On The Folk Historical Narrative In Yan Geling's Novels

Yan Geling,a woman writer who residing in the United States,is full of talent and very prolific.She has a strong consciousness of history and culture.Because of the delicacy and profundity of her works,she is praised by critics as the most influential new immigrant writer in North America.Yan Geling's novels since the new century are mostly based on the history of the Chinese mainland in the 20 th century,and trying to restore the historical picture and the existence of individual life covered by the grand narrative in the folk imagination.It presents a kind of pursuit of free folk aesthetic ideal and a new attempt of historical construction and cultural identity construction.Since the 1990 s,Intellectuals turn to the folk for spiritual reconstruction and new discourse resources.The folk history,which has been covered by the grand historical discourse for a long time,began to surface from the writers' sinking narrative perspective.The folk provides rich creative resources for Yan Geling's historical narration,and Yan Geling's selective absorption of folk culture also reflects her creative posture of writing folk life from the folk standpoint and retelling history according to the folk value standard.First of all,the daily life obtains the narrative legitimacy,and the lively folk dialect also enters the novel text.The political noise is digested by the folk trivial.Secondly,the folk provide a new standard of integrating history,which is different from the revolutionary discourse and the Enlightenment position.Thirdly,the life resilience of the folk individual to face the suffering and the stable folk ethical structure has become the cultural basis for Yan Geling to consolidate the folk historical narrative.It is only the starting point of writing to examine the historical changes from the folk standpoint.Yan Geling's historical narrative also highlights an intention to stay away from the grand narrative and the “history-family”narrative mode,shows a query on the epic character,and “individual” becomes the subject of history.Yan Geling has always been keen on writing female life experience,and her “female” narrative motif has been infused with freedom spirit and rich perception from the folk.The lifeexperience of the bottom female directly becomes the cornerstone of the construction of history,thus shaping the image of “Ground mother” female with life strength and subject consciousness,and composing the “herstory”with private and secular nature.The folk spirits such as optimism,tenacity and shrewdness and survival philosophy embodied in these women are exactly the path Yan Geling found to go through the historical fog and fight against the historical suffering.Yan Geling's historical narration has drawn from the folk the value standpoint,cultural resources and new narrative angle of restatement of history,and has formed a legendary,romantic,calm and confident aesthetic style.The writing of folk belief dilutes the concentration of history and widens the distance between the protagonist,political power and knowledge power.The symbolic folk images also create an ambiguous and mysterious atmosphere for the novel.In the novel,the dilemma of personal life is always intertwined with the historical node,and the optimism from the folk land makes the passion of life and the romance of love wear through the misplaced life,and composes the music of mixed sadness and joy.Yan Geling created a strange and colorful landscape of human nature in her writing of “looking back the motherland ”.The identity crisis caused by the migration of cultural identity was strongly supported by the broad folk,and turned into a writing posture of transcendence,self-confidence and composure,which tried to reach the other and the world by returning to the motherland.