| In this paper, the so-called "bandit narrative" mainly refers to those literature with bandits as the protagonist, and whose function is social interventions and cultural critique. This paper’s observation is roughly from the30’s to80’s of last century. In the fifty years, bandit narrative mainly displayed the following three kinds of trend. The First one is the disenchantment of the bandit. Through alienating the extreme treatment of bandit, this trend emphasizes the secular nature of the man philosophically. We can take Li Jieren’s writing Ripples in the Stagnant Water in30’s for example. On one hand, it continued to think about the May-Fourth themes, such as the freedom and liberation of the person, on the other hand, it took the context of the times into account and made efforts to explore the relationship between the Historical and the small figures. This naturalistic style writing also bought out a new understanding start of the truth, namely the person rather than the revolution. Secondly, the bandit image and narrative were transformed and utilized by the politic and shaped an ideology symbolic system. This transformation was usually misunderstood as a violent process which in fact adopted a smooth way by repeating some of the basic Folk Ethics and public opinions and then formed a kind of political aesthetics or aesthetic politics. This paper selects Qiao Longbiao as an example and not only analyses the coincidence between literary and politic, but also points out these political symbol can be viewed as a narrative, a mentality or a discourse, even a specific cultural practice which core feature is economy. The last one could call aesthetic tendency. This tendency was intended to reveal the cultural implication, or to re-explain some basic concept of bandits, and effectively fulfilled the cultural critique. Red Sorghum, appeared in the period of Root-seeking, this work not only queried the validity of government statement on history, but also demonstrated the energy of the folk world which takes bandits as the representation by retelling the history of bandit family. What’s more, it offered a new interpretation of the meaning of "root".In addition to the discussion on the bandits narrative in the three different stages, in the conclusion, this paper tries to briefly point out that some basic literary and cultural motif, such as the dialogue between literature and politics, fiction and reality, individual and collective, tradition and modern, mainstream and marginal stream and emphasizes the historical and cultural value of the bandit narrative in the20th Century China. |
