20201214 trans

Cao Runxin 曹润鑫

In fact, reportage research and composition along with organizing and performing in roving theatrical troupes became one of the principal modes of ”internship” for young writers in the socialist educational system as it emerged in Yan’an.

Yang Shuo, Liu Baiyu, and Qin Mu were all in their twenties at this time, so they had limited literary experience before the 1940s. Thus for Liu and Yang, the Yan’an years helped define for them what literature is supposed to be from process to product. Qin Mu, however, never went to Yan’an; he spent the entire war in Guangdong, Guangxi and Guizhou. Thus though he had experience with some of these procedures of production in progressive circles in those areas, Qin Mu was not saturated in this kind of cultural environment.

Chang Huiyue 常慧月

Once socialism or communism took the position of power (as in Yan’an during the war against Japan and then throughout the PRC after 1949) critical prose writing (whether essays or reportage) as it had been practiced during wartime became much more dubious from the point of view of cultural officials, and nonfiction needed to become a vehicle of literary celebration of public, historical achievements.[ See for example Yang Shuo, ”Qian jin, gangtie de dajun” (March Forth, Great Army of Steel, 1949), Zhonghua sanwen zhencang ben, Yang Shuo juan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998) 25-33; ”Pingchang de ren” (An ordinary man, 1951) 25-33; ”Pingchang de ren” (An ordinary man, 1951), Yang Shuo juan 13-17, ”Gebi tan shang de chuntian” (Springtime on the Gobi, 1953), Yang Shuo juan 29-33. ] This is precisely the familiar dilemma of Ding Ling, coming into Yan’an society well trained as a keen critic of her environment. It was an awkward transition, except for those who came into the socialist educational cultural system while still relatively young. To them the business of literature was that of constructing an unprecedented new vision.

Chen Han 陈涵

Writers’ changing roles changed literary prose

Each of the three authors I am discussing here was born between 1913 and 1919, only a few short years after the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China. They were all in their late teens and early twenties at the outbreak of the war against Japan. Being roughly the same age, they shared the same historical and cultural atmosphere, but being in different locations, engaged in the war in different capacities, their transition into the aesthetics of incongruous lyricism took different paths and thus embodied different tensions.

Chen Hui 陈惠

Yang Shuo[ 1913-1968, orig. Yang Shujin(?), of Penglai County in Shandong.] is probably the most ”standard” of the three from the point of view of the Communist Party in that he went to Yan’an early (winter 1937) and worked under the direction of the party’s cultural apparatus for the duration of the war there, in the northwest, and in Guangzhou. Like the reportage writer Huang Gang, he was of the right age for this Yan’an-based period to be his principal formative and educational experience, deeply conditioning his approach and attitude toward writing in the 1950s and 1960s. That being said, Yang Shuo was more concerned with issues of literary quality and symbolic meaning than others writing under the direction of the CP, and this concern colored even his most famous works with puzzling tones of ambivalence and reservation.

Chen Jiangning 陈江宁

Liu Baiyu[ 1916-?, orig. Liu Yuzan, of Beijing. See Niu Yunqing, Liu Baiyu pingzhuan (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1995).] arrived in Yan’an relatively early too, and was quickly immersed in its literary activism. Only weeks after his arrival, and though Liu was only 22 at the time, Mao Zedong personally assigned him to lead a five-person escort for the American marine observer Evans Carson to visit the guerilla areas in Northern China (one of a variety of types of ”cultural worker” assignments in the communist base areas). Despite this promising start and occasional contact with Mao, Liu published works that incurred the wrath of some critics and officials, became a target in the Yan’an zhengfeng campaign after Mao’s Talks, and underwent a process of mutual and self-criticism at the Central Party School.

Chen Jiaxin 陈佳欣

Though the result of this painful process was apparently ”successful” (Liu went on to hold important cultural administrative positions in the PRC), it also alienated him from certain elements in the literary community and led him to take an aggressively authoritarian role as the Party secretary of the Writers’ Assocation during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and 58. This alienation is occasionally revealed in his sanwen works from that point on.

Qin Mu[ 1919-199?, orig. Lin Juefu, b. Singapore, of Chenghai County in Guangdong. See Huang Zhuocai, Weng Guangyu and Ai Zhiping, Qin Mu pingzhuan (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1989).] is one more step removed because he did not share the Yan’an experience with Yang and Liu. Though he was active in the literary resistance during the war against Japan, and though his biographers insist that he originally planned to go to Yan’an as early as 1938, he never went there (Huang, Weng and Ai, 1989, 26-27).

Chen Jingjing 陈静静

Because he did belong to the age cohort and had the same basic inclinations, he did come into contact with the same organizations (the Communist Party, Wenxie) that the others did, and indeed could even have met Yang Shuo in Canton when Yang was sent there on assignment in 1938. He also engaged in similar types of literary intervention, organizing and performing traveling anti-Japanese theater in the countryside, accompanying troops in the field as a writer, and publishing anti-Japanese and anti-KMT/US zawen in Rear or KMT area newspapers. But his experience during the war was not a community experience: Qin at first alone and later with his wife underwent the trials and tribulations of a writer at wartime as an individual, making his own decisions and contacting organizations only when the opportunity presented itself and he wished to do so.

Chen Sha 陈莎

Thus there is an especially independent streak about him that made relations between him and the Writer’s Association after 1949 somewhat strained. He was attacked in the 1957 zhengfeng movement, and it was not until 1962 that he joined the Communist Party.

Thus each of these writers exhibited different tensions as they approached writing after 1949, and particularly during and after the Hundred Flowers Campaign. All of them, however, adopted sanwen as a vehicle to express themselves, and while these essays at time seem on the surface to be pat or fulsome propaganda, they continue to be colored by these at times very personal tensions that often make the essays more compelling reading in spite of themselves.

Chen Sunfu 谌孙福

Procedures and interests of socialist essays

The sanwen of the late 1950s and early 1960s, because of a variety of different such personal and larger cultural tensions, manifest various kinds of ”incongruous lyricism.” All three of these writers had their essays included in textbooks for junior high school and high school during the 1960s and 70s. But these canonic texts represented only the completion of a gradual process of adjustment and must be viewed alongside earlier, less well-known efforts by these authors as well as their works in other genres, particularly fiction.

Chen Yongxiang 陈永相

Friction with leftist aesthetics

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the term sanwen was more frequently associated with ”lyricism” (shuqing) and opposed to ”expository” (shuoli) prose essays. In practice, this is indicated by long descriptive passages, the frequent use of direct address to the reader in the second person as well as rhetorically loaded interrogative, imperative and expressive particles. At particularly rhapsodic moments, socialist sanwen texts take on a fu-like rhetoric, syntactic parallelism and a piling up of listed concrete objects and rich varieties of adverbs and adjectives. One is attempted to associate this attempt at of verbal profusion with certain Republican period stylists like Zhu Ziqing and Yu Pingbo, but the socialist version is much more extravagant both in verbiage and emotional exhibitionism.

Cheng Yusi 成于思

On the level of imagery, a general fascination with images of light, fire and torches left over from the war period[ Particularly evident in Liu Baiyu’s reportage works from the late 1940s.] remains but in part gives way to a new interest in flower imagery in the 1950s.[ Qin Mu’s essays and some of Yang Shuo’s are filled with varieties of flowers and plants, enjoyed in themselves and as symbols of other things. ] Finally a strategy common to all three writers is to conceive of a vista or an experience as a living landscape painting, emphasizing a magnitude of vision and the accompanying emotional exhilaration. In some cases, these highly visual essays are accompanied with illustrations uncannily consistent with the texts’ visualization of the landscape.

