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Critical Discourse on Li Ruzhen•S Flowers in the Mirror

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Critical Discourse on Li Ruzhen•S Flowers in the Mirror critical Discourse on Li Ruzhen•s Flowers in the Mirror by Aidong Zhang Comparative Literature Program McGill University, Montreal August, 1990 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts (c) Aidong Zhang 1990 Cette these examine le discours critique sur Flowers in the Mirror en se basant sur un panorama litteraire de plus de soixante articies de la critique du dix-neuvieme siecle au present. Ces critiques sent examinees et discut~es succes­ sivement sous les rubriques de "Critiques portE~es aux horizons des Flowers in the Mirror," "Comparaison entre Flowers in the Mirror et Gulliver's Travels," et "Comparaison entre Flowers in the Mirror et Dream of the Red Chamber. " A part cet survol du discours litteraire sur Flowers in the Mirror, nous examinons ses interactions avec les discours politique, philosophiques ou cultural. Le contexte socio-historique des discours critiques demeure il:llilli#n•ar une cle pour une com­ prehension approfondie. 0 iv Acknowledgement The author is grateful to Dr. Darko Suvin, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, whose enthusiasm and guidance helped this thesis come to fruition. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Ken Dean, Professor of East Asian Studies, for his kindly advice and support. The pursuit of this Master's degree owes much to my husband, Yongqing Fang, for his understanding and encouragement. V Table of Contents . Abstract ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ~l.l. Resume iv Acknowledgement V Chapter I: Introduction ••••••••.•••..•.•....••••.•.•.•• 1 Chapter II: critiques About Horizons of Flowers in the Mirror .•.••..••.••.•••.•..••• 11 Chapter III: The Comparisons Between Flowers in the Mirror and Gulliver's Travels •.•.•••.••• 31 Chapter IV: The Comparisons Between Flowers in the Mirror and Dream of the Red Chamber •.••• 49 Chapter V: Conclusion . 62 Bibliography . 7 3 Appendix . 82 vi 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Li Ruzhen's Flowers in the Mirror (1820?--henceforth referred to as FIM), a novel of the late Qing Dynasty, has attracted considerable critical attention. Unlike some other novels of the same period, such as The Scholars and Dream of the Red Chamber, which enjoyed much more favourable discussion, FIM received less praise from its contemporaries and later generations. The critical discourses on FIM were always diverse and, to some extent, quite controversial. It will be shown in this thesis that critics do not hold a uniform opinion of this novel. Those who valued it in some respects also showed their disappointment at some of its features, while the attackers of the novel also applauded certain aspects. Sometimes the appraisals of both sides go to extremes. This phenomenon distinguishes the critical dis- course on FIM from others about novels of the same period: its puzzling nature presented major difficulties for critics and invited ample disagreement. The disputed quality of FIM makes the critical discourse multidimensional and fascinating. From the Qing Dynasty until today, critics rarely hold identical views about the author's intention, the novel's status in 2 Chinese literary history, or its collocation into a Chinese (or indeed international) genre--is it satire, utopia, critical tract or something other? The critical discourse on FIM presents many important issues. For example, how do critics evaluate a literary text? What expectations do they bring to it, and what fulfilments do they anticipate to derive from it? Why does a novel generate much more interest at one time than at other times? What causes the remarkable diversity in critical discourse, even of the same period? How does literary discourse interact with other discourses, such as the political one? This thesis wants to approach an examination of such questions. 1.2. Having conducted an extensive survey, I have collected more than sixty critiques of FIM, in books and articles as well as dissertations, from the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., from libraries of the University of Maryland, University of Toronto, and of Montreal universities, and from P.R. China. Most of the materials are the works of Chinese critics (in P. R. