Research On Fei Ming's Poetry-like Novel

Fei Ming's literature history value mostly lies in his connecting classicality and modern times and pioneering the poetry-like tradition of modern novels. Fei Ming's novel belongs to the poetry-like novel school, and its pursuit of stressing the subject and stressing the language, prose-like and poetry-like tendencies, thick cultural deposits, fascinating artistic charm and distinctive national characteristics represent a totally different direction during the entire development process of the modern novel literary style.1. Fei Ming: Pursuit of poetry-like novel in aesthetic modernity1).The establishment process of Chinese poetry-like novelLyric poetry is one of the traditions of the Chinese classical art, being embodied in the shaping of the poetic conception and sentiment, pursuing the novel's artistic conception. Fei Ming's experience and thought were representative during the May 4th Movement period. Being at the social turning point when the new replaced the old, no matter what kind of theory or opinion he accepted later on, to view from the experience in his earlier years, Fei Ming attended the old-style private school, having accepted the comparatively systematic edification from the traditional culture, thus the Chinese classical literal poetry and prose having profoundly influenced his aesthetic taste and aesthetic expectation.During the establishment process of the May 4th New Literature, the introduction of Western literature played a role as an exotic catalyst. Compared to the 18th and 19th centuries, the literary style of Western novels since the 20th century also had a significant narration reform, novelists were no longer zealous to narrate the story in a way full of twists and turns, but changed from imitating the outside world to paying attention to expressing the characters'inner worlds, trying to exploit people's inner worlds, applying the artistic method of stream of consciousness to let the mental activities carry more expression duties. In the concrete creation, such situation was expressed as the weakened storyline, character building being no longer the centre, with the character's feelings and emotions being enhanced to a more important status, even replacing the expression of the character's features.From the very beginning, the May 4th New Literature Movement revealed the tendency of canonizing feelings and despising rationality, and then showing the phenomenon of writing poem with the prose style and expressing one's emotions with the novel style, which caused the confusion and melting from different literary styles. And by the time of 1930s, since the climax of the May 4th Movement New Literature had passed, with quite a number of northern writers migrated southward to Shanghai and elsewhere, those writers, who mainly taught or studied in the universities in Beijing and Tianjin, due to being far away from the centre of the era, generally had a natural and graceful, peaceful, and well-knit mental attitude of writing, and had a relative consistency in terms of the spirit of creation, mental attitude and aesthetic pursuit, that is, weakened political consciousness and strengthened consciousness of artistic independence.2).The aesthetic pursuit of poetry-like novelPoetry-like novel doesn't pay attention to the narrative function, doesn't adopt the storyline conflict to build the character's personality, but pay attention to creating the artistic conception. It resorts to metaphor, emblem and sentiment-as-priority feature of poetry so that the time and mentality become harmonious and integrated naturally and the storyline gets weakened and abounds in philosophic poetic beauty. The novel with poetic beauty possesses a kind of vitality which can make the novel sublime from the limited picture to unlimited thought and idea, and a kind of generalizing ability which can enhanced the specific character and storyline to the extensive conception and poetic sentiment, possessing both the concrete sense of reality, the sense of beauty and the rich and broad thought connotation which causes people to think.The storyline setting of poetry-like novel is subject to the changing of emotions, and the writer used the idea he wanted to express to control the storyline development, which is a kind of poetic way of thinking. The writing of poem places the artistic conception as the centre and constitutes the entire text through the artistic conception, depending on the projection of the writer's subjective feelings. Fei Ming's works ever were influenced by the modern trend of poetry, which caused the form of his poetry show the features of Western symbolic poems.2. The poetry-like world of Fei Ming's novels1).Beauty of native soilHuangmei in Hubei province on the one hand was the writer's hometown, at the same time it was the spiritual home where his soul perched. Also Fei Ming's creations mostly adopted the source materials from the countryside life in his hometown--Huangmei, Hubei, using the people, matters, nature and customs as the background and writing the daily trivial things in the countryside, possessing a thick native soil atmosphere, local flavors and beauty of local customs. On the one hand, it represented the writer's compliments on the unpolluted natural beauty of human nature, on the other, due to the writer's dissatisfaction with the political utilitarianism, partisanship and commercialism, it strived to rewrite his own spiritual home with the traditional and folk moralities.2).Beauty of human natureLike many poetry-like novel writers, under Fei Ming's pen, there are more beauties of human nature and the poetry flown out of the human nature. He always thought that"the human nature is good from the beginning"in his heart, so the poetry flown out of the human nature naturally became the moral realm and value orientation which he had been pursuing. In these novels with weakened storylines, the poetry is embodied as the brilliance of human nature itself, which came out of the morality and ideal of the age-old Chinese traditional civilization, also originated from Fei Ming's yearning for the harmonious relationships between human and nature in the traditional world as well as the harmonious relationships in the universe.3). Female beautyFei Ming's novels everywhere revealed the writer's concern about the female, and he liked to