Deng Jinxia 邓锦霞

Yang Shuo

Yang Shuo’s 1959 essay ”The Highest Peak of Taishan”[ Taishan jiding, wr. 1959, from Haishi. Yang, 125-129.] features this kind of overt reference to landscape painting. The text simply narrates the author’s ascent of the famous Shandong mountain, but the narrative structure of the climb is interwoven with a figurative structure consisting of three elements. The first is the traditional landscape painting motif: ”All the way from the foothills, looking closely at the mountain landscape, I felt like what was before me was not the lord of the Five Famous Mountains, but more like a green and blue landscape painting of astounding size,” (Yang, 125) an idea he develops as a conceit with figurative descriptive language. Second, Yang writes ”after a while, I began to feel that I was not only looking at a landscape painting, but randomly flipping through a historical manuscript.” (Yang, 126)

Ding Daifeng 丁代凤

This in reference to the calligraphy of famous visitors to the mountain carved into its sides and the legends and stories about them. The third and last layer of figuration is the sense that the author is not climbing a mountain, but climbing into the sky.

The touristy desire to see the sunrise from Taishan’s peak introduced at the essay’s outset and which teases the reader occasionally throughout the text is deftly frustrated in the rhetorical pursuit of what to the author is a higher aim: the recontainment of a Taishan travelogue into the extolling of the historical achievements of socialism. Once he has passed through the Southern Gate of Heaven, the author sees the Shandong landscape spread out at his feet, but what he notices are the grand commune wheat fields (amber waves of grain) as opposed to patchwork agricultural quilt of yore, and smoky plumes in the distance are not scattered homes but factories.

Fang Jieling 方洁玲

Though the weather had been clear at night near the peak when the party went to bed early in order to get up in time for the sunrise, fog and rain overnight linger to create an overcast sky at dawn. But author’s socialist/communist landscape epiphany of the previous evening eclipses the banal tourist wish for a beautiful sunrise – he has seen ”another kind of” (metaphysical) sunrise, that of the Chinese people/nation on the horizon.

In his essay about Kunming’s camellias,[ ”Chahua fu” (Ode to the Camellia) written 1961, from Dongfeng di yi zhi. Yang 134-37.] Yang Shuo opens with a discussion with an artist friend about what kind of painting would show the face of the ”motherland” (zuguo). He then turns to his trip to Kunming after returning from travels abroad.

Gan Fengyu 甘奉玉

Especially as a ”northerner” he is struck by the beauty of the red camellia flowers around the city and in Huating Temple, where he is escorted by Jin Zhiwen, the landscaper. His attention is drawn to one variety called ”Child’s Face” tongmian. As is almost invariably the case in Yang Shuo essays, the subject he has chosen becomes an opportunity for the author to contemplate the symbolic resonances of its characteristics – in this case the camellia’s sensitivity to proper care, environment and natural enemies, but also the fact that great trees centuries old have been carefully cultivated with hundreds and even thousands of blossoms. A detailed description of the gardener himself provides the author with the key to the signified:

Gao Mingzhu 高明珠

I fervently gazed at his hands, hands covered with mud-stained calluses. Then I looked at his face, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were cut deep, and it was not necessary to ask about his background: I could guess that he was a middle aged man who had been through a lot. If he waled away from you and into the crowd, he would vanish immediately and it would be very hard to find him again – he was just that kind of very ordinary laborer. But it is just this kind of person, month after month, year after year, exerting mind and body, cultivating flowers and plants with all his effort, beautifying our lives. This is how beauty is created. (Yang, 136)

Gong Yumian 龚钰冕

When author observes a group of schoolchildren who have come to see the camellias, the bond is cemented and the ”paint the face of the nation” riddle is solved – paint the Child Face Camelia.

What is incongruous in Yang Shuo’s lyricism, in many other examples in addition to these, is that no matter how transparent the symbolism and fervent the message of his essay, there is almost always slight ambivalence introduced by negative elements at the fringes: why does the glorification of socialist progress in ”Taishan’s Highest Peak” have to come at the expense of the famous sunrise? What has Jin Zhiren ”been through” that has deepened his wrinkles, and why should that pain be related to the creation of beauty?

Gu Dongfang 顾东方

Liu Baiyu

Liu Baiyu’s transition toward sanwen in the PRC came from the direction of reportage literature. Liu had established some reputation as a novelist on the literary scene through key connections he had made with Ba Jin, Zhang Tianyi, Ye Yiqun and other major figures in the 1930s. But by 1949 it was his reportage collections, including Around the Northeast, The Light Shines Down on Shenyang, Cutting across the Central Plains, and The Torches Glow Red in the Yangtse River that were some of the best known works by a communist writer during the civil war in the late 1940s.

Guan Qinqing 管钦清

The late 1950s text ”Lamplight” revisits the experience of the battlefield in a much more peaceful China. ”Lamplight” has a forceful, shrill rhetoric in its development of the image of glowing light through a number of different contexts, from war to socialist economic construction without losing the sense of militant struggle that informed the image of light for Liu from the beginning. [ ”Denghuo” (Lamplight), Liu Baiyu, Hong manao ji (Red agate) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1983) 5-11. ] Evidently Liu, though he holds influential positions in the literary establishment of the time, feels alienated by certain elements on the literary scene, particularly in regard to the stigmatization of the experience of the battlefield:

Gui Yizhi 桂一枝

. . . nowadays some people treat the subject of war, regardless of right or wrong, regardless of green red black or white always make it look bloody, dark and horrible! They call this ”through the soldier’s eyes,” ”foxhole realism” Hai! This makes those of us who have strapped puttees on our calves and have had the smell of gunpowder about the shoulders want to laugh our heads off. What can you do? There are brave soldiers who fight for what’s right; there are counter-revolutionary murderers; and there are cowardly traitors. Since there are different kinds of soldiers, there have to be different soldier points of view, and there must be different kinds of ”foxhole reality.” Perhaps there are those who would criticize me: how did I get from lamplight to this argument about war, aren’t I getting way off track? Actually, no. The lamplight I am talking about may be a small matter, but it really is a reality of life at war. Getting back to the subject, on the chill wilderness of the Songhua river, trudging through winter snows, wading through summer rapids, from lamplight I was able to understand a certain kind of warmth. (Liu, 7-8)

Guo Lu 郭露

"The Brilliance of Spring,"[ ”Qingchun de shanguang,” written 1959, in Hong manao ji, 23-33.] a lengthy, fu-like essay extolling ten years of socialism in China, manifests many of the distinguishing characteristics of Liu’s post-1949 sanwen. Though written in the wake of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, it casts no shadow on the essay and though there is flower imagery, significantly, it does not emphasize diversity (as in ”hundred flowers”). At about 6,000 characters, it is also much longer than most of Yang Shuo’s essays, which are usually about half that long, particularly those most revered and anthologized. ”The Brilliance of Spring” does not start out with a clearly-defined topic; the occasion or motivation of its composition did not become obvious to me until near the end.

Han Haiyang 韩海洋

The visualization with which the text begins juxtaposes a dawn construction scene complete with a handsome, rugged construction worker in Tian’anmen square with author’s memories of other occasions when he was ”right here, in this spot!” including most significantly, a vision of a Japanese tank rolling up from Qianmen, its treads gouging scars in the ground. Liu also includes memories of the entry of the People’s Liberation Army into Beijing, and the ceremony at which Mao Zedong officially established the People’s Republic, but the author moves from one impression-layer to the next vaguely and ambiguously, punctuated with the refrain ”Here! It was right here!”

