Chapter 655 - 384: The Meaning of Literature

A person is endowed with seven emotions and responds to external stimuli. Expressing these feelings through writing is entirely natural. — "The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons"

Humans have seven emotions and desires. When stimulated by external objects, they have a specific response. Feeling something in the heart and expressing it in writing is completely natural.

To put it simply, writing novels is about expressing one’s own emotions, and reading novels is about finding resonance for one’s emotions.

This is what Yu Hua refers to as ’solace’. Li Peifeng agrees, saying that the delight of online literature is a form of ’solace’. YY, after all, provides significant solace.

But he believes that literature has some deeper meanings...

In fact, these meanings are the problems existing in contemporary literature.

Almost everyone in the literary world understands this, especially the scholars who study contemporary literature. However, they refuse to speak out about it because doing so would offend people. Digging deeper would embarrass the leaders, and belittling contemporary literature as worthless would damage their own status as researchers in the field.

As a graduate student at Beihua Normal University of Arts and Sciences and an online writer, Li Peifeng is also part of the literary circle. He, as just a little grasshopper, doesn’t care if the contemporary literary world is damaged or not. In the early days of his graduate studies, he wrote two papers criticizing contemporary literature.

In those papers, Mr. Li expressed his thoughts. In his view, the biggest problem with contemporary literature is that the aged traditional writers have a somewhat too simplistic understanding of the meaning of literature.

This is understandable. They grew up in a different era, surrounded by challenging conditions, a time of national humiliation and burdens, full of turbulence and unpredictability. This had a tremendous impact on their worldview, leading them to interpret the meaning of literature and the stories’ backgrounds similarly.

Even though negative aspects such as guilt, heaviness, and suffering are ancient human problems that literature cannot avoid, it is known to all that where there is darkness, there must be light. Black and white coexist in the world. However, the depiction of the light side seems to be a shortcoming of contemporary writers.

They handle the darkness of human nature well, but when it comes to the brilliance of human nature, like "hope, joy, love, ideals, beliefs," etc., they do poorly.

Perhaps these contemporary writers disdain to write about them, thinking these elements lack depth. They believe that their focus should be on darkness and despair as the main tone, using writing as a tool to fight against all injustices, to expose social darkness and the baseness of human nature, laying the ugliness bare before people to provoke deep thought and reflection, thereby achieving the goal of transforming society.

This in itself is fine. Mr. Lu Xun, who sits at the top of modern cultural history, did just that. But the problem is, contemporary writers lack Lu Xun’s cultivated writing skills, profound thinking, and courageous optimistic fighting spirit, not to mention the stance of using the pen to save the country and the psychological alignment with the lower masses.

As a result, they cannot write like Lu Xun, who stood firm in despair and wrote articles that could awaken the Chinese people’s patriotism and fight against feudalism.

Most of them are driven by prejudice, bitterness at their core, and the things they write naturally carry that bitterness, exhibiting problematic expression. One could describe it using words like distorted and twisted.

For a more specific description, if we use these contemporary writers’ ’crude’ writing skills to characterize their books, it would be like: being battered by tradition and politics for too long, carrying a sense of value imbalance, akin to experienced but inferior women of the past looking to reform.

When a certain leader of contemporary literature was awarded, he said, "Literature is meaningless." Years later, he couldn’t help but speak his mind, "I always maintained a bias that literary works should not gloss over reality, literary art should expose darkness."

This statement sounds compassionate and virtuous, but it’s actually prejudice, a view lacking in historical scientific knowledge, and a speech from a librarian fits perfectly in response to it:

"For revolutionary literary figures, the target for exposure can only be invaders, exploiters, oppressors, and the adverse influences they leave among the people, not the masses themselves. The masses also have shortcomings, which should be overcome through internal criticism and self-criticism, which is one of the most important tasks of literature and art. But this should never be called ’exposing the masses.’ The fundamental issue for the masses is one of education and elevation. Unless one is a counter-revolutionary literary figure, only then would one depict the people as ’born stupid,’ the revolutionary masses as ’tyrannical thugs’."

"Criticism of the people’s shortcomings is necessary, but it must be done from the people’s standpoint, speaking with a heartfelt desire to protect and educate them. Treating colleagues as enemies means placing oneself in someone else’s shoes."

Li Peifeng believes that the issue cannot simply be summarized as a problem of stance. It can only be said to be the result of multiple factors.

To this end, Li Peifeng published several papers on critical analysis. Zhao Qingge, his mentor, naturally knew what he thought and wanted to explore the topic further. However, she still began with some other topics for preparation.

"Teacher Yu is right, Li is right. The level of agreement here makes me wonder if you two have been discussing in private... Peifeng, are you thinking of changing advisors?"