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Geomoral landscapes: The regional fiction of William Faulkner and Shen Congwen

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Geomoral landscapes: The regional fiction of William Faulkner and Shen Congwen

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Content GEOMORAL LANDSCAPES: THE REGIONAL FICTION OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SHEN CONGWEN by Sheng-Tai Chang A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Comparative Literature) May 1993 Copyright 1993 Sheng-Tai Chang UMI Number: DP22561 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, th ese will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. IJMT Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22561 Published by ProQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQ uest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 E ast Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007 This dissertation, w ritten by Sheng-Tai Chang under the direction of h .l? .. D issertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted b y The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re quirements for the degree of D O C TO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y Dean of G raduate Studies Date DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Ph.P C o ’13 C46>b ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Dominic Cheung, Dr. Jay Martin, Dr. Vincent Farenga, and Dr. Paul Alkon for their patient guidance. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. Cheung and Dr. Martin for their unfailing support, encouragement, and mentoring in a variety of ways. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION SPATIAL THOUGHT AND REGIONAL FICTION CHAPTER ONE FAULKNER'S FICTIVE CARTOGRAPHY: YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY AS A GEOMORAL LANDSCAPE CHAPTER TWO THE CONSTRUCTION OF A GEOMORAL LANDSCAPE IN SHEN CONGWEN’S WEST HUNAN FICTION CHAPTER THREE FAULKNER AND SHEN IN PERSPECTIVE: GEOMORAL THOUGHT, SPATIAL FORM, AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF REGIONAL WRITINGS EPILOGUE: THE BEGINNING OF RAMIFICATIONS WORKS CITED 1 16 84 146 235 238 APPENDICES: MAPS 254 Introduction Spatial Thought and Regional Fiction The American writer William Faulkner (3. 897-1962) and the Chinese writer Shen Congwen /A ^ (1902-1988), both deemed leading fiction writers of this century in their respective countries and both enjoying an international reputation,* primarily for the creation of a literary world based on their respective native regions— Yoknapatawpha County for Faulkner and West Hunan for Shen— invite a comparative study.^ The points of similarities or parallels between the two writers are many, ranging from family backgrounds to the genre of regional fiction that both practice, to the complex and compelling moral visions they articulate in their work.^ Meanwhile, the widely differing cultural and literary traditions and sociopolitical conditions in the United States and China, as well as the different personal experiences of the two authors, give the two bodies of regional work understandably dissimilar features. Between these samenesses and differences, roughly outlined above, lies a fertile field for comparative studies. A comparative approach to Faulkner or Shen can add to the study of each writer a welcome new dimension by taking the author out of the familiar cultural and critical parameters and viewing him in a new perspective. Despite all the good promise, skepticism may still remain about the rationale on which such a comparative study is based. The t French school in comparative literature, for all its pioneering contributions to the discipline, is notorious for its practice of generating comparative topics by mechanically matching authors (with the proviso that they be linked by rapports de fait").4 The American school, by liberating the discipline from the positivist straitjacket of influence studies, opens the door widely for parallel studies, i.e., for comparative studies between genetically unrelated literary traditions, with mixed results.^ At their best, parallel studies help one to understand the underlying laws and practices shared by dissimilar works and traditions by transcending the diversities of specific traditions. Each successful parallel study may, so some critics hope, bring us a step closer to the goal of universal poetics.^ At their worst, parallel studies easily degenerate into meaningless "trivial comparisons" which usually go no further than listing superficial, misleading similarities, without even having to mind rapports de fait as required by the French school.^ The key to significant and productive comparison, it seems, lies in finding a suitable base on which, or perspective from which, to compare. The perspective I propose is a spatial approach to the regional fiction of Faulkner and Shen Congwen. Spatial thought, by which I mean a mode of thinking that gives prominence to the spatial dimension of human experience, is central to the literary imagination of both Faulkner and Shen. To reveal the complexity and richness of the spatial imagination of the two authors and the 2 larger spatial implications of their work, I shall distinguish three main levels of discussion, namely, geomoral landscapes as presented in the two bodies of regional fiction, the use of "spatial form" in Shen's and Faulkner's work, and the geopolitics of their regional work and regional literature in general. The exploration of the concept of geomoral landscape is central to this dissertation. The geomoral landscape is defined here as a systematic correspondence between topography on the one hand and the moral visions based on different cultural and socioeconomic conditions on the other.8 in Faulkner's and Shen's regional work, the literary worlds they create are spatially or geographically specific and complex. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life, constitutes a literary geomoral landscape. In Chapter I, titled "Faulkner's Fictive Cartography: Yoknapatawpha County as a Geomoral Landscape," I shall approach Faulkner's regional work by way of the fictive maps of Yoknapatawpha drawn by him. Faulkner's maps clearly indicate that the geographical dimension is an encompassing and adhesive structural feature of his regional fiction. However, critical attention to them has not gone beyond studies aiming to determine the degree of their conformity to or departure from the real geography of Lafayette County, as well as occasional uses of them by readers to locate specific places mentioned in Faulkner's work. The status, functions, and implications of these maps within Faulkner's fictional world remain 3 unexplored. My approach is to see these maps as unified cartographic works in which topographical features belonging to different historical periods achieve unity in the complex moral visions of Faulkner. The Yoknapatawpha maps can be regarded as a conflation of cartographic texts representing four worlds sequentially related to the Indian era, the antebellum times, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the modern period. Each world, supported by certain works, is intensively realized in certain parts of the fictive county. For instance, the Indian world portrayed by Faulkner's stories about the Indians is intensively realized in the Northeast part of Yoknapatawpha. In describing and analyzing the four worlds, I pay special attention to the spatial dimension of Faulkner's work, from large geographical units to subdivisions within the county, to plantations, houses, and even rooms, and to spatial metaphors, in order to associate spatiality with Faulkner's specific moods, emotional stances, and moral visions, all of which are finally inscribed in Yoknapatawpha as a geographical space, of which the maps are a version of representation. The maps turn out to be fictive constructs which interact with Faulkner's work in various ways: they help to synthesize the vast amount of fictional information about Yoknapatawpha, highlight Faulkner's moral visions, and serve as trigger devices for exploring Faulkner's fictional world in ways not suspected before. The geomoral landscape that emerges from the map-based or -guided approach enriches our understanding of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha as a fictional universe. 4 Finally, a spatial analysis of Faulkner's work also reveals the inadequacy of certain historical or temporal approaches in Faulkner criticism. For instance, the classic Bildunqsroman cannot adequately account for certain Faulkner characters who do not develop along a neat line of progression or evolution; a spatial model of juxtaposition appears to be more effective in such cases. Shen’s fictional West Hunan is closely based on the real geography of West Hunan (though it cannot be reduced to that), with its internal division into Miao, Han-Miao, and Han zones, arranged from the west to the east in a descending order of altitude in the general direction the Yuan River and its tributaries flow into Lake Dongting in the middle reaches of the Yangtze (Changjiang) River. The geographical differentiation and specificity entail cultural and socioeconomic differences in the various zones, created by settlement patterns and molded by a regional history fraught with ethnic conflicts and cultural interactions and mutual assimilation. Shen brings to each of these zones, overlaid with the distinction between the city and the countryside, a specific emotional slant, moral vision, and even literary style, orchestrating his West Hunan fiction, which comprises some one hundred works, including novels and short stories, into a symphony of regional life. To continue the musical metaphor, the leitmotif, idealist and romantic, is provided by Shen's stories about the innocent, primitive Miao among whom God still dwells; whereas the cities in the Han zone in the lower reaches of the Yuan represent the diametrical opposite of Miao 5 life, corrupt, sordid, with all the vices of city ways. Between the divinely good Miao and the hellish urban existence spreads the vast area of the countryside and the Han-Miao zone, with its mixture of good and evil. The good cities of Fenghuang, Shen's native town, and Chadong represent a secure emotional anchor, based on the sweet childhood memories and the nostalgia of a self-exiled adult, against which the tears and laughter of life can be measured and with which the brutal elements of life can be weathered. In Han-Miao countryside where a heavy Miao influence is present, the robust, innocent plain country folk are extolled for their sincerity, vitality, their capacity for passionate love, and their intimate touch with nature. Where Confucian Han culture holds sway or modern commercial culture has infiltrated, perversion of human nature and tragedies occur. Like his stories about the city, Shen's fiction about the bad countryside is usually written in a realist style, scathing and unsentimental. Taken together, Shen's West Hunan fiction presents a geomoral landscape whose richness and complexity are unequaled in modern Chinese literature. And, quite significantly, this geomoral landscape also challenges several influential critical approaches in Shen criticism which neglect the complex spatial dimension of his work. This is the subject of the second chapter of my dissertation, titled "The Construction of a Geomoral Landscape in Shen Congwen's West Hunan Fiction." In Chapter III, titled "Faulkner and Shen in Perspective: Geomoral Tradition, Spatial Form, and the Geopolitics of Regional 6 Writings," and divided into five sections, I shall attempt to place the two authors' geomoral landscapes in larger historical contexts as well as comparative perspectives. I will begin by tracing a tradition of geomoral thought Cof which the geomoral landscape is a sophisticated form) both in the West and in China. Geomoral thought may be found in discourses as diverse as mythology, geography, religion, travel writings and other genres of literature. I trace it through a brief examination of the Bible, Greek mythology, and modern European and American fiction in the Western tradition and travel writings, landscape poetry, and geographical work, especially the gazetteer (difanpzhi") r in the Chinese tradition. The second section outlines a history of the privileging of the temporal or historical imagination over the spatial or geographical imagination both in the West and in China. It then proceeds to demonstrate the ways in which spatial thought resists the tendency of historical discourse toward totalization and abstraction in the Chinese and Western, especially American, traditions, each through a set of mechanisms peculiar to that tradition. The third section is devoted to an examination of "spatial form" as a major literary means of resisting the temporal imagination in the two traditions. In the West, the first flourishing of spatial form coincided with the modernist movement; in fact, the term was first invented by Joseph Frank to account for certain peculiar features of modernist work. In China, a comparable mechanism, described here with the term borrowed from Frank, exists 7 in a wide range of discourses, from the traditional novel to classical poetry, especially landscape poetry. In the early 20th century, as China was determined to repudiate her oppressive tradition and learn from the West in order to modernize herself, as the modernist movement rebelled against traditional values in the West, the two sides were each attracted to the other's discarded tradition, a phenomenon called by Chen Sihe "cross-inversion" fduini xionxianq i ). In this historical context, Chinese spatial form was introduced to the West through Pound's imagist poetics, hence a convergence of spatial form in the two traditions. Yet Faulkner and Shen cannot be fit into this model of cross inversion. Faulkner may be situated in the modernist movement which questions and rejects the traditional historical imagination, while Shen departs from the May Fourth metanarrative of progress, imported from the West, through his West Hunan fiction. The two authors thus parallel each other in their uses of geographical discourse to counter the tyranny of historical discourse and in their aesthetics of geomoral landscapes. In the fourth section, I shall compare Faulkner and Shen on the basis of their most striking similarity, i.e., the geomoral landscape as a macroform for their respective regional fiction. The specific points of comparison include the following: the spatialization of history, which largely accounts for the mythic character of their geomoral landscapes; the use of spatial structures and spatial form; the flexibility or expansiveness, and the heterogeneity of their geomoral landscapes. 