Organizer and Chair: R. Bin Wong, University of California, Irvine
From Poetic Realm to Fictional World: Chinese Theory of Fictional Ontology, 1900-1916
Lijun Fu, University of Toronto
The first two decades of twentieth century saw the appearance of an unprecedented large number of critics of fiction in China. These critics made great contributions to the development of Chinese fiction and theory of fiction. Besides their success in launching a "revolution in fiction" and in promoting fiction from a traditionally marginalized genre to the literary center, which has been fully appreciated by today's scholars, they also succeeded in developing the traditional Chinese theory of fiction into a modern poetics of fiction which in many aspects has not been surpassed by modern and contemporary Chinese theories of fiction. Unfortunately the significance of their poetics of fiction has not been fully acknowledged or understood by today's scholars.
In this paper, I intend to take their theory of fictional ontology as an example to demonstrate the theoretical merits of their poetics. Specifically I am going to show how they developed the traditional Chinese concept of "poetic realm" into a modern concept of "fictional world" and how they use the concept of fictional world to define the nature of fiction. The modernity and even post-modernity of their theory will be made clear through a comparison with Western theory of fictional ontology developed since the 1980s. The relevance of their theory to today's poetics of fiction will be made explicit through a comparison with Chinese theories of fiction developed since the May Fourth era.
Shuqin Cui, University of Michigan
Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) chronicles 50 years of China's modern history in the lives of two Peking Opera players. While the film is banned in China, it has received critical and popular success in the United States and drawn immediate attention from academic circles. Among the many questions the film has raised, gender construction and representation provide a central focus for a portrait of the quest for a life of integrity in the midst of endless social upheavals.
This paper examines the phenomenon of female impersonation in its socio-cultural and cinematic forms. The film relates how the conventions of traditional opera gradually transform the boy Dieyi into the female role of the concubine, Yuji. At the same time, the film narration intertwines the once insular opera world with a threatening historical reality in depicting Dieyi's increasingly desperate attempt to create a refuge in the art of his femininity. Three elements in the film are crucial to an understanding of the question of Dieyi's gender: the metaphor of castration, the ritual practice of corporal punishment, and the elaborate use of costume and make up.
Dieyi's abrupt transition from a precarious life as the son of a prostitute to a regimented existence as a student in the opera school is marked by his mother's brutal amputation of a sixth finger on Dieyi's hand. The symbolic castration speaks clearly: the desiring subject denies the inherited past to seek a new social identity. The root of biological determinism has been severed and the subject freed to pursue a place in a symbolic world of gender fluidity. While symbolic castration signifies the possibility of Dieyi's movement from biological maleness into a gendered female role, corporal punishment palpably initiates and enforces that transition through strokes of pain. In the opera school, lashing the boys' bare buttocks is a traditional method of training used to establish the relation between master and student. Such punishment instills in students a sense of the power of the social order and their place within it. Dieyi's designated "place," however, requires that he learn to deny and efface his male identity. Whereas corporal punishment remakes Dieyi throughout raw force, costume and make up function aesthetically, providing the signs of beauty and femininity. Dieyi comes to embody an idealized rendering of femininity which the opera audience has been educated to read and appreciate.
However, the socially constructed gender identity fails to correspond with China's ever-changing history. Through a narration composed by devices of time and space, the film representation of female impersonation registers the intensifying conflicts between on-stage art and off stage life. In the face of increasing political turbulence, social unrest, and personal uncertainties, Dieyi tries to live wholly within the role of Yuji. The truth and beauty of opera remain crystalline and unchanging; the king and concubine forever declare their loyalty to each other. Ironically, the social system which acted with violence against the young Dieyi, forcing him, through canings and verbal humiliations, to dress, walk, and talk as a woman, in so doing bequeathed him an identity that opposes and stands apart from the vulgarity and violence of a society torn by political conflict. Against the melodramatic, historical tapestry of Farewell My Concubine, the figure of Dieyi struggles first to resist a female identity, then to embrace and preserve it, underscoring how gendered identity is buffeted by the tumultuous currents of social and cultural change.
Jie Lu, Stanford University
In this paper I will discuss the use of memory in the saga fiction of the contemporary Chinese Avant garde writers, Su Tong and Ye Zhaoyan. I will examine how the memory functions as a paradigm for representation, and how it acts as a counter discourse to the historical narrative that has dominated Chinese literary writing since 1949, thus enabling such writing to move away from the tyranny of historical thinking, consciousness and discourse.
"The burden of history" over the Chinese mind is not just cultural, political, ideological, intellectual, but also literary. Its constraints-ideologies of referentiality, objectivity, continuity, and teleology-are also constraints in literary writing. The consciousness of historical narrative embodied in linear temporality and causal relations greatly limit perceptive, cognitive, and productive dimensions in literary form and language. With its truth claim and moral authority (for determining the meaning), the historical narrative becomes the master narrative of contemporary socialist realist literature.
