The division between the scholar-gentry class and the "people" was
an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic
state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between
intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the
writing/intellectual self and the peasant "other" a central concern
of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created
the "peasantry," the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper
objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas.
Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only
a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention.
Because of this primacy of language, the author's main approach is
the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative
fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how
historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed,
articulated, and debated within the text.
Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction
of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation
with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of
the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist
Party as a model "peasant writer," tragically exemplifies in his
career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the
post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928--) uses the ironic play of
language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating
intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four
"generations" examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956--), Han
Shaogong (1952--), and Wang Anyi (1954--) as examples of
"root-searching" fiction from the mid-1980's. While reaching back
into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in
technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about
the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of
narrative representation itself.
Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of
representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is
present--as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or
as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the
writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the
peasant "other" providing a theater for acting out varying dramas
of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and
self-representation.
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