8 Faulkner's and Shen's geomoral landscapes differ in several ways. The most interesting difference is perhaps the different drift of the two bodies of regional work in terms of mimesis or fictionality: whereas Shen's work seems to invite a close identification between his fictional and the real West Hunan, Faulkner would have encouraged a certain dissociation between fiction and life, as is suggested by the creation of fictive Yoknapatawpha County. This difference is explained in terms of their different physical and psychic distance to the regional materials they worked on. Drawing on Martin Buber's existential spatiality, I argue that both Faulkner and Shen as regional writers amplify the ontological alienation and relation expounded by Buber, that they finally arrive at a similar position with regard to their native regions by opposite routes. The fifth, i.e., the last, section places Faulkner's and Shen’s work in the context of the geopolitics of regional cultures within the respective national traditions of China and the United States. As is true of American literary nationalism, the literary regionalism of the American South is also an important way of defining the political and cultural identity of a geographical entity. After its defeat in the Civil War, the South diverted its energy to other means of defining regional identity. The Southern Renascence (1.920-50), of which Faulkner's regional work is one of the crowning achievements, can be regarded as a successful sublimation of the South's drive for recognition of its unique cultural identity. Though economically and politically poor, the 9 South found itself rich in literature, occupying the center of American literary activities for a period of thirty years. Faulkner's contribution to the rising prestige of Southern literature cannot be overestimated. Shen pursues his literary regionalism in a comparable way. By claiming lineage with the ancient civilization of Chu, he upholds the secondary traditions of Chinese culture, such as Taoism and the Chuci CThe Songs of the South’ ), vis-a-vis dominating Confucianism and the Shiiing CBook of Songs’ ). and champions the lost cause of Chu, which is a figure for the real cause of modern West Hunan. Shen's regionalist agenda culminates in his virtual demand for autonomy for West Hunan. Some general observations about literary geopolitics are offered by way of a summary, and a comparison of Faulkner's and Shen's regional fiction with analogous or related genres in the two respective traditions concludes this chapter. I will briefly outline here the contemporary contexts within which this study has been conceived and composed. For the past decade or more, there has been a growing tendency in social sciences, including human geography, to challenge the traditional privileging of the temporal or historical imagination over the spatial or geographical imagination.® This parallels several similar movements in various fields, e.g., the continued interest in and extension of Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form,1® and a rising attention to regional literature.11 Indeed, all these intellectual trends occur in their respective disciplinary spheres IB and have not, to my knowledge, been brought together for any synthesis. In theorizing about spatial thought as it is particularly related to regional fiction, I have included both the American (as well as the Western) tradition and the Chinese tradition. This comparative approach allows me to compare Faulkner and Shen and broaden my examination of spatial thought to two major traditions of civilization. The scope of my study and the demands it makes on my meager resources almost necessarily result in visible traces of tension between what I propose to do and what is actually accomplished. I therefore leave all the loose ends, the unexplored potentials, and the possible ramifications of this study to Epilogue. I will conclude my Introduction with two quotations, from Denis Donoghue and Susan Sontag respectively. Donoghue prompted me to begin this project by suggesting that one "would do better to turn away from time toward space, from history toward geography, topography, landscape, place."12 Sontag encouraged me as I was weaving together what sometimes appeared to be a jigsaw puzzle of ideas, impressions, and observations and was terrified of the dark threat of losing a neat line of argument: Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is black, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, Uturns, dead-ends, one-way streets. (117) 1 1 Notes 1 The international reputation of writers has both an objective measurable aspect and a biased element related to the subjective position of a particular literary tradition or that of the comparatist. The worldwide renown of Faulkner, a Nobel Prize laureate and one of the most translated and widely admired 20th- century writers, is beyond question, particularly for Americanists who follow closely the fluctuation of the literary fortunes of "their" American writers or, for that matter, anyone discussing Faulkner within the American institution (interested readers may examine Faulkner; International Perspectives, proceedings of the 1982 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie [Jackson, MS; UP of Mississippi, 1984]). Shen's international reputation, on the other hand, has to be established for American readers, not just because he does not command an equally wide influence as Faulkner does, but also because he belongs to a tradition historically viewed as beyond the concern of the general academic community in the U.S. (There are two issues involved here which I cannot elaborate, namely, the question of canonization on a global scale and that of the relationship between ethnocentrism and literary studies.) Put briefly, Shen has enjoyed sustained critical attention and admiration among students of Chinese literature in the West, regarded by some as among a handful of the very best writers in 20th-century Chinese literature, a fact that was even instrumental in Shen’s post-Cultural Revolution rehabilitation in his own country (for the vicissitudes of Shen's life and career, the reader may consult two excellent biographies, viz., Jeffrey Kinkley's The Odvssev of Shen Conawen [Stanford UP, 1987] and Ling Yu's Shen Conawen zhuan CA Biography of Shen ConpwenJ [Beijing: Shiyue chubanshe, 1987]). Shen has been translated into Japanese and many Western languages and is the subject of several dissertations in English and many scholarly studies outside China, the best-known to date being Kinkley's critical biography mentioned above. In 1987 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, causing many to hope that he would become the first Chinese writer to receive the honor. (That no Chinese writers have ever been awarded the Nobel Prize is the subject of heated, sometimes quite emotional, debates among contemporary Chinese, touching on a wide range of issues such as the problems of modern Chinese literature, the ideological motivation of the Award Committee, Eurocentrism, and the possibility or impossibility of full literary appreciation across wide cultural gaps.) In fact, the literary world portrayed in Shen’s West Hunan fiction has been equated by many in the West with the image of traditional China (see C.T. Hsia 189-211). There have also been attempts both in China and abroad to boost Shen's international standing by comparing him to Faulkner (for details see note 2 below). 12 ^ Two comparative studies of Shen and Faulkner have come to my attention: Cheng Guangwei and Wang Lili's "Shen Congwen yu Fukena chuangzuo shijiao bijiao" ("A Comparison of Literary Perspectives in Shen Congwen and Faulkner"), Xinvang shifan xuevuan xuebao fzhexue- shehuikexue ban’ ) 1985.1: 54-60; Zhao Xueyong and Lu Jianhong's "Ren yu wenhua: 'xiangxiaren' de sisuo: Shen Congwen yu Fukena de bijiao yanjiu" ("The Individual and Culture: 'the Countryman's Reflections: A Comparative Study of Shen Congwen and Faulkner") Lanzhou daxue xuebao: shekeban 1991.3: 130-37. Both articles treat the two authors from the perspective of country people caught in the conflict between traditional rural culture and the modern way of life. Partly because of the constraint of short articles and partly owing to the authors' lack of a mastery of the complex oeuvre of Faulkner, both studies are impressionistic and wanting in in-depth analysis. The Chinese interest in comparing Shen and Faulkner seems to have been inspired by American critics. Casual references to Faulkner in discussions of Shen Congwen appear in C. T. Hsia's A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961) (see 191 and 202). Kinkley notes parallels between the two authors (see, for instance, Odvssev 114 and 118). The most enthusiastic champion of a comparative study of the two authors is H. R. Stoneback, a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, who has lectured on Faulkner overseas, including in China. Stoneback called Shen "China's Faulkner" and dedicated to him a long poem titled "Xian gei Shen Congwen de zhuge" ("Songs to Shen Congwen," 1984 [?]) (see Ling, Biography 11-15 for an excerpt from the Chinese translation, done by Professor Wu Ningkun of Beijing Foreign Language Institute; I have not seen the English original). Stoneback's call for comparison has found echoes among Shen scholars in China. However, apart from the striking similarities between Shen and Faulkner well acknowledged among Shen scholars, no one, to my knowledge, has attempted a book-length study of the two authors in a theoretically sophisticated way. This dissertation can be regarded, in a sense, as a response to Stoneback’s call for a comparative study of Shen and Faulkner. ^ Both Faulkner and Shen Congwen were born and raised in small towns in backwoods country: Shen in Fenghuang, West Hunan, Faulkner born in New Albany and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. Both had an eminent family background recognized in their respective local communities. Faulkner's background is well known in this country. His great grandfather Col. William C. Falkner (1825-89) was a legendary figure who had been a lawyer, soldier, author, entrepreneur, and politician. The colonel's offspring never managed to live up to his stature, with the exception of William Faulkner. Shen's adopted grandfather (actually his grandfather's elder brother), Shen Hongfu ^ (1837-67), was a general who once 13 served as the governor of Guizhou province but died young. His father was also a career soldier, but never managed to get above the rank of a major. The Shen family was related to influential families in the region, including that of Xiong Xiling , one of the molding figures of modern Hunan history. Both Faulkner and Shen were essentially self-educated and felt comfortable in the self-cast role of a "countryman." Both became established writers fairly young, and both captured the imagination of their compatriots by writing almost endlessly about their native regions. ^ See Maurius-Frangois Guyard, La litterature comparee (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951) 124-25. For critiques of Guyard's method, see Rene Wellek's Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965), 289; and Eugene Eoyang, "Thinking Comparatively: Orienting the West and Occidenting the East," a keynote speech delivered at the meeting of the American Association of the Chinese Comparative Literature Conference, UCLA, 21 March 1992, p. 3. 5 For discussions of the connection between the American school and parallel studies, see Heh-hsiang Yuan, "East-West Comparative Literature: An Inquiry into Possibilities," in Chinese- Western Comparative Literature: Theory and Strategy, ed. John Deeney (Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1988): 1-24. 6 For a discussion of universal poetics, see for instance, Wai-lim Yip's Xunaiu kua Zhong-Xi wenhua de wenxue gongtong guilu fin Search of a Common Poetics Between Chinese and Western Cultures), eds. Wen Rumin and Li Xiyao (Beijing: Peking UP, 1987). For an opposite view, see Owen Aldridge's "East-West Relations: Universal Literature, Yes; Common Poetics, No," Tamkang Review 10.1- 2: 17-33. ^ See Eugene Eoyang, "Thinking Comparatively: Orienting the West and Occidenting the East," 3. 8 Besides its various senses related to ethics, the word "moral" also means "of, pertaining to, or acting on the mind, feelings, will, or character" (see Random House Webster's College Dictionary [New York: Random House, 1991], 880) As both in the coinage "geomoral" and in the phrase "moral visions," "moral" is used in its full range of meanings, with emphasis on certain senses as will be made clear by the context. ^ The most important work along this line is Edward W. Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 14 Joseph Frank's original essay on spatial form is included in a new volume titled The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1991). An excellent collection of essays, with an extensive bibliography on studies in spatial form, can be found in Spatial Form in Narrative, eds. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1981). 11 The growing importance attached to regional literature is dramatized in a sharp rebuttal of James M. Cox by James H. Maguire. Cox's article, titled "Regionalism: A Diminished Thing," is a chapter in Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988). Maguire's response appears in American Literature 60.4 (1988). Maguire was incensed by Cox’s dismissal of Western literature as well as his general undervaluing of regionalism in contemporary American literature. The recent publication trend in this country seems to bear out Maguire's sense. Following The History of Southern Literature (1985), there appeared A Literary History of the American West (1987), which is incidentally a bigger volume than Colymbig Literpry HiStQCy.,.Pf—tJlS U . Q i - ± . e d . . . . S . t f l i g . S , and A_Li±e.Eflr,y History of New England (1988). Works devoted to individual states are numerous: a partial list will include A Literary History of Alabama: The Nineteenth Century C1979J. California Writers: Jack London. John Steinbeck, the Touah Guvs (1983), Literature of Tennessee (1984), and A Literary History of Kentucky (1988). Maguire is right in suggesting that "[p]erhaps a better understanding of regionalism might help solve the problem of just what constitutes a national literature" (652). Similar moves to write regional literary histories in China have been reported. Literary histories have been published of Tibet, Yunnan, Guangdong, Jiangxi, and other provinces or regions. Shanghai wenxue shi CA History of Shanghai Literature^ is in good progress under the editorship of Professor Wang Wenying of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Many provinces are either writing their own literary histories or planning them. The above information is culled from Wang Wenying's lecture titled "Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu de huigu yu qianzhan" ("Modern Chinese Literature Studies: Retrospect and Prospect"), University of Southern California, September 29, 1992. 