More Pop Fiction

I finished my novella (Did I tell you?) and am now working on the idea for another one. But, you know, I dread critique. My skin isn’t tough enough yet. But I dread more to be a bad writer, or a formulaic one. I don’t think that, just because, I’m relatively young my literature has to deal with sex and angst and that in an unsophisticated and juvenile way. I want my writing, whatever the genre, to be bold and beautiful, in the since of having a meaning beyond me and even beyond the confines of the world created in the text. I want to build upon the “kernel of truth;” “to use writing as an art, not as a method of selfexpression.” Writing is, of course, a good outlet for such frustrations but the youth literature of first Japan and its cellular literature and now China disturbs me. It is certainly not a trend that I would like to see bleed into American youth’s hands, though they aren’t reading anyway. It chills me to read in Aventurina King’s NY Times essay that

While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”

Tao Dongfeng, a professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing who has harshly criticized some post-’80s writers for their lack of social conscience and their reliance on overblown fantasy elements, said young fans see authors like Guo less as writers than as “entertainment idols.” “What they write isn’t important,” he said. “What’s important is Han Han’s looks, the cars that he drives.”

Such things are certainly important to the authors themselves. I met with Guo last summer in a newly built upscale area on the outskirts of Shanghai, in the offices of Ke Ai (a homophone of the Chinese word for “cute”), the entertainment company he established in 2004 to produce teenage literary magazines like “I5land” and “Top Novel.” He enthusiastically demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of “American Idol” and his excitement at seeing the “Transformers” movie. An hour before the interview, I had phoned to ask if I could take his picture. He politely refused, saying an hour wasn’t long enough to prepare. “My fans worry about whether I look good, what clothes I wear,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”

I guess it’s just my old fashioned sensibilities, but I think writing should be active and purposeful. There should be deep beauty in it. I’m expressing myself poorly on the point, because of course, beauty is relative, but I abhor the thought of suicide, rape, pregnancy and murder becoming the formula that sells for young adult fiction in any community. That desensitizes one to the true nature of such things and it all becomes a bad play instead of a call to think and to act. And the artists themselves are a part of that. King’s essay states that:

Guo’s second novel, “Never Flowers in Never Dreams,” a love triangle featuring harmless forays into the Beijing underworld, was published while he was studying film at Shanghai University. It sold 600,000 copies in its first month. Soon after, Guo was accused of plagiarizing the novel from Zhuang Yu’s “In and Out of the Circle.” In 2006, a court ordered him to pay $25,000 to Zhuang Yu and to apologize. Guo paid the judgment but refused to apologize or admit any wrongdoing. The press was outraged, calling Guo “Super Plagiarism Boy,” a play on “Super Voice Girls,” the Chinese equivalent of “American Idol.” When the author Wang Shuo, famous for his best-selling novels about Beijing drifters and lowlifes published in the late 1980s and early ’90s, denounced Guo as an “out-and-out thief” with “no sense of decency,” Guo replied that it was only “normal for the previous generation to discipline the later generation.”

Guo remains unbothered by the episode. “A lot of people who criticize you, they haven’t read your works, they really don’t understand what this thing is, so I don’t pay attention to those opinions,” he told me.

Neither, apparently, do his fans. While the case was still in process, Guo produced a musical album, “Lost,” a thin spread of guitar and piano under lyrics about young love, performed by singers chosen in a national competition he organized. It sold 400,000 copies. Last year, his novel “Cry Me a River,” about the ostracism and suicide of a pregnant high school student, sold a million copies in 10 days.

But that’s fame anywhere, right? We don’t always hold people accountable financially. I guess my worst fear is that of an end of days of literature, replaced by pop culture and bright lights that hide behind them a dearth, a death, and a severe lack of art in its execution which is what “explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.” Well said, Virginia.