The Importance Of Existentialism In Scar Literature

In spite of the spiritual poverty of the social reality suicide is not an option. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference, it is a futile question, says Camus, the real question is whether life has a meaning or not, because if the answer is negative then suicide is legitimate. But life seems to be worth to be lived, even if there is no God, even after the Holocaust it is still possible to find a meaning beyond nihilism. Existentialism tout-court, unlike the previous literary framework, rejected suicide in name of an impossible choice. Outlive oneself:

“My all life is behind me. I see it completely; I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say

Do we find absurdity in Scar Literature? As a matter of fact we do, though we have to abandon the metaphysical halo surrounding Western literature and accepting a more secular dimension. The world of Scar Literature immediately becomes inexplicable, it loses the rationality in which the Party had compressed reality, and instead it allows reality to explode into nihilist and irrational fragments, as it is for instance the bigamy in What Should I do? or the blind obedience to Mao in Drunken among Flowers where a young city girl let a poor peasant sleep with her in the name of the revolution . Xiao Yi’s story, the Little Egg Girl is absurd in a way that it depicts the malaise of a generation looking for identity. And it’s not about women condition in China, neither the fanatic rhetoric over class enemy, it’s about the absolute loneliness those characters are inevitably tied on once the ideological machine closes on them. What if I really were? is a political act of course, but it is as well a literary satire rooted in absurdity and melancholy. Well

If a man is a coward or a hero it is not because he was born coward or hero, but because he made himself as such. Such a philosophy had enormous consequences on the literary production which followed. Existentialist novels tend to cover a space of few days, they abound of details and introspective monologue, they recall god but to avoid it, all in all they use literary techniques which help to diffuse a realistic atmosphere around the characters and their surroundings. A suffocating realism covering the all narrative is very much present in Scar Literature as well. Clearly we shall keep in mind that Chinese realism is very much different from let’s say the Italian verismo of Verga or the French realism of Zola and Balzac. The former is a scientific experiment which wanted to prove the application of Positivist methodology of natural science over human science. Chinese realism is nothing as such, it is the attempt to reproduce historical truth after for decade it was denied, to restore the distinction between I and They, to some extent between self and society, after for decades it had submitted to a collective We. Their works touched the overall social stage,