A variation of contemporary Jiangsu literary city writing

In the second decade of the 21st century, urban literature has gradually become the focus and focus of contemporary Chinese literary creation, if the dual structure of "local-city" can be used as a basic model to interpret Chinese literature over the past century, then the obvious literary bias is accelerating. As shown in the seventh national census in 2021, the number of Chinese living in cities and towns, accounting for more than 63% of the total, whether as living space or desire object, "city" has been increasingly internalized into "literature", and "urbanity" has begun to become the "default attribute" of literature. Whether as an entry point for understanding or as a base point for interpretation, the "city" has become difficult to shake and difficult to replace.

As a province with a permanent population urbanization level of nearly 10 percentage points higher than the national average, urban experience has greatly nurtured, nourished and reshaped the face of Jiangsu literature, and the unprecedented "change" of the city has taken the lead in Jiangsu. The Jiangsu writers who accompanied this great change naturally showed this change with their creations, and depicted the texture of the "change" of the city with a high degree of sensitivity and precision at a fairly rich level.

The universal establishment of a sense of boundaries is the first major feature of urban literature. The so-called "change" of the city, first of all, refers to the fact that the city is a huge "relationship destruction machine", and the entry of individuals into the city often means the complete disintegration of the original social relations and the forced reconstruction of new urban social relations. A hundred years ago, Lu Xun's naming of "vernacular literature" and his induction of its "overseas Chinese fables" are profound understandings of this phenomenon. In the 21st century, the "local-city" binary relationship begins to lose its importance. Contemporary urban populations often lack a blood relationship with the countryside, they are the "second generation of the city" or the "third generation of the city", and the "countryside" has long become a vague background. As a result, not only have the original social relations from the countryside been degraded and reshaped, but the original relations within the city have also undergone drastic changes. Whether as a memory or an experience, the importance of individual life to literature is constantly increasing, while the sense of existence of clans, families and even families is relatively low. Living in the city often means "one man's army" and "one man's war". If in the 1920s, urban life was still closely related to the countryside, and there was an umbilical cord relationship between the two, and the "umbilical cord" was often the expansion of the family and the family, then the current urban life means "only homecoming, nowhere to come", and the importance of the family is constantly dissolved. Jiangsu writers have a high degree of touch and perception of this, and the family stories that appeal to the pen are often in-depth.

In his novel "Maybe a Story Ever Happened," Lu Min describes a family in which the daughter shares a room with a business partner, the divorced father lives in a villa under the Purple Mountain, the mother lives in a downtown neighborhood, and the once-close grandmother lies in the rehabilitation department of the city hospital. When her daughter, Mimi, chooses to commit suicide, none of these blood relatives can say a single reason that is close to the truth. Blood ties that have been ploughed over by city life once or several times can no longer bear intimacy, and these survivors are more anxious to grasp any reason that is not very reliable to fill their own guilt and emptiness that they have nothing to do and nothing to say. Relationships such as roommates, business partners, and sexual partners take up most of the time of city dwellers. Lu Min sharply wrote that although Mimi and her roommate Hatsune had "built more than thirty groups", "split up cooking, creating an atmosphere in each group, giving everyone a praise and voting card to do sports to share experience, and then slowly bringing goods", it can be described as a concerted effort, but it is unclear whether Hatsune is extremely sad or extremely unscathed about Mimi's death, because the performance of the two is exactly the same. Whether between blood relatives or non-blood relatives, invisible and hard boundaries have been established, and this sense of boundaries has greatly suppressed and reshaped people's emotional expression, and the deep emotional resonance has been excluded, so that the death of the biological mother to Mimi is also "partial to crying". In Lu Min's pen, the only person who enthusiastically pays attention to the cause of Mimi's death is a journalist who makes a living by writing self-media articles (that is, the "I" in the text), because "I" urgently need this suicide material to write articles in pursuit of "steady profit and no loss". Mimi and I although the yin and yang are separated, Mu Mu is almost the same two sides of the same person, in the face of workplace pressure, I hold the determination of this time can not do well, I die to pursue clues, but also a undead Mimi; Mimi struggles alone in the city to make a living, but also a dead me. However, this kind of mirror reflection and illumination between people is still difficult to cross the boundaries between each other, let alone form a deep resonance, the so-called "or some stories have happened", which means that this is a story limited by boundaries, neither can people visit the scene, nor can people attribute the narrative. Under this strong sense of boundaries, people have developed new types of links that cannot be nurtured by various traditional concepts. Homogeneous life and hard boundaries have the potential to become the main content of urban literature. The deep expression of this reality is obviously the deep cultivation of contemporary Jiangsu writers.

The combination of squeezed sensations is the second characteristic of urban literature. Cities not only destroy primordial relationships, but also integrate and reshape human relationships. In this relationship, human beings must cooperate with high intensity, but also must maintain spacing and distance, high density of population and efficient daily life make urban people wear the thorn armor of the needless, the workload on the boss's mouth, the payroll in the eyes of the workers, the broken thoughts in everyone's heart... All were converted into unattainable KPIs, and people flew over each other, thinking and feeling like dancing with wolves. People not only have difficult boundaries to break, but also have great pressure on each other, and the relationship between them has become "unable to be white," difficult to know, and only by the sword.' Even if you are on the edge, do not need to be closely linked with others, this relationship of "walking and cherishing, separating at any time" is still anchored in the depths of people's hearts, so that contemporary interpersonal connections present a different landscape, and Jiangsu writers have a deep experience and writing about it. Not only that, Jiangsu writers have further sunk, and their pen power has penetrated from the city into the county, reaching a considerable depth in county writing.

