Desperation: One Facet Of The Modern Literature Of China

Desperation is a kind of life style, many writers are enthusiastic to producing writings which exhibit hopeless feelings, such as Yu Hua,Mo Yan,Jia Pingwa,Chi Zijian and Shi Tiesheng, etc. The writers exhibit a hopeless world by depicting the living conditions of the dramatis personae accurately, and this may evoke philosophic considerations about lives. Desperation is a real facet of the modern literature of China.Yu Hua and Mo Yan are the representation of the modern writers who exhibit hopeless feeling. They come from life, they know the evil of the human nature, they are worried by fate. From their living conditions and deeply considerations, there comes their intrapersonal yell——desperation. Yu Hua and Mo Yan exhibit desperation from three aspects: desperation behind violence, desperation of being unable to reach, desperation of being unable to resist.In their early works, Yu Hua and Mo Yan all tended to describe violent. They chose violent details to exhibit the hopeless feeling of people. The author leads us to a grotesque and gaudy world through the particular way of none-sensation narrate, everthing is just so cruel and horrible and even sick. But put the tendency of readers aside, when analyzing our thought deeply, we can simply find that we felt discomfort to the cruel description while reading is just because we feel discomfort and antipathy to the violent itself. So the author is just try to accomplish the charge towards violent through cruel description. In Yell in the Rain by Yu Hua, the weak mother finished her uncomplaining life, only showing her rage at the last moment; Sun Guangcai gained power through violent, so no one dared go against him in the family. Even the kids know how to get power through violent. For example, Sun Guangping injured his brother's head with a hook, in order to escape his father's punishment, he then injured Sun Guanglin, his another brother's face and brought a false charge against Sun Guanglin in collusion with him. As a result, the one be punished was not Sun Guangping, was Sun Guanglin instead.'Commit a crime, while gain a good result.'Violence conquered power, while power proved the rationality and validity of violence. So a human prison was set up with violence and power. In Handcuff of Thumb by Mo Yan, A Yi is handcuffed unreasoningly, he bites his thumb away to escape. This is a symbolic scene. As an important part of body, the handcuffed thumb is the symbolization of the painful life. The bloody description of biting the thumb away just reveals the self-disengagement with violence when facing tribulations. This is a kind of hint of inner logic exists in the works. When analyzing the works deeply, we can find that the finally purpose of the writers is not just to exhibit violence, their real purpose is to reveal human desire and human nature. The tendency of cruelty and violence of human is actually the representation of desperation when facing tribulations.According to the philosophy of ShrenKierkegaard, there are two kinds of desperations, one comes from possibility and another comes from impossibility. This elicits another two kinds of desperations which are much stronger——desperation of being unable to reach and desperation of being unable to resist. Classical Love by Yu Hua is such a writing which exhibits desperation of being unable to reach. In his way to attend an examination, Mr. Liu met a beautiful girl and engaged himself to her. When Mr. Liu came back to find his girl after failing in the examination, he found that the family of the girl had been broken up, and the most miserable thing was that his girl had become an esculent person. Being hopeless in pursuing official career, losing his lover, Mr. Liu decided to live his left life accompanying the tomb of his girl. But hope came at that time——the soul of his girl emerged and told him that she would be brought back to life soon. While the cruel fate is doomed and life is always linked with tribulation. The hope of bringing the girl back to life became irrealizable because Mr. Liu opened the tomb with curiosity. The dramatis personaei is in the hope of happiness and blessedness, but his destiny is stepping from misfortune to misery. Always being failing in pursuing official career, the family of his lover being broken up,his lover becoming esculent person, the new hope coming after all, but sliding away incautiously……the destiny of being unable to reach, of losing soon after getting, of being hopeless in longing happiness life is a heavy misery. Actually this is"the inconsistency of the desire of human nature and the reality, suffering from tribulation and desperation is inevitable living in such inconsistency."The deepest desperation is desperation of being unable to resist. Tiredness of Subsistence and Death by Mo Yan is writing about the palingenesis between hope and desperation. The writer takes field as the main clue. Lan Jiefang left the field, Ximen Jinlong destroyed the field, only Lan Lian who stayed with the field, resisted the destroying and betraying toward the field in his own way. Ximen Nao stayed with his family and his field by taking palingenesis of donkey,cattle,pig,dog,monkey, and an infant with an abnormally big head at last. But what brought to them by their insistence was tribulation and desperation. The condition of Lan Lian was more miserable than landlords in culture revolution, he got strike from everywhere, everyone betrayed him including his wife and his son. After several times'palingenesis, Ximen Nao still couldn't come back to be a normal man, and still couldn't be with his field. Ximen Nao thirsted for coming back to be a normal man to redress an injustice for himself, but after several times'palingenesis, he got a self-identity of animals, forgetting the human nature what he insisted at first. It's more the start of a new desperation than the way out of the old desperation that convert from remembering to forgetting. The palingenesis between hope and desperation is doomed. There there's no way to resist it.Many modern writers are taking special considerations toward the world. They figure unique stories and scenes about the living conditions of normal people, describe loneliness,bepuzzlement and grief of them. They try to evoke common feelings of the authors by exhibiting the experiences of the dramatis personae in their writings. The fancied life which is different from the real life is much colorful. The more careful we observe the world, the more incisively it is to find the hardship of existence. Then desperation comes out from the writers'pens. We can't forget the woman struggling with the hopeless feeling in all Nights in the World by Chi Zijian, and Gao Jialin in Life by Lu Yao, who is stepping from hope to desperation, from the longing toward the happy life to the gulf of the distressful fate, etc. Revealing desperation and exhibiting desperation has become a voice and a facet of the modern literature of china. The hopeless feeling spreads everywhere in the modern literatures, with worries and anxieties of the writers toward the society all around. We expect bringing the authors into deeper considerations by describing such desperation living conditions.