Su Tong and New Historical Novels

Su Tong began to create and publish literary works in 1983 at the age of 20. His first medium-length novel Escape of 1943 written between the autumn and winter of 1986 has unique historical meanings. Su Tong's main representative works include Opium Family, Rouge, Wives and Concubines, Rice, Divorce Guide, Binu, etc.

Su Tong used flowery and romantic language to build a beautiful and elegant "southern world" in his novels. The author directly depicted people leading secular lives in this "southern world," and wrote about their understanding of life, their questions about existence and their complex and subtle subconscious world. "Escaping" is an image frequently appearing in Su Tong's novels, e.g. escaping from the hometown and escaping from the countryside to a city. He created a series of characters "on the run" and a group of vagrants having lost their living space or spiritual home. They resist the mediocre and boring life and the predetermined fate and look for a new way out but do not know the direction. Su Tong sang many sad plaintive songs for them. Another characteristic of Su Tong's novels is that they shape many full-fledged women's images. These women are no longer angels always pure and nice or ideological pioneers manifesting women's emancipation and fighting against men's oppression but women sunk into trivial life. They are eager to live and experience inner struggles, but they finally lose themselves, submit to the current status of their existence and stage tragedies of fate time and again.

More uniquely and importantly, Su Tong's creations link and traverse history and reality, and establish his own understanding of the meaning of life, social evolution and historical development.

Wives and Concubines is one of Su Tong's representative works. The story of the novel happened in the 1920s. The protagonist Songlian is an educated "new woman." Her family declines when she is 19 years old. To ensure sufficient food and clothing, she abandons the dignity and pursuit of "new women," voluntarily accepts old-style marriage, and becomes the fourth wife in the Chen family, a big feudal family with traditions inherited generation after generation. Though it is very rich, its inhibition and devastation of human nature are beyond all proportions. The master of the Chen family sleeps with a different wife every night and hangs a big red lantern as a mark. The frequency of hanging the big red lantern represents how favored that wife is, and thus she gets power or loses power. This phenomenon in the Chen family typically represents extension of traditional forces in Chinese feudal society to modern society. This living environment causes Songlian's self-respect to gradually disintegrate. She gradually participates in the cruel open strife and veiled struggle among the wives for winning favor. After watching many women being thrown into the deep well, Songlian feels afraid and desperate and becomes a lunatic at last. The novel explores the state of women's existence, describes women's psychological struggle in detail and in depth, and depicts the tragedy of many Chinese women's fate and life. In 1991, film director Zhang Yimou adapted it into the film Raise the Red Lantern, highlighted the specific historical scene, and achieved a strong artistic effect.

In Binu, Su Tong brings us back to remote antiquity. Lady Meng Jiang is an amazing woman who is loyal to love and travels one thousand li on foot to bring winter clothes to her husband in an ancient Chinese legend. Her story is known by almost all Chinese people. In this "myth-retelling" novel, Su Tong changed the name of the protagonist from Lady Meng Jiang to Binu. In the novel, Binu's tenacity and loyalty defeat secular conspiracies and ugly human nature. This woman at the bottom of the society oppressed by power and influence creates a myth-like legend with her love and kindness in troubled times. Su Tong thinks he never wanted to subvert the story of Lady Meng Jiang. "I will not adopt the method of deconstruction to change people's impression of Lady Mengjiang's beautiful legend. My novel undoubtedly tends to express feelings with 'tears.' The essence of Lady Meng Jiang's weeping at the Great Wall is 'weeping.' I focus on studying tears. This novel can be called a history of tears, describing various postures, types and origins of weeping." This shows Su Tong is different from many "myth-retelling" Western writers in that he does not deconstruct myths through later modern methods but highlights the most moving characters and scenes in myths through his understanding of history and thus reveals the value and significance of history and myths to the present age.

It is just in this sense that Su Tong's creation is associated with neo-historicism, so he is also regarded a representative writer of neo-historical novels. Neo-historicism, born in the British and American cultural and literary circles in the 1970s and 1980s, advocates including historical survey into literary research, and points out that there is no "foreground-background" relationship between literature and history and that they interact on and influence each other. The most important significance of neo-historicism is that it eliminates the boundary between history and literature and no longer emphasizes the traditional concept and model of real history and fictional literature. It gives special attention to history also having people's subjective consciousness, which can help people expand and deepen their understanding and comprehension of history itself.

In the mid-1980s, neo-historical novels emerged in China. Mo Yan's Red Sorghum and the creations of Su Tong and others jointly manifest the basic characteristics of neo-historical novels: history is no longer simply recognized as certain figures or things that emerged in the past and can be interpreted from multiple perspectives such as the past, today, others and oneself; historical figures are not just specific individuals who emerged in history, and these individuals also embody certain common features of human nature and manifest the universal significance of culture; historical scenes are time-specific, particular and even non-recurrent, but literary imagination and association can make scenes go through history and link history and reality - for example, many historical scenes of the Great Wall can be reproduced and sublimated in people's imagination today. Su Tong writes in Preface to Binu:

In the mythical tale of Lady Meng Jiang, a woman s tears bring the Great Wall crashing down; it is an optimistic tale, not a sorrowful one. Rather than characterize it as a woman s tears bringing an end to the drawn-out search for her husband, we might say that those tears enable her to resolve one of life s great predicaments. I have seen the Great Wall, and I have visited the Lady Meng Jiang Temple. But I have never seen Lady Meng Jiang. Who has? She is set.adrift in narrative history and takes on many forms. I have attempted to give her a rope, one that can stretch across two thousand years, allowing her to pidl me along with her; like her, I want to go to the Great Wall.

Su Tong's statement explains his understanding of neo-historicism very well, and his works also practice neo-historical views very well.