Writing Lives in China, 1600-2010

Histories of the Elusive Self

Marjorie Dryburgh, Sarah Dauncey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137368560
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137368577
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This innovative collection explores the life stories of Chinese women and men between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on both biographical and autobiographical narratives and on perspectives taken from life writing theory to ask how lives were lived and written within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game.

1

Chinese Life Writing: Themes and Variations

Marjorie Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey

The critical literature on Chinese life writing has expanded rapidly in the past two decades: while only a handful of studies were produced before the 1990s, the past two decades have seen the publication of specialised monographs and essay collections, several dozen scholarly articles and a growing body of translations. That has produced a collection of very rich and scholarly works that, in their individual insights, do much to advance our understanding of categories of life narratives as historical sources, life narratives as artefacts and life writing as social practice. The growth of that corpus of specialised studies challenges our understanding of the wider context of life writing practice and life writing texts, and has produced a divided literature in which more general studies that tend to emphasise the ‘rules of the game’ (and in China, as elsewhere, life writing is a rules-based practice¹) exist in uneasy tension with more specialised works that highlight variations on, and departures from, those established patterns.² Whereas, once, it was possible to understand Chinese auto/biography as overwhelmingly ‘Confucian’,³ didactic, state-centred and masculine, more recent work has highlighted frequent departures from that apparent norm.

The cumulative effect of recent research has been to populate the field with so many exceptions that the ‘rules’ are sometimes obscured; it is time, we suggest, to look again at those rules and their place within the wider range of life writing practice. In this chapter, therefore, we offer a critical reappraisal of the existing literature on Chinese life writing that aims, first, tentatively to map the landscape in which our own chapters are sited and, second, to point to some of the unresolved questions raised by that literature. We will also suggest some of the challenges inherent in drawing general conclusions from a body of diverse, fragmentary material that was produced across many centuries, and whose porous boundaries are not yet fully charted. We would not argue that life writing practice across the smaller territory of western Europe had remained unchanged across a comparable period and do not think it wise to suggest the same of China, despite the rather greater efforts expended by state and elites in maintaining the appearance of a unified, empire-wide (later, nation-wide) culture.

To set that reappraisal in context, we will begin by highlighting some of the factors in strategies of composition, selection and preservation that have shaped and filtered the life writing corpus as it now survives and that thereby shape our understanding of life writing practice. The remainder of the chapter is structured along loosely chronological lines, addressing first the early traditions from which many assumptions on the nature and development of life writing in China were formed, before examining other work on the period covered by the later chapters in this volume. First, the critical literature on early life narratives reveals the assumptions on the power of orthodoxy in historical and biographical writing that are reflected in much of the existing scholarship; at the same time, it shows the inherent tensions and internal variations in those developing traditions, and the external pressures created by other, competing narrative forms, and suggests that those traditions and that assumed orthodoxy may have been less robust than once supposed. Second, work on life writing practice between the fourteenth and early twentieth centuries shows that social changes and new intellectual stimuli prompted changes in the authorship, audiences and uses of life narrative, as social biographies and personal memoirs were deployed in the negotiation and articulation of personal and group identities and values, and thus reflected shifting currents of change. Finally, studies of auto/biography from the late twentieth century highlight the efforts of the state to control the content and circulation of life narratives, the reception of those efforts and their complex legacies as the state becomes less assertive. Thus the literature reveals, on one hand, that state and non-state elites harboured powerful ambitions to manage the production and publication of life writings on terms that served their own interests but, on the other hand, that neither those interests, nor the conventions developed to defend them, were fixed, and that these were repeatedly re-appropriated, recast or rejected by others seeking new ways of storying lives and building communities.

Here, as in the specialised chapters that follow, we have adopted an inclusive definition of ‘life writing’. It is of course possible to query the treatment of certain works as life narrative – there is much in the poetry of the imperial era, for example, that sits between self-expression, self-portrait and self-narrative – and some narratives were necessarily spoken, rather than written, ‘speaking bitter’ in the early People’s Republic being the most striking example. Inspired by Thomas Couser’s recent work on memoir,⁴ we have chosen to focus on clarification of the development and uses of Chinese work, rather than devoting space to classification and to determining which works used in China can be categorised as specific ‘life writing’ genres, which can not and on what terms that decision is made.

Considering the archive

Before considering the insights that we can take from the critical literature, it is instructive to consider how the extant archive of life writing was created. Our understanding of Chinese life writing work and practice is shaped by multiple, layered selections, and we see the work of composition only through those lenses of selection. Although conventions of composition and strategies of preservation offer important insights into the social context in which they are deployed, they may also obscure detours, alternative traditions and the work involved in the negotiation of generic norms. The work to which we now have access is best understood not only as a residue, a passive accretion of life writing work by Chinese across the centuries, but also as the product of repeated triage, sometimes through historical accident, but often also through human agency, informed variously by principle, generic convention and sectional or personal interest.

The physical survival of texts was challenged periodically⁵ by the devastating upheavals that accompanied domestic rebellion, foreign invasion and dynastic change, as well as by flood, fire and family financial crisis when the empire as a whole was nominally at peace. The work of Lynn Struve⁶ has recovered and analysed vivid personal accounts of some of these traumas from the seventeenth century, and highlighted the role that local scholarly, religious and commercial networks played in preserving and circulating such work – in some cases rushing to press memoirs and eyewitness accounts of the Manchu invasion and Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the 1640s for audiences outside the occupied zones – yet it would be unwise to assume that little of interest was lost.

