Accompanying
the novel is the exegesis, Poetics And Politics Of Memory: Theories
From A Bai Sha Studio. The exegesis has two main aims: firstly, to examine
the major theoretical and philosophical themes of the creative work; and,
secondly, to interpolate a methodology for the author’s creative writing
process. The themes of the novel and writer’s methodology will be analysed
utilising theoretical elements from literary and social science
discourse, postmodernism, and present theories and language of narratology.
Primary and secondary sources will be examined as well as interviews and
eyewitness reports. The exegesis is
structured so that it can
act both as a work of creative writing (a creative work in its own right), and
as a traditional research thesis.
The exegesis
explores the creative work using four major themes and a number of minor
themes.
The major
themes already outlined are:
·
The
Strange: the presence of the dissident outsider in contemporary China
·
Memory:
the politics of narrative as cultural memory
·
Language:
the power of semantic relations in narrative structure
·
Transcultural
Experience: beyond the East /West paradigm
Other themes
outlined in the exegesis are:
·
Politics:
China as a post-global and post-modernist communist nation state
·
The
Countryside: Ethnic identity in contemporary rural china
·
The
City: Urban transition and exploration
·
Gender:
Sex, sexuality and women in post-revolutionary China
·
New-wave
Art: The 80s avant-garde renaissance
·
The
Fox-Spirit: A social psychology
·
Tao,
Buddhism and Christianity: the ethics of religion
In the
exegesis there will also be a close examination of the author’ processes in the
creative writing of the novel A Strange
Tale From A Bai Sha Studio
Processes
that will be examined as part of the author’s methodology include:
·
Initial creative idea and the ‘role of
serendipity’
·
Creating the authorial space
·
Initial research including the collecting
together of the author’s personal experience
·
Adapting academic non-fiction work - the role
of ‘found objects’ (academic journal articles) and ‘creative reading’
(projecting the author’s imagination) in the context of the fiction narrative
·
Immersion in the cultural and social space of
the creative work
·
Spiralling research and the making of the
creative work
·
Unifying personal collective knowledge and
the expectations of the university.
Research for the Exegesis:
The literary
core of the creative work has two overriding themes that will be examined in
detail in the exegesis. The first theme is that of the ‘strange’, ‘ and the
‘ooutsider’ (Songling & Minford 2006, Zeitlin 1993, Baranovitch 2001). This theme is intertextualised from the
original Songling Strange Tales From a
Chinese Studio text. In the creative work
the concept of ‘strange’ comes to represent those individuals, ideas and events
that act as ‘different’ and ‘outside’ the dominant political discourse pursued
by the present Chinese Communist Party regime. The second theme is that of
‘memory’, it’s poetry and politics, and its ability to act as an agent for both
liberation and repression in the socio-political life of contemporary China
(Debord & Knabb 2004).
The Strange: the presence of the dissident
outsider in contemporary China
In
the exegesis I aim to analyse the concept of ‘otherness’, and the role of the
‘dissident outsider’ in contemporary Chinese society. In the creative work, the
liminal, borderland-territory of the dissident outsider is traversed physically
and psychologically by the protagonists Yue and her brother Shen. Pu Songling’s
Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio (Songling & Minford 2006) acts a rich
intertext for investigating this concept of alterity.
Zeitlin (1993) emphasises that the concept of ‘strange’ is ‘a
cultural construct, created and constantly renewed through writing and
reading’; that there is no specific, objective reading of the term strange. In the writings of Songling the meanings of
‘strange’ are expressed across a broad semantic range. The character
guài is
used in the shorter (‘accounts of anomalies’
[i])
stories of strange tales
(zhī guài 志怪); qí is used in the ‘longer and more artfully narrated’
[ii]
marvellous tales (
chuán
qí 傳奇); and
yì (different) is used when combined with
guài to form guài yì 怪異 (weird
tales).
In the thesis I argue that many
‘strange’ events are now taking place in contemporary China, and that these
events (many of which have been published as studies in academic journals) can
be successfully re-written in the creative work as ‘recent stories of the
strange’, using a postmodern narrative style. I contend that the concept of the
‘dissident outsider’ is very closely aligned to concept of the ‘strange’ (Zeitlin
1993), and that these ‘strange events
and people’ also represent those things that are ‘different’ and ‘outside’. In
my creative work the ghosts, fox-spirits, unusual events and marvelous acts of
Songling’s Strange Tales From a Chinese
Studio are transformed into the artists, dissident activists, political
protests, repressed memories and altered histories of contemporary post ’79
China.