12 Communication from Professor Jay Martin, of the University of Southern California, October 1990. 15 Chapter One Faulkner's Fictive Cartography: Yoknapatawpha County as a Geomoral Landscape Now it is fairly commonplace to regard Faulkner’s works set in fictive Yoknapatawpha County as a whole, linked with recurrent characters, cross-references, retellings of events, and common themes, and unified by a complex moral vision on the part of the author and a shared geographical space within which the stories take place. The two maps of Yoknapatawpha County drawn by Faulkner himself, one attached to Absalom! Absalom! (1936; slightly modified for the 1951 Modern Library edition; see Map 1 in Appendices) and the other a revised version of the first for The Portable Faulkner (1946; see Map 2 in Appendices), emphatically underscore the geographical dimension as an encompassing and adhesive structural feature of Faulkner’s regional works. Although they are widely reproduced, Faulkner’s fictive maps have as yet received little critical attention.^ If any analysis is attempted of them, they are usually studied with a view to ascertaining how they agree with or depart from the real geography of Lafayette County.^ In this chapter I propose to examine Faulkner's maps as fictive cartography. The questions I will explore include the following: What are the functions of Faulkner's maps? What can they tell us beyond what we 16 already learn from individual works? What is the status of fictive maps based on a fully realized fictional world? An initial examination of the two maps will allow us to make these observations: that they are remarkably consistent with each other and with the descriptions of Faulkner's worksthat they include topographical features such as rivers, roads and bridges, towns and settlements, and built structures; that they mark historical territories; and that they contain short descriptions of fictional actions related to certain stories set in places marked on the maps. The two maps differ in the following ways: The Portable Faulkner map (hereinafter referred to as the later map) omits a number of topographical features present in the map attached to Absalom1 . Absalom! (hereinafter referred to as the earlier map): 1) "Pine Hills," both in the east and southwest of the county; 2) a stream originating east of Jefferson and flowing southward into the Yoknapatawpha River at a point between the bridge near Frenchman's Bend ("Tull's Bridge") and the bridge whereby the highway running north-south through the county crosses the Yoknapatawpha River ("Samson's Bridge"); 3) three farms in the southeast corner of the county: Bundren's, Armstid's, and Suratt's, together with the paths connecting the latter two farms with the highways; another farm, McCollum's, in the northeast part of the county; 4) several structures in Jefferson, viz., Belle Mitchell's, Benbow's, Rosa Coldfield's, and the Reverend Hightower's houses; Sartoris's Bank; Holston House (a hotel); the sawmill; the courthouse; and the 17 Confederate Monument; 5) two directional descriptions: one on the top of the map ("To Memphis Junction") and the other on the lower part of the map ("To Mottstown, where ..."). On the other hand, the later map contains a few features not present in the earlier map: 1) McCaslin Edmonds in the northeast of the county, near where McCollum's farm is on the earlier map; 2) the airport and Grierson's in Jefferson. Other alterations in the later map are: Varner's store is replaced by the more general place name, Varner’s Crossroads; and Compson’s is replaced by Compson's Mile, represented by a sizable square. In addition, sixteen short descriptions of fictional events or actions associated with topographical features in the earlier map are reduced to six in the later map (with descriptions associated with the same feature altered as well). The later map differs from the earlier map in one significant way: it inscribes the titles of novels and short stories in places where they are set. This list includes Faulkner’s major Yoknapatawpha works: the novels The Unvanquished. The Sound and the Fury. Absalom. Absalom!. Sanctuary. Light in Augu?t, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet; as well as stories, either in their own right or excerpted from larger works: "Spotted Horses," "Was," "Death Drag," "That Evening Sun," "A Rose for Emily," "Raid," "An Odor of Verbena," "Wash," "The Bear,” "A Justice," "Red Leaves," and "Percy Grimm" (an excerpt from Light in August, which is never a separate short story as "Was" and "Raid" were). "The Old Man," from The Wild Palms, which is not, strictly speaking, a Yoknapatawpha story, may 18 be regarded as a tangential case. In fact, most of the selections included in The Portable Faulkner find a cartographic representation on the map, either directly or through the title of the work of which they form a part (e.g., "Dilthy" is contained in The Sound and the Furvl. The few exceptions are "The Courthouse” and "The Jail," both from A Requiem for a Nun, and "Ad Astra," which is a World War I story set in Europe. A comparison of the two maps shows that the earlier map apparently aims to evoke a greater sense of realism by depicting the terrain and the road system (with directional cues and indication of distances between selected points) and by including over thirty features of settlements, private houses and public buildings, many of which are accompanied by brief descriptions of memorable events associated with them. The earlier map seems to encourage the reader to visualize Yoknapatawpha as a three-dimensional world peopled by families and individuals of various social standings and backgrounds who play different roles in the fictional world. It has many salient features of what geographers call the "reference map." Philip Muehrcke writes that reference maps have a basic "Here is found. ..." character and useful for looking up the location of specific geographical features. On reference maps, no particular things are emphasized over the others; all features are given fairly equal visual importance. (13) By contrast, the later map is less detailed than the earlier map in terms of geographical features (some 50 in the earlier map 19 vs. 25 in the later map), hence less useful as a reference map. It has, however, on it some twenty titles, representing the major Yoknapatawpha works, and encompassing almost all the selections in The Portable Faulkner. The later map seems to be intended to indicate how each work is set in fictive Yoknapatawpha County and how Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha works in their totality can be represented spatially on one "postage stamp" (Faulkner, qtd. in Kerr, Yoknapatawpha. title). Since the later map contains fewer brief descriptions of fictional events or actions (16 in the earlier map versus 6 in the later map), the evocation of the Yoknapatawpha saga now depends less on the accretive effects of individual features than on the recall of entire stories triggered by their emblematic titles. Hence a somewhat abstract air about the later map. What purposes do Faulkner's maps serve? Apparently, they help to concretize Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, much as the genealogies supplied by him do. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stories are technically challenging and can be very confusing in plot. In dealing with the stories in their totality, the readers find their difficulty compounded because of the extra dimension provided by the interconnections and cross-references. By drawing maps of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner meant to help his readers find their bearing in his imaginary world. But, if one equates Faulkner's fictive maps with real maps (reference maps) on the basis of their common function as a guide to 20 locating specific features and aiding movement, one would overlook many differences which are crucial to the meaning of these fictive maps. A regular map usually has a spatial-temporal unity. Temporally, a map assumes a point of time or a narrowly conceived period of time at which all topographical features are present simultaneously. This is a technique to approximate pure spatiality so that the reader may have a "God's eye view" of the geographical environment portrayed on the map. As Muehrcke points out, ”[a] major advantage of maps is that they suspend time and let us see what has been happening" C33). Spatially, a map usually represents a continuum where it is possible to travel actually from one spot to another within the same temporal framework. By contrast, Faulkner’s maps present features of widely varied historical periods within a single geographical space, where it is often not possible to move from one place to another without moving backward or forward between different spheres of time. For example, anyone who has just been to the Grierson's to pay last respect to Miss Emily in 1924 cannot go to visit the Sutpen mansion because it belongs to a different time sphere Cbuilt in 1830s and burned down in 1910); the best one could see is its ruins. Thus Faulkner's maps can be seen as a conflation of many maps, each pertaining to a different period of time, such as the Indian period, the antebellum era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the modern times. Faulkner's maps resemble none of the academically designed modern maps. Rather, they recall a type of tourist maps that presents features belonging to different 21 historical periods, many of which are reduced to ruins or simply nonexistent today. In moving through the space indicated by such a map, one also travels back and forth through history.^ In view of the peculiarity of Faulkner's maps, one could regard them as a purely spatial framework, a usual reference map with which to locate specific topographical features, measure distance between points, and attain a general idea of the geographical environment. Or one could adapt them to specific uses as one reads individual works by Faulkner and tries to evoke a corresponding Yoknapatawpha. For instance, if one reads Go Down. Moses, one would need to refer to the northern part of the county, especially the McCaslin estate, the woods where the bear "Old Ben" roams, the former Indian territories marked as the Chickasaw Grant and Issetibbeha's realm, and Jefferson. The southern part of the county and many features in Jefferson need not be consulted and would at best be present as a silent backdrop. On the other hand, As I Lav Dving locates its scene of action in the southern part of the county, specifically as it is relevant to the journey from the Bundren farm to the cemetery in Jefferson. Indeed, such work- specific uses of Faulkner's maps are probably the most common approach, for it allows one to circumvent the apparent contradiction between the convention of the reference map, which assumes a single point or a narrow stretch of time, and the collapse on Faulkner's maps of the entire history of a fictive county in a single cartographic representation. To a far less extent, Faulkner's maps 22 are also used seriously as reference maps by Faulkner scholars like Calvin Brown and Charles Aiken who painstakingly attempt to read them against Lafayette County and discover their close resemblances to real geography and their frequent departures from it as well. To the two approaches to Faulkner's fictive maps described above, i.e., first, the realist approach which sees the fictive Yoknapatawpha maps as a representation of Lafayette County in fictional disguise and, second, the work-specific fictional approach which uses the maps for discrete illustrations of individual works, now I propose to add a third approach, which regards Faulkner's fictive maps as unified cartographic works. In this approach, topographical features belonging to various historical periods and associated with different fictional actions are assumed to be present simultaneously, with its unity lying not so much in Yoknapatawpha as a shared geographical space, as in their intricate interrelations in the complex moral vision Faulkner articulates by way of the fictive maps. In other words, I propose that the Yoknapatawpha maps present a complete geomoral landscape. Cartographically, this approach takes the two maps as "thematic maps." According to Muehrcke, thematic maps use symbols "to emphasize the form of geographical distribution," and "[t]he map design has a basic 'What if we were willing to look at the world this way. . . . ?' character" (13). in the case of Faulkner's maps, this question can be rephrased as "What if we were to look at Yoknapatawpha as a geomoral landscape?" The theme of the two maps 23 thus conceived is based on the distribution of various moral attitudes and historico-ethical issues across the geographical space of Yoknapatawpha. To read Faulkner's maps as a representation of a geomoral landscape in a way levels off the various time spheres to which individual Yoknapatawpha works belong. This is necessary for fully spatializing these works in order to attain a state of cartographic simultaneity according to cartographic convention. But such a high- level spatialization of cartographic symbols does not rule out the role of time as both pertaining to the specific historical periods in which the various works are set and, at a more local level, to the time frame within which fictional events are enacted (and indeed human actions can be conceived at all). In this sense, my thematic- map approach can be seen as an attempt to unify Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction on the basis of his complex and evolving moral visions as contained in individual works.^ Yoknapatawpha as a geomoral landscape comprises four major worlds, viz., the world of the Indians, the antebellum world, the transitional world marked by the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the modern world. It is easy to see that the four basically sequentially ordered worlds correspond to the entire history of Yoknapatawpha County. When spatialized, each of the four worlds is coterminous with the extent of Yoknapatawpha, but achieves intensive realization in selected parts of it. For example, the Indian world spreads over the entire region later named Yoknapatawpha County. 