Han Wanzhen 韩宛真

Liu makes a conspicuous gesture away from the scene of Tian’anmen to other significant spaces including oilfields in the Western deserts, a poignant scene of a mother sending her son off to the Korean war, Anshan the ”city of steel,” a humble Party meeting among lumberjacks taking place in a shack deep in the forest far from Beijing, and other sites of significant material and spiritual progress in the PRC. As the essay progresses, a new motif is picked up from the contemporary Tian’anmen scene and repeated with increasing frequency: the ”radiant red face and brilliant eyes” of the young socialist citizens whose verbal pictures Liu paints. There is much hyperbole and the extraordinary breadth of subject matter, convering ten years of socialist achievement packaged in spatial-visual tableaux, like a memorial display case or monument, which was the usual strategy of essays and reportage about the Korean War.

He Changqi 何长琦

Despite the desire to come into close contact with the masses through genuine experiences, it was more common for writers to come into contact with workers, peasants and soldiers through the organizational activities and connections of the Communist Party. In Liu Baiyu’s essays from the 1950s and 60s, you can feel the author incongruously straining to make the most of his experience (straining to maximize its feeling of authenticity) and the characters he describes.[ ”Xie zai taiyang chu sheng de shihou” (Written as the Sun Begins to Rise), Hong manao ji 34-52 [written 1959?]. ] On the level of subject matter, since the (model) workers etc. he writes about are models and leaders, already part of the (embodiments of the) local Communist Party administrative apparatus, they too are straining to give the correct impression, put the right spin on their experiences and ideas, to behave in the way expected of them.

Hu Baihui 胡百辉

Qin Mu

Qin Mu’s case might be distinguishable from the others by virtue of the fact that he established himself as a satirical (zawen) columnist during the civil war, and of course satire in general had to go after 1949.[ Interestingly, Qin Mu continued to write zawen in the 1950s and beyond, publishing a very popular collection in 1960 entitled Yihai shibei (Gathering Shells by the Sea of Art). By then Qin’s zawen were not combative, but expository in nature, reflections on principles of artistic creation, so in a way Qin had redefined the zawen genre for himself. The sanwen collection Hua cheng was published at roughly the same time as Yihai shibei and was distinguished by the author himself as ”more lyrical” than the ”expository” pieces in Yihai shibei. Comparing the essays therein with those of Hua cheng, one is struck by formal differences (the Yihai shibei pieces are much shorter than those in Hua cheng) and by the almost complete lack of figurative or descriptive language in Yihai shibei. However difficult it might be for us to define the differences between zawen and sanwen now, it seems clear that Qin Mu had a clear idea in his own literary practice.] Fortunately he had been accustomed to making fun of Americans and the Guomindang which continued to be safe and politically correct targets in the 1950s, but he had to find positive things to write about as well, and considering his background and the ambiguity of his relationship with the Communist Party, this must have been a difficult transition for him, more difficult than it was for those who were already linked up with the party for years in Yan’an and other base areas.

Hu Huifang 胡慧芳

In his 1960 essay ”Earth,” (Tudi), Qin Mu makes a figurative connection between earth how handfuls of earth can serve as symbols of wealth, power, sovereignty, political positions. Part of the visualization involves (like Liu Baiyu) aerial views. As war with its arial reconnaisance and bombing transformed the concept of China’s space into a contiguous whole rather than a network of locales, the wider availability of air travel in the 1950s added a visual dimension to this contiguity that reinforces the connection between earth, China’s physical expance, the map of China, and the concept of nation:

Hu Jin 胡瑾

Once I gazed out an airplane window straight down upon the Pearl River delta; the heavens were crystal clear and I looked down and couldn’t help but cheer out loud because the Pearl River delta looked so magnificent that words couldn’t even describe it. The network of rivers and lakes shimmered in the sunlight while the earth looked like a piece of dark green velvet. The roads seemed as straight as if they had been sliced with a knife while the fields looked as neat as a chessboard. Wow! A hundred thousand years ago people looked to the skies for gods and miracles, but today the real miracle is taking place on the earth below.[ Qin Mu, Hua cheng (Guangzhou: Zuojia chubanshe, 1961) 17-18.]

Ji Tiantian 纪甜甜

Many of Qin Mu’s essays in the collection Hua cheng (City of Flowers) imaginatively recreate an (occasionally ancient) historical scene, in a specific place the essay focuses on that the author is observing today (or at least gives that impression) like Liu Baiyu’s ”right here on this spot” refrain. In his 1956 essay ”Lyric on the Altar of the God of Grain,” the earthen, square altar referred to in the title is in Zhongshan park in Beijing, and was where aristocrats were traditionally enfoeffed by the emperor.[ Qin, 21-31.] In many ways, this is a continuation of the previous essay (”Earth”), extending reflections on the material symbolism of earth and the glorious wisdom of the ancients.

Jiang Fengyi 蒋凤仪

This essay distinguishes itself by its relentless return to the altar itself, its self-conscious admiration of the brilliance of the ancients (with overtones of ethnic and cultural pride and reconciliation with the premodern culture of China) as well as a shrilly specific emphasis on unity as territorial sovereignty (”Once we liberate Taiwan and a few coastal islands, [our territorial] unity’s scope will be even more unprecedented.” 30)

Qin Mu is at his most characteristic, though, in writing educational essays (zhishi xiaopin). Also known as scientific xiaopin, the character of such writings would seem to be defined by their subject matter. [ Another writer of the post-Hundred Flowers period that writes a lot in this vein is Ma Nancun (Deng Tuo), whose popular Yanshan yehua column in Beijing Wanbao lasted for years and was published in four volumes in book form.] But I would like to suggest that the transmission of modern scientific knowledge in these texts is not an end in itself, but rather one answer to the question of ”what to write about?” in socialist sanwen. And it conveys (in addition to the knowledge or information), a certain scientistic, post-industrial atmosphere of enthusiasm that is a style as much as content.

Jiang Hao 姜好

Qin Mu’s ”Xing xia” (Under the Stars, 1958)[ Qin, 49-60.] begins as a sweeping exploration of stars, moving from the universal experience of gazing at the skies and wondering about the questions of existence to the cultural perspectives of the beliefs and lore of the ancients and finally to the scientific perspective of the astronomical knowledge gathered in recent centuries, decades and years that confirm the author’s faith in science and industrial modernity. The scientific knowledge in fact becomes a context or background against which to look back with some disdain at the superstitious quality of premodern beliefs, not only about the structure of the cosmos, but the extensions of such speculation into areas of human destiny and supernatural beliefs.

Jiang Qiwei 蒋淇玮

Reading this essay one can see that one of the keys to Qin Mu’s popularity lay not in his conspicuously Marxist-Leninist politics, but in his sweeping, timeless, universal and seemingly all-inclusive scope of vision and contemplation. Many or most of his essays give an exhilarating sense of vastness.

But this essay does not reach its completion without being recontained, as are Yang Shuo’s landscape meditations, in a political context. Written in the early years of Soviet space exploration, it seems obvious to Qin Mu that Soviet success in this area and the US’s failure is a clear sign of the direction of history. He argues with almost excessive rhetorical force that the failure of space exploration and science in general under capitalism signifies the inability of the capitalist world view to free itself from outmoded beliefs, while socialism is easily and innocently aligned with scientific achievement and progress.

Kang Haoyu 康浩宇

Qin Mu’s often shrill diatribes on historical materialism and Marxism-Leninism in educational essays (zhishi xiaopin) like this one, or about the history of overseas Chinese or the cosmic theories of warring states philosophers is an incongruous, inverted reflection of Qin’s perennial status as an outsider to the PRC socialist literary orthodoxy, being victimized by literary officials like Liu Baiyu in the anti-rightist campaign and only being admitted to the Communist Party in 1962. It is in his attempts to contain an ambitious gaze that can encompass human and natural history and the furthest reaches of space in a historicized polemic about the supremacy of Marxism-Leninism in the post war years that the incongruity of Qin Mu’s lyricism manifests itself.