A number
of authors have noted the ‘outsider’ aspect of Songling’s Strange Tales From a Chinese
Studio.
Chang & Chang (1998) affirm
that Pu Songling was engaged in a history of alterity that challenged
traditional historiography. McMahon (2006) recognised
the liminal and borderland nature of Songlings’s tales, as did Zeitlin
(1993) who saw ‘the boundaries between the real and the illusionary’ as the
heart of the text. It was Zeitlin (1993) who reclaimed the ‘strange’ as the
book’s major discourse (as an unofficial Communist ban on all things
‘superstitious’ existed up until the late 1970s (Shishuo 1998)). Zeitlin (1993)
states that Strange Tales From a Chinese
Studio ‘deliberately straddles the border between fictional and historical
discourse’.
A number of
authors have examined the ‘outsider’ status of China’s ethnic minorities.
Baranovitch (2001) explored the role that the PRC (Peoples Republic of China)
government had, in constructing ‘outsider’ ethnic identities for China’s
sixty-nine official ethnic minorities. In addition he highlights the ethnic
minorities’ counter resistance to these ‘state’s constructions.
[iii]
Baranovitch (2007) also wrote on a number of dissident Uygher writers who, as
‘inverted exiles’ in Beijing, were granted a surprising amount of freedom
compared with their silenced colleagues back in homeland Xinjiang.
[iv]
This study highlights the nuisances of the PRC’s response to the actions of the
‘dissident outsider’ in today’s China.
The contemporary Chinese political dissident can also be perceived as
an ‘outsider’. This dissidence can take shape in the form of the labor
protestor. Lee
(2000) examined the dissidence of labor protests in north-eastern China,
exploring theories of mobilisation and class formation, and the importance of
concepts such as ‘insurgent identities, narrative identities and collective
memories’ in the emergence of labor activism.[v] Lee (2007) also examined
labor protests in the two Chinese provinces; the declining Liaoning ‘Rustbelt’
in the northeast and burgeoning Guangdong ’Sunbelt’ in the south. The problems
of bankruptcy, and unpaid wages and pensions, plagued the Rustbelt and
non-payment of wages and oppressive working conditions were rife in the
Sunbelt.[vi] These case studies will
in part be fictionalized in the creative work.
The political
dissident, and protestor, can easily transform into the political prisoner.
Torgeson’s (1997) edited collection of the prison writings of the leading
dissident Wei Jingsheng, who
during the 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement famously declared the need for ‘fifth modernization’ democracy and was then
incarcerated for fifteen years in a number of Chinese detention centres and
labor reform camps, are important both for their ontological dimension as well
as for their historical relevance in connection with the 1989 democracy
protests. Both protests failed in their inability to gather support from
democratic forces with the CCP.[vii] Paltemaa (2005) examines
the Democracy Wall movement, through the ‘individual and collective identities’
of its participants.[viii]
Paltemaa focuses on the complex politics of in the formation of these identities
and offers many specific insights and historical facts that will also be
incorporated into the narrative text of the creative work. The above sources
are drawn upon in the Tiananmen Square component of the creative work.
The ‘political dissident’ can also
be examined using the concept of generational change, with its associated
cultural dissidence. Cherrington’s (1997) case study ‘of the 1980s generation
of young intellectuals’,[ix] some of whom
became the young dissident leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy
movement demonstrations, offers critical insights to what contributed to the
mass-movement of protests that ended in the bloody massacre of Tiananmen 1989. Yang’s (2003)
study of China’s 1990s zhīqīng generation’s
cultural dissidents (the educated youth who were sent to work on farms during
the Cultural Revolution)
examines the ‘wave of nostalgia that swept over the zhīqīng generation
after this generation’s viewing of the 1990 Beijing based exhibition titled Our Spiritual Attachment to the Black Soil—A Retrospective Exhibit
about the Educated Youth of Beidahuang.[x] This flood of nostalgia
was in direct contrast to the same generation’s literary response, ‘the
literature of the wounded’, which flowed after their return to the cities ten
years earlier. Yang explores the reason for this dissimilarity in response.
Yang sees this nostalgia as a form of collective cultural resistance at a
social and cultural micropolitical level, rather than as a mass political campaign
that occurred in Tiananmen 1989. Yang’s identification of the numerous cultural
products of this zhīqīn nostalgia
acts a rich source of material for the creative work.