24 This is evidenced in the establishment of large plantations on lands acquired from the Indians in various ways by Thomas Sutpen in the northwest part of the county, by Carothers McCaslin in the northeast, by Sartoris in the central-north, by Compson in the central, and by Louis Grenier in the southeast part of the county. But, the Indian world is intensively realized only in the northeast part of Yoknapatawpha, historically known as the Chickasaw Grant and [old] Issetibbeha's realm, where the Indian stories are set. Since most of Faulkner's works deal primarily with one of the four worlds mentioned above, the major scene(s) of the work usually can be regarded as a zone of intensive realization for that world. In the following pages, I shall describe the four worlds by reference to selected Yoknapatawpha works, particularly those whose titles are inscribed on Faulkner's later map, in order to depict Faulkner's geomoral landscape by associating spatiality with specific moral visions. The Indian world, from which Yoknapatawpha County emerges, is intensively realized in the northeast part of the region. Four stories about the Indians written by Faulkner are set here: "Red Leaves" (1930), "A Justice" (1931), "Lo!" (1934), and "A Courtship" (1948). To this group one may also add "The Old People" (1940) and "The Bear" (1942), which form parts of Go Down, Moses! (1942). These stories can be divided into three subgroups: "Lo!" and "A Courtship" deal with "prelapsarian" Indians; "A Justice" and "Red Leaves" are stories of Indians under the corruptive influence of 25 white colonialism; "The Old People” and "The Bear," though centrally concerned with the moral growth of a white boy, Ike McCaslin, portray Sam Fathers, the last Indian, as a pivotal figure. The native Indians occupy an interesting position in the historical imagination of the American nation. While they were doubtless the victims of European colonialism, the Indians were regarded by white colonists on the Eastern seaboard, at different times, as "allies in the contests with French and Spanish rivals," as objects of Christian salvation, as "savageCs] incapable of becoming civilized and Christianized," and as the Noble Savage with great romantic charm, i.e., as "a stoical, dignified, unspoiled child of nature" Csee Curti 44-47). Faulkner’s Indians at once recall such stock images and depart from them. Without minimizing their "otherness," Faulkner brings his Indians to the same level of humanity as his characters of other racial backgrounds: the Indians may be good or bad or good and bad, but they too are inescapably involved in the human drama of joys, sorrows, loyalty, perfidy, kindness, and cruelty. From these stories which deal with the historical fate of the Indians and various racial relations, whether harmonious or oppressive and exploitative, whether between Indians and whites or between Indians and blacks, the pursuit of justice and freedom inspired by the indomitable human spirit emerges as a predominant theme. In fact, the Indian stories may be read as a powerful anti-colonial discourse. 26 "Lo!" and "A Courtship," both dealing with "prelapsarian" Indians, present humorous and romantic views of Indian life. "A Courtship" portrays somewhat sentimentally the racial harmony between Indians and whites, especially the great friendship between Ikkemotubbe and his white friend. "Lo!" describes a "sit-in" staged by Chickasaw Indians outside the White House in the 1830s to demand a fair judgment of the chief’s nephew from the president of the Republic, the "Great White Father."® The boy has been charged with the murder of a white settler. It turns out that the white man bought from the Chickasaws a room-sized plot containing the only access to an only ford within hundreds of miles on a river in Mississippi, fenced it off, and built a tollgate. Then the chief's nephew invited the white man to a horse race with a large tract of land as a prize; the man came out of the race with a split skull. The president exonerates the boy to get the Indians out of the capital, only to learn, a few years later, that another white man who subsequently owned the ford has died in a "swimming contest" with the same nephew of the Chickasaw chief. Obviously, the Indians resent the white men's greed and trickery and the private land ownership the whites bring into the Indian world, and they manage to restore the order of their world by outsmarting the intruders. Rarely in Faulkner's works do the Indians, and the oppressed in general for that matter, succeed in turning the tables on their oppressor. The story is remarkable in that the Indians not only get rid of the white "landlords" but also successfully manipulate the 27 president into acknowledging the inviolability of the Indians. Beneath the humor and satire is a tribute to the Indians' historical resistance to white encroachment and their struggle to defend their own way of life. "A Justice" is a story told to Quentin Compson by Sam Fathers, who in turn has heard it from Herman Basket, a friend of both major characters, Ikkemotubbe and Craw-ford. The story contains two major subplots: in the background, Ikkemotubbe's violent usurpation of the chiefship of the Choctaw tribe; in the foreground, his intervention in the triangular relationship involving a black slave woman, her husband, and her Indian wooer, Craw-ford, whom Sam calls "pappy." Ikkemotubbe returns home from a seven-year stay in New Orleans, profoundly influenced by white culture. He is now renamed "Doom," derived from the French "du homme," meaning, according to himself, "the Man."^ Being a son of the Man's (title of an Indian chief) sister, Doom has no right to the chiefship.^ Yet he wastes no time poisoning his uncle the Man and his son and cowering the Man's brother into inaction, and then becomes the Man himself. It is significant that the name Doom is given him by a French colonialist. Although the possibility of fierce power struggle in the traditional Indian world cannot be ruled out, Doom's coup d'etat is clearly a result of the impact of European colonialism. The Indians lose their world to the whites not only through the latter's direct oppression but also through accepting the corruptive influences of white colonialists. Ikkemotubbe's ascension to power marks the fall 28 of Indians from the moral innocence they used to possess, and the change of his name to "Doom" aptly symbolizes this historical change. Doom's intervention in the triangular relationship, or his dispensation of justice, is an issue of much scholarly contention. Those who believe that Doom is the father of the child named "Had- Two-Fathers," i.e., Sam Fathers, and that he uses Craw-ford as a scapegoat, usually cite evidence from Go Down. Moses.^ I believe that relying too much on external sources to clarify the plot is presumptuous. On the other hand, while I tend to agree with Lewis Dabney that the plot of the story gives no clear evidence to support the theory that Doom is Sam's father, I do not think that it rules out the hypothesis entirely. In other words, the story is ambiguous in this respect. It is possible that Doom is the real father of Sam, but uses Craw-ford as a cover and scapegoat. This would make Doom's later selling of Sam and his mother seem a callous denial paralleling Sutpen's refusal to recognize his son Bon, "tainted" with Negro blood. It is equally plausible to see Craw-ford as the father of Sam, and see Doom actually protecting the black woman's husband. Doom may not be motivated solely by a righteous desire to protect the weak from his predator, as he claims; he may be partially or mainly motivated by a spiteful desire to punish Craw ford for not going along with him in his plan to seize power Che repeatedly brings up the question of Craw-ford's trust in him). In this scenario, an ostensible execution of justice is occasioned by 29 and made to serve unjust political purposes. Sam Fathers' Choctaw name given by Doom, "Had-Two-Fathers," is deliberately ambiguous, too. The "Two-Fathers" could be a reference to the black man and Doom in the first reading, or to the black man and Craw-ford in the second reading. Interestingly, the past-tense form "Had-Two- Fathers" may imply the present-tense form "Has-One-Father," which can only refer to Doom himself. The very fact that Doom owns all the Negroes on his "Plantation" and wields autocratic power over Craw-ford renders the dispute over who is the biological father of Sam insignificant. Whereas "Had-Two-Fathers" has only a past relevance, "Has-One-Father" in the present is what really matters to the fate of the boy. Doom's prerogative of naming the boy already makes him the Father in the present, no matter who is Sam's natural father; his later selling of Sam and his mother confirms his absolute patriarchal rights. "A Justice" is thus a story about Doom's usurpation of power and assertion of authority; the drama of dispensing justice to the black husband, whether real or false, is framed by this larger injustice. Doom's world is already steeped in violence and oppression, where justice is hard to come by; it is against such overwhelming odds that the black husband's obstinate pursuit of justice becomes an admirable instance of the unyielding human spirit. In "Red Leaves" this human spirit is put to an even grimmer test. In the story Issetibbeha, Doom’s son, has just died, and his black servant is supposed to be buried with him. The black man does not want to 30 die. For a week or so he is on the run, pursued by his Indian masters. When he is finally caught and led to his death, the reader realizes that the black, "taller than any" of his oppressors (340), represents a race that will endure, while the Indians, cursed by the slavery introduced from the white world, and corrupted by the evil ways of the whites, are doomed. The tenacity of the black's will to live contrasts vividly with the indifference of his pursuers and the living death of Moketubbe the new Man. "Diseased with flesh" (321), Moketubbe is most of the time seen in a faint induced by forcing his feet into a small pair of slippers with red heels, brought back from Paris by his father, which is a symbol of power and corruption of European provenance. If Doom's love of power renders him a ruthless and terrible figure, then his grandson has degenerated to the point of fetishizing power as a mere symbol without any personal competence at all. "Red Leaves" shows Indian culture in its last stage of decay under the impact of European colonialism. By the time the white settlers have acquired land from the Indians and set up their plantations, the Indian world has come to an end. Except for a few scattered Indians, what was left of the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes were moved to Indian reservations in Tennessee in the 1830s. However, the Indian spirit, as if purged of the sins which have brought about the destruction of the Indian world, remains unconquered in the last Indians in Yoknapatawpha. "The Old People" and "The Bear," both from Go Down. MosesL. pay tribute to this Indian spirit, which is a crystallization of the 31 native American's traditional way of life, primitive, free of the corruption of European civilization, and in harmony with nature. Three characters of (partial) Indian descent are portrayed in the two stories. First, we have Jobaker, a full-blooded Chickasaw, who is sketchily described in "The Old People." Jobaker is a primary example of the excluded other in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. As far as the community can see, he has no history, no affiliation, no normal social ties; he is feared or shunned by everybody except Sam Fathers. Jobaker lives as a "hermit" and dies without leaving behind any trace. To the boy, Ike McCaslin, Jobaker is eccentric and funny, for he acts and speaks differently from others and "call[s] himself Jobaker, as if it were one word" (172). Jobaker epitomizes the Indian as a victim of colonial history, dispossessed, misunderstood, forced to live in a world alien to his own tradition, yet determined to maintain his independence. His withdrawal from the community is both a result of racial exclusion by white society and a chosen, albeit idiosyncratic, way of resistance to the assimilation of white culture. That he alters his name, which has apparently been given as "Joe (Joseph) Baker" according to the tradition of whites, to sound as "Jobaker" in conformity with the Indian convention (e.g., Ikkemotubbe, Issetibbeha), suggests this resistance. Then, we have Boon Hogganbeck, a quarter Indian, who seems more readily to identify himself as white. He is described in "The Bear" as having "the mind of a child, the heart of a horse" and 32 completely expressionless (227). In "The Old People," Ike compares him unfavorably with Sam. Whereas Sam bears himself toward all white men "with gravity and dignity and without servility" or over eagerness to please, Boon is called "a mastiff, absolutely faithful" to his white masters on whom he is absolutely dependent for his bread (170). Boon is also a notoriously bad shot and generally an ineffectual hunter, although he does finally redeem himself by courageously stabbing the bear "Old Ben" to death. If Boon is a comical figure who has drifted away from his Indian roots, then Sam is the true Indian who embodies the free spirit of the wilderness and whom Ike the boy loves, admires, and emulates. Sam teaches Ike his hunting skills and his knowledge of the woods, initiates him into manhood, and passes on to him the undying Indian spirit, from which Ike evolves his moral vision. However, Sam does not come with his spiritual stature already made; he has to struggle in his own way to get back to his Indian heritage. In "The Old People" and "The Bear," Sam's parents are said to be the Chickasaw chief Doom and a quadroon slave woman, and Sam and his mother were sold by Doom to Carothers McCaslin, Ike's grandfather. Sam's mixed blood is a burden to him: he has to live the life of a social underdog as a black (though an outsider among the blacks), while carrying the blood of his white oppressors. In McCaslin Edmonds' words, Sam is "himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat" ("Old People" 168), and he lives in an invisible "cage." According to 33 Edmonds' interpretation, both the Indians and the blacks were until historically recent times living in close touch with nature, whereas the white race has long lost the vitality, the spontaneity, and the spirituality which only the "savages" can possess. Because he is "not even a generation away from the woods ("Bear" 246), because he was born a "wild man," Sam can easily reach back to his Indian heritage and identify himself with the Indian spirit. In both stories, Sam repeatedly says, "Let me go" (173), "Let me out," and "Let me go home" (245), which can be taken symbolically as announcements of his determination to return to his Indian roots. Sam's unfortunate birth into bondage and his life-long struggle to free himself from the oppressive racist society and to live in accordance with the Indian tradition