余华长篇小说新作《文城》的承续与创新

The Inheritance and Innovation of Yu Hua’s New Novel Wencheng

余华长篇小说《文城》综合了余华20世纪80年代中短篇小说的先锋性和90年代长篇小说“回归”现实主义的传统性,既有艺术形式上的先锋探索,又有对历史和现实的真实反映,具有极高的可读性。《文城》的内容既有“生活的现实”,又有“文学的现实”,其“现实”是“虚伪”与“真实”的混合。与余华其他长篇小说相比,《文城》的时代与历史、现实与想象、虚构与真实的“并存”更为自然无痕。小说讲了三个故事,这三个故事内部是统一的,相互之间却是分裂的,但这种分裂在余华创作的整体上却实现了某种统一性,也即先锋的余华与“回归”的余华在这部小说中实现了统一。《文城》在书写血腥、暴力、死亡上,在语言诗性上,在人物对话书写上都承续了余华小说的一贯风格,但在主题、结构、题材、人物形象塑造等方面又有比较大的变化,具有新的开拓意义。

Combining the avant-garde nature of Yu Hua’s short stories in the 1980sand the tradition of“returning”realism in the novels in the 1990s,Yu Hua’s novel Wencheng,therefore,not only has the avant-garde exploration in artistic forms,but also reflects the history and reality as realist novels which endows it with readability.The content of Wencheng includes both“the reality of life”and“the reality of literature”,which means its“reality”is a mixture of“hypocrisy”and“reality”.Compared with Yu Hua’s other novels,the“coexistence”of times and history,reality and imagination,fiction and reality in this novel is more natural.The novel tells three stories which are unified internally and split extrinsically,while the split has achieved some unity at a higher level,that is,on the whole of Yu Hua’s creation.It means the pioneer Yu Hua and the“returning”Yu Hua have achieved unity in this novel.Wencheng inherits the consistent style and expertise of Yu Hua’s novels in terms of writing bloodiness,violence,death,etc.,in terms of the poetic nature of language,and in terms of writing character’s dialogue,but there are relatively big changes and new development in terms of the theme,structure,subject matter,character image,etc.