Town And Country: Confines Of Life In Fiction

In the fictional world of Lu Yao, genuine protagonists are rural school graduates, whose fate in contemporary China and their life experience of upward mobility against sufferings have become an impetus to the establishment of a fictional world by Lu Yao.Starting with his novel Life, Lu Yao has cultivated his own domain for literary meditation and artistic expression—"the intersecting zone between town and country", while the contradiction between town and country has been repeatedly manifested as an inhibitive factor for life disputes in his fictional world. In The Normal World, the locale for tales in his narrative of life miseries is still the "intersecting zone between town and country". This paper attempts to probe into the relationship between modes of social structure and life patterns and living experiences so as to identify the humanistic significance beyond ethic admonition in Lu Yao's fiction by studying his major works along with textual analyses and social criticisms.In this paper, the issue is approached in three parts. In Part One—Life in Distress under Diverse Administration for Town and Country, a discussion is made on how rural areas, since the founding of New China, had been rendered destitute due to the state's accumulation of funds for industrial development by implementing the "price scissors" policy and how country-dwellers had been inhibited in their career options and free mobility by the census register system while an analysis is made, in line with Lu's specific works, of the life tragedy of school graduates whose ideal of existence has been shattered due to their inhabitancy in the dual society intersecting town and country. Part Two—Self-Struggle of Heroes at the Bottom of Society—is devoted to expounding the life and sacrificial personality of down-trodden talented persons who have endeavored to advance in defiance of sufferings in the milieu of exclusion of and discrimination against country imposed by the census register system and the cadre mechanism in the dual society involving town and country, as is evident in Lu Yao's fiction. Moreover, an analysis is made of the meaning of the "town" for country-dwellers in the relationship between town and country so as to highlight Yu Yao's artistic portrayal of the personality and temperament of "a generation sandwiched between the crevices of history". Part Three, Love as a Homologue, touches upon the love narrative mode determined by the dual social structure intersecting town and country, pointing out its functional significance and affirming Lu Yao's authentic delineation of love mentality. Furthermore, the life of down-trodden people under the inhibitive social system is mirrored while urban and rural females involved in such a love mode are discussed as well. It is opined that Lu's delineation of females is characterized by his due stress on the modern character of urban females depicted as ideal dates for rural heroes and by his portrayal of rural females as the embodiment of national traditional virtues.