Not The - Li Rui Novel

Among contemporary Chinese writers, Li Rui has demonstrated a sober vigilance and reflection of the engulfment of cultural globalization. His radical reflectiveness not only determines the themes and forms of his literary works to a large extent but also gives rise to the form of paring intertextuality in his fictional writings.In the pair of works of Thick Soil and Peaceful Landscape: An Exhibition of A Series of Farming Tools Stories, Chinese peasants are portrayed as suffering from the double torments of premodern conditions and modernization. In Thick Soil, Li Rui deviates from the traditional rural novels and pastoral novels and relocates Chinese peasants in an eternal time-space and a power structure of dominance/submission that are neither modern nor pastoral. By employing the"tick-tick"rather than a"tick-tock"narrative structure, as well as repetition and limited viewpoint, the novella presents both the living conditions in which Chinese peasants have been bound for generations and their complicated and ineffable inner experience. In Peaceful Landscape, Li Rui reverses the hypertext collage of postmodernism and describes the pain, rage, and hope of Chinese peasants in the process of modernization. Just as the premodern era is not a paradise for Chinese peasants, modernization could not offer them a promising prospect either.In another novelistic pair of Trees without Wind and Cloudless Sky, Li Rui creatively dissolves the hierarchical relationship between intellectuals and the mass by drawing on William Faulkner's multiple first person narrative. Li Rui's narratives of Cultural Revolution adopt neither a moralistic stance nor a posture of"refusing to regret"assumed by some intellectual youth. Rather, he offers a penetrating reflection of Cultural Revolution from the triple levels of mass ignorance and fervor, intellectual unreflectiveness, and the modern characteristics of revolutionary ideology. His narration of the complex observation, interrogation, denial, co-optation, and mythologization between intellectuals and the mass deepens the theme of alienation since May Fourth movement.In the novelistic pair of Old Site and Story of Yincheng, Li Rui deliberately breaks away from the narrative mode of revolutionary novels. He dissolves the progressive view of history through time setting and articulates a position of cultural relativism through multiplying historical forces and frequent shifts of point of view. He also deconstructs the argument of historical script through traps, death, contingency, and uncertainty. Li Rui's view of history lies somewhere between critical historical philosophy and narrative historical philosophy and is characterized by a Chinese style of"melancholy."To sum up, Li Rui's fictional works, written with a conscious Chinese identity, engage in a"battle of life and death"with the culture of the First World and exemplify his reflection on and distancing from earlier mode of writing. The totality of his uniqueness constitutes the positive of the negative that distinguishes him from other writers.