In a broader
context, Wasserstrom (2003) attempts to extract contemporary Chinese protests
away from what he sees as the restrictive prism of Tiananmen Square, where the
presence of a repressive CCP regime is seen as the only causal factor. He
details other continuities that are also in place. In the context of the
‘creative work’ this is pertinent. There are over 6000 reported ‘incidents’
each year ranging from riots in Tibet and Xinjiang
to a sit-in by members of the Falun Gong sect. Some of these ‘incidents’ are fictionalised in the novel as
‘strange’ events; incidents that are instigated by those ‘outside’ the official
CCP discourse.
Memory: the politics of narrative as cultural
memory
“Memory remains in permanent evolution, open to the
dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive
deformation, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being
long dormant and periodically revived.” Pierre Nora, 1989.[xi]
Memory
covers a diverse set of cognitive labels; Tulving (2007) provides an impressive
list of 256 memory related terms, and is capable of social, political and
literary construction. The study of memory is enabled through a number of
disciplines, the primary ones being philosophy, science, psychology literature,
education and literature. Very recently there have been attempts to
reconstitute this multidisciplinary approach into a new interdisciplinary field
of memory studies (Hoskins, Barnier, Kanseiner & Suttton 2008).
In the
creative work the repressed memories of the protagonist, Yue, are meant to act
as a metaphor for what I contend are the politically, and socially, repressed
memories of post-Mao China citizens. The damage, done by this ‘forced
forgetting’ as imposed by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) regime, as well as
the ‘repressed forgetting’ of traumatised Chinese individuals, has affected a
whole generation of post 70s children. In the creative work this social dilemma
is examined through the eyes of a single outsider Yue, both in terms of her
‘strangeness’ (a returned fox-spirit child from an original Pu Songling story,
who possesses special powers around memory) and in terms of her inherited louwai status (an adopted Chinese child
who has spent most of her early life overseas).
In
researching for the thesis I have accessed a number of academic journal
articles on memory covering a wide range of these disciplines, including
politics and political science (Chan 2003, Heisler 2008, Lebow 2008, Wang 1997), architecture (Harmansah 2006, Jager 2002,
Silbergeld 2004), cultural studies (Brockmeier 2002, Brockmeier 2002, Rigney 2005, Brockmeier 2002), history (Aymard 2004,
Bendix 2002, Errante
2000, Poole 2008, Choi 2009, Agnew 2009, Cunningham 2000),
memory studies (Till 2008, Rigney 2008, Roediger 2008, Fivush 2008, Campbell 2008, Connerton 2008, Burton 2008, Brown 2008, Hoskins,
Barnier & Kanste 2008, Olick 2008, Pentzold 2009, Yeo 2008, Zelizer 2008), archeology (Delle 2008, Wallis 2008, Bennardo 2008), geography (Fan 2007, Clancey 2004, Dora 2006, Inwood 2009, Message 2005), anthropology (Yelvington 2002), cross-cultural psychology
and transcultural psychiatry (Conway, Wang, Hanyu & Haque 2005, Van Dongen 2004), anthropology (Tonkin 2001),
and philosophy (Sutton 2010).
A number of
authors (Lee 2000, Li 2009, Mitter 2003, Schaffer & Song 2006, Schwarcz 1991, Wasserstrom & Perry
1994, Xinran 2008, Lee & Yang 2007, Yang 2003) offer ‘alternative’ memories and analyses of
past events in contemporary China. These sources are accessed for components of
semi-fictional text in the creative work.
In a
literary context, memory is open to constant transformation, once it has gone
through the process of recollection. When the writer or storyteller constantly
re-imagines her/his individual past, the literary narrative attains an
ever-closer resemblance to a creative work of fiction (Lindbladh & Segesten
2007).
[xii]
The creative
work predominately concerns itself with ‘cultural memory’ and its formation.
Assmann
(1995) argues that the fixed points, or ‘figures of memory’, around which
cultural memory revolves ‘are fateful events of the past, whose memory is
maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and
institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)’.[xiii] These figures of memory
and their political and poetic manipulations are examined in the creative work.
The three main characters of the novel continually construct narratives around
these figures of memory, but as Agnew (2009) reminds us it these very
narratives that ‘are both central to memory and the most likely means of its
abuse’.[xiv]
All the
characters in the creative work are constructing their own, and each other’s,
identities through these narratives. The reader remains uncertain of the
dramatic, symbolic and psychological significance of each individual narrative.