Kang Lingfeng 康灵凤

Conclusion

The question of whether the ”real” world corresponds to the world these authors describe and narrate is moot; through the act of seeing or imagining the world as they do, they helped create the socialist world. These authors did not slavishly obey orders, writing from formulae they were provided by superiors and other writers; they willingly engaged in the procedures of research and composition that were part and parcel of communist education and literary practice; what they wrote followed from their training, it was the logical and organic extension of that training. They helped write the socialist world into existence.

Kong Xianghui 孔祥慧

Slavoj Zizek’s interpretation of Pascal that belief can actually emerge from deliberately going through the motions of ritual and imitating the faithful, and Zizek’s further point that ”reality” in any society is produced by ideological fantasies peculiar to it, suggest a similar interpretation of socialist sanwen.[ Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 38-43.] Going through the ritual motions of faith, the individual already believes without realizing it, he argues, and then it is only a matter of time before that belief gradually takes control of the conscious mind. But within that ideological fantasy that is the representation of social reality, there are at the fringes and in the shadows suggestions of the impossibility of the vision. What I have referred to as the ”incongruous” in Yang Shuo, Liu Baiyu and Qin Mu are those almost unconscious suggestions tainting the pristine vision.

Kong Yanan 孔亚楠

Reading literature from the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China requires as much attention to practices within the socialist orthodoxy as to dissidents and victims. Against the prevalent view that socialist literary culture in China was a self-contained system introduced from the Soviet Union as if into a vacuum, socialist sanwen speaks to the mutability of that literary culture and the voice of individual writers in its development, however much sanwen may have been used for propaganda and indoctrination, it retained an ambiguity and reserve inherent in the genre since before the War gainst Japan. Above all, I think this speaks to the enormous importance of various forms of sanwen in modern Chinese literary culture in general, and any general apprach to the modernn Chinese essay must further explore the legacy of socialist sanwen, particularly as today’s sanwen writers for the most part read the works of Yang Shuo, Liu Baiyu and Qin Mu in their middle school textbooks.

Lei Fangyuan 雷方圆

Tradition as Construct and the Search for a Modern Identity: A Reading of Traditional Gestures in Modern Chinese Essays of Place [ This article is an extended version of the paper “The Self in the Landscape: Chinese Essays of Place in the Republican Era (1912-1949)” delivered at the conference The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Self in the 20th Century, held in Achern, Germany, August 25-27, 2000.]

Alexandra R. Wagner

Abstract Zhu Ziqing’s “The Qinhuai River Amidst the Sound of Oars and Shadows of Lamps” (Jiangsheng dengyingli de qinhuaihe, 1923), Yu Dafu’s “Spring Day on Diaotai” (Diaotai de chunzhou, 1932), and Fang Lingru’s “Travel Notes from the Langya Mountain” (Langyashan youji, 1936) are three modern Chinese essays in which place and memory serve as the main textual and conceptual elements through which the writers’ negotiation of identity and search for meaning unfolds. Examining these “essays of place” with a focus on the dynamics between place, on the one hand, and personal as well as cultural memory, on the other, challenges the prevailing views of modern travel or landscape essays as either lyrical evocations of scenery, backdrops for personal experiences and thoughts, or sources for information on locations.

Lei Kuangxi 雷旷溪

The aggregation of cultural and personal memory in these essays foregrounds the skepticism and uncertainty that characterize the mindset of Chinese writers situated in a transitional period moving from tradition to modernity. By questioning apparent meaning and literary convention, the essays are ultimately texts on writing as a continuous and open-ended exploration.

Examining the “traditional gestures” central to the essays by Zhu, Yu, and Fang most prominently demonstrates this questioning of apparent meaning. Activities closely tied to places, such as climbing mountains, traversing lakes and rivers, and contemplating past history during visits to ruins and other sites are highly reminiscent of poetic onventions that have informed the long pre-modern literary history of travel and landscape writings.

Li Haiquan 李海泉

As manifestations of cultural memory, such activities are more than simply concrete actions; they are gestures, i.e. “acts made as a sign of attitude.” These traditional gestures suggest an affinity between pre-modern and modern texts, yet at the same time, the essays consistently question the significance and consequence of this apparent affinity. This questioning is achieved, first, by the authors’ encounters with people inhabiting the landscape, second, by introducing elements of imperfection and incompletion throughout the essays, and, third, by the self-referential aspects of the essays.

Li Lili 李丽丽

Adopting traditional gestures of contemplating place and past can be seen as an attempt to place the author in a privileged and thus assured position, offering him a way to authoritatively define himself within, yet separate from, his surroundings. However, encounters with people inhabiting the places make the author “interact” with these places. Rather than being objects of perception and contemplation only, places become parts of the perceiving and contemplating subject. The idea of place as distinct from the observer, providing a setting against which he can define himself as well as measure the changing times is deceptive.

Li Lingyue 李凌月

In addition, elements of imperfection and incompletion disrupt the narrative in these essays and thus similarly question the reliability of traditional gestures in the search for stable definitions of selves. Self-referential aspects of the texts also draw attention to the essays’ constructedness, thus questioning the idea that the texts have a single, accurate (and thus authoritative) interpretation and significance.

In sum, an “ironic” reading of the traditional gestures in these essays of place foregrounds the concept of tradition as a vital part and construct needed to engage in a discourse on tradition and modernity from which modern texts ultimately evolve.

Li Liqin 李丽琴

Zhu Ziqing’s “The Qinhuai River Amidst Sounds of Oars and Shadows of Lamps” (Qinhuaihe), Yu Dafu’s “Spring Day on Diaotai” (Diaotai), and Fang Lingru’s “Travel Notes from Langya Mountain” (Langyashan), are three notable essays of place in which place and memory serve as the main conceptual elements through which the writers’ negotiation of identity and meaning unfolds. By questioning apparent meaning and literary convention, the texts become ultimately texts on writing as a continuous endeavor and exploration and thus texts on the open-ended nature of essays.

In the essays, the authors engage in activities such as climbing mountains, traversing rivers, and contemplating history and historical figures while visiting ruins and other sites.

Zhu Ziqing’s Jiangsheng dengyingli de Qinhuaihe, written in 1923, was first published in the January 25, 1924 issue of Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany, founded in 1904). （文献无需翻译）

Yu Dafu’s Diaotai de chunzhou, written in August 1932, first appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Lunyu (Analects), on September 16, 1932.

Fang Lingru’s Langyashan youji was written in April 1936 in Nanjing. Reprints in contemporary essay anthologies are taken from Fang’s essay collection Xin (Letters) published in 1945.（文献无需翻译）

In this paper, the terms “writer” and “author” are used interchangeably.（文献无需翻译）

朱自清的《浆声灯影里的秦淮河》（《秦淮河》）、郁达夫的《钓鱼台的春昼》（《钓鱼台》）和方令孺的《琅琊山游记》（ 《琅琊山》）是三篇有关地点的著名散文。在这几篇文章中，地点和回忆是主要的概念性元素，作者通过这些元素来具体展开关于身份认同以及具体含义的阐述。通过质疑明显的含义和文学习俗，这些文本最终象征着作者的不懈努力与探索，因此成为了文本的开放性文本。

在这几篇散文中，作者在参观历史遗址时都参加了诸如爬山、过河、对历史以及历史人物进行深思的活动。

Zhu Ziqing’s Jiangsheng dengyingli de Qinhuaihe, written in 1923, was first published in the January 25, 1924 issue of Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany, founded in 1904). （文献无需翻译）

Yu Dafu’s Diaotai de chunzhou, written in August 1932, first appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Lunyu (Analects), on September 16, 1932.

