological tendency and value evaluation. Most writers tend to grasp some folk customs and deliberately exaggerate them, while ignoring the true anatomy of "nationality". Dive into the distant, primitive and wild, lacking the guiding significance for contemporary life. Ignoring the revelation of life problems and contradictions in real society leads to the alienation of works from contemporary reality, which leads to the decline of "root-seeking literature" a few years later. Although the root-seeking literature is only a flash in the pan in the history of China literature, it gradually declined from 65438 to 0987. But after all, it is like a meteor, which once cut through the vast night sky of literature in the middle and tenth centuries and completed the romantic exploration of the vast universe of literature.
Although under the banner of "cultural root-seeking", these root-seeking writers can't agree on what "culture" is. Most writers choose a region that they are most familiar with as the basic point of cutting into the cultural level. From this perspective, we can divide "root-seeking literature" into two major areas: "urban culture root-seeking" and "rural culture root-seeking".
Below, we will introduce these two kinds of "root-seeking literature" representing different regions.
Root-seeking of urban culture
There are not a few writers exploring urban culture. For example, Liu described the feelings of ordinary and colorful people in contemporary Beijing in Bell and Drum Tower. In Three-Inch Golden Lotus, Feng Jicai reproduces the discrimination and banter of men against women in China. Among these writers, He Lu is outstanding and can be called "two outstanding writers in the North and South".
Deng Youmei was famous for his short story On the Cliff in 1956. After entering the new era, he first launched several military works, and then focused on life in Beijing, and wrote a series of "Jingweier" novels. Among them, Nawu and Yanhu, the representative works, won the second and third novella awards respectively, and the rest were Looking for a Painter, Two Cats and Four Seas. These street novels, with strong folk flavor, mostly take the old times as the story background, and outline all kinds of characters from princes and grandchildren, children of the Eight Banners to the bottom of society, which have unique aesthetic charm.
"Nawu" is set in the commercial society of old China and Peking in 1930s and 1940s, and depicts the embarrassing situation of Nawu, a son of the former Qing Dynasty, who wants to survive in society. "Smoke Bottle" shows the rebirth of the children of the Eight Banners from another angle, and describes how Wu Shibao, a disgraced aristocrat, learned the stunt of painting in a snuff bottle and embarked on the road of self-reliance. Deng Youmei's works use authentic Beijing dialect and describe various traditional customs in detail. Even from the perspective of folklore, his works are rare.
Lu Sheng is in Jiangnan and grew up in Jiangnan. Most of his novels are based on trivial matters in Suzhou alleys, such as eating and drinking, weddings and funerals. His language is humorous and gentle, which embodies the long-standing charm of Wu and Yue culture from the overall atmosphere. His representative novella "The Gourmet" created the image of Zhu Zizhu, a housing capitalist who was addicted to food, and described his strange experience of devoting himself to his appetite for more than forty years before and after liberation and becoming a well-known gourmet in society after the Cultural Revolution. As a revolutionary and builder of New China, the narrator Gao Xiaoting's experience is a microcosm of China's political and economic life, especially his Hotel Revolution, which reflects the serious mistakes in economic work in the left-leaning era. But the most attractive part of the work is obviously not the comment on the superstructure, but the unique artistic charm of the food world and the strong folk color behind it.
In Helu's works, the description of local customs has become a major feature. For example, in "Wu Na", because those five students want to learn singing and drama, the following narrative is introduced:
"This box office is divided into rich and poor, and the fans are different. First-class ticket lovers should be free, rich and entitled. Only when you have leisure can you work hard, starting with carpet exercise; Only when you have money can you hire a gentleman, worship a famous teacher and set your clothes; Only when you have the right can you organize people to support you, put stills in newspapers and tabloids and write articles. Second-class people can only be famous if they have money and leisure. They can rent tables and invite performances, and singers can spend money to worship famous teachers. Then please Jiang Miaoxiang, Yan Juming and other famous singers to sing together. " Third-class people have no money and no power, but they also need to have a good voice, work hard, practice some real skills, and let insiders and outsiders nod, so as to make ends meet. "
Of course, the general reader can't understand the introduction of this industry rule, which will be very interesting to read. For another example, The Gourmet is particular about Zhu Xuan's teahouse: "There are teahouses everywhere in Suzhou. Why did Zhu go to Shiban Road in Nagato alone? Well-bred The big teahouse is separated from ordinary tea drinkers by several rooms, mahogany tables and rattan chairs, forming a small world of its own. The water there fell from the sky, and the tea was bought directly from Dongting Dongshan; Boil water in a crock, use pine branches as fuel, and make tea in a teapot made in Yixing. "
Just drinking tea is like a lot of attention, such as many rules-when a thing begins to form a certain order, its order itself often has meaning, and the so-called "culture" appears here. Many years later, Zhu Naben's "poor concern", which was hated by the "I" in the novel, was affirmed by the society and became a valuable "historical culture" representing Suzhou City-this may be what the novel wants to express: "culture" has been formed, so it cannot be denied, and it has become an "aesthetic object" with tenacious vitality.
He Lu's novels are good at expressing their familiar local customs with concise spoken language. As Deng Youmei said, he "longs for a kind of novel, such as The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, which is a work of art.. It has aesthetic function and cognitive function, and also provides some reference materials for folklore scholars. " Although the works of these two writers may not play a powerful role in rebuilding China's national culture, they do show a little-known cultural tradition when telling the stories of characters, which makes readers feel some aesthetic pleasure and conveys a mellow folk charm.