are traced in a trajectory through sacred and profane spaces, both as realistic settings and as symbolic images. Sam was born in the slave quarters on Ikkemotubbe's "plantation" and has lived most of his life in the "[slave] quarters" of the McCaslin plantation, even after the abolition of slavery. The debased socio-physical space of Sam's dwelling is matched by metaphors of the oppressive psychic space in him, such as "cage," "battelground," and "mausoleum," suggesting imprisonment, violent clashes, and death. Sam's leaving the McCaslin estate to live in the woods traverses two morally polarized spaces: On the one hand is the white world built on land taken from the Indians, operating on a plantation economy which necessitated slave labor, dedicated to the exploitation of both men and land in 34 the name of profit, a world replete with greed, corruption, and crimes— in short, a profane space. On the other stands the wilderness which has existed from time immemorial, which has until recent times nurtured a traditional Indian culture distinguished for its moral innocence, for its vitality and spirituality, and for its harmonious relations with nature— in short, a sacred place. Faulkner's assignment of positive moral qualities to the wilderness and negative values to the civilized world of white settlers is a reversal of mainstream American thought, which associated the wilderness with temptation, banishment, and evil spirits but give settlements/town the status of a sacred place, as a castle of Christendom wrested from wild Indians and wild nature (see Ruzicka 99-100). The wilderness as a sacred space and the spiritual stature of Sam Fathers, who is closely identified with it, cannot be fully appreciated without a discussion of Faulkner's primitivism. Primitivism is a way of thinking which takes nature as norm. According to Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster: Its primary technique in art has been that of regression: the artist regresses in time to a far-off primal golden age (chronological primitivism); or regresses in culture to a simple, primitive savage stage (cultural primitivism); or regresses to childhood or to the domain of the subconscious (psychic primitivism). . . . (143) In "Big Bear," and in several Indian stories, Faulkner reverts to the Indian world at the beginning of the history of Yoknapatawpha or 35 even to the prehistory of America in order to criticize the greed, cowardice, corruption, and materialism of contemporary society. He goes back even beyond the era of Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes already tainted by European colonialism, to a primordial past when the Indian world is self-sufficient and exists in a sanctified harmony with nature. Sam becomes a crucial figure in such primitivist reversion. That he is only half Indian suggests that the authenticity of his Indian-ness goes beyond a narrow conception of blood; he is intended to embody the Indian spirit as a moral vision for the world at large. (One thinks of Shen Congwen's similar move to extend the Miao spirit from an ethnic cultural trait to wider moral applications in the Chinese context.) The historical regression to an untainted Indian world is then spatialized as a journey into the wilderness. To have a full understanding of Sam Fathers and Ike, his protege and spiritual heir, it is necessary to see them in the larger context of the story "The Bear." "The Bear" is both a realistic story about hunting and a symbolic tale about the wilderness and thence about history. The spirit of the wilderness, or the Indian spirit, extolled in the story, has two aspects. First, hunting as a means for Indians to derive their livelihood, i.e., as a mode of production, requires skills and courage in the hunter, which are encoded as prized cultural values. Second, to ensure nature as a bountiful source of game, and to express their mystic awe and gratitude to Mother Nature who provides sustenance 36 and protection, the Indians have evolved a pantheistic nature cult. In hunting as a rite of initiation, the apprentice is supposed to embrace both the practical and spiritual levels of Indian values. The difference between these two aspects of Indian culture becomes a problem in "The Bear," taking the form of a conflict between the realistic and the symbolic meaning of the bear. The bear, named Old Ben, is hunted annually, almost ritualistic ally, but is not killed for many years because it is both q bear in realistic terms and the bear, an incarnation of the spirit of the wilderness that must not be violated. Both Sam Fathers and Ike know this and adopt an ambivalent attitude toward the bear: they join the annual hunt and contribute to its eventual success but will not be directly involved in the killing of Old Ben. (Ike's shooting the buck does not have the same symbolic implication as the bear hunt.) Such double attitude is aimed at complying with both principles of Indian culture mentioned above. Still, the consequence of helping to destroy a symbol of the spirit of the wilderness cannot be easily evaded. Sam Fathers dies shortly after the bear hunt is successfully concluded, ostensibly because of age and exhaustion, but really because he has undermined his own raison d'etre. After the death of Old Ben, his superb expertise as a hunter is no longer needed. Moreover, he may be said to have died of a guilt for helping to bring about the downfall of Old Ben as a symbol of free spirit. Exhausted, heart-broken, Sam probably has asked Boon to mercy-kill him. Sam and Old Ben may be seen as doubles of the 37 spirit of wilderness. Ike senses correctly that with the bear's death, Sam cannot live either. However, Sam's death atones for his guilt and redeems him as a true Indian, freedom-loving and nature- loving. Ike, on the other hand, while having learned a valuable lesson about the free spirit of the wilderness from Sam, has to live on to carry the burden of the guilt of having helped to kill Old Ben and indirectly hastened Sam to his grave. Ike's guilt toward the bear later takes the form of a compensatory passion for the wilderness, which is further compounded or fueled by his discovery of his grandfather's crimes of incest and miscegenation (?!), and finally elevated to a philosophical plane through the Christian doctrine of original sin. Ike's repudiation of his inheritance, which is intimately related to his experience in the woods, is double-edged and deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it is a radical, romantic break with the existing property relations and the ideology that promotes and rationalizes them (and it distantly echoes but does not come near Utopian socialism). In this context, Ike may be regarded as a rebel, a hero, and can claim spiritual lineage with his mentor Sam Fathers. On the other, Ike imposes on Sam's Indian legacy an idiosyncratic version of Christian theology, which, curiously, both justifies his repudiation of the inheritance and absolves him of any responsibility for engaging himself in the daily battle against evil with full awareness of his own limitations and fallibility. For Ike conveniently has his God rationalize everything wicked that has come 38 to pass, including the destruction of the Indian world. Ike eventually isolates himself from the "tainted" humanity and severs all vital human bonds. In lieu of a wife whom he fails to keep and who does not give him any offspring, he takes solace in taking the woods as "his mistress and wife" (326). Ike’s annoying deficiency in basic human qualities undermines the reader's sympathy for him. Not a few eminent critics have judged him severely on these accounts.^ On the symbolic level, however, Ike's repudiation is significant. By questioning the whole of colonial history in North America, he comes very close to defending the Indians against the historical injustices they have suffered in the hands of white colonists and against the theory of progress the whites imposed on them, which is their ultimate justification of white colonialism. In his limited and partial way, Ike's clinging to the wilderness is his way of resisting "progress." It is Ike’s, and Faulkner's, romantic primitivism, which makes "The Bear" an important story. Faulkner's skepticism about or even opposition to the destruction of the wilderness in the name of progress marks him decidedly from the majority of nineteenth-century American novelists who upheld the doctrine of progress and expansion. And he further "puts (his view] in the context of the corruption of the new world, and identifies the dying Indian way of life with the best of his own society" (Dabney 143). Primitivism as it is expounded by Ike and Faulkner, for all its limitations, is a powerful counter-discourse in an age of blindly optimistic faith in expansion and progress and as such 39 cannot be dismissed as impractical dreams. The irresolvable contradiction between primitivism and the ideal of progress upheld by American society, as it is partially reflected in Ike's personal dilemma, is ultimately Faulkner's own ambivalence, born of the clash between his romantic imagination and his level-headed realism. Most criticisms on "The Bear," including Olga Vickery's and David Stewart's, assume a totalizing unity of the work, no matter how they disagree with each other on where this unity lies, whether, for instance, it lies in Ike as a spiritual heir to Sam Fathers or in Ike as one who escapes from his social responsibility through cloudy rhetoric. In either argument, an incompatible strain or phase of Ike's life (the boy who is Sam's spiritual heir, or the man who chooses to isolate himself from the world) is subordinated to another which is thought to really count. Such a critical procedure is apparently a legacy of the New Criticism, which traces its roots, among other things, to the dominant nineteenth-century romantic notion of organic unity. For my part, I would suggest that "The Bear" reveals two incompatible strains of thought in its author, as embodied in the two different phases of Ike's life. The relation between the two is not entirely causal but one of juxtaposition. In other words, a historical approach which emphasizes a linear development of events and character shows its limitation here. A spatial approach, which emphasizes the simultaneous presence of various, sometimes contradictory, events and phases of a character's life, without subsuming one under another, is thus valuable. On 40 Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha maps, Ike's life can be seen as distributed in two major areas, the woods where the bear roams and the world of civilization, which is for him first the McCaslin plantation and later his home in Jefferson. As the opposition between the sacred and profane spaces need not and cannot be canceled out on Faulkner's maps, so the reader must accept any apparent inconsistencies in Ike without having to seek an artificial unity. A similar problem with privileging the historical approach occurs in criticism on "Lo!" which allows the Indians to defeat white encroachers. Lewis Dabney, while rightly pointing out that this scenario "is an alternative to the history in [Faulkner's] novels and 'The Bear,'" sees it as "a joke on history as well as on the government" (48). The Indians can get the upper hand, Dabney explains, "because the story is an entertainment in which the writer's realism is relaxed ..." (48). Obviously, Dabney feels that Faulkner deviates from the historical truth about the fate of the Indians, and he also prizes realism over what he calls "entertainment." Dabney's complaint reflects a fairly common approach in Faulkner studies, i.e., a tendency to subsume everything under a totalizing historical scheme, which privileges history over fantasy, historical consequences over historical processes, and the main drama, thought to reflect historical truth, over fanciful sideshows. In view of this, a spatial approach would provide a necessary counterbalance. For it allows all stories, composed in different modes, thematizing diverse historical issues and 41 possibilities, to come to the (potentially) equal attention of the reader, as topographical features on a map do.-^ "Lo!" and "A Courtship" should not be undervalued because they present clearly idealized images of the Indians. In fact, they represent a significant counterpoint to other Indian stories in which the Indians have fallen and are losing their world to the whites. The world that succeeds the Indian world is dominated by the white plantation owners. In addition to the McCaslin plantation, treated in "The Bear" and elsewhere in Go Down, Moses, four features on Faulkner's later map are related to the names of leading plantation owners. "Old Frenchman Place" is named after Louis Grenier, a founder of Yoknapatawpha County who "brought the first slaves into the country," "was granted the first big land patent and became the first cotton planter" (Kirk 143). Grenier is dealt with or mentioned in Requiem for a Nun (1951) and several other novels. "Sartoris," located north of Jefferson, derives the name from a large plantation owned by John Sartoris, one of the crucial figures in Yoknapatawpha history; the railroad constructed by Sartoris, which bears his name, runs north-south through the county. Colonel John Sartoris and his family are the protagonists in The Unvanquished (1938) and appear extensively in Yoknapatawpha fiction. "Compson's Mile" in southeast Jefferson is an estate founded by Jason Lycurgus Compson I in 1812 on a solid square mile of land acquired from Ikkemotubbe in exchange for a mare. Reflecting the changing fortunes of the Compson family, the place has been known 42 successively as "the Compson Domain," "the Governor's house," "the Old Governor's," "the Compson's place," and "the Old Compson's place." The Sound and the Furv Is a novel dealing with the Compsons, who also have important parts to play in Absalom, Absalom! and several stories, including "That Evening Sun." Situated in the northwest corner of the county, "Sutpen's Hundred" is founded by Thomas Sutpen in 1833. The legend of Sutpen and his family, and its impact on Yoknapatawpha, is told in Absalomr Absalom! C1936). All these plantations set stages for the histories of the leading families in Yoknapatawpha and, as they thus epitomize the history of the South, they also become places assigned complex moral meanings. Of these plantations, though all trace a trajectory of an ascent to the apex of prosperity followed by decline, decay, or even ruin, none matches Sutpen's in the dramatic intensity of its history: its sudden and mysterious rise, its owner's grandiose design executed with a ruthless drive and determination, its violent family feuds and murders, and its tragic end. The history of Sutpen's Hundred is the most poignant example of the tragedy of pioneers who built the foundation of Southern society, or, more accurately, the Old Order in the South, and, as told in Absalom!. it has the air of a fantastic legend and the magnitude of a Greek tragedy. In the following discussion, I shall focus on the spatial dimension of the story and demonstrate how Faulkner's imagination, particularly his moral visions, is expressed through the spatial dimension. 