The Cracks in Root-Seeking Literature — A Rereading of Han Shaogong's Father Father
Abstract
Father Father, a novel published by Han Shaogong in 1985, is an important representative work of Root-Seeking Literature. With a bizarre and grotesque writing style, the work tells the story of Jitou Stockade and Bing Zai, pushing the marginalized rural culture back into the spotlight of the upsurge of cultural reflection in the 1980s. Although "Root-Seeking Literature" has solidified into a concept in the history of literature, we still cannot lump all such works together based on stereotypes when studying specific ones. There may never be a "standard answer" to the "root-seeking" in literature. In fact, however, this very "absence of an answer" is an answer in itself: it refuses to simplify rural experience into the binary opposition of civilization and ignorance, for no literary trend is a homogeneous singular entity, but a plural one brimming with tensions and cracks.
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