Chinese writers on writing: Zhang Xianliang A f t e r T w e n t y Y e a r s o f S i l e n c e W e L i c k O u r W o u n d s Our Battle for a Place in World Literature ------------------------------------------ Zhang Xianliang May 20, 1985, in the United States AFter a dozen years and more of strict isolation, the doors of China were recently thrown wide open. The present policy of opening up to the outside and putting life into the domestic economy has brought China into the world economic system. It has also strengthened China's intellectual and cultural contacts with the rest of the world. These of course include literature and art. China's progress in the last few years has changed the coordinates by which we Chinese measure our position and changed our scale of values. We no longer measure our achievements only by those of other Chinese, or of other parts of China. We want to be measured by universal standards. It was in this spirit that our highly respected Ba Jin expressed a noble aspiration on behalf of all Chinese writers at the recent Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers' Association: "Chinese literature must take its place in the front rank of world literture." Since the excitement and inspiration of the congress, writers have had time to think deeply on this proposition and come up with different views on propositions like Ba Jin's. Some writers hold that in the last few years, the Literature of the New Era has already produced much outstanding work that can be placed without a blush in the front rank of world literature. The only reason why this work has not received its due recognition abroad is because of ingrained prejudices on the part of foreign critics and the linguistic barrier. Other writers believe that the uniqueness of China's social system, of the beliefs and ideals held by Chinese writers, and of the country's cultural traditions and aesthetic psychology, puts China's literature in a class of its own. Hence China cannot compete with other countries in literature on the basis of some universal standard in the way that is possible in science, technology, and athletics. According to this view, Chinese writers can only make their contribution to international exchanges by faithfully portraying the life and the values of the Chinese people and China's historical progress and evolution. The great majority of writers, especially the younger and middle-aged writers now most active on the Chinese literary scene, agree to some extent with the first of the aforementioned opinions. We should not be spineless or belittle ourselves. We can take pride in the fact that in the last few years we have produced some writing that will stand comparison with the best of the contemporary world; we only regret that our foreign friends do not yet know about it. At the same time, we also believe that in literature, as in science, there are no national frontiers. "World literature" is a concept raised by Goethe long ago, and China should be a part of it. Italian, English, French, Scandinavian, American, and Russian/Soviet literature all have long been and are today recognized as standing in the front rank of world literature. They all have been and still are pathfinders and models. We have our own Chinese version of socialism, and we Chinese writers have our own philosophical beliefs and social ideals, while the Chinese people have their own cultural traditions and aesthetic psychology. But if we accept that the uniqueness of a literary work depends not on the profundity of its concepts but on its construction, and that the work consists not of what it describes but of the work itself, then it can be subject to shared and universal criteria. These criteria are the artistry and the emotional impact of the work itself. On the other hand, we also recognize that, by these universal criteria, there really are some things wrong with contemporary Chinese literature taken as a whole and all by itself (averaging out the outstanding works with the run-of-the-mill ones, which can of course only be done intuitively). Where then do we fall short? Every single contemporary Chinese writer has lived a rich and unique life. During nearly twenty years of silence we all buried ourselves deep in thought, and each of us acquired our own original understanding of society and life. It was a case of a disaster turning out to have some good side effects. After all that high-pressure and high-temperature treatment, every Chinese writer's head has become an inexhaustible mine of raw material for writing. But during that same period of nearly twenty years of isolation, Chinese writers almost completely lost their opportunity for artistic development. Under the high-pressure and high-temperature treatment we were cut off from the literature and art not only of the rest of the world but of China's past. The few connections that remained we were forced to repudiate. In their universities, research institutes, and studies, or in their travels around the world, today's active and productive writers in the West have been educated in literary tradition, experienced what is special about many different kinds of culture and art, and had their eyes opened. They have sharpened their aesthetic sensibilities in preparation for new artistic explorations and breakthroughs. But today's active and productive Chinese writers have had to endure cold and hunger, biting winds, and drenching storms in the course of exile. We were in remote villages, completely cut off from culture and art, tilling the land, pasturing horses, and feeding pigs with the most primitive methods. Or we were behind bars, licking our wounds like dogs. All