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This article investigates the specific realism deployed in To Live (1993), Yu Hua's description of the struggles of the spoiled son of a wealthy landowner transformed into a kindhearted peasant after the revolution. The analysis shows how narrative technique and Yu Hua's active interventions in his narrative affect the novel. Originally banned in China, it was later called one of the nation's most influential books. Three main themes within the novel are highlighted, that of violence and death, the role of spiritual cynicism, and the general humanism pervading the narrative. Five types of narrative operations are at play in To Live; the use of a dual voice, the invention of unique plot patterns, the mechanism of anachrony, the recourse to metalanguage, and the technique of double-voiced discourse. The ultimate purpose of this expanded realism is to make readers understand the world thanks to embodied experiences of language and not just by following a sequence of events.
Keywords: To Live / Yu Hua / narratology / narrative voices / cynicism / humanism / realism
Yu Hua (I960-) is considered one of the most radical, controversial, and avant-garde Chinese writers. His fiction places him at the forefront of China's contemporary literary arena and exemplifies the swift rise and fall of China's avant-garde. Yu Hua's best known novel in the Anglophone world, To Live (Huozhe, 1993), was awarded Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998; the book was named one of the 10 most influential books in China in the last decade and was adapted by Zhang Yimou into a critically acclaimed film.1 The author is the recipient of numerous international awards and honors, including the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award, and was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2004.
Now known as one of China's best-known novelists, Yu Hua was born in Haiyan, Zhejiang province, in 1960. He grew up in and around a hospital where his parents were both doctors. His education was encompassed almost entirely by the Cultural Revolution, an experience that marked most of his stories and novels, which explains his penchant for descriptions of brutal violence. As an adult, he was assigned to a job as a dentist but five years later turned to...