Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.2, 2025 

Yunluo: A Realistic Reason and Mourning

(Abstract)

Jiang Xiao

The historical background of Zhang Chu’s novel Yunluo is reform and opening up. In the novel, Zhang Chu writes about the history of the mind with the sensual experience of his contemporaries. Wan Ying is the meta-narrative device of the novel. As a philosophical symbol of reality, she embodies a sympathetic method of understanding and a constant experience of time, and becomes a traumatic presence for reflecting on the experience of modernity. Accordingly, the novel depicts the consumerist order of everyday life and the aestheticization of desire, outlining the weariness and shame of a secular age. In an accelerated age, nostalgia is an inevitable choice for the novel to be embedded in the emotional structure of the reform era, but the mysteries of the characters’ births also create a rift between the old and the new. Characters from three generations of the forty years carry their spiritual origins with them as they float and search for their roots in the changing times, ultimately realizing that while it is important to explain where they came from, it is even more important for us to think about what kind of mentality we should have and where we should go in order to look forward to the future. The poetics of the novel combines the poetic experience of existentialist philosophy and the epistemology of realism, which is not only the historical rhetoric of contemporary narration, but also implies that the author reconstructs a poetic world in which the inner experience and the outer world are connected.