A Study Of Memory In Bi Feiyu’s Fictions

Memory is all-encompassing and embodies people’s generalization and interpretation of experience,self-consciousness,historical reality and national culture.Cognitively speaking,memories in the brain help people form their way of seeing the world and solidify their experiences of the past.Literature is closely related to memory.Memory is the cradle of literature.The essence of any literary creation is the imitation and demonstration of memory.The concept of memory writing extends from the western "memory" theory and has experienced a rich development process from individual to collective.In the history of contemporary Chinese literature,writers usually start from personal memory or collective memory,and the process of historical development is also a process in which the power discourse of social memory,political memory,cultural memory and writer’s personal memory compete with each other in collective memory.Writers have realized the transformation from writing grand collective memory to focusing on personal experience.Bi Feiyu,who was born in the 1960 s and became active in the literary scene in the 1990 s,is classified as a group of writers born in the 1960 s because of his similar background to other writers of his generation.Although the practice of dividing writers by generations is not very accurate for the study of individual writers,it can extract the similar common factors that affect writers’ memory within the collective framework.In Bi Feiyu’s personal memory,the "missing" caste and land are the motivation for him to write memories,while his childhood memories in the northern Jiangsu countryside are interwoven with the history of the "Cultural Revolution",forming the collision and fusion of personal memories and collective memories.Bi Feiyu’s youth coincided with the "golden period" of the 1980 s when the country was undergoing reform and opening up and ideological liberation.He began his writing career under the double influence of Chinese traditional literature and Western modern thought.In Bi Feiyu’s novel creation,he takes history,space and objects as the carriers of memory writing,trying to establish a relationship between his own memory and the external collective framework,so as to imprint individual memory with the brand of a nation and a country.Literary narrative is a way of demonstrating memory.Bi Feiyu uses personalized narrative perspective,language rhetoric,narrative sentiment and other means to demonstrate for us the beautiful,warm or thought-provoking side of the past memory.Narrative has become an effective strategy for him to connect personal memory and collective memory.The memory writing in Bi Feiyu’s novels is of great value to the history of Chinese contemporary literature and the history of contemporary thought.He avoided the practice of "scar literature" and "reflective literature" mixing individual memory with collective memory in response to the political call,and also made up for the defect of "avant-garde literature" divorced from real experience.He constructed the memory writing framework of "people with things" and provided the real and felt "Biesian experience" for contemporary literature.At the same time,he established the self-identity of contemporary intellectuals in the process of memorizing the history and expressed the ideological value of looking at the spiritual home.