Wandering Consciousness In The Vision Of Modernism

As a spiritual seeker, Yu Hua living in the period of social transformation witnessedcontemporary people’s mental crisis caused by times and launched the spiritualexploration. Vagabondage, an inherent human lifestyle, has been internalized intohuman’s collective unconsciousness after thousands of years of development，and hasobvious prototype significance. Being faced with the situation of cultural fracture, YuHua produced a sense of loss and rootlessness which generated the awareness ofVagabondage. Yu Hua’s awareness of vagabondage was deeply influenced by thewestern modernism which has penetrated into the area of Chinese literature in thesocial transition period, showing modernistic features.Yu Hua’s awareness of vagabondage presents two forms in his creation: one is thebehavior wandering as an overt vagabondage and the other is the spirit vagrancy as acovert vagabondage. Behavior wandering refers to the original meaning ofvagabondage, which is going on a long journey which is characterized by leavingfrom his own residence. In Yu Hua’s works, the behavior wandering shows four types:the irrational traveling, the alienated hero wandering, the decadent life wandering andthe mad self-imposed exile. All of the four types are different from the traditionalpicaresque model and manifest the modernistic features. The spirit vagrancy is theproduct of modern civilization. It concerns about what is on the spiritual level andtakes on the spiritual senses of drift, emptiness, confusion and absurdity, together withthe soul sense of homelessness. In his creation, Yu Hua expresses this spirit vagrancyas a quest and escape of soul and as an emptiness and absurd of spirit, which containsmood of the end of the20thcentury. Fear has become the sufficiency of the quest andescape of soul, and despair has turned into the symbol of the emptiness and absurd ofspirit.Yu hua’s wandering consciousness embodies a kind of spiritual exploration whichis also a spiritual wandering. However, compared with it, this kind of spiritualexploration is more initiative. In the premise of freedom of creativity, Yu Hua begins his mental journey of exploration in which his soul travels without fetters. Enteringinto the world of wandering, Yu Hua has to bear loneliness, because loneliness is aspiritual journey that the spiritual seeker can not get rid of. Meanwhile, in a process ofvagabondage, anxiety has become a form of spiritual exploration. Through thenarrative, Yu Hua expresses his thoughts on survival and his question on life ontology.