43 First of all, the unusual size of Sutpen's plantation already gives the story a heroic proportion to begin with. "Sutpen's Hundred" reputedly covers one hundred square miles, which not only stretches historical probability to its limit, but appears unrealistic on Faulkner's own maps as well.1^ If the distance between Jefferson and Sutpen's, given as twelve miles on Faulkner's earlier map, is any measure, then Sutpen's plantation would take up almost the whole of the northwestern sector of the county, pressing both on Jefferson and on Sartoris’s plantation. Perhaps because of this sensed threat to the geographical consistency of Yoknapatawpha County, Leland Cox decides that the real size of "Supten's Hundred" is ten square miles (see Cox 178). Without having to reduce the size to only one tenth of what the text claims it to be in order to make it appear realistic, I believe we could take the name "Sutpen's Hundred" as a hyperbole suggesting the megalomaniac ambition of its founder, or allow the plantation to extend westward off the left margin of the maps, or do both. That a feature on Faulkner's maps may extend beyond the limits of the maps, certainly indicates that the mapped area is only part of a larger geographical region. Moreover, it may also suggest the idea that the "real" history of Yoknapatawpha County, to which corresponds the mapped area, fades into the larger history of the South, or better, into a mythic past, to which correspond the unrepresented, open spaces. For instance, "Issetibbeha's [tribe, territory, or domain]" marked across the top of Faulkner's maps may be interpreted in both ways. Since its 44 extent obviously does not stop at the straight line marking the upper edge of the map, it suggests that Yoknapatawpha County is an insertion of white colony into the Indian world and that the chronicled history of Yoknapatawpha emerges from a generally undocumented native American history, which would be best regarded as mythical. Similarly, if Sutpen's Hundred extends off the left margin of the maps, we could read the space covered by his plantation as astride myth and "reality"; in other words, the very fact that Faulkner's realistic-seeming maps have difficulty containing Sutpen's plantation gives his story a mythic dimension beyond realism and historic "truth." The most memorable topographical feature on Sutpen's Hundred is doubtless the grand mansion, the heart and soul of the plantation. The central role of the building may be confirmed by the working title of the novel, "A Dark House" (see Cox 175),^ and some 200 direct references to the house in the novel, according to the concordance compiled by Polk and Hart. Indeed, the dark history of the Sutpen family is perfectly mirrored and encapsulated in this dark house. In 1833 Sutpen comes to Yoknapatawpha with a drove of "wild" West Indies Negro slaves and a captive French architect apparently out of nowhere and then builds a large plantation at an astonishing speed, surprising his neighbors and arousing suspicion and resentment from the community. In Rosa’s account, the house seems to have been conjured into existence by some sort of black 45 magic rivaling biblical genesis. As Quentin watches in his mind's eye, Sutpen and his slaves overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Liaht. (8-9) After Sutpen completes the mansion, he proceeds to furnish his palatial home not only with expensive furniture but with social respectability as well by marrying Ellen Coldfield, the daughter of a respectable family in Jefferson. Two children, Henry and Judith, are born to him in time. When it seems that Sutpen is close than ever to realizing his dream of founding a dynastic plantation, fate catches up with him. Charles Bon, his son by an earlier wife repudiated for her Negro blood, appears in the house, captures the heart of Judith, and wins the approval of Ellen the would-be mother- in-law. Sutpen's refusal to recognize his son and his forbidding the marriage between Charles and Judith stiffen Bon's determination to seek revenge. To prevent incest and miscegenation, perhaps more the latter than the former, which his sister's marriage with Bon would lead to, Henry kills his half-brother. When Sutpen comes home at the end of the Civil War in 1865, he finds Bon and Ellen dead, Henry gone, Judith suffering irreparably from the series of events that have befallen the family, the house half in ruin, and the plantation mostly lost. To make a last-ditch effort to save his "grand design," he needs to procure a male heir; it is in this house 46 he callously proposes to Rosa on condition that she prove herself capable of bearing a son. His total lack of respect for her dignity and individuality causes her to withdraw violently to nurse a wound which will never heal. Sutpen's similar treatment of the granddaughter of Wash Jones, his tenant and handy man, finally leads to his murder in the hands of Wash. (The story "Wash" is devoted to this incident.) After Sutpen's death, Judith and her mulatto half- sister Clytie live together first with Bon's son, who is embittered by his racial background, and then with his grandson, an idiot. In 1909, Clytie sets fire to the house to save her half-brother Henry, who has come home to die, from falling into the hands of the sheriff. To have a full understanding of the meaning of the "dark house," we must place it in the context of Sutpen's whole life, marked by four geomoral spaces. Sutpen was born to a poor farming family in the mountains of West Virginia, where human worth is determined by what one is rather than what one has. Then, the family moves to the coastal plains, where Sutpen suffers traumatic humiliation at a plantation. Sutpen's experience causes him to choose the pursuit of wealth as the goal of his life, which leads him to Haiti. After his colonial experience there he returns to the States, to Yoknapatawpha to found a plantation of his own. The four worlds— the West Virginia mountains, the tidewater Virginian plantation, the Haitian plantation, and Sutpen's Hundred in Yoknapatawpha— correspond to four stages of Sutpen's life: from 47 moral innocence to the germination of the "grand design," to overseas colonial adventure for primitive accumulation of capital, finally to the execution of his design. Sutpen's Haitian experience is not an omissible detour; it places him in the larger historical picture of European colonialism in the New World and explains the morally tainted origin of his plantation. The Sutpen mansion marks the end-point of a trajectory beginning with a shack in the mountains of West Virginia where Sutpen was born and grew up, followed by the large plantation house in Virginia to which he is denied admission as a boy, then by the colonial chateau in Haiti where he lives as an overseer of slaves and the son-in-law of the wealthy French planter. The dark house thus accumulates all the moral burdens of these houses. To sum up, as a reification of Sutpen's dynastic ambition, Sutpen's Hundred rises both on the wealth and on the moral debts he has accumulated from his past. Sutpen's plantation, especially the mansion, is the setting for many important fictional actions and events that make up this Southern tragedy, and is associated with such themes as incest, miscegenation, fratricide, disease, death, and idiocy. To the narrators in the fictional present who attempt to reconstruct the Sutpen legend, with the possible exception of the Canadian youth Shreve, the dark house becomes a metaphor for the dark recesses of their respective tormented psyches: for Rosa, a wrong rankling all her life which can never be redressed; for Quentin, a lurid symbol of the epic grandeur and decay of the Old 48 South which parallel his own family history, as well as a dramatic repetition or foreshadowing of his own incestuous feelings for his sister; for Mr. Compson, a Greek tragedy whose magnitude and fatalism both comfort him in his own ineffectual existence and confirm it. The Sutpen mansion is perhaps the most sophisticated instance in Yoknapatawpha fiction where topography intersects history and the psychology of characters to make possible the unfolding of a multi-level plot and the articulation of a host of Southern themes. If Thomas Sutpen in Absalom! is portrayed basically as a negative character, then John Sartoris in The Unvanquished is presented in a more complex and ambivalent light, both as a Southern hero inspired by an aristocratic idealism and a ruthless killer who uses violence as a regular means of achieving his political goals. Compared with the Sutpen legend, which comes to Quentin, the central character in the narrative present,^ through highly biased reminiscences, scattered evidences, and a series of subjective speculations, John Sartoris's life is recounted more directly by his son Bayard as he grows up during the Civil War and the following years of Reconstruction. Consequently, whereas Sutpen's Hundred is shrouded in a misty evil seductive to the susceptible Quentin, Sartoris on Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha maps is associated both with nostalgia for a romantic past and critical reevaluation of the Southern legacy. 49 Narrated by Bayard, The Unvanquished composes six previously published short stories plus one specifically written for the book. It covers Bayard's life from early adolescence to early manhood: in the first chapter, "Ambuscade," Bayard is twelve; in the last chapter, "An Odor of Verbena," he is twenty-five. Chronologically, one may discern a process of maturation for Bayard through these chapters. The basic tone of the first three stories, when the narrator is twelve to fourteen, is romantic and sentimental, even though the subject matter is war. In "Ambuscade," Bayard and his black companion Ringo snipe at Yankee soldiers and, when pursued, have to hide behind Granny's spread skirt. Colonel Dick of the Northern army knows where the boys are hiding, but is too much of a gentleman to push the matter to an embarrassing point. In "Retreat," Bayard and Ringo ride after the enemy's mules for the excitement of it and later witness Colonel Sartoris fool Yankee soldiers into surrendering their weapons. In the eyes of an admiring Bayard, Sartoris represents Southern heroism at its most romantic moment: "He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing . . . that made him seem big to us" C10). In "Retreat," Rosa Millard, Bayard's grandmother, travels with Bayard and Ringo to the Yankee camp to demand the return of the chests of silver, mules, and slaves (!) that belong to the Sartoris plantation. Sure enough, the Northern army courteously returns what she claims to be her property— actually gives her more than what belonged to her originally. On their way home, she uses a paper 50 signed by the Northern army command to trick the Yankees out of their mules and horses. Rosa justifies her dishonesty with the wartime condition and her unselfish motivation: she distributes the money and mules she steals from the Yankees to her needy neighbors, both white and black. Throughout the book Rosa is described as a determined, courageous, resourceful Southern matriarch, generous to the poor and dignified even in adverse circumstances. There are a few persistent themes and ways of looking at the Civil War and the Old South which are important to an understanding of Bayard. These include the myth of the Civil War "ruled by antebellum courtesies rather than military necessity" (qtd. in Holder 208), the treatment of war as game, and an aristocratic idealism which stresses noblesse oblige and chivalry; these themes have the effect of displacing the harsh reality of war and obscuring slavery as a central fact of Southern society. Obviously, the persistent romanticization of the Civil War and the Old South on the part of an older narrator is meant not only to convey realistically the limited vision and naivete of an early teenager but also, more importantly, to stress Bayard's tenacious memories of a boy’s world of emotions: the security and love of grandmother, the exemplary heroism of father, the loyalty and fraternity of a Negro companion, and all the noble values and ideals they stand for. "An Odor of Verbena" may be regarded as the climax of the novel. In the story, Colonel Sartoris is killed by his enemy Redmond, a one-time business partner, largely through his own 51 arrogant and tactless attacks on the latter. Bayard, now twenty- five, is required by the tradition to avenge his father’s death by killing Redmond. Indeed, the community expects him to defend the honor of Sartoris, and his stepmother Drusilla ceremonially hands him the dueling pistols before the coffin of his father and puts a sprig of verbena, a symbol of courage, on his lapel to make sure that he will deliver "the fire of heaven" (274). The pressures on Bayard to undertake a violent revenge are enormous, both from the outside and from inside his own heart. Bayard, however, finally chooses to obey the biblical commandment of "Thou shalt not kill," for he realizes that his father has killed too many people and there has been too much violence in the South, which no amount of high- sounding idealism can justify. As a gesture of renunciation of violence, he walks courageously into Redmond's office, unarmed, to confront the murderer and shames Redmond into leaving Jefferson immediately. Bayard's repudiation of violence and his departure from the tradition represented by Colonel Sartoris are significant. Now he sees clearly his father's predilection for killing, his "violent and ruthless dictatorialness and will to dominate" (258), which used to be hidden by a romantic haze of heroism. This is especially remarkable considering that he grew up in the violence of the Civil War and that, even when a teenager boy, he avenged his grandmother's death by killing and mutilating Grumpy, her murderer, in a horrendous way. Indeed, "though he arrived at manhood through 52 violence, it is through forbearance that he achieves maturity" CCox 196). Yet, Bayard's criticism of Colonel Sartoris and his rejection of violence does not imply a fundamental repudiation either of his father or of the Southern tradition embodied in the Old Order, as many critics have alleged it does.