Hua Tong, "Yan'an Seeds"

Cultural revolution fiction: what can one say about an individual piece? Like the individual humans of the time, the individual fictions are lost in the vast sea of the collective. But, taking this one as a proxy for the whole, it is curious how socialist fiction rides roughshod over the Aristotelian conception of literature as a medium between history and philosophy. The constant erasure of personality, individuality, unpredictability, and hence historicity by ideology makes literature less of a medium than a sort of sad, vacant stage on which one hero drags the corpse of the other by the heels.