Abstract
Lu Ling (1923-1994), representative of the writers closely associated with July Magazine, had been active in literary circles in the 1930s and 1940s China.Circumscribed by systems of critiques of literary/political institutions, his early works have not been fully attended to while the connotations not expressed. Imprisoned and forced to suspend his writing for years, Lu’s works produced after the 1980s resemble the tip of an iceberg, under which a sea of meanings awaits our exploration. To reassess Lu’s literature, this dissertation walks along the route of Lu’s life and creations, in order to explore the artistic characteristics of his language, narrative, and structure while trace the connections between his personal experience [journey of life?] and creation path [trajectory of creation?]. It focuses on Lu’s theses on reality,including complexity of representing the multitude/people, relationships between the individual(ism) and the (revolutionary) collective, as well as the affect of “Internationalist patriotism” in his frontline war-writing of the Korean War. The first chapter introduces the purpose of this research, literary review, and chapter layout, to illustrate the main argument of this dissertation. Chapter Two, “PASSION: Sufferings/the Imprint of the Age of Passion,” is the basis on which the later chapters develop their respective argument. It offers a silhouette of Lu’s writing trajectory,and then attends to the interior of his works to explore the influence of Russian literature, investigating the ways in which Lu’s wring had been informed by and articulated with the contextual changes. Chapter Three, “Road of the Youth,” analyzes how Caizhu De Erniimen—“a major incident in Chinese literary history,” as acclaimed byHu Feng— can be read as an ideal for the youth in the context of the “pursuit and plight of the intellectual youth.” Chapter Four, “On the Eve,” discusses Lu’s works in the 1940s that attend to the underclass workers and peasants, who, unlike the revolutionary subjects moving forward in the nation-building process, are not qualified to enter the great new age. Chapter Five, “After the Eve,” discusses Lu’s 1950s novels and plays that focus on the workers, the war-writing of the Korean War frontline, and fictional writingof volunteer soldiers. Chapter Six, “ I Am Not Anti-Revolution: Works after 1955,” analyzes the artistic characteristics in Lu’slater poems, essays and novels,so as to converse with the following statement: “Lu leads a life in two generations.” Chapter Seven, “Conclusion: and yet the dust does not speak,” reviews the argument of this research, and concludes with a general assessment of Lu Ling’s literature. Most distinctive of Lu’s works is his affective description of “feelings” and “emotions” of the characters. The affirmation and negation of Lu’s works fluctuate along with the systems of critiques of literary/political institutions, with the extremes of resistance and non-resistance. Precisely because of such a fluctuation, the critique of Lu’s works exposes the conservativeness of the seemingly critical literary-political rhetoric of “progressive/backward.” In the view of the left progressive politics,, Lu’s writing is akin to a shade of carmine that lacks the color of realistic blood;however, if we read Lu’s works with Zhang Zhongxiao’s thinking on realism, replacing “exposure” and “praise” with “pain,”“joy,”“pursuit,” and “dream,” we would realize that Lu’s creation has never “turned.”The carmine is not a sham, while the blood is hardly truer. Lu Ling’s writing has not been circumscribed by the binary oppositions such as “progress/backward,”“realism/modernism,”“the collective/the individual.” The borderland between the boundaries may be where Lu’s creation situates.