Fang Lingru’s Langyashan youji was written in April 1936 in Nanjing. Reprints in contemporary essay anthologies are taken from Fang’s essay collection Xin (Letters) published in 1945.（文献无需翻译）

In this paper, the terms “writer” and “author” are used interchangeably.（文献无需翻译）--Li Liqin (talk) 11:26, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Li Luyi 李璐伊

For example, all three essays contain elements reminiscent of the poetic convention of contemplating the past (huaigu), often conveying regret over gone times and places. Images exposing the transience of human life in an enduring landscape suggest the writer’s uncertainty about the present and future, implying his desire to find a more lasting place within his existing surroundings.

In their apparent affinity to poetic conventions, traditional gestures seem to promise the writer a degree of authority and certainty in observing and interpreting surroundings and thus in determining his position and role in them. An ironic understanding and reading of such gestures in Zhu, Yu, and Fang's essays however, exposes the concept of tradition as construct indispensable for a discourse on modernity.

Evoking and sharing the cultural memory of place writing, Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s essays not only contain, but also constitute traditional gestures.（文献无需翻译）

FFor a concise explication of this poetic convention, see Hans H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven and London, 1976), chapter 9 “Contemplation of the Past.”（文献无需翻译）

Li Meng 李梦

Modern texts evolve from a questioning and reassessment of well-established meaning and value, rather than from a mere rejection of what are perceived to be traditional notions, customs, and ideals. Once tradition is divested of its absolute claim and subject to interpretation and reconstruction, modernity can emerge.

Generally, the term “gesture” describes an activity as “something done to convey one’s intentions or attitude.” The traveler’s activities are more than actions that have an obvious purpose, such as getting to a location or viewing a certain site. Roland Barthes’ notion of gestures in writing and writing as gesture suggests the multiplicity of meaning within essays of place and ultimately bears out the idea of essays of place as texts on writing. In The Responsibility of Forms, Roland Barthes describes “gesture” in art as

“Gesture.” Def.2. Oxford American Dictionary. New York: Avon Books, 1980. （文献无需翻译）

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “gesture” as “a move or course of action undertaken as an expression of feeling or as a formality; especially a demonstration of friendly feeling, usually with the purpose of eliciting a favorable response from another.” Def.4.b. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Ed. (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1989).（文献无需翻译）

Li Yongshan 李泳珊

[s]omething like the surplus of an action. The action is transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result; the gesture is the indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences which surround the action with an atmosphere [. . .]. Hence, let us distinguish the message, which seeks to produce information, and the sign, which seeks to produce an intellection, from the gesture, which produces all the rest (the “surplus”) without necessarily seeking to produce anything.

Traversing mountains and lakes are activities with a concrete objective. As “gestures” or “surplus action,” those activities are signs of attitudes that in Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s essays ultimately serve to constantly question and change meaning by providing possibility instead of demarcation of meaning and signification.

Barthes, Roland. “[Readings: Gesture] Cy Twombly: Works on Paper.” The Responsibility of Forms. By Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) 160.（文献无需翻译）

According to Roland Barthes, every text is ultimately a product of gestures Discussing the work of American painter Cy Twombly (b. 1928), Roland Barthes furthermore says about the workings of gestures:（文献无需翻译）

[t]he artist [ . . . ] is by status an “operator” of gestures: he seeks to produce an effect and at the same time seeks no such thing; the effects he produces he has not obligatorily sought out; they are reversed, inadvertent effects which turn back upon him and thereupon provoke certain modifications, deviations, mitigations of the line, of the stroke. Thus in gesture is abolished the distinction between cause and effect, motivation and goal, expression and persuasion (Barthes 160).（文献无需翻译）

Li Yu 李玉

Zhu Ziqing’s Qinhuaihe describes a pleasure excursion on the Qinhuai River he and his friend Yu Pingbo embark on one summer evening. Singsong girls and their musicians, offering their services to passengers in the roaming boats, provide popular entertainment on the river. Zhu and Yu try to enjoy the atmosphere produced by a combination of natural scenery, history, lantern lights, and sound of oars and of music. Despite mingling with other boats whose passengers happily solicit the singsong girls’ services, they remain passive observers. Zhu's narrative culminates in his and Yu’s direct encounter with the singsong girls, who approach them to solicit business. This encounter mortifies and confounds Zhu, turning the trip into a disconcerting experience. Both Zhu and Yu reject the singsong girls’ solicitations, and soon after the encounter, they head back to the pier.

Lin Min 林敏

Yu Dafu’s Diaotai describes his travels in the countryside after having hurriedly left Shanghai to avoid being rounded up by Nationalist forces in the spring of 1931. Watching boats taking locals to their ancestral graves, Yu decides to visit his hometown in time for the Qingming festival. After only a few days with relatives and friends however, he becomes restless and leaves for a trip to Diaotai (Fishing Terrace) on Fuchun Mountain. He stops over at Tonglu for the night and despite the late hour climbs Tongjun Mountain located across the river. The next day, Yu visits the memorial hall on Fuchun Mountain dedicated to the Eastern Han recluse Yan Ziling and then climbs the famous Diaotai.

Lin Xin 林鑫

Fang Lingru and a group of friends visit various historic sites scattered in the mountains they traverse during a spring outing. The most famous site is the pavilion named by Ouyang Xiu and celebrated in his famous An Account of the Pavilion of the Drunken Old Man (Zuiweng ting ji). The group decides to stay overnight at the Temple of Cultivation (Kaihua si), located deeper in the mountains, and spends the rest of the day touring the mountains and their cultural imprints guided by a monk. In the evening, the friends enjoy the nocturnal atmosphere and quietude of temple and mountains. The next day, the day of the Qingming festival, the group tours two more mountains before returning to Nanjing in the evening.

Ling Zijin 凌子瑾

All three essays contain attempts to adopt gestures of contemplating times and places while traversing varied landscapes. Yet, three elements in the essays destabilize significance and consequence of those gestures, undermining their power to confirm identities and signaling the questioning nature of the texts. These three elements are first the authors’ encounters with people inhabiting the landscape, second, elements of incompletion and ambiguity that unsettle the traditional gestures, and, third, as supplementary elements, the essays’ self-referential strategies. The following readings of Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s essays explain and illustrate one of each of these elements respectively.

Liu Bo 刘博

Encounters with People in Zhu Ziqing’s Qinhuaihe

Encounters with people populating the landscape have two effects. First, these encounters force the author to interact with the landscape. It becomes impossible for him to demarcate his position and identity by contemplating places from an autonomous vantage point. Zhu and Yu’s encounter with the singsong girls is the central human encounter in Zhu’s Qinhuaihe. Initially, the singsong girls’ presence on the river does not appear to displease or disconcert Zhu. However, he maintains this sanguine perception by keeping a distance to the singers’ boats. The distance allows him to assume the traditional gesture of traversing a river to take in and contemplate its scenery and history from an independent viewpoint.

It is important to point out that a clear distinction between traveler and landscape does not mean the travelers’ disassociation from his surroundings. Rather it points to the clear demarcation of positions and roles necessary to form a stable unified whole from two distinct units.(文献无需翻译)

Liu Jinxingqi 刘金惺琦

The encounter with the singsong girls witnessed by other passengers unsettles gesture and atmosphere. By diminishing the safe distance between writer and observed place (which so far included the singers), the encounter forces Zhu to play an active role in his surroundings. The singers step out of the landscape picture, and Zhu becomes part of the place against his will.

