Poetics and Politics of Memory
Part 1: Introduction - Writing Issues in the
Novel
(1) The Exegetical Essay
(2) “Writing History”
(3) The Research
(a) Initial creative
idea and the ‘role of serendipity’
(b) Comprehensive
survey of literature concerning major themes of the novel
(c) The creative reading of found
objects: 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. The methodology of the
author’s writing technique draws on the use of non-fiction contemporary Chinese
‘outsiders’ addressing key socio-political issues and trends in post-1979 China,
These non-fiction texts are 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 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.
(4) The Process of Writing
(a) 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.
(b) 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.
Part 2: Creating the authorial space as an Outsider
(i) Pu Songling and the characters of Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio as outsiders - a narratological
survey
(ii) The author and the
characters of A Strange Tale From A
Baisha Studio as outsiders – a narratological survey
(iii) The author’s
‘outsider writing’ of the main character, Yue, in A Strange Tale From A Baisha Studio: can a White man write as a
Chinese woman … does anyone care? The author as the outsider - look at such
aspects as the author’s early personal experience, author’s 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
Part 3: Creating the memory space as Poetics
and Politics
(i) The Poetics: Memory in literature -
A memory’s discourse (homage to Barthe)
... introduction ... the argument ... pleasure ... nostalgia ...
coincidence ... repetition ... physical ... arbitrariness ... insignificance
... degree ... banishment ... memorial ... idolatry ... the author ... pu
songling ... yue ... rong ... shen ... the lotus fragrance ... the party ...
the outsider ... the strange ... fox-spirits ... ghosts ... memory ...
epiphany ... trust ... truth ... proust ... flaubert ... wordsworth ... barnes
... woolf ... joyce ... plato ... time ... mimesis ... repressed ... reimagined
... decoding ... encoding ... politics ... poetics ... love ... bildungsroman
... china' memory ... the correspondents ... embedding in china ... writing
memory ... framing ... narratology ... the poetics of space ... the politics of
space
(ii) The Politics: Memory in A Strange Tale From A Baisha Studio – An
Outsider’s discourse
(a) The Strange: the
presence of the dissident outsider in contemporary China
(b) Memory: the
politics of narrative as cultural memory
(c) Language: the power
of semantic relations in narrative structure
(d) Transcultural Experience: beyond the East /West paradigm
Part 4: Conclusion
Reflections on the Novel, Memory and China
Bibliography
Exegesis Overview
Accompanying
the novel is the exegesis, Poetics And Politics Of Memory. 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
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 1
And shimmers along the waves for
thousands of miles.
The
river meanders through fragrant fields
huí (return)
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)[i]
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)[i]
huí (return)
(i) lìchūn (beginning of spring)[xvii]
I arrived for my second meeting with Rong in
his studio in Beijing. The first meeting had been tentative, two people walking
on the fragile ice of a thawing spring. After three hours of expressing a
shared longing for Shen’s safety, both of us new in intimate deatail the pain
and suffering Shen had endured at the hands of the ignorant and brutalized
goons of a government that could only express itself through repression and
control. we had felt as though we’d always been fated to be friends; confidants
in a world of outsiders; me, because I had received a fox-spirit belonging;
Rong, because he had taken the path of a free-thinking poet in China.
Rong
and I became ‘brothers' in common. I had known about Rong for more than ten
years. Shen’s continued praise of him was remarkable in its enduringness and
strength. Rong was well known to the Chinese public at large, as a result of
his political and controversial poems that for over forty years had been set
down on paper, and eventually read by those that knew there was more than one
history. The poems spanned the modern years of Chinese history; the banished
years of the Cultural Revolution, the ‘opening up’ of China, the subsequent
‘lost decade’ of the 80s, and the torturous ‘golden’ years leading up to the
present. They were poems of love and dissent.
The moment Rong opened the studio door for me
he started to apologise, “I’m sorry Yue for the room being so hot. The windows
have only just been opened and the room’s not been properly aired. There should
only be the smell of the magnolia drifting through the window to mark the
return of spring.[xviii] I’m sure
that Mei the new housekeeper has been smoking again, leaving the room a blended
scent of magnolia and tobacco. Such a confusion of perfumery,” he laughed. He
followed with a whimsical sigh and and an exasperated, “Oh my god.”
