The Redemption of the Peach Blossom Spring

Abstract

Yan Lianke completed the first draft of his recent novel Central Plains (Zhongyuan) in 2020, when China was ravaged by COVID-19. The novel was then revised at the end of 2020, when Yan was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, and published in the bimonthly literary magazine Flower City (Huacheng) in March 2021. The production timing of this novel is indicative and meaningful. This chapter first conducts a textual analysis of Central Plains, arguing that the text embodies the alienation of people in daily life under capitalism and highlights the dominance of privileged mechanisms on the fixity of mobile meanings under the current globalization and transnationalism mobility. This chapter also interprets the spatial metaphors of Gaotian Town and Balou Mountains by drawing on the imagery of Peach Blossom Spring (Taohuayuan). The imagery of utopia is closely linked to the discussion of the novel's theme. Since Yan seems to have more or less inadvertently mentioned the title of his acceptance speech for the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature at the end of the novel, that is “A Village Larger than the World” (“Yi ge bi shijie geng da de cunzhuang”), his acceptance speech may be interpreted as a subtext of the novel. It is argued that this subtext provides the context for researchers to place Central Plains within Sinophone literature, further highlighting the dialectical relationship between the novel's title and the outside world. This novel can be used as a research subject to validate the “human condition” under the discourse of Sinophone/Xenophone (Huayifeng) initiated by David Der-wei Wang. Moreover, through the intertextuality with “A Village Larger than the World,” the meaning of this novel is not limited to the alienated human relationships within the family or under capitalism but also echoes the current discourse of Chinese nationhood by drawing on the imagery of Peach Blossom Spring.