^® In a conversation with Bayard, Drusilla distinguishes John Sartoris's dream from that of Sutpen, who is regarded contemptuously by the community as an "underbred," cold, ruthless, selfish, untrustworthy man: "... [Sutpen's] dream is just Sutpen. John's is not. He is thinking of this whole country which he is trying to raise by its bootstraps, so that all the people in it, not just his kind nor his old regiment, but all the people, black and white, the women and children back in the hills who don't even own shoes, [may live a life of abundance and happiness.]” C256) What Bayard objects to is his father's use of violence to achieve these goals and his disregard for human lives if they stand in his way, but not the goals per se. Toward the end of the story, after his climactic encounter with Redmond, Bayard describes his father's dream as "something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes" C291). COne can easily see that those blacks who would endorse Colonel Sartoris's legacy are "good" Negroes like Ringo, but not the rebellious Loosh or Uncle Cash, whom Sartoris prevents from becoming marshal for Jefferson; that whites like the Burdens, whom Sartoris murders for championing 53 black rights, would certainly think differently from Bayard.) Earlier on Bayard mentions Colonel Sartoris's desire to give up violence shortly before his death, which makes his repudiation of the code of vengeance seem to conform to his father's wish (also see Holder 217). All these textual moves indicate that Bayard not only attempts to salvage the aristocratic idealism that Colonel Sartoris stands for from the legacy of the Old South but also resolves to protect Sartoris's image from any further damage. The result is what Holder calls "a distinct ambivalence" (217). This is not surprising, for Bayard has too much a stake in the Southern tradition and his upbringing to effect a radical rupture with them. Faulkner's family and personal history provides a clue to an understanding of such ambivalence. As is well known, Colonel Sartoris in many ways parallels Faulkner's great-grandfather Colonel William Clark Falkner (see Cox 5-7). Like Sartoris, he was a self- made man; fought in the Confederate army; married, fathered a son, was widowed, and remarried; built the railroad that ran through Lafayette County; killed several of his opponents and was eventually murdered by his former partner in the railroad company, ironically after he had renounced violence himself. In addition, he founded a bank (which in fiction will be established by Bayard Sartoris), practiced law (as Bayard also does), and wrote several works of fiction. Although Faulkner's father and grandfather were no mean figures in local history, they seem to have been overshadowed by his great-grandfather. Through family legends, "the personality and 54 deeds of Col. William Clark Falkner maintained a stronger hold on Faulkner’s imagination than did the achievements of his father or grandfather" (Cox 5). Clearly, growing up listening to numerous tellings and retellings of his great-grandfather's unusual life and reliving them in his imagination made it easy for Faulkner to place himself in the position of Bayard. Through Bayard's eyes Faulkner would recreate his great-grandfather's life in the stories of John Sartoris and, through Bayard’s ambivalent responses to the legacy of the Old South embodied in Sartoris, Faulkner would articulate his own complex relationship with the Southern tradition. Faulkner's attitude blends romantic longing with realistic criticism; these two basic tendencies exist in a delicate tension. Those critics who believe that in "An Odor of Verbena" Bayard grows beyond a romantic view of his father and the Southern tradition and finally achieves maturity, seem to have applied to the story mechanically the classic model of Bildungsroman. which usually ends with a resolution based on transcendence or repudiation of a former self. In The Unvanquished. Bayard never arrives at such a point; his repudiation or transcendence is partial and deeply ambivalent. Commenting on Faulkner's relation to his heritage, which may also be applied to Bayard, Volpe writes, "His mature appraisal of the past did not correspond to his boyhood feelings, but one did not negate the other; in this book fThe Unvanauishedl and in many other stories he expressed both attitudes simultaneously" (86). One way to characterize Faulkner’s mode of imagination in the novel is to see 55 it as a spatialization of different or even contradictory emotions and moral positions, which allows him to depart from the strict temporal structure of a classic Bildungsroman. Cartographically, Faulkner (and Bayard as well) can be seen as projecting both his nostalgia for a glorious family past and criticism of the Southern tradition simultaneously onto Sartoris on his maps, making it a topographical correlative of his own complex emotional links with the legacy of the South. The modern world occupies the most important position in Yoknapatawpha fiction; its centrality is paralleled by the fact that most of the novelistic actions in it tend to take place in or around Jefferson or converge on it, which is situated right in the center of Faulkner's fictive maps. Although many of Faulkner's works span several worlds— for example, Absalom! could be read as Quentin’s story as well Sutpen's story, therefore regarded as astride two worlds— the following are major works centrally concerned with the modern world: The Sound and the Furv (1929), As I Lay Dvina (1930), Sanctuary (1931), iifl.bl.-ln_ August. (1932), and the Snopes trilogy, which comprises The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). The modern world in Yoknapatawpha is a world marked by the disintegration of the old order, the daily violence beneath the surface of law and order, the alienation of humanity from nature, community, and conscience, and the spread and ascent of Snopesism— a callous commercialism that purports to substitute the worst cash nexus for the traditional human relations veiled by sentimentality 56 and romance. It is also a world where the individuals attempt to cope with radical social changes, the burden of tradition, the collapse of value systems, or even the absurdity of existence itself. Some succumb to despair; some endure stoically; some still manage to cherish the hope, precious because it is chastened, that courage, compassion, and love will not die, that the sun will not dim, that humanity will prevail. The Sound and the Furv is probably the most poignant example in Faulkner's fiction of the disintegration of the Southern family, specifically of an old, aristocratic house, the Compsons. Absalom! comes as a close match, but its effect is somewhat muted by the temporal distance and the speculative character of the narrative. By contrast, The Sound and the Furv plunges the reader right into the minds of the Compsons, and, in trying to make sense of their retarded, morbid, and obsessed consciousnesses, the reader is deeply involved in the psychic and emotional consequences of the breakup of the Compson family. Although the Compson family has been in decline since the Civil War, i.e., since Quentin’s grandfather, a "failed brigadier" (see Appendix to The Sound and the Furv. 409), started selling fragments of "Compson's Mile" regularly, its tragic end occurs as an event of the modern world. For the Compson children, the problems really begin with their parents. Mr. Compson is an ineffectual father, alcoholic, pessimistic, cynical; he is able to offer neither protection nor a role model to his children. In the context of patriarchal Southern society, where in prominent families 57 like the Compsons, the heroic deeds of grandfathers and great grandfathers are legendized and told repeatedly to the children, Mr. Compson's failings as a father figure are striking Csee Kerr, Keystone 128). On the other hand, Mrs. Compson gives up her role as mother by withholding her affection for her children, with the possible exception of Jason, and withdrawing to her private world of hypochondriac languor, fierce bigotry, and the imaginary superiority of the Bascombs. Thus deprived of maternal warmth and nurturing, Benji and Quentin begin to look to their sister Caddy for emotional support. Of the four Compson children, Caddy, though central to the novel, does not have a direct voice; Benji, being an idiot, has rather limited capacity to fully engage the reader with the intensity of the Compson tragedy; Jason simply alienates the reader by his villainy; only Quentin's agonizing attempts to solve his existential crisis have a power to make a strong emotional impact on the reader.^ Quentin wants to have Caddy as a pre-adolescent sister at all costs; his arrested psychological development is manifested in his desire to stop time— to deny the inevitable sexual maturity in her and in himself. Although his possessive desire for Caddy is more psychological than physical, but his incestuous feelings lead to actions which help to precipitate Caddy's sexual misadventures and eventual elopement. With Caddy gone, Benji is in perpetual mourning for the loss; Mrs. Compson becomes more withdrawn and bitter; Quentin finally commits suicide; and Jason, in his role 58 as the head of the house after Mr. Compson*s death, is completely dominated by greed and hatred. Persecuted and exploited by Jason, Caddy's illegitimate daughter Miss Quentin runs away from the loveless family with a bigamist, repeating the tragedy of her mother. In Appendix to the novel, we learn that after Mrs. Compson*s death, Jason sends Benji to the state asylum, sells the crumbling house, and moves into an apartment. As a confirmed bachelor, he is not likely to have an heir. The fall of the Compson family is thus complete. As Dilsey, the black servant of the Compson family puts it, "I've seed de first en de last ... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin'* C371). There already exists a huge body of criticism on The Sound and the Furv. using almost every conceivable approach and theory. What seems lacking, however, is a spatial analysis of the novel. The different parts of the Compson house, for example, are associated with different moral ethoses and emotional tinges. Mr. Compson's study, stocked with musty Latin classics and often smelling of liquor, is the scene where he dismisses an anguished Quentin's "confession" of incest with Caddy as insignificant, as his son’s futile attempt to assign meaning, albeit sick and desperate, to his meaningless existence. It is a space of nihilism. Mrs. Compson's bedroom is the place for her self-confinement; it suggests sickness, real or imagined, and bigotry. Benji's room is filled with the inarticulate pains and sorrows of an idiot, whereas Quentin's occupied by a thought-tormented soul. Jason's well-guarded room 59 where he keeps a safe hoarding his ill-gotten gains is a symbol of a niggardly, cynical, and mean spirit. By contrast, in the absence of Caddy, only the kitchen, where Dilsey cooks and serves meals, and gives Benji the mothering he is denied, stands as a space of faith, compassion, and justice. If the Compson house is basically a profane space associated with pains, decay, and moral confusion, then the church Dilsey attends can be seen as an island of sacred place where the black pastor preaches passionately about faith and hope beyond dogmas. This serves as an important counterpoint to the "Compson devil," which pervades modern society beyond the Compsons. The decline of the Compson family can also be correlated to the changes "Compson's Mile" undergoes. The land that forms the basis of the Compson estate is a space that represents economic power and social prestige, which in turn support the Compsons' self- image as an aristocratic family in Jefferson. As the estate shrinks, so the Compsons’ social standing goes down, pressing on their ego Ca psychic space), which stubbornly refuses to adjust to a diminished space. Hence the unavoidable clash between constrained reality and memories or illusions of grandeur; hence untold sufferings for the Compsons. The toponymous changes in "Compson's Mile" parallel the fall of the family: It is first known as "the Compson Domain," suggesting the ambition of a feudal principality. Then, it is called "the Governor's house." When Quentin's grandfather, General Compson, takes over, it is referred to as "the Old Governor's," instead of "the General’s." When Mr. Compson, 60 Quentin's father, is in charge, it is "now known merely as the Compson place" (409). After Mr. Compson sells the pasture to provide for Caddy's wedding and Quentin's education at Harvard, then after Quentin’s death, it becomes "the Old Compson place." This name will remain on the map of Yoknapatawpha even after Jason has sold the house and the former "Compson's Mile" is transformed into a jerrybuilt, crowded residential area— a lasting trace, both poignant and ironic, of a once-mighty family in Yoknapatawpha. The Sound and the Furv begins with a description of space, in Benji's narrative: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces. I could see them hitting" (1; my emphasis). Benji is looking at another space, the golf court built on land sold by the Compson family. He is also looking at a more spacious and glorious past, at the fragmentation of family property, at a family falling apart. The disintegration of the Compson family, which the novel deals with, can be viewed as a "hollowization" of the Compsons, who become increasingly an empty name totally unworthy of what it stood for in its heyday. The novel ends with the word "place," again involving Benji: The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and fagade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place. (401; my emphasis) Previously Benji was howling angrily because Luster turned the carriage around the Confederate Monument on its right. It appears 61 that right is wrong for Benji; he can only accept the left, the gauche. The old order with all its perversity is thus naturalized symbolically through spatial arrangements, for an idiot. Benji has no flexibility and cannot adapt to changes; this ensures that the old order is doomed. As the reader's mind rests at "place" in the end, this last word suddenly reverberates throughout the novel, echoing the Compson place, the Old Compson place, all the places and spaces touched by the Compsons. The novel's progression from "space" to "place" via the various forms and kinds of spaces, places and movements Cphysical, social, or psychic) through them, has a large metaphysical meaning. The eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defines "space" and "place" from a humanist perspective: "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other" (3). The Sound and the Furv can be read as the final loss of "Compson's Mile" as a space in and on which the freedom and power of the Compson family once resided. It also recounts attempts made by its members to secure their places in their crumbling world: Mr. Compson seeks his "place" in decadent classics; Quentin finds it in death; Caddy does not find it in Jefferson; Jason tries to define it between his safe and stocks; while Benji locates it in a fastidious observance of an empty ritual of spatial movement. The completion of the fall of the Compson family is signified by the total loss or perversion of both space and place, two crucial dimensions of human experience. 