Ricoeur (2004) states that it is ‘only at the deepest level, that of the
symbolic mediation of action’
[xv]
that narrative is incorporated into the formation of identity. The protagonists
have certainly ‘acted’ in the past, but are now going through a long period of
recollection and reflection.
As a
concluding perspective on the politics of narrative as cultural memory I would
like to cite Schwarcz (1994) who states ‘that in China there is no homecoming
of memory is allowed’. He emphasises the importance of personal narratives, as
it is only these stories that he believes will ‘provide a meaningful
alternative to politically mandated histories of events’.
Methodology for the Creative Work
Set in post-1980s China, A Strange Tale
From a Bai Sha Studio (with only approx 10% drafted so far) is completely
told in the first person, with narration shared by the three main protagonists,
P, Yue and Shen. The novel is presented in the structure of an extended
dialogue occurring in an unknown studio in the present.
The Process of Writing:
Memory: At this inchoate stage, the writing is
taking a mosaic form, whereby sections of the narrative are written not
according to any strictly linear narrative.
This allows the narrative to shift through time and space, as well as
across geographical, emotional and cultural borders. This non-linear narrative
attempts to mimic the principle processes of memory: storage, retrieval and
recollection. Memory is not linear, it slips
through time and space, and is a matrix of highly charged personal and
emotional recollections. Memory is ‘vulnerable
to manipulation and appropriation, and susceptible to being long dormant and
periodically revived’ (Nora 1989). The non-linear mosaic nature of the writing
highlights this ‘vulnerability’ of memory to the processes of manipulation and
alteration.
The methodology of the author’s writing technique
draws on the use of non-fiction text from academic
journal articles addressing key socio-political issues and trends in post-1979
China, These non-fiction texts are then juxtaposed with the ‘remembered, perceived, and imagined’
(Sutton 2010) experiences of the novel’s characters, as well as the literary imagination
of the real author. This results in a semi-fiction of ‘reimagined experiences’.
This methodology demands that the found non-fiction texts have ‘relevance’ and
‘integrity’ to both the plot and story of the novel. An authenticity of these
‘found texts’ is demanded in terms of the credibility of the protagonists
perceived ‘character’, and in terms of the dramatic structure of the novel.
Language: The methodology of the author’s writing
utilises a major feature of the Chinese written language - its capacity to form
numerous semantic meanings when two or more ideograms are used in combination -
in constructing the narrative of the novel. The novel is divided into twelve
chapters, each chapter based on a particular Chinese ideogram. The ideogram’s
formal definition, as well its lexicological relationship in combination with
other ideograms, is used as device to both overtly and covertly affect the narrative
text. As an example, the first chapter is driven by the character qì (strange) that, in combination with
other Chinese characters, is capable of over fifty distinct semantical
relations. This device is further exploited by dividing the creative work into
the twenty-four traditional Chinese calendar solar-terms, two for each chapter.
This writing methodology defines and shapes the narrative by utilising the
inherent dynamics of the written Chinese language.
The following extract demonstrates this methodology:
CHAPTER I
The tide in the Spring river meets the
flat ocean.
On the sea a bright moon is born with the tide
And shimmers along the waves for thousands of miles.
Nowhere on the Spring river is without bright moon.
The river meanders
through fragrant fields
And in the flowering woods moon makes everything snow,
Until even frost flowing in space is invisible
And on the shores white sands disappear in light.
(first two stanzas)
Moonlight on the Spring River, ZHANG
RUOXU Chang Jo-Hsü (c. 660-c.720)
(Trans: Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)
[xvi]
qì (strange)
lìchūn
(beginning of spring)
P: Yue, I’m sorry the room’s so
hot. The windows have only just been opened and the room’s not aired properly
yet. We really should be having the smell of the magnolia drifting through the
window. Instead I sense that Xi Ni has been smoking again. Magnolia and
tobacco, oh my god! I’ve ordered some coffee and tea for us, and also a
surprise. Chocolate biscuits, all the way from Guangdong, tiramisu!
Yue: Xie xie, thanks. You really are an urban legend P.
[xvii]
Just then I was standing in the street and I heard an older man and a young
woman discussing you, at length [laughs]. I was dying to join in the
conversation. And then at dinner the other night, your name came up again. We
were talking about ghosts and spirits. The night was cold and windy, and the
tree branches were even knocking against the windows. The ghosts were nearly at
the door! I didn’t dare mention that I knew you.