He
gestured for me to sit down. He’d prepared a pot of Yunnan coffee for me, and
some ten-year old puer tea for himself. “I have another surprise for you;
chocolate and tiramisu biscuits, sent all the way from Guangdong by a close
friend,” he announced with a childlike glee. “I have been hoarding them for a
special occasion. You know my addiction for chocolate is famous; I have an
unrequited love for it,” he proudly told me. Then he jokingly exclaimed, “Repent and we will all be saved!”[xix]
“Thanks
Rong,” I said laughing back, “I am sure that you will be the one who will be
saved, and I am sure that those who do the saving will surely share in your same
passion for chocolate. By the way Rong, you really are an urban legend.”[xx]
I added, and then had started to tell him about what had happened just thirty
minutes previously on the way to the studio, “On the way here I was standing in
the street and heard an older man and a young woman discussing you, at length!
I was dying to join in the conversation.”
We
both smiled.
“And
at dinner the other night, your name came up again. We were all sitting around
the table talking about ghosts and spirits and someone quoted from one of your
poems. 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.”
“Thanks
for not bringing up my name.” Rong replied. “I think it’s best. This city of
Beijing is a place where people’s homes should stand as places where one can
shelter and remain private. Instead the city seems like a streetscape of
carapaces that are illuminated even in the bright light of day. These spaces
have become capable of exposing even the inner thoughts of old men like myself.
It’s dangerous. Drink your coffee, Yue. I’ll wait for my tea to cool in this
beautiful fresh morning air.” He spoke in the manner of a man that had still
not seen too much of life.
“In
our last talk together you started up a meandering conversation[xxi] regarding
Shen,” Rong started to remind me of what we had been discussing in our last
meeting, “About the time last year, when you met him for the first time
face-to-face. You were waiting for him in downtown Beijing, in a pizza hut, and
you were lamenting that you would rather have been meeting him down at the
local Tuanjiehu Park where the old men and women practiced their calligraphy
every morning.”
I leant forward towards Rong, the studio now
full of the smell of coffee and tea, and started to tell him of my love for
that park, and of my first meeting with Shen.”
***************
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.
* * *
·
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
********
[i] Each chapter begins with a segment of traditional Chinese poetry relating its theme character. The first chapter starts with two stanzas of Moonlight on the Spring River by Zhang Rouxu (c. 660-c.720). (http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/zhang.html)
[i] Zeitlin,
Judith T. (1993) Historian
of The Strange: Pu Songling and The Chinese Classical Tale, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, p 4.
[ii] Zeitlin,
Judith T. (1993) Historian
of The Strange: Pu Songling and The Chinese Classical Tale, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, p 4.
[iii] Baranovitch,
Nimrod. (2001) ‘Between Alterity and Identity - New Voices of Minority People
in China’, Modern China 27 p 360.
[iv] Baranovitch, Nimrod. (2007) ‘Inverted Exile - Uyghur Writers and
Artists in Bassin, Mark. (2000) ‘‘I object to rain that is cheerless’ -
landscape art and the Stalinist aesthetic imagination’, Cultural Geographies 7:3 pp 313-336.
[v] Lee, Ching Kwan. (2000) ‘The `Revenge of History' - Collective
Memories and Labor Protests in North-Eastern China’, Ethnography 1:2 pp 217-237.
[vi] Lee, Ching Kwan. (2007) Against
the law: Labor protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, University of
California Press, Berkley, California.
[vii] Jingsheng, Wei. (1997) The Courage to Stand Alone - Letters from Prison and Other Writings. Edited
and translated by Kristina M. Torgeson. New York: Viking.
[viii] Paltemaa, Lauri. (2005) ‘Individual and Collective
Identities of the Beijing Democracy Wall Movement Activists, 1978–1981’, China Information 19: 3: 443-487.
