The Prosaic and Provincial History of an Epic Revolution

ABSTRACT

Li Jieren’s (1891–1962) novel sequence Ripple on Stagnant Water (sishui weilan 1935), Before the Tempest (baofeng yuqian 1936) and Great Waves (da bo 1937) recounts the last days of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) in Chengdu, the capital of its frontier Sichuan province. In a double-layered narrative, it recreates, on the one hand, the affective and social transformations of a provincial city following the ‘New Policies’ of a dying empire and, on the other, the great agitations leading to the riots of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (1911), which launched the revolution that ended China’s imperial history. This essay studies Li’s structural juxtaposition of epic events with prosaic details of a fin-de-siècle life world. It suggests that, in the search for the narrative possibilities of the ‘historical real’ of a seminal event, Li’s novel cycle inscribes monumental revolution in the process of a communal world change and, in this way, opens up a new direction for the development of the modern Chinese novel. His prosaic vision and narrative of an epic event in spatial-descriptive form demonstrates an original conceptual and formal possibility that is all the more significant because of its loss in the second half of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Li Jieren
• historical fiction
• world change
• revolution in the province
• the prosaic and the epic

Notes

1. Zhang Zhongliang and Qin Gong, The Narrative of Chinese Novels: 1930s–1940s (Taiwan: Xiuwei Communications, 2004), 96.

2. Yang Lianfen, The Moving Moments: Late Qing and May Fourth Literature (Taiwan: Xiuwei Communications, 2006), 159–60.

3. Lu Decai, The Formation and Development of the Vernacular Chinese Novel (Tianjing: Nankai daxuechubanshe, 2002), 19.

4. Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 141–43.

5. See Zhu Guangqian on the epic and Chinese literary tradition, The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 8 (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1993).

6. James Legg, The Sacred Book of China (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1990), 380.

7. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); David Der Wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendour: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

8. Andrew Plaks, ‘The Novel in Premodern China,’ in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel: History, Geography and Culture, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 181–216.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 10.

10. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 404.

11. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2015), 7.

12. Since only the first volume in the sequence, sishui weilan, is translated, see Li Jieren, Ripple on Stagnant Water: A Novel of Sichuan in the Age of Treaty Ports, trans. Sparling, Bret and Yin Chi (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), I use my own translations throughout for consistency.

13. Jaroslav Prusek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

14. Sima Changfeng, A New History of Chinese Literature (Hong Kong: Zhaoming chuban youxian gongsi, 1976), 455–57; Kenny Kwok Kwan Ng, Monumental Fictions: Geopoetics, Li Jieren, and Historical Imagination in Twentieth-Century China (Harvard University, PhD thesis, 2004), 97–134. Li and his works were excluded from official Chinese literary history for most of the twentieth century.

15. Albert Thibaudet, Reflexions sur la litterature, in Antoine Compagnon and Christophe Pradeau, eds., (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

16. Laurie Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction.1850–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 13.

17. Guo Moruo, ‘Waiting for the Chinese Zola (zhongguo zuola zhi daiwang),’ Chinese Literature and Art (zhongguo wenyi) 1, no. 2, (1937); Selected Works of Li Jieren (Li Jieren xuanji), Vol. 1 (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1980), 5.

18. Li Jieren, ‘Postscript: Great Waves Vol. 3,’ in The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 4c (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 769.

19. Li, Jieren. ‘Preface to Ripples on Stagnant Water,’ in The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 9 (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 241.

20. Li Jieren, ‘My Writing Experience,’ in The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 9 (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 246–47.

21. Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 44–45.

22. Sichuan Railway Protection Movement – a local elite-led popular movement in 1911 to resist railway nationalisation which is generally considered the trigger for the Chinese Republican Revolution that ended millennia of imperial rule. See Michael Dillon. China: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary (London: Routledge, 2003), 259.

23. G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China, Studies in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 253–89.

24. Shi Bing, Telegraph and Political Changes in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Shanghai Jiaotong University: PhD Dissertation, 2010), 129–43.

25. Li Jieren, Great Waves, The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 4 (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 387–456.

26. Antonia Finnane, ‘Yangzhou’s “Modernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11 (2003): 395–425.

27. W. Feng, ‘Yi, Yang, Xi, Wai and Other Terms: The Transition from “Barbarian” to “Foreigner” in Nineteenth-century China,’ in M. Lackner, I. Amelung and J. Kurtz, eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 95–124.

28. See Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006).

29. See Yang Tianshi, End of the Empire (dizhi de zhongjie) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2013); Zhang Ming, Xinhai: A Crumbling China (yinhai: yaohuang de zhongguo) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue xhubanshe, 2011); Sebastian Veg, ‘1911: The Failed Institutional Revolution,’ in The China Beat, 10 October 2011, <www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3867> (accessed 19 Jan. 2015); Ke Weilin and Zhou Yan, eds., The 1911 Revolution: Retrospection and Reflection (xinhai geming: huigu yu fansi) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2012).

30. For the Qing Empire’s strategic realignment of Sichuan province as a stronghold along its south-western border, see Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle: the University of Washington Press, 2010).

31. This essay concentrates on the Ripple and the Waves to delimit its scope. Before the Tempest is a transitional volume.

32. The present essay will concentrate on the 1937 version. The complexity and scope of the 1957 revision of the Waves merits separate treatment.

33. Li Shiwen, Life and Works of Li Jieren (Chengdu: Sichuan kexueyuan chubanshe, 1986), 209–34.

34. Li Jieren, ‘French Novels and Novelists after Naturalism,’ in The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 9 (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 143–81.

35. See Chen, Pingyuan, Transformations of the Narrative Mode of the Chinese Novel (zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian), (Beijing: beijing daxue chubanshe 2010), 195–221.

36. Li Jieren, Great Waves (1937), The Complete Works of Li Jieren, Vol. 3a (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2011), 5.

37. Benjamin A. Elman, ‘Late Traditional Chinese Civilization in Motion, 1400–1900,’ in Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng, eds., Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World (Heidelberg: Springer Dordrecht 2014), 169–88.