Ironically, however, the ensuing interaction nevertheless exposes an unbridgeable gap between author and people inhabiting the landscape. Zhu’s confrontation with the singsong girls reinforces an experience of distance, misapprehension, and alienation rooted in the dilemma of modern intellectuals.

Liu Liu 刘柳

Zhu is both tempted by the offer and ashamed about even entertaining such a sentiment. Being publicly approached by women who sell their services to men and confronting his inner conflicting emotion embarrasses Zhu, who considers himself a moral and modern individual professing to condemn the exploitation of underprivileged social groups.

The text moves from the portrayal of external space and atmosphere to a detailed self-dissection of Zhu's psyche and thoughts, a strikingly modern feature. As Zhu's progressive sensibilities interfere with acting out his desire, this psychological passage further disrupts the cohesion of the text as traditional gesture.

Liu Ou 刘欧

The encounter quickly deflates and undermines Zhu's attempt to adopt traditional gestures, causing confusion and conflict rather than reassurance of positions and identities in the river’s ultimately unpredictable space. Zhu’s experience of place is marked by a tension arising from an attempt to assert his independent position within his surroundings, the futility of the attempt, and the concurrent impossibility to become part of his surroundings.

Significantly, only when Zhu’s inner conflict has abated somewhat, he and Yu are rewarded. On their way back, they pass a boat with a solitary singer coming toward them.

Liu Yangnuo 刘洋诺

The singer is sitting in the bow of the unlit boat, singing only to herself. This unexpected episode has an at least temporarily redeeming quality for Zhu. However, his feeling of contentment lasts only a fleeting instant, and soon he and Yu are back in the bustling amusement district. Importantly, Zhu and Yu do not truly encounter the solitary singer. Possibly, the singer did not even notice them. This brief moment comes closest to successfully adopting a traditional gesture. As long as they maintain a distance, fulfilling the significance of the gesture seems possible. Ultimately however, Zhu, not in control of the gesture, is unable to prolong this moment.

Liu Yi 刘艺

He is left in utter despondency. Threat and intimidation Zhu experiences are signified well by the way he perceives his surroundings immediately after passing the lone singer’s boat. Passing under a tall bridge, it seems to Zhu “as if the darkness was opening its huge mouth, about to swallow [their] boat.” Zhu is left in a no-man’s-land between private desire and modern awareness.

Incompletion and Ambiguity in Yu Dafu’s Diaotai

Elements of incompletion and ambiguity further question the significance of traditional gestures. By unsettling the essay’s narrative, these elements suggest an ironic reading of the texts that undermines the reliability of traditional gestures when searching for stable definitions of selves and surroundings.

Liu Yiyu 刘怡瑜

Obstacles in Yu Dafu’s path paired with a restlessness he experiences in places destabilize the gestures he tries to adopt. The significance of his trip remains ambiguous.

The evening before reaching Diaotai, Yu sets out to climb Tongjun Mountain to visit a Daoist temple. Upon disembarking from the ferryboat, he immediately falls over a loose rock on the dark and rugged mountain path. The image of a stumbling Yu on his solitary endeavor to climb the mountain at night is almost comical. His idea to climb the mountain at this hour appears unreasonable and undermines any effect the attempt to adopt a traditional gesture might have.

Liu Zhiwei 刘智伟

The ferryman hands Yu a pack of matches to help him find the way. At first, Yu is “groping [his] way up the mountain,” but as he approaches the top, moonlight begins to illuminate his path. A vast sky and a broad vista into the distance and onto the town seem to increase Yu’s chances of adopting the traditional gesture of contemplating place and past. As he approaches the temple however, an apparently locked gate in the low wall surrounding it obstructs Yu’s progress. After pacing up and down for a while not knowing what to do, he finally tries the gate, and surprisingly it opens. Ironically, Yu’s trip is delayed and almost cut short not by a locked gate but by his indecision and hesitation.

Lou Cancan 娄灿灿

Although he finds the temple gates indeed securely shut for the night, Yu is at this point quite content to sit on the wall adjacent to the gate from where he can overlook the river and enjoy the scenery. He gazes at the stars, clouds, and moon above and the lights of the boats below gently wavering in the wind. At last, Yu’s position allows him to contemplate place and past from an elevated and independent vantage point. The unparalleled scenery of Tongjun Mountain inspires Yu to contemplate the lives of the Eastern Han (25-220 A.D.) recluse Yan Ziling and that of the two Dai brothers, Dai Bo and Dai Yong of the Easter Jin (317-420), who made this area their home.

Luo Weijia 罗维嘉

Yu fully appreciates and identifies with their decision to lead a hermit’s life foreshadowing his own life of seclusion soon to begin. The clapper of the night watch in town finally wakes Yu to reality. Startled, he runs back head over heels to the boat. This abrupt ending to Yu’s reverie and his sudden anxiety to get back to the boat sharply contrast with the reflective atmosphere and sentiment of the passage. The traditional gesture is abruptly terminated. Like the clapper startling Yu, this abrupt ending to the nightly scene startles the reader.

Luo Yuqing 罗雨晴

On the boat to Diaotai, Yu, tired from admiring the scenery, falls asleep and dreams of a gathering with some old friends in an inn along the river. The text does not make it explicitly clear that Yu is dreaming. This becomes fully clear only when the boatman wakes Yu as they approach Diaotai.

In his dream, the friends chat and make merry, but after all has been said and done, the atmosphere turns cheerless and awkward. At the center of the dream is a poem Yu composed a few years ago at a similar occasion. It is a political poem written in traditional septa-syllabic regulated verse style, lamenting the chaotic state of the country and expressing the dissatisfaction of intellectuals with the government.

Ma Juan 马娟

One prominent traditional image in the poem is the loyal official who, “feigning madness,” (yang kuang) speaks the truth that goes unheeded. Here, a well-known traditional gesture is embedded in a text within a text. Before the gesture can come to full fruition, however, it is again terminated, this time by the boatman who wakes Yu.

Significantly, Yu's perception of his surrounding has completely changed. Before falling asleep, he saw green mountains encasing the clear river and sandbanks with blossoming flowers; in short, tranquil and picturesque scenery. As the boat approaches Diaotai, however, “river and mountain scenery all around had suddenly changed.” (文献无需翻译)

Zhu Ziqing, “Jiangsheng dengyingli de qinhuaihe,” Zhongguo xiandai youji xuan, eds. Ma Zhonglin, Yang Guozhang, and Wang Zhonghua (Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou chubanshe, 1982) 95.(文献无需翻译)

Yu Dafu, “Diaotai de chunzhou,” Zhongguo xiandai youji xuan, eds. Ma Zhonglin, Yang Guozhang, and Wang Zhonghua (Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou chubanshe, 1982) 204.

Yu Dafu, 206(文献无需翻译)

Ma Shuya 马淑雅

The river has narrowed and the mountains have moved extremely close, “as if ahead was no further way.” The towering mountains create an oppressively lonely atmosphere, in which even the sound of the oars seems disheartened; the echo is audible only after a long while, amplifying the “ancient silence,” the “silence of extinction” enveloping the boat. The sun is gone, and only a soughing wind comes and goes.

The surrounding has turned ominous. Yu’s anticipation turns into apprehension. Compared to his reverie on Tongjun Mountain, Yu now perceives Diaotai as desolate and gloomy, eerily echoing the chaos and tumult evoked in his poem. He describes dilapidated stone structures overgrown with weeds.