In addition to these external interventions, decisions on composition and on preservation were shaped by judgements on individuals’ value as biographical subjects; and while conventions shifted over time, some lives were much less readily marked as subjects for recording than others. Subjects of official biographies were consciously selected in the first instance for their utility as positive or negative exemplars; subjects of social biography were chosen to reaffirm networks, alliances, kinship and status. Thus, the influence of official and social biography encouraged attention to orthodox behaviours and patriarchal attitudes, and hierarchies of gender and generation often combined to valorise the lives of adult males and consign those of women and of children to a formulaic hinterland. The conventions of life narrative were assertively championed by official and non-official actors, assumptions on the fit form and content of a life story offered powerful discouragement to those who might produce or preserve unorthodox accounts, and the power of these filters is suggested by references to ‘lost’ or suppressed works, the only trace of whose existence is a comment that they should never have been written.

Even for Chinese of some status, acceptable forms of self-narration were limited by custom. Before the seventeenth century, for example, confession as a mode of spiritual self-discipline was neither common nor orthodox, and apologetics were treated with outright distaste. Condemning an unrepentant confession, historian Liu Zhiji (661–721) grumbled, ‘Although the episode may well have been true, there is nothing commendable about it. Is it not shameful to include such an episode in an autobiography?’, and other apologetics are known to us only through similarly disapproving commentaries.⁷ This heavily loaded the dice against anyone who – like Alison Hardie’s subject in this volume, Ruan Dacheng – might hope to salvage a compromised reputation; and even once self-scrutiny and self-criticism became a requirement (rather than a taboo) under Communist rule in the twentieth century, the power to decide how a life was to be scrutinised, criticised and given meaning lay in the hands of the state and elites, and not of the self-critic.

While defenders of orthodox life narrative worked to keep out deviant narrators, the converse also applied: the auto/biographical form was not the primary vehicle for much life or self-narration, and this often appears as ‘auto/biographical moments’ in poems, paratexts and other occasional genres. While it is probably not useful to define every poem or essay that reflected a mood or a moment as ‘life writing’, amongst the reflections on conventional subjects such as flower viewing, temple visiting and examination success or failure, it is worth noting works such as Du Fu’s (712–777) ‘Journey North’ and ‘Seven Songs written while living at T’ung-ku in 759’ that link the poet’s personal history to the fate of the empire, Gao Qi’s (1336–1374) verse commemoration of his daughter’s brief life, essays such as Gui Youguang’s (1506–1571) ‘The Xiangji Studio’ that packages personal and family narrative into a description of Gui’s study, or Zhang Dai’s (1597–1689) rueful pastiche, ‘An Epitaph for Myself.’⁸ Nor should we ignore the accumulation of this work across a writing lifetime: the private summary auto/biography may not have been a common form in some eras, but literate Chinese lived auto/biographically, and the work of life/self-narration was deeply embedded in study and sociability.⁹

Undoubtedly, this material is harder to track than canonical works. The growth of commercial publishing after the fourteenth century allowed circulation of a massive range of works on history and philosophy, popular almanacs and ‘how-to’ works, as well as collections of belles-lettres containing material of this type; yet the markets for such work were fluctuating, fickle and often localised.¹⁰ While the survival of official biographies was secured by the resources of the state, the longevity of works outside the canon depended on the will and resources of social networks; even minor occasional works produced by persons of recognised status were preserved, yet we know much less of what many literate Chinese chose to commit to paper.

The case of one early nineteenth-century work raises intriguing questions about the distance between the production and preservation of life narratives. Six Chapters from a Floating Life charts the precarious existence on the fringes of official and gentry life of one Shen Fu, native of Suzhou in Qing China’s prosperous heart-land. Completed probably between 1809 and 1816, the Six Chapters remained in obscurity until 1877, when four chapters were discovered in manuscript in Suzhou and subsequently published.¹¹ Shen Fu’s was an unexceptional life: in his repeated failure to progress through the examinations that governed access to official posts, his struggle to secure a respectable living, and in his leisure pursuits, he appears wholly typical of men of his social background; he does not try to present himself as exceptional. That said, Six Chapters is an exceptional work; yet it is hard at this distance to determine whether this strikingly intimate self-portrait was quite as exceptional a composition in 1809 as it was a survivor in 1877.

These cases challenge us to ask what we are looking for as we explore traditions of life narrative. Are we seeking to explore what writers chose to write? Or do we confine ourselves to what others chose to preserve and publish? How do we account for slippages between composition, preservation and circulation? How does awareness of these slippages shape our understanding of life writing work? Finally, how far can we confidently generalise on the basis of a body of work that we know to be fragmentary, and whose contours – as recent work continues to demonstrate – are still emerging?¹²

Reappraising ‘Chinese traditions’ in early life narrative

Much of the critical literature on early life writing practices focuses on biographical, rather than autobiographical work. This accounts for the bulk of the surviving Chinese material, and it is this tradition that is commonly treated as hegemonic. Denis Twitchett argues that the didactic conventions of ‘official biography’, produced for dynastic histories, influenced other life narratives to the extent that these ‘share[d] many formal characteristics and form[ed] a single tradition’.¹³ Yet, the political, social and intellectual contexts within which these early traditions emerged were shifting and uncertain. The earliest documented works date from the last centuries BCE and were produced as a central state was forged, in what is now northern central China, out of smaller warring regimes. As auto/biographical traditions developed, they grew in a China that was expanding in territor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Writing and Reading Chinese Lives
• 1. Chinese Life Writing: Themes and Variations
• 2. Self-representation in the Dramas of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646)
• 3. How to Write a Woman’s Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China
• 4. The Fugitive Self: Writing Zheng Xiaoxu, 1882–1938
• 5. Destabilising the Truths of Revolution: Strategies of Subversion in the Autobiographical Writing of Political Women in China
• 6. Zhang Xianliang: Recensions of the Self
• 7. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Disabled Life Stories in Post-reform China
• 8. A Look at the Margins: Autobiographical Writing in Tibetan in the People’s Republic of China
• Bibliography
• Index