On Narration Art Of Feng Zhi's Early Epics

As one kind of poems, epics have long been ignored. Neither its creation nor its theoretical construction is far from mature. As a special type of literature, in fact, epics could not gain its independence from other types in the history of ancient literature. Although the movement of new verse around the 1920's encouraged the epic's creation, it could not make a breakthrough in three basic models of traditional epics. The modern transition of epics actually started from Feng Zhi, whose creation in its artistic form has shed important light on the development of epics.Feng Zhi's epic is a kind of poetic narration. Apart from three traditional narrative models, namely, "narration", "experience" and "plot", he has applied a unique symbolic model. Poems mostly select materials from ancient mythology or folktales, which has cut off its direct connections with reality and has formed a sense of distance and illusion in the space and time. This virtual narration of space and time has created an insular artistic atmosphere, while the plots of epics have broken through the linear model and weaken the plots, intending to realize the changing course of characters' inner world. Feng Zhi chose unique symbolic images in his epics, who has formed an image system with rich symbolic connotations on the level of character and imago. By applying this narrative model, he conveys modern experience of individuals in modern society.The symbolic connotation in Feng Zhi's epics has been conveyed through a dramatic and modern form. His epics focus on building scenes of drama and aim to create a kind of mysterious and romantic narration conception through an illusioned circumstance of space and time. The conflicts in epics are not exteriorly represented by speeches and actions between characters, while they show a feature of inner world. Meanwhile, Feng Zhi's epics continuously change narrative views by changing personal pronouns. Multiple use of personal pronouns and cross-development of plot clues makes poems present a discourse mode of multi-voices.