The lack of sense of history and reality and the homogeneity of experience have become a common question faced by a new generation of writers

　　Instead of sticking to the "ten" or "five" years to divide a generation, I prefer to call the generations born before and after the reform and opening up as the children of the era of reform and opening up. If we take into account the significance of school education to a person ’s spiritual adult, we can put all those born after 1970 in this group, because almost from the first year of reform and opening up, children born in 1970 began to enter the school to attend primary school .

　　From Wang Zengqi, Lin Jinlan, Gao Xiaosheng, Lu Wenfu, etc., born in the 1920s, to Gefei, Chi Zijian, Bi Feiyu, Mai Family, Dongxi, Ai Wei, etc. born in the mid to late 1960s, even if they did not overflow their biological age, they wrote reform and opening up In the era, "before reform and opening up" was brought in, whether it was "Li Shun's big house", "foodie", or "life and death fatigue", "Qin Qiang", "empty mountain", "flowers", "alive", "brother", "plain", "spring" "Just Jiangnan", "Cross Country Race", etc. For them, "before reform and opening up" and the era of reform and opening up are on the same stretch of historical logic. The next generation of young writers is different. If you want to build the historical logic of the past and the present like the predecessors, it is retrospective. Yizhou's "Suiyuan", Xu Zechen's "Northbound", Ge Liang's "Suzaku" "Northern Kite", Di An's "Dragon City Trilogy", Sun Pin's "Songlin Night Banquet", Zhang Yueran's "Cocoon", Mo Yin's "A Horse" ... These novels are all related to the family lineage or China. Identify "Who Am I?" In contemporary history

　　In 2019, "Selected Chinese Literature" sent a questionnaire to 117 young writers born in 1985 and later who were active in literary journals, online communities, and genre literature, and asked 10 sets of questions. Question 8: "Is it true that the lack of sense of history and reality and the homogeneity of experience are common problems faced by young contemporary writers? Do you think you have a unique personal experience?" Between 1985 and 1970, there was a gap of 15 year. The "historical sense" imagined by the questioner and the responder seems to take for granted "the way to go", that is, whether young writers can write a "past" beyond their life and experience. Moreover, according to my speculation, the designer of the question may have pre-set the question and question of the young writers who do not write "past".

　　But what needs to be analyzed is that the so-called "history" may be either the "past" or the historical logic and texture of the contemporaries. Therefore, writing the contemporary era may also be writing history.

　　As for the lack of realism, it may involve how we view reality? How to measure light and heavy? Simply saying that young writers do not write "reality" is obviously not in line with "reality". To a certain extent, "lack" refers to the history of literature and aesthetic conventions. I notice that critics often accuse younger writers of indulging in small fortunes and sadness. In our literary tradition, the unit used to measure the weight of a writer's writing reality may be various so-called "big", and in the past and the present, it is also customary to emphasize the "weight" of the present and the national memory. Once the "realism" of young writers cannot satisfy the imagination on these two heavyweights, they may be criticized as "lack" and "homogenization".

Different from the older writers who regarded the contemporary as the past, the young writers write contemporary

　　Compared with predecessors, what is the history and reality that young writers understand? Ban Yu believes: "A person ’s transformation can be catalyzed by the outside world. Those absurd landscapes and turbulent times are indeed worth writing, but they can also be entirely individual. This is also very dramatic. Carver, Yates, The era that Updike was in did n’t seem to fluctuate too much, but they did a deep dive into the relationship between people. ”This history and reality of personalization, introversion and spirituality, Sun Frequency is defined as "common hidden sadness". It can be easily compared with the "laid-off" in recent novels such as Ban Yu and Sun Pin, and the "Dachang novel" of the "realistic shock wave" in the late 1990s, perhaps understanding the literary outlook of the younger generation.

　　From the perspective of aesthetic innovation, personalizing, introverting and spiritualizing history and reality can effectively control the "epoch" to become a label. The "era" of tagging into the text can be cited as an example of Guo Jingming's "Little Times". In other words, Guo Jingming is only a literary symptom of a certain period. The "era" of the metropolis is labelled. Wei Hui, Mian Mian and Annie Baby before Guo Jingming have done this, but Guo Jingming is more naked and omnipotent. "Little Times" replaces the insights of possible emerging cities with savvy interests. The angular "era" has also been carefully polished into "patches of the era".

