In the contemporary literary field where all kinds of magical stories, science fiction imagination, virtual reality and "setting systems" are popular, what kind of novelty can historical fiction writing bring us? Does history offer the writer a wider fictional space, or is it "dancing in shackles"? Or, conversely, does historical fiction provide readers with the illusion of historical truth, or does it touch on some more essential truth beyond the level of "historical facts"? For China, a country with a long history and literary tradition, how can traditional literary forms such as storytelling, history telling, and historical interpretation provide nourishment and help for the current writing of historical novels?
The "Qilin" and "Qin Detective" written by the new generation of writers in the past two years seem to provide us with an interesting research sample for thinking about these questions.
Start with the subtleties of history
From the auspicious legend of the "Qilin Descending to the World" during the Qianlong period to the "Tumubao Change" in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the traveling "Qilin" and "Qin Tan" focus on different historical dynasties, but try to avoid writing about the major events that occurred in history in a positive way, and choose to start with the subtleties of history. For example, "Qilin" starts from the incognito Tao Mingxin and his sworn brothers, wives, children, in-laws and other characters, and slowly unfolds a story network of so-called "Cordyceps", "Eight Characters" and "Fate Manipulation". "Qin Detective" even let the protagonist take over the investigation of the reasons for the defeat after the "Tumubao Change" occurred. The target of his investigation is not a powerful general, but more focused on border guards, "night without harvest", and even cooks. The advantage of this method of cutting through the gaps in history and writing big history with the help of small people is that it is easy to achieve a certain balance between the "truth" of history and the "fiction" of fiction. On the one hand, the major historical events in the novel are real, and the background and framework of the whole story are supported by historical events that are familiar to Chinese readers. At the same time, many specific and subtle scenes, utensils, costumes, and meals in the story are also real, creating a certain real texture or historical illusion for readers in the details. On the other hand, the main characters, actions and stories of the novel are fictional, which leaves plenty of room for the author to use his imagination and express himself.
For such a way of writing, the author Zhou You is highly conscious, as he stated in "· Afterword" that he wrote historical novels in order to "sustenance and anger":
These writers write because of loneliness and anger, and they are lonely and angry by writing, and their songs are also thoughtful, and their cries are also bosom, or they stand in the present, face the bleakness and despair, or pretend to be in the past, deeply contain heart songs and ironies, and use Mr. Wu to vent their yellow sorghum career. All words flow out of the heart, and the hearts of the eternal literature will never be annihilated, and they have become one of the most important contexts of Chinese novels.
In the Chinese literary tradition, there is a close relationship between history and novels, and there is even a tendency to "separate literature and history". On the one hand, history constitutes an important subject and object of novel writing, such as storytelling and history, or historical romance, which we are all familiar with. On the other hand, from a more fundamental point of view, the novel was regarded as the content of "supplementing" the "que" of the official history to a certain extent in ancient times. Whether it is telling historical stories or writing historical novels, they all have the important function of "using history as a mirror to know the rise and fall", which is the deep hope of every aspiring ancient novelist for his words. At the same time, this is also the reason why the author Zhou You attaches so much importance to the "connotation" of historical fiction writing, he believes that good historical novels can play the function of "sustenance" and break our general stereotype of so-called "elegant and popular literature".
In fact, it is true that in the contemporary Chinese literary scene, from serious literature to online literary creation, historical novels can be said to have crossed different boundaries such as "elegance and vulgarity", "offline and online" - for example, "Li Zicheng", "Baimen Liu", "Zhang Juzheng" and other "Mao Dun Literature Award" award-winning works are of course typical historical novels, Gao Yang, Februaryhe, Sun Haohui are also representative writers of contemporary popular historical fiction writing, and "Shao Song" is a popular online historical novel, and even such as "Step by Step", "New Song", " Back to the Ming Dynasty as a Prince", "Lingao Qiming" and other time-traveling novels, after the protagonist completes the crossing, the historical time, space, events, and characters he experiences are essentially the writing of historical novels. The continuous exploration of the depths of history constitutes an important way for contemporary historical fiction writers to express themselves, and these two works can also be understood and recognized in the slightly broad genre of "historical fiction", without being confined to the so-called "elegant and vulgar".
"Writing" and "Reading" of Classical Chinese Novels
We are no strangers to the writing technique of portraying small people in historical events, such as Ma Boyong, who can be called a master in this regard. Another common denominator between Ma Boyong and Zhou You's novels is that they are both good at writing historical novels with the framework structure of a certain type of novel, such as Ma Boyong's "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" for counter-espionage novels, "Two Beijing Fifteen Days" for fugitive adventure novels, etc., while Zhou You's "Qin Detective" also adopts a typical detective novel investigation structure.