that the fortunate ones could do was write literature to order. Far from improving their artistry, it so restricted them that they lost all their individuality as writers. The writers active in China today are talented and intelligent. Despite the big gap in our artistic experience, we only needed this change in the situation, bringing us creative freedom, to produce immediately works of a certain quality and make Chinese literature and art flourish as they never have before. But that big gap in their artistic experience has caused the great majority of Chinese writers to lose out on their artistic formation. Art is art, after all, and literature is primarily the art of language. The great majority of contemporary Chinese literary works neglect a most important law of artistry in the use of language: economy. Thus, our language lacks ambiguity, subtle nuances, and multiple meanings. It is short on understatement and humor. Because we try to write everything that is on our mind, we often fail to set readers off on associated lines of thought of their own. This makes it hard for readers to bring their own creativity into play when they enjoy a piece of writing. Because of this lack of linguistic artistry, we writers often express our ideas and the main themes of our works very directly and explicitly. We make too little use of detailed metaphorical and symbolic descriptions, or of images -- real or unreal, precise or undefined -- to create profound imaginary worlds in which there are "images beyond the images and thoughts behind the thoughts," worlds that readers must fill out and bring to life with their own imagination, experience, and aesthetic sensitivity. This gives them an ineffable artistic pleasure they can feel. Most contemporary Chinese writers have a very well-developed aesthetic sense. They have a subtle capacity for sympathy and are imbued with the spirit of humanism. That is why they can write their unique stories and sketches of local customs, creating all kinds of typical characters that attract and move many millions of Chinese readers. But one often regrets that the stories and skietches based on these characters are not still better written and even more moving. A good piece of fiction is a three-dimensional world. The characters and the plot should be multicolored, polyphonic, many-layered, multifaceted. If writers are to create such works, it is not enough for them to have experienced life, felt stormy emotions and strong feelings. Novelists also need to know something of poetry, music, painting, aesthetics, history, and philosophy. They need the widest possible general knowledge. It is in precisely these areas that China's middle-aged and young writers, who have wasted ten to twenty years of their life, are now having to catch up on their education. Few of us can yet claim to have reached maturity. That is why we commonly find in most contemporary Chinese fiction an inability to coordinate multiple artistic factors in the work's structure. Description and narrative tend to be thin and hackneyed, and three-dimensional space is presented to readers as a flat surface. Here I have been dealing mainly with the shortcomings of our contemporary literature, and fiction in particular. What we call our "Literature of the New Era" is only seven years old, and China's contemporary writers are still growing up. This is why we do not mind talking about our shortcomings. The year 1985 has been important in the history of Chinese literature. For one thing, at the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers' Association, the Communist party reaffirmed that its guarantee of freedom for writers was a firm and unshakable one. Another factor is that we writers active today are summing up what we have learned from our last seven years of writing. There is hardly a single writer who is satisfied with what he or she has achieved so far. We all want to outdo ourselves artistically and write things that are original. It starts with us. Refinement, imagination, and quiet appeal to the emotions have always been special national emphases in China's aesthetic tradition. So, too, has the demand that writers reflect the multicolored, polyphonic, many-layered, and multifaceted nature of the external world in their spiritual world, which makes their writing natural. China's contemporary writers, who have long used the methods of realism and romanticism, can today derive more artistic techniques from Western modernism. We are simultaneously turning back to tradition and stretching our arms out to the world. By extending ourselves in these two directions, we increase our mental range. Given solid artistic and philosophical training within this vast area, Chinese literature, the literature of one-quarter of the human race, is bound to take its place in the front ranks of world literature. -- "Zhongguo dangdai zuojia zai yishu shang de zhuiqiu" (The artistic quest of China's authors today), a May 20, 1985, speech delivered in Chinese in the United States, originally published in English in Chinese LIterature (Spring 1986): 152-56. Chinese manuscript from the conference volume of the International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Literature, Jinshan, Shanghai, November 1986. -- Translated by W. J. F. Jenner -- W. J. F. Jenner is a noted translator of Chinese fiction and a professor of Chinese at the Australian National University. -- Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals, edited by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, published by M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992. -- This book is available at Central Library, PL2277 Mod