P: Thanks. That’s best. Here, have
some coffee. I’ll wait for my tea to cool.
Yue, Last week you started to
talk about Shen. A significant path to follow.[xviii]
I remember when you first met him. You had to
wait for him in a Pizza Hut, in Beijing. I would’ve guessed you’d preferred to
have been down at Tuanjiehu Park talking to the old men doing their
calligraphy, painting strokes of water onto the path with those huge plastic
brushes of theirs [laughs] Spring breezes stroking the face … the large characters fading away slowly in
the early morning sun … retiring into seclusion, all worries eliminated, all
sadness dispelled![xix]
Quite beautiful wouldn’t you think?
In the above
extract, the ideogram qì (strange)
acts as an intertext for the main narrative text. The term ‘urban legend’ is
used because its Chinese translation, dū shì
chán qì, contains the ideogram qì (urban legend - translation of recent western term - story or
theory circulated as true). The narrative text in the above extract, such as
the ‘odd mixture of magnolia and tobacco smells’, and the ‘surprise gift of
tiramisu chocolate biscuits from Guangdong’, also reference certain semantical
relations pertaining to qì (strange),
through its meaning of ‘odd’ and ‘surprise’; as does the text, ‘ghosts nearly
at the door’.
In another
example of this methodology, the reference to the first solar term lìchūn (beginning of Spring), triggers
the inclusion in the front of the chapter of a classic Chinese poem from the
Tang period to start the chapter. This methodology is used for all twelve
chapters, in which a Tang poem, reflecting the theme of the solar term
designated for that section f the novel, forewords each chapter.
In the above
extract, the expression ‘Spring breezes
stroking the face’ (chūn
fēng fú miàn: a spring
breeze strokes the face) is also used due to its reference to Spring. Through
juxtaposition, this phrase also references the wet paintbrush stroking the
concrete path.
* * *
In the text above I have referenced only one aspect of the methodology employed
by the author in the production of the creative work. Other aspects of the creative writing methodology that will be
examined in the exegesis include:
·
Initial creative idea and the ‘role of
serendipity’
·
Creating the authorial space (living in China
and Japan for the three years of the PhD writing)
·
Initial research including the collecting
together of the author’s personal experience
·
Adapting academic non-fiction work - the role
of ‘found objects’ (academic journal articles) and ‘creative reading’
(projecting the author’s imagination) in the context of the fiction narrative
·
Immersion in the cultural and social space of
the creative work
·
Spiralling research and the making of the
creative work
·
Unifying personal collective knowledge and
the expectations of the university
Methodology for the Exegesis
The writing of critical essay exegesis coincides with the
completion of first draft of the creative component in the second year of
candidature (2011). There will be continuing process of conducting a literature
review, and a further reefing of the chapter outline as outlined on p 15.
Provisional Chapter Outline
The Exegesis
Poetics and Politics of Memory:
Theories From A Bai Sha Studio
Introduction (1)
Part 1: Writing Issues in the Novel
(1) The
exegetical essay (3)
(2) “Writing
History” (7)
Part 2: Narratological Survey of the
Novel
(1) The
development of Character (13)
(2)
Architecture, Structure and Plot (17)
Part 3: Issues in Writing the Novel
(1) The Genesis of the Novel: The Creative Idea (21)
(i) Initial
creative idea and the ‘role of serendipity’
(ii)
Creating the authorial space
(2) The Research: The Creative Reading of Found Objects: Comprehensive Survey
of Literature concerning major themes of the novel (25)
(iii)
Initial research including the collecting together of the author’s personal
experience
(iv)
Adapting academic non-fiction work - the role of ‘found objects’ (academic
journal articles) and ‘creative reading’ (projecting the author’s imagination)
in the context of the fiction narrative
(3) The
Process of Writing: A Creative Writing Methodology: Re-imagined Experiences
(31)
(v)
Immersion in the cultural and social space of the creative work
(vi)
Spiralling research and the making of the creative work
(vii)
Unifying personal collective knowledge and the expectations of the university
Part 4: Analysis of the Novel in terms of its
three major themes
(1) The
Strange: the presence of the dissident outsider in contemporary China (40)
(2) Memory: the
politics of narrative as cultural memory (55)
(3)
Language: the power of semantic relations in narrative structure (70)
Part 5: Conclusion
Reflection on the Novel (80)
End Notes (86)
Bibliography
(92)
(note: numbers in brackets (xx) indicate proposed page number)