convey his own life experiences and conception of feelings by writing the lives in the boudoirs. If the children's lives under Fei Ming's pen represent"truth"which is yet not polluted by the adults'world, then the females in his novels, we can say, emerge as the embodiment of"beauty". The leading characters in Fei Ming's novels are mostly females who integrate the outside and inside beauties within themselves, embody the beauties of youth, purity and truth, and life. In this sense, the female is the concrete embodiment of the beauty of poetic nature.3. The poetry-like characteristics of Fei Ming's novel1).The native soil novels in early days:Artistic conception is the centre of Fei Ming's novel creation. The artistic conception in Fei Ming's novels mainly was embodied as two points: tranquility and still. What constitutes the artistic conception of tranquility and still are the intuition and the enlightenment on nature and life expressed in the works, which to a large extent promotes the novel's artistic image feature, making the feelings, artistic conception and philosophy gain a highly harmonious unification.The weakened and strong poetry-filled artistic conception in Fei Ming's works mainly was embodied in the long novel, Bridge.2).The prose-like novel in later days:Although the emphases of Fei Ming's novels in later days transferred to narration, but there were not complete storylines, and there were only piles of disorderly and various stream-of-consciousness-style life trivialities and fast-passing inner emotions, neither telling stories nor deliberately building images of characters. Actually, Fei Ming's novels'being prose-like in later days and being poetry-like in early days were interrelated. There are dual tradition of writing prose and writing poetry in China, and poetry was the most serious method of expressing feelings and conveying ideas for Chinese ancient intellectuals, while prose was their poetic impulses switching and spreading to daily lives, however, the common artistic feature of these two was pursuing the artistic conception.3). Influences from BuddhismFor Chinese literature, Buddhism prospect is actually a more artistic poetic conception. In Fei Ming's works, Buddhism prospects are often combined with the poetic conceptions. The writer often wrote his sentiment and enlightenment when being alone, integrating the still, silence, observation and contrast of Buddhism with his aesthetic experiences on the mountains and waters, conveying his feelings and emotions as well as some change in his heart through describing the nature, and reflecting the clean and serene Buddhism interest. The writer, in the bright and beautiful poetic conception, makes the readers feel a kind of tranquil mental state depending on which they can get rid of the hardship of life and escape from being distracted by artificial factors, and enjoy the empty and fine tranquility and still, thus creating the poetic beauty which comes out of his feelings upon the nature, universe and the eternal beauty of emptiness and tranquility4). Poetic expression of the languageFei Ming had been painstakingly building up his novel language, aiming at serving his experiment and exploration on the novel form, with creating a kind of poetry-filled, fresh, dynamic and lively conception of beauty and atmosphere of beauty being as his final target. Usually, this kind of poetry-like language chooses a totally different way from the habitual expressing ways of language, comprehensively organizing the sensual pictures such as sound, color, taste, form and light, etc., stressing not the semantic information but the understanding width which the language could obtain beyond the semantic information itself.4. Historical positioning of Fei Ming's poetry-like novels1). Fei Ming's literature history value and findings thereofAfter the middle period of 1980s, with the writers'creations booming, the literary aesthetic spirits became increasingly diversified, and a batch of writers'values, exactly at that time, were repaid attention to and were accepted by the literature circle. The first writer who was"reaccepted"was Shen Congwen. Meanwhile, people began to pay attention to and rediscover Fei Ming, which couldn't be separated from people's reaccepting Zhou Zuoren, however, due to the obscurity of his works, Fei Ming's contemporary status was far from Shen Congwen's, Wang Cengqi's and other people's. But with the tradition as a whole returning since 1990s, more and more researchers began to notice the internal successive interrelation between the New Literature and the tradition of Chinese literature, and the New Literature was no longer simply regarded as"being cut"from the tradition, but was regarded as a"creative"transformation towards the classical literature, with Fei Ming's novels exactly being as the analyzable and explainable model text for such theory of literature history.2). Being lonely but not aloneTo view from the development track of poetry-like novel, Fei Ming succeeded to Lu Xun and was succeeded to by Shen Congwen and other people. He regarded the age-old countryside as the ideal Garden of Eden, leading the readers to recognize and appreciate the primitive, simple, tranquil and leisurely countryside civilization with his natural and comfortable mental attitude. The creation of countryside pastoral style romantic literature originated in 1930s, and reached the artistic peak via Shen Congwen. Fei Ming can be called the originator of the modern Chinese poetry-like novel, from Fei Ming to Shen Congwen, He Qifang, Fengzhi, Wang Cengqi, we can find out a coherent clue of the poetry-like novel in Chinese modern novel history.ConclusionBoth realistic novel and poetry-like novel are manners in which writers express the feelings in their hearts. The development process of Chinese modern literature is actually the establishment process of all kinds of modern literary styles. The significance of re-mentioning Fei Ming and re-mentioning poetry-like novel exactly lies in researching these writers'efforts to find the bridge connecting classicality and modern times, and the writer's value in creating this novel style. Perhaps, for himself, what Fei Ming chose was a narrow and thorn-filled road, but for the researchers on the 20th century Chinese literature, the road Fei Ming had chosen pioneered for them a different landscape.