Fiction of Wang Meng and Alai

Since the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals have been preoccupied with the notion of national survival and grand history in the face of foreign invasion and forces of modernization. In order to rejuvenate the weakening country, Chinese literature, as the intellectuals’ most powerful weapon, has since been devoted to the idea of social progress, supporting the belief in a teleological history. In the post-Mao era, when writers have tried to fill in the historical void created by the Great Cultural Revolution, historical teleology remains significant in the literature of the new era. It works in two ways to look back to the nation’s recent past and, at the same time, to endorse the “forward-looking” political agenda in Deng Xiaoping’s regime. Whether it is “scar literature” which focuses on investigating social tragedies that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, or “root-seeking literature,” which turns to the premodern and indigenous traditions for the “pure” past, the retrospective literature in the 1980s reaffirms traditional historical narratives that aim to advance the progressive viewpoint. As Yang Xiaobin explicates in his discussion of root-seeking literature, the seemingly contradictory view of time is created “by guiding the historical development toward an ideal future through the detour of recalling the presumably purer and more vital primitive.” ¹ In other words, the narration of the past not only accommodates the present; it ultimately anticipates an idealistic future. More importantly, with the gradual opening up of society and the literary world since the late 1970s, more and more writers began to shift their attention from the pursuit of historical truth to history-writing per se. Through experiments in form, they challenged the reader’s faith in the historical subject, casting doubts on historical determinacy and wholeness, the notion of progress, and the representability of history. By analyzing Wang Meng’s famous Seasonal Series and Alai’s Red Poppies (Chen’ai Luoding, aka When Dust Settles, 1999), this chapter examines the innovative narrative approach to explore the past in Chinese literature of the 1990s, with a focus on the two authors’ contemplation on the representation of history.