Comment On Dong Xi’s Novel Writing

Dong Xi experiences three phases in his novel writing. In the phase when he signed his real name Tian Dailin, he acted as a toddler. While in the other phase, when he uses his pen name Dong Xi, he pays attention to form exploring and depth mining. His novel didn’t have fixed theme and creative form in the phase of Tian Dailin. However, his tragic complex appeared in that phase. From1992to1994, he focused on form innovation in terms of narrative time, narrative perspective and story structure, which correspond to the skills of pioneer novel. Since1995, he has turned his eye to depth mining. Since then, he has paid little attention to form exploring and formed fixed theme.Dong Xi concentrates on the spirit world of modern people, thus he has been acutely aware of secret in their heart, namely self-identification crisis, ontology insecurity and existential anxiety. Self-identification means identification of one’s internal identity. The crisis comes from a sense of no direction, which manifests as division of ideal self and actual self, separation of symbols and identity as well as self-identification change resulting from social identification. Ontology security is the trust that most people have in continuity of self-identification and constancy of society and material environment. It is also a sense of reliability. On the contrary, existential anxiety is the opposite of trust. The sense of insecurity and anxiety becomes more and more intense from physical and mental display in Sleep and Something seems to be happen to action to prove in Guess to the end, and then to using double to seek security with unconsciousness in Laozhao who doubles everything. Furthermore, Dong Xi shows us the modern people’s situation under impact of medium. The fascinating emotional world for Chen Li and me in lyrical era, people’s crazy desire for and imagination of Yang Shuanglang in Misery match and language world built by full automatic camera in My machine and I,all the circumstance under the influence of medium is virtual. Such circumstance becomes more and more because of the progress in modern science and technology and desertification of personal emotion. This is just what Dong Xi wants to tell us. Through emotional situation of leading character in his novel, Dong Xi wishes us to rethink current culture profoundly.Dong Xi views Absurd as the outlet of literature. During his writing process, he has been in pursuit of defamiliarization of language and plot. He tells fantastic stories in tones of ridicule and irony, thus his novels are full of sense of absurdity. Most his novels concentrate on poverty both in material and spirit. However, the narrative makes readers happy because of tones of ridicule and irony. The emotional language contains Dong Xi’s rational and serious thinking about existence predicament especially the spiritual reality of human beings. Since Dong Xi sticks to the inner truth, the absurdity either in part or whole in his novel doesn’t cover the truth. It is transcendence of life to find and confront absurdity in our life.Over the past30years or so, Dong Xi has developed a style of his own in both theme and artistic feature. His emphasis on inner depth and language of novels has implications for the contemporary literary world.