Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Xiaomei Chen, Ohio State University
Journey Within: The Inward Turn of the Contemporary Chinese Novel
Susan Shuyu Kong, University of British Columbia
This paper examines the tendency of internalization and subjectivation in contemporary Chinese novels of the later 1980s and early 1990s. It uses three novels as examples, they are: Wang Anyi's Facts and Fictions (1993), Ge Fei's On the Margins (1992), and Yu Hua's Crying and the Fine Rain (1991). I try to demonstrate a new narrative mode emerging, with its thematic novelty and formal changes, against the background of the collapse of official ideology and "master narrative."
In these works, first-person autobiographical narrators are employed to explore personal experience and private life, a space once repressed and forbidden in modern Chinese literature. Reflections on growing-up, personal memory of the past and the imaginative search for identity can thus be read allegorically as a Chinese Bildungsroman of the awakening consciousness of Self.
This new kind of narrative not only emphasizes the importance of inner territory, but also bring a new subjective writing style which greatly changes the appearance and conception of the Chinese novel. The chronological line is broken up into a psychological temporal order; plotting of events disappears behind the mental scenery; and omniscient didactic voices are replaced by self-conscious reflective ones. Such individualist inward-turning narratives challenge the former collective, socially-oriented "realist epic" produced since the 1930s. It provides an alternative form and function for modern Chinese novels.
Gu Cheng's Novel Ying'er : A Kingdom of Daughters:
Xia Li, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Gu Cheng's novel Ying'er was completed in March 1993 in Germany and published in China in the same year. Its immediate success as an important and authentic document of a troubled artistic mind can be attributed to a number of factors: the author's international status as a poet; the sensational circumstances of his and his wife's death; the lingering controversy over the authorship of the novel; the overt biographic dimension of the young artist's journey to New Zealand and Berlin and the memories of his past reanimated in his new environment; the narrative technique employed; the lyrical quality of the language and the thematic core of the text. However, despite its popularity in China, the novel has received little serious critical attention. This paper will focus on the thematic core and the underlying archetypal metaphor of the text where the protagonist's pilgrimage to the West (New Zealand and Germany) can be seen as a quest for self-realization and freedom that ultimately leads to self-destruction and on the two female characters, Ying'er and Lei, who accompany him on his ritualistic journey and their role as essential aspects of the protagonist's Self.
Beyond the Yellow Earth: Post-Socialist City as a Cinematic Space of Anxiety
Harry H. Kuoshu, Reed College
This essay studies the PRC's young film directors' "return" to the city. It specifies the rise of the new kind of city films in the mid 1980s as a testimony to its contemporary political and cultural phenomenon that it refers to as the "beyond-yellow-earth-syndrome." It argues that the contrast of city and countryside on screen is engaged in a discourse that speaks of the separation of the "individual beings" (geti ren) from the "collective beings" (qiunti ren) and "economic beings" (jingji ren) from "political beings" (zhengzhi ren). The young directors' "return" from the filmic countryside (which, such as those of "the yellow earth" and "the red sorghum," represents their contemplation, in collective terms, of the history, legend and potentiality of a nation) to the filmic city (which, as the essay is to show, represents fragmentation) marks their changed sense of cultural engagement-their cultural anxiety turns from that of a nation to that of the individual, projecting a new type of screen characters, i.e., marginal urban youth whose dislocations are related to a rapidly changing urban life.
Taking the "beyond-yellow-earth-syndrome" as a political and cultural phenomenon, the essay believes that the new city films will yield more sense if they are discussed in the post-socialist framework incorporated by the framework of modernism (the Western "God is dead" modernity is interestingly matched by the Chinese loss of its political and ideological "God"). The new city films are "new" exactly because they project the PRC's "the God-is-dead-world" on the screen. The importance of being "new" lies in this adjective's relation to its synonyms of "beyond" (yellow earth) and "post" (socialism).
To vindicate what is being discussed, the essay draws attention to three new city films. Sunshine and Showers is viewed as a spatial negotiation between the small alley and the dazzling metropolis. Samsara is seen as a doomed city pastoral, and Trouble Shooters is looked into for its staging of the post-socialist cultural and ideological ambiguity.
Re-theorizing the Personal: Negotiating Self-Identity in Yu Luojin's
Autobiographical Writing
Lingzhen Wang, Cornell University
Yu Luojin has been regarded as one of the most controversial women and writers in China during the 1980s. With her brother's posthumous fame as a national hero, with several autobiographical writings and with an unconventional record of marriages and divorces, she was several times at the center of heated national debates about various topics, ranging from the literary value of her writing to women's rights of marriage and divorce; from the representation of history in her writing to moral evaluation of her behavior as a historical Chinese woman. Her name is associated in the press with either a brave and bold writer or a degenerate woman.
What is the relationship between a woman's writing and the convention of being a woman of the time ? How does a woman, through writing, negotiate her gendered identities with the dominant ideologies of the society at the given moment ? How should we read out of Yu's written stories a female historical experience, an experience which does not refer to a unified and natural entity but is the material location of the complex interplay of multiple discourses? How have these constantly changing experiences re-negotiated the writing contexts and re-created, through writing, new dimensions of the self?
I will address these issues in my paper and will illustrate that the subjectivity of Chinese women writers is produced neither by a prediscursive identity, nor by any non-historically mediated discourses, but through complex personal negotiations among the constructed identities, specific writing contexts and fantasies in their writings.
Violence: The Aesthetics and the Politics: Towards a Reading of Yu Hua
Jianguo Chen, Michigan State University
Violence is a recurrent motif in the writing of Yu Hua, a contemporary Chinese writer. In most of his major works Yu Hua displays an unusual interest in this provocative subject matter, one otherwise shunned because of its association with moral indecency. My paper demonstrates, by means of a metaphorical model, (1) how Yu Hua uses violence as a symbol of existential plight in China, in which history and present, fiction and reality seem to have merged into the political delirium of torture and self-torture and (2) how he shows the necessity of reading aesthetics and politics together in a symbolic resistance to the "metanarrative."
The paper consists of four parts The first part discusses Yu Hua's postmodern reading of Chinese history and demonstrates how violence and cruelty become his favorite metaphor for the Chinese reality of horror, which strips Chinese history of its grandiose garment. The second part is focused on Yu Hua's aesthetics of violence: how violence pertains to inspiration for artistic creation and human instinct for self-destruction, as well as on the ethical responsibilities in the writer's naked representation of horrible social reality. The third part examines Yu Hua's dialectic of violence-his literary treatment of dominance and subjection. The discussion of the logic of torture and self-torture is the focus of the last section, in which I argue about the historical and ideological implications of violence in Yu Hua's works.