In Cao Kou's novel "Mother", the mother of his girlfriend, who has been separated for ten years, suddenly visits and skims the protagonist's life in an awkward and inexplicable atmosphere. Whether it is between the mother-in-law and the son-in-law who have failed, or between the true mother-in-law and the true son-in-law who have all the feathers in the family, the tension is the same. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tosses and turns and the fly camp dog has a whole novella question - why did the ex-girlfriend decide to break up with himself - and finally was launched, but was shot down by the ex-girlfriend's mother: "Because she doesn't love you." As a result, the omnipresent sense of squeezing and the sense of cliff-like emptiness are two sides of the novel, and explode. As a larger urban space, the "county town" rarely becomes the object of desire, but it solidifies the richest "Chinese urban sense", and the various kinds of unbearable and funny in the "county town on earth" have not yet been fully explored in literature, which is especially worth looking forward to. However, the efforts of Jiangsu writers in this field have begun to look like this, and their sense of foremanship cannot be described as exquisite.

The "county town" has long been the main container of contemporary stories, and it is also an important reactor for various literary elements. In the story of the county town written by Jiangsu writers, there are more fierce beasts patrolling above the human world. Huang Xiaoyang's novel "Worth it in the world" creates a thing called "Zhang San", a person who is compatible with the children of officials, cement merchants, thinkers and writers, and is also the top predator of the "county-provincial city" food chain, and in the author's own words, this kind of person is "not an egg under the rural order, nor a child of urban civilization... They are middle-aged, and now most of them have in fact become the voices of the various ecosystems of county politics, economy and culture, the capillaries of power, and the makers of various unspoken rules and secret orders, familiar with different discourse systems, freely switching, and can play animals and humans in an hour. Zhang San's flesh runs rampant in the "county town- provincial city", preying like a beast but also like all top predators can not avoid the enrichment effect, the death of Zhang San's prey and the death of Zhang San himself in the novel illustrate this point. This kind of writing in which plunder and anti-phagocytosis are integrated, squeezed and pressured into one, constitutes the main content of county literature, and is more likely to become an important content of contemporary literature. The attempts and efforts of Jiangsu writers have contributed greatly to the exploration of new literary possibilities.

The forced shaping of adulthood is the third characteristic of urban literature. Urban shapers are just like local shapes, and the general characteristics of urban shapes can probably be summarized by the word "adult". As the popular phrase "children distinguish between right and wrong, adults only look at the pros and cons", and the universal sentence "You are already a mature adult, you should..." Based on the compulsive shaping of "pros and cons" and "should", it is ubiquitous in urban life and urban literature. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Bozeman declared that "childhood" is only a sociological concept born of print culture, and this cherished concept will fall apart with the advent of television. To some extent, the historical narrative of Modern and Contemporary Chinese literature is based on the imagination of innocent children, or this thing that is judged to be outside the adult world has actually supported the adult world, and Lu Xun's "saving children" can probably be regarded as the first driving force of this literary imagination and practice. Voltaire, who was regarded by Snow as the "French version of Lu Xun", already had the philosophical novel "The Naïve Man", using the mouth of a barbarian to ridicule the "civilized" urban people - "You must guard against this and that between you, it can be seen that you are not good people." ”

In the current Literary Creation of Jiangsu, the fierce hedging of the "rural-urban" and "barbaric-civilized" styles has passed, and the "change" of the literary city is reflected in the withdrawal of this origin narrative, the establishment of urban dominance and the improvement of the sense of maturity of the characters. The imagery with a rural meaning gradually recedes into a certain discursive relic, only in the corners of the narrative to exist in the corners of the narrative, Zhu Jing's "For example, the eaves" contains 13 stories created since 2018, all of which are written as "those small people hidden in the standardized life of the city, those emotions and hardships that cannot be named and placed", of which the characters in "The Dog It Is Going to Anhui" seem to be born in a mature state, "most of them live a similar, bounded life", and "go to elementary, junior high, and high school" in the city , the university is not far away from ... After college... Back near home, I opened this company", the fierce time and space transfer no longer appeared, and the literary role was firmly anchored in the city. And when the city becomes the only stage, and the scrutiny and control, repression and resistance only occur between adults, the children who "distinguish between right and wrong" have become difficult to have space in urban literature.

If the literature with the "city-township" relationship as the main topic is urban literature with a certain prescient nature, which explains the meaning of urban literature in a partial sense, then literature with the city as the only important space is increasingly becoming the main body of contemporary Chinese literature. Obviously, Jiangsu writers have taken the lead in this field. The definition of people by the city is presenting multiple possibilities, which gives us reason to look forward to the further development of Jiangsu literary city writing.