　　Not all are "patches of the times" like "Little Times". In recent years, some novels by young writers have marked the time clearly, and some of the times correspond to the times very closely. "Fog Walker", Zhou Jianing's "Basic Beauty", Shuang Xuetao's "Moses on the Plains", Ban Yu's "Happy Travel", "Heavenly Life" in the Seven Years of Sunflowers, "I Have Seen the Grass Leaf" and `` Shark '' In the Water Center, Zhang Lingling's "Jealous", etc., this may be a phenomenon worthy of attention. Why don't they generally go to ambiguous time? It is not very accidental that a batch of novels have similar things. We need to think about what each specific time means to the writer's text. Some of these may be technical aspects of the novel, involving the younger generation of writers' handling of the daily life history, fate history, and spiritual history of the small people under the big history, which can be said to be "new history" of Chinese contemporary literature since 1980. The echo of literary heritage such as "New Realism". But perhaps more importantly, it is not just these time-hardened texts, including all their observations and expressions of their time, these young writers seem to be struggling to name their own contemporaries. Furthermore, we should realize that, unlike the older writers who regarded the contemporary as the past, the young writers write contemporary in the contemporary.

How do personal chronicles and "micro-spiritual events" get a sense of destiny that is shared with the crowd

　　If we don't take the existing literary standards to measure their writing, what we need in response to literary criticism and research is whether these young writers provide new aesthetic experience belonging to their time? And as the novelist Yuan Zi who participated in the above questionnaire said: "Of course there are many people writing so-called realist works, and there are a lot of such works on the Internet and in literary journals. But this foolproof realism is actually completely Realistic disjointism. For example, the countryside they wrote was actually a 'literary scene' constructed by a generation, and the older generation of writers and the apprentices they brought out are still working hard on it; for another example, they have already There is a set of standards for farmers to talk about, what workers should think about, and how officials should do things. If you do n’t write it like this, it ’s not enough to be “reality” and “not grounded.” That is, the principle of “realism” they uphold It is precisely the root cause of the lack of reality. "When young writers imitate their contemporaries as their appendages to the" past "before the reform and opening up, and if those" pasts "were not based on in-depth field investigations and documentation efforts The literary transformation of is just such a clumsy reproduction of what Yuan Zi said, but the literary history lineage, aesthetic conventions and patterns are more likely Students "want" and "homogenization."

　　Why can't young writers write the contemporaries that are as long as their lives in the era of reform and opening up as they understand the "big era"? For the time being, let us look back at writing the contemporary "in the contemporary" instead of using the contemporary as an appendage of past history, which has always been an important tradition of modern Chinese literature. The abundance of superstitious sense of history can only exist in the past of physical time. This should have happened in the past 20 to 30 years, but even for epic novels, modern Chinese literature preferentially digests almost contemporary “contemporaries”.

　　I once wrote a commentary on Zhu Jing ’s short story collection Ruoyan Dian, saying that she went from the early "Lian Sheng" and "The Disappearing Light Year" to "The Frog in the Andes" to the most recent "Water Olympics" Philia, "The dog is going to Anhui", etc., is a born in the 1980s from university life to wife and mother, from innocent and pure ideals to small and trivial reality, from whole to fragmented small Chronicles consistently develop tiny daily lives into reflective “micro-spiritual events” associated with individuals and times. Therefore, the so-called "historical sense" should not be understood as an absolute logic above the relationship between the linear past and present. Even if they do not imagine the past they have not experienced, the historical logic of their contemporaries constructed by young writers can of course obtain a rich "history". For example, Wei Wei went from "The Old Lady of Zheng" to "The Chronicle of the Village along the River", Xu Zechen went from the "North Drift" and "Flower Street" series to "Jerusalem" and "Go North", and Lu Min went from the "East Dam" series to "Nine Kinds of Sorrow "Hormon Night Talk", Liang Hong from "China in Liangzhuang" and "Leaves of Liangzhuang" to "Liang Guangzheng's Light" and "Four Elephants", Fu Xiuying from "Moshang" to "Other Country" and Shuang Xuetao From "Winged Ghost" to "Moses on the Plains" and "Hunter", Zhou Jianing from "Desolate City" and "In the Jungle" to "Basic Beauty", Zhang Yiwei from "Family Experiment" to "Feast of the Fine People" ... if we researchers Willing to examine carefully, each of them is a chronicle of the tragic intersection of people and times.

　　How do young writers in the era of reform and opening up digest and write about their contemporaries-inventing and naming "the era of reform and opening up" based on the discovery of literature and the historical logic of contemporaneous generations? How do personal chronicles and "micro-spiritual events" gain a sense of destiny that is shared with the crowd? How can it not be an isolated existence, but a spirit of turbulence and rush out of the times? Regrettably, the current literature seems to be not lacking in sense of reality and history, and it may have precisely lost the interest and ability to imagine and construct the "past". At the same time, "now" or "simultaneous generations" also disperse into a piece of "history" of the history and reality of a glimmer of glory. Based on this, we have reason to criticize young writers for letting the self-proclaimed developed "sense" perfunctory and boring "story meeting", they really lack the ability of rational reflection, philosophical speculation, the creation of the style of the times and the invention of "the national language of literature". So wait. The young writers after another will no longer be young. "Are they all old?" How many classics of consensus remain? It is also based on this, that the defense I have given to the young writers above may just become a lack of defense beyond defense.

　　(The author of He Ping is a professor at the School of Letters of Nanjing Normal University)