some problems we may experience

1. Seeing Is FindingDifferent Perspectives:no “happing ending” for the monolithic readerRujie WangCollege of Wooster

2. some problems we may experience • The purpose of art • Aesthetic and narrative styles • Approaches to literature as biases • Literary truth and methods

3. Differing Purposes of Art and Life • Art for art’s sake or as a vehicle of change • Art as entertainment or as representation of life (social reality) • Anthropocentrism (teleology) versus Chinese cosmology (meaningful coincidences) • Western humanism and Eastern religion

4. How views differ between U.S. and other cultures Commenting on a screenplay by Ken Kesey, Arthur Miller said that it revealed the American faith in the infinite possibility of growth for the individual person, and that its theme was a quintessentially American belief [that] “despair is still for us a kind of frontier to be crossed when in other places [in the world] it is a permanent condition of life.” Arthur Miller, American playwright

5. Chinese Literary Thought and Tradition • First, whereas in Western expressive theories the creative character of the imagination is of central importance, Chinese expressive theorists, with a few exceptions like Lu Chi and Liu Hsieh, seldom emphasize creativity. For example, whereas Coleridge describes the ‘Secondary Imagination’ (the artistic imagination) as the faculty that ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,’ and Wordsworth likewise asserts, ‘The imagination also shapes and creates,’ similar statements are hardly ever found in Chinese expressive theories. This difference may be due to, as I suggested earlier, the absence in traditional Chinese philosophy of the concept of an anthropomorphic deity as the Creator of the world, in contrast to the Judaeo-Christian concept of God the Creator, which provided a model for the concept of the artist as creator. • James Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975, p.87

6. The World as A Moral or Natural Universe The late Dr. Hu Shih, eminent historian of Chinese thought and culture, used to say with sly delight that centuries of Christian missionaries had been frustrated and chagrined by the apparent inability of Chinese to take sin seriously. Were we to work out fully all the consequences for Chinese society of the model offered by an organismic cosmos functioning through the dynamism of harmony, we might well be able to relate the absence of a sense of sin to it. For in such a cosmos there can be no parts wrongfully present; everything that exists belongs, even if no more appropriately than as the consequence of a temporary imbalance, a disharmony. Evil as a positive or active force cannot exist; much less can it be frighteningly personified. ____ Frederick W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China Princeton University Press, 1989. p.21

7. Values, Attitudes, and Histories • “But in India, it [despotism] is normal: for here there is no sense of personal independence with which a state of despotism could be compared, and which would raise revolt in the soul; nothing approaching even a resentful protest against it, is left, except the corporeal smart, and the pain of being deprived of absolute necessaries and of pleasure. In the case of such a people, therefore, that which we call history is not to be looked for. … This [Hinduism] makes them incapable of writing history; all that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams.” • ___ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Dover, 1956 pp.161-2

8. For instance, the Frenchman Maupassant’s Une vie is human literature about the animal passions of man; China’s Prayer Mat of Flesh, however, is a piece of non-human literature. The Russian Kuprin’s novel Jama is literature describing the lives of prostitutes, but China’s Nine-tailed Tortoise is non-human literature. The difference lies merely in the different attitudes conveyed by the work, one is dignified and one is profligate; one has aspirations for human life and therefore feels grief and anger in the face of inhuman life, whereas the other is complacent about human life, and the author even seems to derive a feeling of satisfaction from it, and in many cases to deal with his material in an attitude of amusement and provocation. In one simple sentence: the difference between human and non-human literature lies in the attitude that informs the writing; whether it affirms human life or inhuman life.“Humane Literature” by Zhou Zuoren in Modern Chinese Literary Thought. ed. Kirk Denton. Stanford UP, 1996. Pp.155-6

9. Chen Duxiu, leader of Chinese Communist Party • Chinese literature today is lifeless and stale, unable to stand next to that of Europe. . . . . The problem of Confucianism has been attracting much attention in the nation: this is the first indication of the revolution in ethics and morality. ... The classical literature is pompous and pedantic and has lost the principles of expressiveness and realistic description. Eremitic literature is highly obscure and abstruse and is self-satisfied writing that provides no benefit to the majority of its readers. In form, Chinese literature has followed old precedents; it has flesh without bones and body without soul. It is a decorative and not a practical product. In content, its vision does not go beyond kings, officials, spirits, ghosts, and the fortunes or misfortunes of individuals. As for the universe, or human life, or society--they are simply beyond its ken. Such are the common failings of these three kinds of literature. _______Chen Duxiu On Literary Revolution, p.144

10. Aesthetic and Narrative Styles • How life is understood affects the way human stories are told • Cultural values and attitudes are embedded in the narrative patterns of history and literature (film) • Differing emphases create modes of representation and aesthetic styles

11. Story as Event This is the fact that, despite our easy acceptance of the commonsense premise that narrative is that branch of literature which relates a sequence of human events, it is precisely in the area of defining the “event” as an existential unit that we find a wide divergence of conceptual models from culture to culture. _____ Andrew Plaks, Chinese Narrative. Princeton University Press,1977. p.314.