[ix] Cherrington, Ruth.
(1997) ‘Generational Issues in China -
A Case Study of the 1980s Generation of Young Intellectuals
’, The British Journal of Sociology
48:2:Jun., 1997 pp 302-320
[x] Yang, Guobin. (2003) ‘China's Zhiqing
Generation - Nostalgia, Identity, and Cultural Resistance in the 1990s’, Modern China 29:3 pp 267-296.
[xi] Nora,
Pierre. (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de
Mémoire’, Representations 26:8.
[xii] http://conference2.sol.lu.se/poeticsofmemory/
[xiii] Jan
Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 129.]
[xiv] Agnew, Christopher S. (2009) ‘Memory and Power in Qufu - Inscribing
the past of Confucius’ Descendants’, Journal
of Family History 34:4 pp 327-343.
[xv] Ricoeur,
Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting University
of Chicago Press.
[xvi]
Each chapter begins with a
segment of traditional Chinese poetry relating its theme character. The first
chapter starts with two stanzas of Moonlight
on the Spring River by Zhang Rouxu (c.
660-c.720). (http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/zhang.html)
[xvii] 4 February 2010: spring begins, spring
commences
[xviii] hui (return) - return of spring; huí [to
return]: semantic relations: to pay a return visit, return, recipricate,
payback, to evade, to shun, to avoid, echo - hui2 [to go back] bo1 [wave,
ripple] - hui2 [to go back] she1ng [sound, voice] - hui2 [to go back] yi1n
[musical note], returning wave, to refute, return trip, to go from anger to
happiness, to recharge, return of spring, receipt, return to, return visit,
return a compliment, to reply, to look back, to review, final radiance of
setting sun, fig. dying flash of,
recurring fever, to return to Zhōngguó,
to look back at history, to cook again and re-warm, to return to one’s home
country, retrospective exhibition, to write back, time and again [hui2 hui2],
every time, to fight back, see you later!, to return to the capital, to return
empty, feedback, winding corridor, first return of the bride to her parental
home, to glance back, chapter title in a novel, regression, recall, meandering
and circuitous, return of the prodigal son, deeply moving, magical ands brining
the dying back to life, for he first time, saying is one thing doing is quite
another, gone forever, the sea of bitterness has no bounds turn your head to
see the shore, only Buddhist enlightenment can allow one to shed off the abyss
of worldly suffering, repent and ye shall be saved!, at first raw later ripe,
unfamiliar at first but you soon get used to it, strangers at first meeting but
soon friends, awkward at first but becoming skilful later, an acquired taste,
to go and settle in one’s ancestral village (idiom), succession of seasons /
vicissitudes of life (idiom), unfamiliar at first but you get used to it /
first raw, later ripe (idiom), convoluted (of plots, etc.) / full of twists and
turns (idiom), time and time again (idiom), a mountain road twists and turns
(idiom), to make the rounds visiting patients (idiom), to repent / to start a
new life / to change one’s heart (idiom), to wheel around and attack pursuers
(idiom), to linger in one’s mind (idiom), meandering and circuitous (idiom), to
return to court in triumph (idiom), to rise from the dead (idiom), to refuse to
mend one’s ways (idiom), to mend one’s ways without delay (idiom), all
manifestations of nature return with spring (idiom), to restore to health each
patient traeted (idiom), to dismiss and send home (idiom), magical hands bring
the dead back to life (idiom), to be redolent of the past (idiom), to re-echo
in one’s ears (idiom), spring has returned to the land (idiom), to return empty-handed
(idiom), to waste an opportunity (idiom), to cross the Rubicon (idiom), to be
completely annihilated (idiom), to make a detour (idiom), to change one’s mind
(idiom), to guarentee a promise (idiom), the sea of bitterness has no bounds,
turn your head to see the shore / only Buddhist enlightment can allow one to
shed off the abyss of worldly suffering (idiom),
[xix] hui (return) - repent and ye shall be
saved!,
[xx] dū shì chán qí [urban legend
(translation of recent western term); story or theory circulated as true]
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