The Man, the Place, the Novel

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Man, The Place, The Novel

In the summer of 2000, when I was browsing the bookshelves in Harvard- Yenching Library, I chanced upon a 1938 reprint of Li Jieren’s (1891–1962) monumental novel The Great Wave (Dabo, 1937). The little-known novel describes the mass movement launched by the people in Chengdu to protest the government’s decision to take control of the railways in Sichuan Province dur- ing the latter half of 1911. Although I had some basic knowledge of the history of the Chinese revolution, I knew almost nothing about the turmoil of pre-1911 Chengdu. I finished reading the lengthy novel in a few days. I was overwhelmed by its stunning realism. Its photographic actuality seemed to make the reader present at the chaotic happenings. In vividly representing the everyday life of ordinary people in a bygone era, the novel demonstrates the power of literary fiction to capture the elusive and private past that future-oriented history has consistently left out. The Great Wave was the last part of a trilogy on turn-of-the-century Sichuan society; the other two novels were Ripples on Dead Water (Sishui weilan, 1936) and Before the Tempest (Baofeng yuqian, 1936). The opus received only scanty critical attention upon its publication except some enthusiastic comments by Guo Moruo (1892–1978). In 1937, Guo took only a few days to read the trilogy and wrote an essay blessing it as China’s first modern epic imbued with trenchant local colors and regional flavors. Guo remarked, “The scope of the work is surprisingly monumental, and the flavor of different periods and their relationship to one another, of local customs, the social life of people of different social strata, their psychology and language is presented in a thoughtful and natural way.” Having praised the realistic style and localism of the novels, however, Guo went on, “The only criticism I can make is that the style of his writing is ‘somewhat dated.’ But it is probably precisely this that enables him to avoid being pretentious or ostentatious.”1 Guo Moruo’s slightly dismis- sive comment on Li Jieren’s ‘outdated’ fashion of writing might refer to his prose style, which actually showed Li to be a better master of the Chinese language inherited from traditional Chinese vernacular fiction than many New Literature writers.

1 Guo Moruo, “Zhongguo Zuo-la zhi daiwang” and “Li Jieren and His Novels,” pp. 94–95.

Li Jieren’s historical-fictional narration appealed to me somewhat differently than it did to a fellow Sichuanese like Guo. Li’s novels can be seen as a creative appropriation of the social panoramas with which late Qing writers experi- mented, as well as a generic parallel of the ‘social novels’ (shehui xiaoshuo) popular in the Republican era. The dense fictional universe crowded with characters and having an open structure is a microscopic mirror of a society in turmoil. My personal interest in the novel’s description of people and events set in a remote time and place was rather driven by a sense of foreignness. Li Jieren depicts local minds and hearts, people’s attitudes and sponta- neous responses to their changing outside worlds, in ways which resemble what French historians have called mentalité. His novel uncovers the forgot- ten stories, events, and conflicts that happened in the provincial capital, and portrays the lively mental worlds of its urban commoners who lived through the events. The lived experiences of Li’s characters diverge widely from what we normally read in history books. I could smell and enjoy the novel’s ‘thick description’ of Sichuan’s social mores, daily lives, and human behaviors—‘local knowledge’ for a remote reader observing from a temporal distance of nearly one hundred years. The novel conveys a deep sense of social and historical space in its geographical configuration. The writer’s creative commitment to Chengdu inevitably reminds us of the sense of territorial belonging and geographical authenticity which we find in Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) on Paris, Charles Dickens (1812–70) on London, or William Faulkner (1897–1962) on the American South. In other words, my initial reading was motivated by an interest in the place (and of course, the romance). It then took me a decade’s work to figure out the historical events and their relations to the people and the places. In 1936 Li Jieren was forty-five. Driven by his preoccupation with the 1911 events in Chengdu, he swiftly finished three full-length novels—Ripples on Dead Water, Before the Tempest, and The Great Wave—in two years. Spanning the period from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to the 1911 Revolution as back- ground, the novelist strove to turn his experiences and memories of these historical events into fictional narratives. Ripples on Dead Water centered on a woman’s love affairs with a Christian convert and a secret society bandit. Before the Tempest focused on a gentry-scholar family’s interaction with students and revolutionaries in a society where reformism and radicalism clashed with the traditional Confucian worldview. The Great Wave, a much longer work in three volumes, chronicled the pivotal events of the Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan that triggered the 1911 Revolution. In the events of 1911, Sichuan and its capital Chengdu occupied a prominent place. At the time, the Qing government was attempting to nationalize the private railways, a move which brought unprecedented protest. Initially, the local