12. Narrative Patterns in the Classical Novel The ubiquitous potential presence of a balanced, totalized, dimension of meaning may partially explain why a fully realized sense of the tragic does not materialize in Chinese narrative. .... But in each case the implicit understanding of the logical interrelation between these fictional characters' particular situation and the overall structure of existential intelligibility serves to blunt the pity and fear the reader experiences as he witnesses their individual destinies. In other words, Chinese narrative is replete with individuals in tragic situations, but the secure inviolability of the underlying affirmation of existence in its totality precludes the possibility of the individual's tragic fate taking on the proportions of a cosmic tragedy. Instead, the bitterness of the particular case of mortality ultimately settles back into ceaseless alternation of patterns of joy and sorrow, exhilaration and despair, which go to make up an essentially affirmative view of the universe of experience. Andrew Plaks, Ibid. Pp.351-2

13. Post-modernism as a biasand approach to literature • History is also a cultural construction just like fiction, legends, and myths created to serve interests and power • Reality is constructed, mediated and presented through language, and contingent upon discursive conditions • Knowledge (truth or understanding) is an event, with its being grounded in time with its own biases and prejudices • Literary realism ought to be treated first and foremost as aesthetics (principles governing how the Real is represented)

14. Fiction as Auto-ethnography? In other words, fictional works written in the twentieth-century to reject “old” values and attitudes can be seen as Chinese self-representation and self-reinvention. It is in the ways in which the Chinese (authors) tell the stories of their lives that they become “modern” and achieve what Lydia Liu called a “translated modernity.”

15. The New Year’s Sacrifice (by Lu Xun and dir. By Xia Yan in 1956) indicts traditions as repression

16. An adaptation of the novel (1986) by Mo Yan, the film Red Sorghum celebrates primitive passion and reinvents the Chinese as sexually uninhibited

17. Raise the Red Lantern (Su Tong), dir. Zhang Yimou in 1991, exoticizes the tradition of concubinage

18. Sheldon Xiaopeng Lu The end result of Zhang's film art may seem to be his ability to tell the Western audience enchanting, exotic stories about the other country 'China' through stunning visual images. He has offered the Western viewer a museum of precious Chinese objects, costumes, and artifacts. He has presented a dazzling array of icons and symbols of his 'China': green sorghum field, red sorghum wine, colorful strips of cloth, dye mill, red lanterns, red pepper, and puppet show. He has told lurid stories of murder, incest, polygamy, and concubinage. He has rendered on screen masquerades of terrifying political events such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. All these spectacles have been masterfully manufactured for the pleasure and gaze of the Western viewer. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu. Transnational Chinese Cinema. University of Hawaii Press, 1997. p.126.

19. Sheldon Xiaopeng Lu Some films achieve a transnational status precisely because they are seen as possessing an authentically 'national' 'Chinese' 'Oriental' flavor by Western audiences. In the meantime, the domestic Chinese audience dismisses the same films as 'misrepresentations' and 'mystifications' of China." • Ibid. p.12.

20. Rey Chow: Primitive Passions Although Zhang (Yimou) may think that he is making films about China, what he is doing is representing a timeless China of the past, which is given to us in an imagined because retrospective mode. The China, which is signified mythically, is the China constructed by modernity—the modernity of anthropology, ethnography, and feminism. It is also a China exaggerated and caricatured, in which the past is melodramatized in the form of excessive and absurd rituals and customs. p.145

21. Truth and Methods of Interpretation Roland Barthes, French linguist and thinker“To understand a narrative is not merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its construction in ‘storeys’, to project the horizontal concatenation of the narrative ‘thread’ on to an implicitly vertical axis. To read (to listen to) a narrative is not merely to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from one level to the next.” ______ Image-Music-Text. trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. p. 87.

22. Literary reviews and interpretations • There is not unmediated perception and the narrative stories we read are never self-explanatory. For these stories to be interpreted as meaningful, we need to be aware of various systems of signification responsible for the way a story is put together. "Since every sign supposes a code," says Roland Barthes, "it is this code that one should try to establish. The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code, the other with a code." ________ Roland Barthes, Ibid. p.19.