National Imagination Farmer Perspective

THREE MILE BAY is a novel of Zhao Shuli who produced it after the foundation of our country, which reflecting agriculture cooperative movements in rural areas. The novel obtained good results in issue, which was welcomed by the readers of the sales of400,000in the first publishing year. However, the spokesman of the mainstream literary circles Zhou Yang thought the novel "have not been able to achieve greater success in thought and art". Indeed, there is really a gap between THREE MILE BA Y and the work History of Entrepreneurs hip which in a similar theme in conveying the values of socialism.This article mainly starts from the shaping of the "new man", to reveal the values of Zhao Shuli which rooted in folk custom and ritual, constructed above folk ethical logic and way of thinking by contrasting the "new man" in THREE MILE BAY with "socialist new man" in the form and connotation. Compared with the strong preacher color of ideology, these folk values which are obtained unconsciously from generation to generation show an unrestraint. By revealing the folk logic in his literature, this article attempts to explore the national imagination mode under the perspective of peasants provided by Zhao Shuli.The first part of the article discusses the efforts and failure of Zhao Shuli in pursuing the epic form of literary works.In order to be closer to the epic asanas, he broke the single linear narrative mode, trying to cover a wider space as well as a larger scale, which showed the pursuit of larger scale; at the same time, he developed the characters’connotations, transformed them from the previous democratic revolutionary pursuing ones to the socialist value oriented ones. However, due to the similar approach in shaping characters with the one in the liberated period, he still provided group portrait, Zhao Shuli had not been able to create a central hero as the epic asana core element, so his pursuit of epic asanas ultimately failed. This formally led to the novel’s alienation from the expectation of the mainstream literary and art circles.The second part of the article takes a deeper discussion of the new men’s character, mainly excavates the differences connotations between the "new men" in THREE MILE BAY and "socialist new men" to reveal it is the connotation difference that are the deeper and more essential reasons for this novel’s failing to reach the thought and art altitude expected by Zhou Yang and other people. This article reveals the folk unconstraint of the "new men" from the following five aspects:transition from craftsmen to technicians, folk wisdom, authority relationship embodied in "send to the court", ethnical logic of cadres and various social relationships surrounding the new men. These folk unconstraint poses a threat to dispel socialist values, thus limits the connotations of the "new men".THREE MILE BAY contains the subjective pursuit and objective subconscious values and ideals of the author. By analyzing characters and descriptions of the novel, we can find Zhao Shuli’s national imagination under the perspective of peasants. His support and advocacy for individual liberation and human equality inherited from the May4th new culture; but different from the new culture’s over against traditional values, Zhao Shuli cherished the simple and warm folk ethics. He understood and accepted inevitable social transitions under his own attitude of "seeking shelter in the daily changes" and expected a more moderate change process.Zhao Shuli has a very clear identity consciously, he always take "Chinese peasant" as his foothold in literature creation. In THREE MILE BAY, by showing the folk unrestraint of "new man" and inheriting traditional folk ethics logic reasonably, on one hand, weakened the coercive power of the mainstream ideology, on the other hand, closed the culture breakage resulted by over against the traditional culture of May4th. His attempts have a important consulting significance in constructing the nation-state, for it provided another possibility of new nation-state constitution besides the May4th Literature and the Socialist Realism Literary practices.