MCLC: reading Yu Hua's Seventh Day (1,2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: reading Yu Hua's Seventh Day (1)
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Here's another report on Yu Hua's new novel.

Kirk

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Source: Global Times (6/18/13):
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/789704.shtml#.Ue53M2TwJgI

An afterlife perspective
By Lu Qianwen

This year is a big year for Chinese novels, with a long list of leading
domestic authors including Wang Anyi, Su Tong, Yu Hua and A Lai already or
soon to publish new works. Currently with Su's latest work,The Tale of the
Siskin, just released, Yu Hua, another representative writer of the
avant-garde literary upsurge of the mid 1980s and 1990s, comes out with
his long anticipated novel, The Seventh Day.

Thanks to the domestically banned film To Live by Zhang Yimou in 1994,
which was adapted from Yu's original novel and earned high international
recognition, Yu is far more recognized in the world over other leading
authors at home (except for Mo Yan now).

That's why each time news about a new release by Yu begins flying around,
readers and literature critics crane their necks waiting for the new book
to land. That was the case seven years ago for Yu's last novel,Brothers,
and it's happening now for The Seventh Day.

Simply by informing bookstores about the release of Yu's new book and
without revealing any of the contents, the publisher received more than
700,000 orders from bookstores around the country. And within 24 hours of
the book's release on June 14, both its paper and electronic versions
topped the sales charts of amazon.cn.

However, the overwhelming attention didn't result in corresponding praise
for the book. Just like the embarrassment Brothers encountered in 2006,
The Seventh Day triggered an uproar questioning whether Yu has gone over
the hill as a great writer who once created classics like To Live
(1992),Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995) and Cries in the Drizzle
(2003).

Drifting souls 

Labeled by the publisher as more desperate than To Live and more absurd
than Brothers, the story inThe Seventh Day is about a man's seven-day tour
after his death. Yang Fei, the only leading character in the book, dies in
an accident but can't afford the expensive cemetery. So he becomes a
solitary drifting soul without a burial place.

Hence he starts his seven-day infernal wandering during which he meets
other dead souls who like him didn't have the money to buy a cemetery
space and ended up wandering as ghosts. Meeting them enables Yang to
experience a series of absurdities, which are actually a reflection of
real occurrences in the daily lives of Chinese people.

For example, on the third day of his tour he runs into 38 dead souls who
were killed in widely reported fire, reminding Yang that the number was
only seven when he was still alive and read the news about it. Also on the
fifth day, he meets a man who was executed for murdering his wife who had
been missing but police never found her body. But half a year after his
sentence was carried out, the wife returned home, implicating cases of
injustice often seen in recent years.

Examples hinting at recent social realities fill the book: there's the
"rat tribe (those people who can only afford to live in dark and messy
basements in big cities due to high rents)," police being killed by
vengeful criminals, and the illegal but rampant underground kidney selling
business of the past.

In the book, the author creates a fair and caring infernal world to strike
a sharp contrast with the real world. "The Seventh Day shows Yu Hua's
anxiety, anger or even despair about reality," said Hong Zhigang, a
literature critic who wrote the Critical Biography on Yu Hua in 2005.
"This is utterly a realism novel," Hong told the Global Times.

A news skewer

Despite the pressing take on social realities, the book is criticized for
kneading together too many news stories from the headlines. "Clearly the
book isn't a seven-year work and it actually didn't need much time to
finish since half of the contents are hot topics on Weibo in recent
years," said Lu Shu, a veteran member of douban.com, a  site that provides
information and comments on books, films and music.

"It writes seven days in seven chapters, and in each day the protagonist
encounters different people and stories, but the stories don't relate to
each other except for the common feeling of despair," said Lu, "The
fragmented stories make the whole book look like a collection of short
stories."

Choosing to concentrate news in a literary work is a risky choice for a
writer, especially one who has established fame through the way he tells
stories. In Yu's early works like To Live and Chronicle of a Blood
Merchant, his ability to convey feelings of sadness and compassion for the
characters in a concealed way impressed many readers.

But this time, he chose to put those "already extremely tragic"
ingredients straightforward on the table, trying to hit readers more
directly and deeply. "From the perspective of social responsibilities, The
Seventh Day is a good book for its bold revealing of society," said Lu,
"but from the aspect of its literary value, I'm not a fan."