The root of rural culture
Compared with the former "root-seeking literature", there are more works that tend to show the rustic and even humble state of the countryside, and the fields of performance are wider. For example, Wang Zengqi's Notes on Noisy Events, Zhang Chengzhi's Dark Horse, Lu Yao's description of the intersection between urban and rural areas, Mo Yan's description of the secret history of ancestors' life in Gaomi Northeast Township, etc., such as Jia Pingwa's Shangzhou series novels expressing Qin and Han culture, Li Hangyu's Gechuanjiang series novels expressing Wu and Yue culture, and Zheng Wanlong's "foreign land" expressing the life of ethnic minorities in Daxinganling.
Among them, Dark Horse is an excellent work. With profound and beautiful language and strong emotional color, this novella praises the broad mind and tenacious vitality of grassland women and expresses their deep love for "mother" and "land". In addition, Lu Yao's Ordinary World is welcomed by readers because it shows the vast urban and rural and social reality and vividly depicts the tenacious life course of young people.
Among many works, Han Shaogong's novella Dad Dad is regarded by many as a typical representative of "root-seeking literature". This novel tells the story of a remote and unknown cottage "Jitouzhai" and the ignorant and mysterious living conditions of its residents who claim to be descendants of Xingtian. The novel takes a mentally disordered child "Bing Zi" as the central figure, and describes the strange customs and origin of Toutou Village, the isolation of people in Toutou Village from the normal world, their "grudges" with Jiwei Village, and the process of abandoning the old man and children and moving their families after defeat.
A leading figure in root-seeking literature
There are many strange customs in Jitouzhai in the works. For example, if you get lost, you have to pee and scold your mother to get rid of the so-called "fork ghost". Their residents will suffer from a strange disease called "picking worms", and the symptom is "fish eats fish in the stomach and chicken eats chicken in the stomach". The cure is actually to learn to crow three times after drinking the blood of white cattle; The language on the mountain is also different from other places, such as "talking", "father" is "uncle" and "sister" is "brother". But there is no doubt that Jitouzhai is a self-sufficient "small society". It has its own myths and legends, its own written history, its own customs and rules, and even formed its own set of language patterns-that is, it has formed its own set of "culture". Jitouzhai is undoubtedly a strange place, but it seems to really exist in a corner.
The central character of the novel, Bing Zi, also has many strange things. When he was a teenager, he could only say two words: "Dad" and "Mom". Children his age have all grown into mature men, but he is still "only the height of the basket, still wearing a crotch-opening red trousers." Mother always said that he was only thirteen years old, but his face was obviously old and there were slight wrinkles on his forehead. He is "blind and dull, with a big deformed head, like an upside-down green gourd, pretending to be his head, which contains some strange substances." ..... See people regardless of gender, old and young, kindly shout' Dad'. If you stare at him, he will understand, turn your eyes to a position above your head, roll your eyes slowly and mumble' X?' Turn around and run. He has a hard time turning his eyelids. It seems that he can only roll his eyes if he is fully prepared for his chest, abdomen and neck. Turning around is also very laborious. On the soft neck, the head is swaying like a pepper mill, and it must be along a big arc to successfully turn the head steady ... "Legend has it that C cub was born because his mother killed a spider essence. He was bullied by children at random in Jitouzhai, and it seems that he has no pleasure in being a man. But at the end of the novel, Jitouzhai's old, weak, sick and disabled all committed suicide by taking poison, but he miraculously survived after drinking twice the amount of C-cub.
The epigenetic Compal obviously has the shadow of "Ah Q" in his works, and even when he was described, the language of his works began to exude the irony of Lu Xun. However, the more symbolic figure in the work should be the mentally disordered child C. Bing Zi can only speak two words. In his sensory world, the outside world is summarized as simple and abstract poles: good and bad, joy and hate. The existence of Bingzai seems to be worthless. It's better to be alive than dead. However, it is he who will live forever, always wearing open-backed pants, a runny nose, a long pustule, a huge and empty head, and wrinkles on his forehead-a little old man who will always stagnate at the age of thirteen. This image symbolizes a situation that human beings often encounter, a state of being unable to grasp the world, unable to express themselves, weak and helpless. His immortality symbolizes the eternal weakness and smallness of mankind.
In a closed state, it produces its own culture, and this "culture" finally hinders the development of "civilization". This is the case in Jitouzhai, and it seems to be the case in "China" for many years, but isn't it the case in the whole human society on earth? In the mid-1980s, there appeared many iconic works such as Daddy and Daddy, such as Han Shaogong's Return, Girls and Girls, and Wang Zengqi's Notes on Making a scene in Heaven. Most of the areas described in these works are far away from modern civilization and in a closed and stagnant state, thus better preserving the original cultural form and reflecting the ancient history and lifestyle of our nation and even mankind, thus having. Among the root-seeking writers, Acheng, a young writer, should be said to be the one with the most unique personality and superb artistic skill. His representative works, Three Kings, Chess King, Tree King and king of the children, have attracted great enthusiastic attention from sinologists all over the world. The expression of Taoist realm and Confucian style in his works is still controversial and discussed today.
In these "cultural roots" literary works mentioned above, the expression of "people" has changed greatly compared with the previous period. The characters in these works are no longer transcendental gods or heroes, or even the focus of the works that the author tries to express, but the concrete manifestations of many life forms. Behind them, there is a huge invisible hand that controls and manipulates all life, including the typical. Revealing the individual is actually revealing the whole, and the joys and sorrows of the individual belong to the whole. In the novels of representatives of root-seeking writers such as Acheng and Han Shaogong, the mutual restriction, conflict and adaptation between life and culture are fully manifested. These lives are no longer a simple embodiment of human nature, but have been engraved with a deep cultural imprint. Conversely, the characters written by root-seeking writers are life symbols attached to culture.