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.