"cross-urban And Rural Zone": Living Contradiction Staging Ground

The epic feature of Lu Yao's novels, especially PINGFANDE SHIJIE and RENSHENG, makes him very influential in China's literature. Lu Yao observes the reality with a pair of sharp eyes and describes history and men in the history honestly. The core spirit of his novel is the urban-rural dual structure. This paper tries to explore this dual structure and holds that the dual structure is not only a crossing structure in geographical meaning, but also a crossing point economically and culturally, where all kinds of relationships and powers coexist and conflict with each other, from which his novels reveal a conflicting existence and life. Gao Jialin and Sun Shaoping, in this urban-rural dual structure, chase a maximum realization of their self-value. From the experience of these countryside intellectual youth, we can see a dilemma of the survival and development of human beings, through which we can acquire an insight of ourselves.This article can be divided into four parts: features of the urban-rural dual structure, conflicts faced by people living in the urban-rural dual structure, dilemma of the urban-rural dual structure and revelation of the urban-rural dual structure.In the first part, we mainly explore features of the urban-rural dual structure, including the special features, economical features and cultural features. The urban-rural dual structure is a conflicting area, in which the conflicts can be observed from a combination of the urban-rural dual structure from the economic and the social field; from an opposition of the modern and traditional consciousness. The novel can be considered as a historical reduction of the reformation era, which mirrors China's way of change, which, at the same time, reveals various clashes in social reality at that time. Changes have taken place in all fields of the social life in the reformation era, among which changes in the urban-rural dual structure is the most tremendous and thus are the most representative.The second and third parts are analysis of characters in The urban-rural dual structure. Two perspectives are taken into our consideration in these two parts: survival conflicts and survival dilemma. The reform and development of the society imprint deeply in human's spirits, all of which shows themselves in the experiences of Gao Jialin and Sun Shaoping. If we just limit our research within the field of literature or sociology, a deeper meaning may be neglected. We hold the belief that the urban-rural dual structure is an aggregation of conflicts, which shows a contradicting life of Gao Jialin and Sun Shaoping, two rural intellectual youth, who is waking, struggling, and wandering in the changing society, who desire to control their destiny but can not do it. The existence of human beings determines the existence of needs of human beings. The"needs", to some extent, drive the development of human, but at the same time we have to see that these"needs"can and can only exist in certain social relationships and thus can be satisfied in social reality. The contradiction between individual and society is the place where human live and survive. The two heroes of the novel, Gao Jialin and Sun Shaoping, exist in a certain era in history, bearing both urban and rural features, facing the gap between urban identification and rural identification, the split between urban and rural cultures, the conflict between reality and individual needs. They are inflexible in pursuing their goals and holding their believes despite disputes between dreams and realities. Of course, at the same time, they are sunk in the dilemma of modern people, here, we mean that they are forced to correct their destinations from time to time, the result of which is to suffer a spiritual torture, to be expelled away from their spiritual home. The fourth and last part of this article is devoted to the lessons that we can learn from the experiences of these people living the urban-rural dual structure. Three sub-theme, the pursuit of the spiritual home, the hard experience, and the realization of one's value, comprise this part. From this novel we can draw the conclusion that as for human beings, we should go beyond the boundaries to chase the truth of life so that we can construct our spiritual home to realize our value ultimately. Different people cherish different goals, but what matters is not the result but how we can acquire the intended results. So, the definition of"life"probably can go like this: life is a process of surpassing—surpassing all the sufferings, surpassing realities, surpassing limitations and surpassing life itself.This article intends to investigate the urban-rural dual structure and people living there within the framework of Maslo'"needs scale"theory and materialistic interpretation of history proposed by Max and Engles. By analyzing lives of people living in a certain historical era, we try to reveal a universal meaning of what life is.