A Despairer In Desperation: Another Kind Of "Authenticity" In 1930s

To counter the critics' tendency to lump together Zhou Wen and other Young Leftist writers,taking into account the present general conclusions of Zhou's identity as one of the Young Leftist Writers and of his works' sharp local colour, basing on his own texts, this paper, by meticulous analyses of his unique perspective upon arts and its profound cause, seeks mainly to detect the artistic glamour peculiar to Zhou's fictions and thereby uncovers the internal roots of what makes zhou as he is.This paper falls into three parts:Part 1: Marginalized land, wars and cities------a desperate situation.Unlike most of theprovincialism novelists in 193 Os, Zhou portrays the real marginalized land, the wild and isolated area far apart from modem civilization and cities, which assumes more geographical significance than humanism spirit. Such a situation is characterized, first by the state of wildness in terms of marginalized spiritual life and extreme shortage of material supplies, and secondly by desolation in the sense that it is far away from modern civilization and order, allowing barbarism, savagism and countless tragedies without stimulating any sympathetic impulse. In the eyes of Zhou Wen, the cities, where people lead a miserable and mean life and struggle hopelessly for survival, work in concert with the remote marginal land. In addition, Zhou is different from his peers in that deserting the 1930s tendency to consecrate the wars. Zhou aims at restoring the real looks of the wars now and then: wars are also "desperate situation", in another sense梩he man-made destitute land by civilized people. At this point, they are quite the same thing as the natural isolated land.In all, the isolated land, Cities and wars in Zhou's fictions all present a sense of desperation: the remote wildness suggesting hopelessness; unjust wars destroying humanities and civilization; the filthy atmosphere and endless travails in life suffocating the urban residents.Part 2: The hesitating weak group. The protagonists in Zhou's fictions have a common understanding that the world is a desperate land. They are weak either physically or psychologically. Their internal weakness defines ostentation of their struggles and strivings. Zhou Wen describes their feeble struggles in hot water without least concealment and polish.Part 3: Confronting the life: Zhou Wen's idea of authenticity toward life and ants. In 1930's when the theme of revolution plus love was pervasive, Zhou's theme of non- revolution plus non- love or anti-heroes, was another perspective on life and time. Zhou transcends the traditional Chinese convention of "elegant" literature and arts, and with his non-elegant taste in literature and arts, he, in a naturalism style, pierces into the "authenticity" of the world so as to awaken the sense of "truth" in people's mind. This is Zhou's unique idea about life and arts, and also the secret with which Zhou obtained his own artistic identity among the men of letters in 1930's...