Memory, which is often mistaken as equivalent to history, is in effect fundamentally different from history. Resisting to any law, system, abstraction, and temporal continuity, memory is at home in the concrete, as well as in the spaces, images, objects and even temporal disorientation. Open to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, it has its own temporality, which is heterogeneous, fluid, reversible, and multiple, as opposed to chronology and continuity. Being the present past, memory is a figure for representation, which is also an act of perception, of intellection, of language, and most of all, of imagination. Its infinite association and linkage do not reproduce but represent. In the close reading of saga fiction, I will particularly concentrate on the temporal issue, which lies at the core of memory as representation. I will show that by bringing out different times-mythic, religious, natural, and psychological-saga fiction creates a variety of times which not only fall out of the historical and the linear, but also make this continuity as a signifying framework senseless. If memory is often seen as being synonymous with history, it is because it is conceptualized and systematized by historical thinking and reconstruction. I will also argue that the use of memory not only releases all productive and creative powers in form and language, but also forms a counter discourse to the historical one. As a result, we can say that what is represented in the family saga is another history, or histories, which, though, is not a so called unofficial history, a supplement to the official history, but one which can only be understood in its own terms.
Ban Wang, State University of New York, Stony Brook
The transformation of our common run of humanity to a sublime model of ideological perfection engages contemporary Chinese aestheticians in their interpretations of Western aesthetics. To be truly aesthetic, this transformative project has to take account of the creaturely and sensuous dimensions of the human subject. Sense perception, feelings, emotion, intuition, biological needs and unconscious impulses-all this, as Terry Eagleton reminds us, is the proper domain of the aesthetic as the history of the concept has amply exhibited. As a conscientious scholar well versed in Western aesthetics, Li Zehou, the eminent Chinese aesthetician, takes seriously the central category of the human senses. One of the chief task of aesthetics, he asserts, is to study the sensory elements in the aesthetic experience of the individual. This emphasis on the sensuous aspect of the human subject persists throughout Li Zehou's works on the categories of imagination, empathy, typicality, artistic creativity and others, and since the early 1980s he has made fresh and ambitious attempts to construct a theory of the human subject which centers on the concept the human senses.
The renewed interest in the human senses was only one of the strong voices in the chorus of men of letters who sang the "discovery of man" in China in the 1980s. For a long time aesthetic thinking and literary discourse refused to treat the human senses and feeling on their own terms as indispensable and valuable attributes of "the human." With political and ideological control loosening after the Cultural Revolution and with the increasing momentum of the economic reform, discontents about such a conception of man and his senses quickly surged into huge tidal waves in theoretical reflections, literary criticism and literary production. It is in this intellectual and cultural ambiance that Li Zehou's attempts at constructing a theory of the human subject can be best understood. His project focuses on the human senses and is termed the "construction of a new mode of sensibility." The phrase may be taken to mean a reconstruction of the human psyche, despite all its elusive vagaries of senses, feeling and thought, on a collective and rational basis. So modeled and groomed the senses will be freed from the crudely sensuous and sensual, from physical needs and hence become humanized. This paper recounts three ways in which Li approaches his aesthetic project: by a critique of Kant and Zhu Guangqian, by drawing on the humanist notions in Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and by elaborating the concept of "sedimentation."
Li Zehou's attempt to construct a new form of sensibility can be read as lending itself to a project of hegemony in the precise sense of the term. The concept of hegemony denotes the dream of a ruling order, in which the ruling power and its systems of legitimization are constituted, not as a coercive power superimposed from the outside on the individual, but as something resembling inner nature, imprinted, deposited, internalized and "sedimented" on the very pulse, gaze, and feeling of the individual and lived out by him or her in the full delight of consent and "freedom." Li writes that the concept of sedimentation refers to the social, rational and historical as these elements accumulate and deposit and becomes something individual, sensuous, and immediate. The sensuous and the rational, the individual and the social are indeed unified in sedimentation, but the balance tilts to the latter.
Thus Li's account of the relation between sense and reason, the individual and the collective can be seen as an allegory, in the guise of aesthetic theory, of the relationship that is supposed to obtain between the individual and social structure in a hegemonic political order. His aesthetic account resounds with the echoes of Mao Zedong when the late Chairman was picturing the ideal political order to a Party conference attended by the Party chiefs from all the provinces in 1957. Mao said that the political goal of the Party was to "build a lively political environment where there is both centralization and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both totality of will and the felt delight of the individual." Li may bridle at this somewhat abrupt yoking together of Mao's political ideal and his aesthetic theory, but political concern is certainly the hidden agenda of his aesthetic reflection. This is not only evident in the declared purpose of his aesthetic project as the "construction" of spiritual culture going hand in hand with the material construction of socialist modernization, but more evidently in his repeated claim that Schiller's aesthetic theory is politically oriented and that we have a great deal more to learn from him than from Hegel.
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