Ma Zhixing 马智星

Approaching Yan Ziling’s ancestral hall, now no more than decrepit walls and broken tiles, Yu begins to feel “a little afraid, afraid to encounter the ghost of Master Yan, old and dried-up like strips from a towel gourd.” Yu’s rapidly growing skepticism and discomfort upon approaching the setting further suggest the impossibility to find meaning and identity by adopting traditional gestures in places.

On the Fishing Terrace, Yu is curiously reminded of a postcard depicting the William Tell Memorial Hall and its scenery in Switzerland. The colors of mountains and rivers he sees from Diaotai are strikingly similar to those on the “collotype postcard.”

Meng Ying 孟莹

However, in the scenery he views from Diaotai, “the variations are a little greater, the surrounding in all directions is just a little more jumbled and chaotic, that’s all, but this is actually a plus, enough to represent the East’s desolate beauty of national degeneration.” Ironically, Yu’s comparison between the postcard picture and his view stresses the similarities between the colors of the landscapes only. He views a place that in its very structure carries the marks of present crisis. Associating his description of the scenery with Switzerland generally associated with national stability and social order only intensifies the image of national chaos and debility.

Mo Ling 莫玲

Superficially conforming to the traditional gesture of contemplating (and lamenting) place and past, the comparison here is not one between present and past, but one between two presents. Yu's view evokes scenery on a foreign postcard, which in its modern photographic quality and miniature size cannot evoke the past, challenging the idea of a traditional gesture.

After having had some wine in the hall, Yu walks up to the Buddhist shrine whose derelict walls are covered with poems, most of them of poor quality. In a corner near the ceiling, he finds an inscription by the Qing loyalist and fellow villager Xia Lingfeng (Xia Zhenwu, 1854-1930), whose commitment Yu admires despite objecting to Xia’s political convictions. Yu inscribes the poem from his dream next to Xia’s.

Mo Nan 莫南

Initially, Yu's act of inscribing the poem suggests that he sympathizes and identifies with Xia. However, since Yu does object to the substance of Xia’s ideals and motives, the gesture of writing a poem next to Xia’s only stresses the ambiguity of such an act. With the gesture of inscribing his poem along with others of inferior quality and next to that of a Qing loyalist Yu willingly obscures his own political stance and inadvertently questions the relevance of his act. The traditional-style poem placed in an obscure corner on the wall as one among many is ineffective, and the gesture of inscribing it loses its significance. Yu’s position and role in his time and place remains ambiguous and difficult to define. Ironically, while Yu’s essay saves the poem and its context from obscurity, it also exposes the very ambiguity of his act.

Nie Xiaolou 聂晓楼

Self-referential strategy in Fang Lingru’s Langyashan

By foregrounding a texts’ constructedness, self-referential strategies question the idea of a texts’ definite and authoritative meaning. Suggesting the texts’ plurality of meaning further substantiates their significance in negotiating perspectives, positions, and identities.

Concluding the narration of her two-day trip, Fang Lingru writes: “There are still many more scenic spots and ancient sites on Langya Mountain; if it’s meant to be, I’ll come another time to visit again. There is nothing more I can add to this piece (my emphasis).”

Fang Lingru, “Langyashan youji,” Zhongguo xiandai youji xuan, eds. Ma Zhonglin, Yang Guozhang, and Wang Zhonghua (Beijing: Zhongguo lüyou chubanshe, 1982) 148.

Ou Rong 欧蓉

Yet, she goes on to recommend a particular dish and wine the group had at a restaurant in Chuzhou before returning to Nanjing. This rather banal and anticlimactic addendum to her narrative is then followed by two more paragraphs, describing her sentiments upon returning home.

When I got home, it was already ten o’clock at night, and a fine drizzle filled the air. Just before leaving, the old monk Shangkuan had tied three Spring Azalea sprigs to my rickshaw, which I planted immediately upon coming home. Now the twigs have already developed tender sprouts; by this time next year, they will blossom. XX named them “Bodhi Shangkuan.”

Ouyang Jinglan 欧阳静兰

I’ve been feeling extremely tired lately, but thinking back to the trip into the mountains, I can say that it was flawless, and I have no regrets.

It is a cliché to state at the end of a text that nothing can be added. Fang’s appended restaurant and food recommendation suggests her eagerness to relate every detail from the trip. However, extending her narrative by two paragraphs, she effectively contradicts her own assertion that everything worth saying has been said. This contradiction and the contrast between her matter-of-fact-style in which she ostensibly ends the essay and the intimate tone and personal content of the concluding paragraphs highlight the act of writing and constructing the text.

Ouyang Ling 欧阳玲

The final paragraphs further question the effect of adopting traditional gestures to find stable meaning and purpose in and through one’s surroundings. For Fang the gesture of translating visits to sites and ruins into detailed description evoke the past is not sufficient. Her encounter with the monk ultimately renders her experience on Langya Mountain significant. The flowers she received from him signify the possibility of growth, nurturing, and encouragement. By contrast, the significance of the sites themselves remains ambiguous.

Peng Dan 彭丹

The last two paragraphs of Fang’s essay complete the framework of personal reflection that encases the largely dispassionate narration of her trip. Personal memory is the ultimate locus of meaningful experience and the creative force underlying the essay. Exhausting facts and details in representing an experience does not bring a text to its end despite assertions to the contrary. Fang’s last sentence suggests that remembering the trip in close connection with the human encounter constitutes a source of satisfaction for her, rather than the emulation of traditional gestures that seem to promise an authoritative rendition of place and time.

Peng Juan 彭娟

Her memory and text are like the plant, living and changing. The gesture of announcing the end of her text is undermined by that same texts’ continuation. The self-referential strategy in Fang’s essay ultimately affirms possibility and potentiality not completeness and finality.

Conclusion The attempt to adopt established poetic gestures in Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s essays does not dispel the writer’s uncertainty and ambivalence in navigating, redefining, and asserting his (or her) role in a changed and changing environment. In each essay, various elements question reliability and significance of these gestures, highlighting the ambiguity of the writer’s experience and position in the places he visits. Her memory and text are like the plant, living and changing. The gesture of announcing the end of her text is undermined by that same texts’ continuation. The self-referential strategy in Fang’s essay ultimately affirms possibility and potentiality not completeness and finality.

Conclusion

The attempt to adopt established poetic gestures in Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s essays does not dispel the writer’s uncertainty and ambivalence in navigating, redefining, and asserting his (or her) role in a changed and changing environment. In each essay, various elements question reliability and significance of these gestures, highlighting the ambiguity of the writer’s experience and position in the places he visits.

Peng Ruihong 彭锐宏

Traditionally, the poet contemplating place and past was a solitary figure estranged from his times and surroundings, often questioning the present state of affairs. From the perspective of literary history, however, sharing this gesture and its variations with other poets in a long line of succession offered writers a way to secure rather than question their role and identity. Through canon formation and the writing of literary history, acts and themes such as contemplating places and past came to be understood as customary endeavors gaining and increasing their significance from their perceived continuity. Such understanding is part of the construction of traditions to legitimize poetic authority and continuity, or - as during the May Fourth movement - change and eradication.

Relevant to the argument here is the idea of canon formation and the way it works. The argument does by no means suggest that all texts based on or containing certain traditional gestures and conventions are indeed similar and unchanged over the long pre-modern period. Nor does it suggest that in pre-modern travel and landscape writings the writer can indeed successfully confirm his identity and role through following the conventions of his time. （文献无需翻译）

Peng Xiaoling 彭小玲

Instead of confirming the writer’s authority as mediator and interpreter of time and place, traditional gestures in modern essays such as Zhu, Yu, and Fang’s foreground his precarious role and position within his time and place. Attempting to adopt traditional gestures ultimately exposes the gestures as constructs that do not provide an indisputable way of understanding and representing surroundings and one’s position and role in them.