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.) in Chinese, while a smaller portion are written by North American and Chinese critics in English. One critique was originally written in Japanese but a Chinese version was obtained. c Certain items, especially the present ones in P.R. China, 3 0 proved too difficult to acquire for understandable reasons; I hope to collect them in a further study of FIM. Nonethe­ less, the critiques obtained and presented here provide a large and, I believe 1 a representative coverage of the critical discourse on FIM. 1.3. I have two objectives in this thesis. First, I shall examine the critiques on Li Ruzhen's FIM from the nineteenth century to the , present. I have classified these critiques into several categories, namely, "Critiques on the Horizons of FIM," "The Comparisons Between FIM and Gulliver's Travels," and "The Comparisons Between FIM and Dream of the Red Cham­ ber", with the aim of a more intelligible discussion. A roughly chronological division within each category will also be followed. Second, besides an extensive survey of the literary discourse on FIM, attention will be given to its interactions with political, philosophical, or cultural discourses. In both cases, the socio-historical locus of the critical discourse is always a key to its meaning. Although the discussion will be conducted in the light of Western literary theories as well as classical Chinese philosophy and literary criticism, a purely theoretical exploration of either the novel itself or of the variations in the critical discourse can not be accommodated here. 4 1.4. Critical discourse, I believe, is always defined by the critic's contextual location. Thus, the process of reading is always a dynamic one. The literary text "as it is" never exists; even the author is unable to exhaustively interpret his or her work. The more information the work provides, the more indeterminate it becomes (Eagleton 77). Henrik Ibsen perhaps never anticipated that his play A Doll's House would be employed as a weapon of the Chinese feminist movement in the 1930's; however, as the play passed from one cul­ tural/historical context to another, new meanings were generated from it. A good literary work, as Wellek maintains, must possess a "multivalence": "its aesthetic value must be so rich and comprehensive as to include among its structures one or more which gives high satisfaction to each later period" (233). That is the reason why there exist so many Miltons: the Neo-classical Milton, the Romantic Milton, as well as the Miltons in the eyes of Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. On the other hand, if we admit that reading is not a straightforward linear movement, its complexity will unfold as the reading process proceeds. Wolfgang Iser • s term, "repertoire," is important here for a better understanding of the process of reading. It describes the necessary conditions 5 for establishing literary communication. By "repertoire" Iser means the whole familiar territory within the text, "in the form of references to earlier works, or to social and histori­ cal norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged •.. " (Iser 69). Thus, it is not hard to sense the possibility that different readers or critics will select diverse "repertories" from the text. Connected with the "repertories" is the notion of "presupposition," which is not external to the statement of a text but implied in and by it. The presuppositions of an utterance and statement are: "a most intimate mediation between what is 'inside' and 'outside' it, between text and context" (Suvin 1988, 63). The presupposi­ tions can be seen "the cultural invariants or ideological commonplaces of the context common to the text's writer and addressee, and necessary for understanding the text" (Ibid, 64) • Each reader or critic enrols in the reading process with certain "pre-understandings": "The dim context of beliefs and expectations within which the work's various features will be assessed" (Eagleton 77). The interpretation of the text will inevitably depart from and largely move within these "presu­ ppositions," "pre-understandings" and "repertoires." Further, as Gadamer remarks, the interpretation consists in a dialogue between past and present. What the literary text reveals to us will in turn depend on the kind of questions, which we are able to address to it, from our own vantage point of view (discussed in Eagleton 71). This can be seen as an explana- 6 tion of the puzzling phenomenon of distinctively diverse interpretations of a particular text. such different inter­ pretations and evaluations are closely linked with the critic's own language, questions posed, frames of cultural reference, and in particular, socially structured ways of perceiving the world. The past is thus always grasped from the reader's or critic's partial viewpoint within the present. The critic meets the text when his or her horizon of histori- cal meaning and assumptions fuses with the horizon within which the text itself is placed (cf. Adams and Searle 847-48). The nature of texts works toward such a meeting point of diverse understandings. As Bakhtin has persuasively remarked: We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language con­ ceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life (271). When language with such categories implies the specific conceptual horizons or a specific world of the critic, differences in understanding will inevitably take shape. The text is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure which is waiting passively for the critic to dig the "determinate" meaning out.
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