However, unlike the general modern genre novels, Zhou You's novels have vague characters, more scattered narratives, and more jumpy plots, and his novels can branch out from any point, and then layer upon layer, or even completely break away from the original plot line and start a new story. The author seems to be deliberately challenging genre narrative conventions in some anti-genre way. For example, in "Qilin", the most attractive story at the beginning is of course Tao Mingxin's fake death escape, but later readers will find that this story does not seem to be so important to the overall plot of the novel, and each character in the novel has his own motivation for behavior and story line - Western missionaries are eager to preach, Bagua Sect intends to oppose the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty, Qiao Chenru performs the "Eight Character Manipulation Technique", and the housework and world conditions associated with Qi Niang and Qingfeng, etc. For example, in "Qin Detective", Zhu Kang, Zhang Shaozu, and Sister Tian Congee formed the protagonist investigation team, and readers would definitely think that Zhu Kang was the main force in the investigation, but the author "unexpectedly" arranged for him to attempt murder, be arrested and imprisoned during the development of the plot, and lose the action of investigating the case, but a large number of key plots were completed by Zhang Shaozu and Sister Tian Congee. Even a typical villain like Wang San in "Qin Detective", the author spent a lot of pen and ink writing about his escape from prison, fighting with the protagonist group all the way and finally returning to Wara, but he was easily "executed", giving people a feeling of disappointed expectations.
By and large, Zhou You was not nourished by modern Western genre novels, but inherited more from the tradition of classical Chinese novels, or more accurately, Ming and Qing vernacular novels. For example, the plot jump in "Qilin" easily reminds us of the structure of "two flowers bloom, each with a branch" commonly used in Zhanghui novels; The opening scene of "Qin Detective" writes about Zhang Shaozu's drunkenness, which reflects Zhu Kang's high degree of self-discipline and vigilance, and can also be understood in the "back powder method" proposed by Jin Sheng when he criticized "Water Margin"; In the same "Qin Detective", it is first written that the protagonist group pursues the Warat cavalry in the wandering town (one of which is the cavalry disguised by Wang San), and then writes that the protagonist group perseveres and pursues Wang San who escaped from prison all the way, which is the so-called "positive offense" - that is, repeatedly writing the same type of plot from different angles, but bringing readers different reading experiences. Therefore, it may be in the tradition of classical Chinese fiction rather than modern Western fiction that we can better understand and grasp the unique texture of the traveling novel. Its seemingly loose plot is actually a simulation of the story structure in ancient "storytelling" or "storytelling".
Compatible with this kind of novel writing is the mixed story content of ancient and modern travel novels, and the language style of novels with the vernacular charm of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The former is prominently displayed in the "Qilin" setting in "Qilin". The so-called "unicorn" is ostensibly the so-called "auspicious descent" in traditional culture, or a mighty sculpture in a temple, but in fact it is a technological invention of Western missionaries. It is worth noting that the unicorn here as a "rui beast" is, of course, a kind of cultural imagination from the pre-modern era, and the "mechanical unicorn" created by Gretian and Paul is not a technological level that can be achieved by the West during the Qianlong period, but a kind of sci-fi fantasy with a steampunk style. And this interweaving and collision of East and West, tradition and modernity, fantasy and science fiction constitutes a unique feature of the times in the novel. This treatment is very reminiscent of the writing strategy in "Dangkou Zhi", which juxtaposes Gongsun Shengdou's method with the Western inventor Bai Valhan's invention of the sinking conch boat.
The latter's so-called "novel language style with vernacular charm in the Ming and Qing dynasties" runs through the two works from "Qilin" to "Qin Detective", for example, in these two novels, the author deliberately conceals the "say" as a direct quotation prompt, or directly opens the dialogue with quotation marks, or uses the more classical character "Dao". In addition to the modern narrative, there is always a faint tone of a traditional storyteller in Zhou You's novels, as if he is not guiding the reader to "read" the novel, but to let the reader listen to him "tell" the story. This overlapping of narrative "voices" just complements the "quasi-vernacular" characteristics of the language of the travel novel. What's more interesting is that there is really a storyteller Zhao Jingting's character in "Qilin", Zhao Jingting constantly tampered with and told the real story through storytelling performances in the novel, and even the ending of many events in the novel is conveyed to the reader through Zhao Jingting's "storytelling", which forms an interesting text nesting relationship - Zhao Jingting's "storytelling" not only rewrites but also expresses the real events that occur in some novels. Even at the end of "Qilin", Zhou You cleverly borrowed the technique of "pseudo-pretext" and quite a bit of "narrative trickery" to once again reverse the relationship between "story" and "past" (what happened in the past), forming a kind of ending of the novel with epiphysiographic implications.
In general, these two novels of Zhou You are not so much "historical novels" in the modern sense of the West as they are closer to the "historical stories" of ancient China. From the subject matter, narrative technique to the voice of the novel, "Qilin" and "Qin Detective" are more influenced by the vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. However, unlike classical novels, the historical novels of Zhou Zhou are not intended to "make up" the "que" of the correct history, but to question the so-called historical truth through the novel. This is especially evident in "Qin Detective", the novel uses the process of the protagonist's group to investigate the case, not only to reveal the truth of the case level of who is the culprit of the "Tumubao Change", but also to reveal a more complex and subtle historical truth of the times. We can even say that "Detective Qin" uses the narrative framework of detective novels to investigate the truth, and finally arrives at the so-called "truth moment" when there is no truth in history. Specifically, after some painstaking investigation, the protagonist group in the novel finally traced the cause of the "Tumubao Change" to the emperor being hit by a stone while eating. The result of this seemingly absurd investigation is not a nihilistic impulse to deconstruct history, but an attempt to further reveal the complexity of historical truth, and in the huge causal chain network linked like a butterfly effect, every word and deed of every little person may affect the direction of big history. And this is perhaps where the travel novel is truly modern under the veneer of classicism.
Text: Zhan Yubing (Young Associate Researcher, Department of Chinese, Fudan University)
Figure: Information
Editor: Zhou Minxian