Yet in Hong's view, vast references of social news are just the author's
way to show readers more deeply the gruesome nature of our lives. "Too
many uses of it definitely spark controversy, but he still chose to write
them all out instead of just selecting one or two to weave a linear story,
which he was adept at. He wants to reflect life with the quantity of
facts," said Hong.

Style aversion?

Stylistic changes in this new book do not just lie in the way stories
unfold, but also in the use of language. Diverting from his usual plain
and detailed recounting of incidents that befall the characters and the
way those characters react, Yu this time used a lot of inner monologues
mingled with rhetoric.

When describing the mental state of leading character Yang Fei, Yu often
communicates an idea through imagery: "I feel like a tree back to the
forest, a drip of water back into a river, and a particle of dust back to
the earth."

But Lu said, "I don't like this kind of rhetoric. It's repetitive and
pretentious, I wasn't touched."

According to Hong, the style is not changed and is consistent with the
Yu's usual style. "Realism and absurdity are always mixed in his novels,
and this one is no exception. When he writes about human caring..., it is
very real, and when it comes to absurdities like compulsory demolition, he
takes the irony to extremes," said Hong.

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From: gabriel wu <yeowcgwu at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: reading Yu Hua's Seventh Day (2)

Mao Jian 毛尖 also published her reading of Seventh Day, which is harsh but
noteworthy, on Apple Daily (July 14, 2013).

Gabriel Wu
City University of Hong Kong



毛尖：牛仔裤崩裂

喬治．克魯尼在科恩兄弟的《閱後即焚》裏演一個中產偷情男。有一次，他專門跑大超市
買了一捆鋼材回家，音樂稍稍有些刺激地伴着他載鋼材回家，管狀的鋼材像槍
管，他偷偷運到樓梯下的房間，沒讓老婆知道。隨後幾天他時不時地出沒工具間，神神秘秘
地折騰着觀眾以為他要造甚麼凶器，最後鏡頭裏出現了他的發明：女性自慰椅。

看完余華的《第七天》，想起這個細節，因為類似的期待落差。七年等來《第七天》，小說
出場前幾乎是《聖經》的排場，小說題詞也用了《創世紀》的「第七日」，宣傳
大意是，有這本小說，可以安息了。

真可以安息了。十年前，在上海作協，余華作了一次講座，我唯一有印象的是他談到了一則
社會新聞，說一個女孩跳樓，「巨大的衝撞力把她的牛仔褲崩裂了。」他把這句
話說了三遍。十年後，在《第七天》中的「第四天」，這個新聞全景重現：「劉梅留在那個
世界裏最後的情景是嘴巴和耳朵噴射出鮮血，巨大的衝撞力把她的牛仔褲崩裂
了。」後面，余華對這崩裂的牛仔褲作了具體描繪：裂成一條一條的，有點像拖把上的布條。

「牛仔褲崩裂」，在我看來，全方位地象徵了余華的寫作。《第七天》裏的「死人」，全部
來自崩裂型社會新聞：死於強拆的，死於弒警的，死於賣腎的，死於冤案的，死
於火災的，等等等等，這些新聞主人公原汁原味地進入小說，余華的工作，就是加點小補
語：「一條一條的」。而全本《第七天》也就這樣裂成「七條」，從前那個包裹在
牛仔褲裏的充滿緊張感和血肉感的余華在這裏崩裂了，連《兄弟》中那段子般的汪洋恣肆
都不復存在。自《十個詞彙裏的中國》之後，余華不知是對這種卡片式寫作上了
癮，還是只能卡片作文了，所以網友說，這部小說如果是慕容雪村或李承鵬或韓寒寫的，他
會釋懷。

由此，在社會學意義上，余華這樣的第一排作家最終崩裂了全民的「作家」想像。更有意
思的是，在鋪天蓋地的失望中，余華自己為自己站台：「最能代表我全部風格的小
說，只能是這一部。因為從上世紀八十年代的作品一直到現在作品裏面的因素，統統包含
進去了。我已經寫了三十多年的小說，如果沒有文學價值，我想我不會動手。」穿
牛仔褲十八歲出門遠行的余華，高傲得不屑任何掌聲，三十年過去，他自己為自己鼓掌，連
郭敬明的淡定都沒有。

中國最好的作家，給讀者播網絡新聞，給自己看CCTV，這情形，讓人想起當年拍完《無極》
的陳凱歌，自己在電視採訪中給自己頒奧斯卡。而我們似乎有理由期待，從
中國精英導演開始的電影墮落之後，中國小說或者也將迎來一個小時代。