By deconstructing the cultural and literary traditions, May Fourth intellectuals and writers tried to establish a practical dichotomy between conservative past and progressive present and future to confer authority upon the modern text.

Peng Yongliang 彭永亮

As the above readings show however, modern texts inevitably comprise a discourse on what is made out to be tradition and modernity. This discourse inscribes, negotiates, and transforms tradition within the modern text albeit in an ever varying and irrepressible way. The texts’ complexity, subtexts, and plurality of meaning arises from a negotiation between familiar conventions and new and modern perspectives in search of identities, roles, and positions in a changing time and place. Ultimately, the texts are texts on writing as a continuous endeavor and exploration and thus texts on the open-ended nature of essays.

Peng Yuzhi 彭育志

From Historical Narrative to the World of Prose: The Essayistic Mode in Contemporary Chinese Literature

Wang Ban

Abstract

As a genre, the essay in contemporary China can be seen as a symptom of the decline of historical consciousness and narrative. This comes through most sharply when compared with the previously established literary paradigm: the Chinese novel in the realistic mode. For many decades the fiction of revolutionary realism served as ideological apparatus and medium for providing coherent temporal perceptions about past, present, and future.

Qi Kai 漆凯

The realistic novel's central assumption is epic best described by Georg Lukacs, who construes the epic form as a projected ideal that is realizable through narrated social and historical actions. Little thought needs to be taken to see that a revolutionary epic is a strenuous but finally triumphant harmony of ideal and reality. The rise of the essay in the recent decades epitomizes the turn of literary writing from the epic coherence of ideal and life to the dispersed and fragmented sensory or sensual pleasures and sheer appreciation of images or anecdotes.

Qu Miao 瞿淼

The essay retreats from historical consciousness and responds warmly and lightheartedly to the advent of consumer culture. It is designed to satisfy the modest needs of the urban consumer whose sensibility is becoming “essayistic,” prosaic, ahistorical and everyday, preoccupied with the most intimate and quotidian matters. This paper takes a look back at Eileen Chang's thinking on the essay and attempts to trace the linkage between the modern essay and the rise of urban consumer culture. Then through an analysis of Wang Anyi's novella The Story of Our Uncle (Shushu de gushi), I demonstrate how the retreat from historical consciousness to what I would call the essayistic structure of feeling is dramatized by Wang's groping, explorative essay/fiction.

Quan Meixin 全美欣

The main character Uncle's career illustrates the waning of historical consciousness. This paper seeks to point out that the essay's ambivalence lies in its freedom from the straitjacket of the grand narrative and in its contribution to the withering of historical consciousness in the rising consumer culture in China.

The Essay and the Novel

The essay as a cultural form can be grasped in its relation to the novel. In twentieth-century China the novel in the epic, realistic mode had been the dominant form of literature and a pivotal ideological apparatus--probably up to the mid-1980s. The Chinese realistic novel can be construed as epic in the way formulated by Georg Lukács.

Sagara Seydou

Its epic characteristic lies in its historical scope and teleology, its engagement with social and political issues, its intertwining of the individual's fate with collective projects, its aesthetics of the exemplary hero, and its striving for transcendence within everyday immanence. The novel of socialist realism in the Mao era strove to achieve an imaginary unity of transcendent ideals and quotidian reality. It depicts a universe in which the world and the self “never become permanent strangers to one another” (Lukács 29) and the individual's growth is of one piece with communal destiny. In the post-Mao era, often dubbed the New Period, works of fiction appeared to be different but were still imbued with an epic impulse.

Shi Diwen 石迪文

It is true that the 1980s saw the emphatic upsurge of interest in the subjectivity of the autonomous individual, but far from an atomistic ego of appetitive self-interest, fictional characters were still figured as the subject of history. For all its seeming revolt against the previously dominant mode, the image of the newly awakened modern self in the fiction of the New Period went hand in hand with the socio-historical process of socialist modernization, individuals serving as agents of this process. Thus, Fredric Jameson's concept of national allegory--in which the individual's fate tells a larger story of collective destiny – was well received in Chinese criticism and made to apply with equal ease to the realistic novel of the Mao era as well as those advocating reforms.

Critics have noted that in the 1980s thought emancipation movement (sixiang jiefang), the fundamental literary mode and historical consciousness were derived from the Hegelian-Marxist version of the unity of subject and object, the individual and history. So the self that was upheld was not an autonomous self cut off from the collectivity of social processes, but was assimilated and modeled by the requirements of the modernization drive. See Qi Shuyu, 103-104.（文献无需翻译）

Shi Haiyao 石海瑶

If this view of the novel sounds anachronistic to contemporary China, we may justify it by a reference to the striven-for unity of revolutionary ideals and social reality, of theory and practice, a prominent tenet in the utopian legacy of Marxism. As literary counterpart of this projected unity the Chinese realistic novel presents a mythical and epic structure in which dream and history, individual and collective become one. In Lukács the epic is contracted with the novel, because the latter is a form stripped of the former’s immediate and unproblematic unity of ideal and reality (56).

Si Yu 司妤

In other words, the novel in the Western realistic tradition is troubled by the intrusion of time, which causes fractures in the epic, time-defying harmony between self and collectivity, dream and actuality. But Lukács still insists that the novel is a kind of epic, because it strives to close the fissures created by the gap of time, hence potentially able to attain the epic status on a higher level.

The gap between ideal and reality is minimized in the Chinese novel, which appears to be more epic than the realistic novel in the West. The novel of revolutionary realism is closer to poetry, marked with tremendous lyricism, as Charles Laughlin notes with regard to the socialist sanwen in his essay “Incongruous Lyricism” in this volume.

Song Jianru 宋建茹

It would not seem incongruous when lyrical exuberance, equated with revolutionary idealism and utopianism, is maximized in the novel as a way to transcend and close the gap between a historical time marked by imperialist invasions, sufferings, and poverty on the one hand, and the ultimate ideal of communism culminating in the epic harmony of ideal and reality, theory and practice, on the other. The novel in this mode is supposed to be more than a text you read, curled up in your couch in a snowy winter night in solitary comfort. It was ideological, educational, edifying, its grand narrative projecting material praxis. It aimed to instigate you to go out into the streets or impoverished villages and get organized with other fellow humans to make history.

Su Lin 苏琳

The rise of the essay in contemporary China is a sign that the novel in the epic mode has become an endangered species. This is not merely the problem of genre, nor am I suggesting that readers are flocking to essays and abandoning novels. My point is that the novel as a medium of envisioning social life and registering experiences of temporality is giving way to the essay, or more generally to the essayistic structure of sensibility. I play with the idea of essayistic in order to refer to the essay as a canonical textual form as well as those discursive moments in other literary genres embodying an “essayistic” quality and a “prosaic” structure of feeling.

Tan Xingyue 谭星越

One crucial point to made is that this emotional structure accords with the everyday sensibility of a city-dweller and consumer. This is one reason why it is instructive to contract the essayistic with the novel. The essay deals with a prosaic and mundane world. In Hayden White’s recapturing of Hegel’s distinction of poetry and prose, “The world in which prosaic utterance developed must be supposed to have been one in which experience had become atomized and denuded of its ideality and immediately apprehended significance, and voided of its richness and vitality” (87).

Tan Xinjie 谭鑫洁

This prosaic world of fragmented experience is to the Chinese novel as the Lukácsian novel is to the epic: a fall from an original oneness. In contemporary China, neither the novel nor poetry seems to be a means of closing this widened gap. My purpose in the essay is to examine the position of the essayistic in relation to the novel, and the related sensibilities in relation to history.