Traversing The Historic Mist

Wang Xiaobo is a writer of distinctive personality and vitality in China's contemporary literary world.His novels are full of postmodern implication,building various kaleidoscopic worlds of fantastic imagination,bright hues and magic plots for all the individual lives with free wills.The depiction of history is Wang's great achievement in his novels.In his novel Bronze Age,he takes history as clothing,and historical stories are just something to be relied on for the purpose of expressing his feelings and illustrating the world.The real connotation is to take history as a mirror and face forward to the future.The cores of Bronze Age are the problem of existence of individual lives and the realization of free will values.Starting with close reading Wang's historical novels,the paper systematically explores Wang's conception of history and historical narration,then comprehensively grasps Wang's historical writing features,and concludes in establishing a new paradigm of historical writing which has some reference for the historical writing of the currently downfallen serious literature.The subject of the second chapter is unusual historical truth--to depict the truth at maximum with incredibility:Wang's Bronze Age is adapted from texts of the legend of the Tang Dynasty.The writer transforms the historical imagination into a romantic myth of fantasy by the strategies of intertextuality and defamiliarization.The history under Wang's writing is incredible and filled with wonders and anomalies,which is far different with the texts of Yuan Dynasty and historical facts.However,Wang decorates historical imagination of extreme reality in the form of extreme romance.Based on history and looking at the reality,Wang puts his individual experience,critical thinking of social reality and profound historical consciousness of touching the truth in his imitative writing of historical stories.There is a long-term historical discourse relation established in Wang's historical writing by the mutual corroboration between history and reality,thereafter reaching more profound historical truth and human nature.Nevertheless,the kind of profound truth is the survival predicament of individual lives--the slaughter and destruction of individual freedom,wisdom and will imposed by power control.The subject of the third chapter is metaphor for body,taking the narration of body as an entry point to further explore power instruments and anti-power discourse,and focusing on three derivative keywords related to body:the body in our vision,sexual love(physical lust)and criminal punishment(physical pain and physical confinement with the body as recipient).The depiction of body and sex is the pioneer in Wang's fight against power.By exaggerated depiction of sexuality and taking sex as history,Wang denounces the despairing tragedy of life caused by power control,and meanwhile discovers that sexual love has a powerful force against power.In addition,by demonstrations of skills of criminal punishment and spatial and visual factors,Wang gets a glimpse of the disciplines of the ruled individuals imposed by power.In the meantime,the depiction of criminal punishment scene is like a carnival and a game,which overturns and transcends the disciplinary significance of criminal punishment,finally returning to ultimate theme of fighting against power.The subject of the fourth chapter is the variation to history:new landscape of historical narration modes.Wang's historical writing displays his extraordinary efforts of literary narration modes.Starting with analysis of narrative perspective,narrative time this chapter explores the unique mode in Wang's historical narration.The narrative perspectives of Bronze Age could be summarized into compound method mixed with first person and third person,while Wang Er,the narrator,is endowed with the right to freely shuttle in different space-time by the writer.Stories in ancient time and modern time are written from the perspective of Wang Er,and the writer could express his subjective comments and rational analysis at will of historical stories and real world.Wang's strategy of structuring narrative time is to spatialize linear time,which is shown in two aspects:by the setting of two co-existent linear space-time,the writer converts diachronism into synchronicity;regardless of continuity of time in the novel,the writer fragmentizes narration and applies repetition and supplementary instructions to bring in the breakage and recombination of narrative time.