62 Light in August is one of Faulkner's great works that have attracted wide critical attention. Although, "stylistically, it is relatively easy reading," structurally, it is "very complicated, containing several distinct stories whose thematic relationship is not immediately apparent" (Volpe 151-52). I would suggest that spatial analysis will prove very fruiful in clarifying the thematic structure of the work. The complexity of the work is reflected, among other things, in the plethora of fictional spaces and places and a great varieties of ways in which they are used, e.g., as settings, as objects, metaphorically, metonymically, lyrically, and so on. For example, the various built structures in the novel— e.g., the Reverend Gail Hightower's house, Joanna Burden's house, Doc Hines's house, the McEachern farmhouse, the orphanage— are associated with different moods and moral positions; they have made a deep psychic and emotional impact on Joe Christmas's personality, warping and twisting it and uncannily preparing for his final destruction. Here I would like to discuss briefly the different modes of movements through space indicative of the themes of two major stories in the novel, that of Joe Christmas and that of Lena Grove. After killing Joanna Burden and setting fire to her house, Christmas is on the run. At one point, he reflects: It had been a paved street, where going should be faster. It had been a circle and he is still inside of it. . . . "And yet I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years," he thinks. "But I have never got outside that 63 circle. I have never broken out of the ring of what I have already done and cannot ever undo ..." (321) Whereas Christmas’s road is circular, Lena's is open. In the beginning of the story, she marvels at the freedom of movement the road implies: "My, my . . . here I aint been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my. A body does get around" (26). With slight variation she closes the book with: "My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480). Lena's road passes through Yoknapatawpha, leading her to new places and an open future, and promises her numerous possibilities in life. Christmas's road forms a closed circle where the future is a repetition of the past; it symbolizes the narrow range of possibilities available to him. In a sense, his circular movement suggests the claustrophobic society of Jefferson where the minds of a whole community, with few exceptions, are ringed in by white suprematism and religious bigotry. Lena travels through Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, cutting through the closed circle, thus contrasting and connecting the two road metaphors. If projected on Faulkner's fictive maps, the two different modes of movement help the reader to grasp the thematic intention of the novel: Lena's story not only offers a counterpoint to Christmas’s story— and Hightower's and Joanna's, for that matter— it is also an antidote, giving hope and comfort to a world bruised and disheartened by follies, hatred, and violence. 64 Another of Faulkner's major novels, As I Lav Dvinp. builds a whole story on a journey from the Bundren farm in the southeast corner of the county to the cemetery in Jefferson, undertaken by the Bundren family to fulfill Addie's last wish that she be buried there. The novel contains enough concrete information about the spatial movement of the funeral party to allow the journey to be clearly mapped.-*-® In the history of Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens' burial journey is probably remembered as a bizarre event in which a decomposing body with a bad odor was dragged through half a county. The novel tells us much about the mores and customs of poor white farmers in the southern county. The story of the Bundrens is a counterpart, on the lower rung of the social ladder, of the stories of the "great families," such as the Sutpens, the Sartorises, and the Compsons. In the Bundren family one sees the dynamics of family unity and strife; the observance of the code of honor, courage, endurance, and independence on the one hand, and the display of a tendency to violence, stubbornness, and pettiness on the other; the simultaneous presence of the earthiness of peasants and the absurdity of the ignorant; and a blend of the tragic, the comic, and the farcical as well. Generically, the novel is ambiguous, too. It recalls genres such as the classic epic, the medieval quest romance, the picaresque novel, and the modern fiction of travel, but cannot be fully described by any of these genres. For example, whereas quest romances set positive goals, be it the Holy Grail or the hand of a lady, As I Lav Dying ends in the 65 fragmentation of the Bundren family: Addie is finally buried (and forgotten); Dari is taken away to a lunatic asylum; a stranger comes into the family as the new Mrs. Bundren; and the members of the family are alienated from each other despite its apparent togetherness. The narrative of the novel is occasioned by Addie's death and will not stop until she is buried in her family lot in Jefferson. The space traversed by the journey between the Bundren farm and the cemetery in Jefferson, i.e., between Addie's biological death and her narrative death at the burial, becomes a stage for a human drama, now heroic, now absurd, often humorous, but never lacking in bewildering meditations on being, death, language, and the meaning of existence. The country traveled by the Bundren family is both an arena of realistic actions and events and a symbolic space complete with the flood and fire of purgatory. Faulkner said, "I took this family and subjected them to two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer— flood and fire, that's all" (see Gwynn and Blotner 87). If for no other virtues, the Bundrens have at least survived the flood and fire; they have endured. This is perhaps the glimmer of hope that Faulkner was to elaborate into an eloquent declaration of his faith in the human race in his Nobel Prize address. The Snopes trilogy traces the spread and rise of Snopesism, a significant phenomenon in the geomoral landscape of Yoknapatawpha. The Hamlet, the first in the trilogy, is set in the area of Frenchman's Bend, centering on Varner's store. It is the most 66 important Faulkner work dealing with the white yeomen and tenant farmers in the county, focusing on the Snopes clan. The Snopeses are poor white farmers notorious for their crafty, merciless, anti social behavior. Ab Snopes, for example, is known for his record of burning the barns of successive landlords and for spitefully ruining the expensive carpet of Major de Spain (see "Barn Burning"). His son, Flem, is the most typical and successful Snopes. Starting out as a clerk at Varner's store, he later gains the favor of Will Varner, the leading owner of businesses and farms in the area, marries his daughter, and in time manages to control the store, the blacksmith shop, and the cotton gin in Frenchman's Bend by manipulating behind the scene and planting other Snopeses. He is described as sinister and uncannily secretive: he does not "even tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in an empty house in the dark of the moon" CHamlet 284). His impoverished neighbor Armstid is probably his worst victim in Frenchman's Bend. In "Spotted Horses," Flem, in collusion with a Texan horse trader, Buck Hipps, entices gullible farmers into buying uncatchable wild ponies. Armstid gets wounded in trying to catch "his" horse, and Flem cheats Mrs. Armstid out of the five hard- earned dollars refunded by a sympathetic Hipps and trusted to Flem for safe-keeping. Later, he tricks Armstid and two other persons into buying a worthless piece of property by fooling them into thinking that there is buried treasure in it; as a result, Armstid loses his mind and ends up in the state asylum in Jackson. 67 Having conquered Frenchman's Bend, Flem moves to Jefferson and makes his way up the social ladder by a combination of devious stratagems and sheer ruthless energy, in the process bringing in other Snopeses. In Mansion, he is already the President of the Sartoris Bank and lives in the renovated mansion once owned by Major de Spain. To Garvin Stevens and V. K. Ratliff, both from old families of Yoknapatawpha, the increasing influence of the Snopeses is a moral epidemic that must be checked. Both The Town and The Mansion describe the clashes between idealists who want to preserve traditional values and the new brand of capitalists who pursue profit and power unscrupulously, in total disregard of traditional codes. Two other Snopes worth a mention here are Clarence and Mink. Clarence, a Mississippi senator, is a despicable, corrupt politician. Mink, a murderer embittered by Flem's persecution, will some day shoot Flem upon his release from the jail. Stripped of the romantic veil of heroism and sentimentality that usually covers the Sartorises or even the Sutpens, the typical Snopeses are the most negatively treated characters in Faulkner's fiction. The trajectory of Snopesism is most succinctly illustrated by Flem Snopes's movement through space as he moves up the social ladder. The hamlet in Frenchman's Bend, the town of Jefferson, and finally, the luxurious mansion formerly of Major de Spain— all these significant spaces are made titles of the novels in the trilogy— trace Flem's progress from the rural to the urban world, from the lower social stratum to the very top of wealth and power; and they 68 also trace the spread of Snopesism as a moral cancer through Yoknapatawpha County. Varner's store, the power plant in Jefferson, and finally the Sartoris Bank are another set of Cwork) spaces that delineates the same social and moral movement. From a necessarily sketchy survey and selected studies of Faulkner's individual works given above, it is clear that a spatial approach to Yoknapatawpha fiction does not exclude the existing achievement of Faulkner scholarship, but rather builds on it and opens new ways of analysis hitherto neglected. Faulkner's fictive maps prove a most fruitful way to synthesize the large corpus of fictional information about Yoknapatawpha and to highlight the moral visions the author articulates in various works— in short, to present a complete geomoral landscape. Let us take Faulkner’s later map as the basis for a summary of Yoknapatawpha as a geomoral landscape. At the top across the map, north of the Tallahatchie River is Issetibbeha's realm, extending indefinitely off the map— and into the depth of the prehistory of America as well. This is the arena where a primordial, morally untainted way of life is imagined to have existed. Moving down south of the same river, we see Chickasaw Grant which, though inscribed only in the northwest quadrant of the map, actually extends over the whole of what is to be Yoknapatawpha County. The very term "grant" already puts the native Americans in a subject position to white colonialism, which specifically takes the form of 69 a young, expansionist republic eager to settle as many immigrants as possible on her frontiers at the expense of the native Indians. "A Justice" and "Red Leaves" treat the Indian world under the corruptive influence of white colonialism where the Indians are caught in the clashes among native, white, and black (as slaves) cultures. Balanced against this grim picture of Indians are "Lo!" and "A Courtship," two stories not mentioned on the map, which depict, romantically and sentimentally, the prelapsarian Indians as a freedom-loving, resourceful people and the Indian-white relation as one of harmony and fraternal love. Taken together, the four Indian stories present images of Indians both as noble savages and as cannibalistic barbarians who have adopted the evil ways of white colonialists. "Red Leaves" as a title evokes, among other things, the often neglected presence of the Indians (indicated by the color red) in Yoknapatawpha, which tends to be conceived racially as either black or white. "A Justice," on the other hand, raises the issue of justice, with its legal, ethical, and historical dimensions, as one of Faulkner's central moral concerns. It is not fortuitous that Faulkner’ stories, which deal with what he calls in his Nobel Prize address "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" fReader 3), should make right-and-wrong a constant preoccupation. The numerous legal cases in Yoknapatawpha fiction, often complete with investigations, trials, imprisonments, public repercussions and, above all, complicated personal ramifications— which either result in the attainment of justice or, more 70 frequently, in a travesty of it— testify to the centrality of this theme.^ A few features on the map of Yoknapatawpha can be traced to their origins in the last days of the Indian period, e.g., Sutpen's Hundred in the northwest, the McCaslin plantation in the northeast, Sartoris in north-central, Compson's Mile in the central, and Old Frenchman Place in the southeast. Several of Faulkner's major works, including Absalom. Absalom!. The Unvanquished, and Go Downr Moses, are wholly or in important parts devoted to stories of these powerful individuals and families, who have made a profound impact on the collective consciousness of Yoknapatawpha and whose indelible legacy is transformed into place names on the map of the fictive county. While Absalom! recalls the tragedy of Thomas Sutpen and his family, The Unvanquished commemorates the heroic exploits of Colonel Sartoris and his family. "Wash," "Raid," and "An Odor of Verbena" focus the reader's attention on the most dramatic or revelatory moments or scenes in the two works. "Wash" describes the violent death of Sutpen in the hands of his handy man Wash Jones, an ineluctable end to the tortuous and eventful life of a strong but flawed character. In contrast to Sutpen, Colonel Sartoris appears more of a hero. He is portrayed as fighting, during the Civil War and the ensuing years of Reconstruction, for an order inspired by aristocratic idealism. "Raid," which features his teenager son Bayard (cmd Bayard's grandmother), is told in this tradition. In "An Odor of Verbena," this tradition is subjected to a critical 71 reevaluation by a mature Bayard. While Sartoris's heroism is deromanticized and his tendency toward domination and violence is repudiated by Bayard, Bayard still cherishes his father's dream of an idealist aristocratic order. His ambivalence is best expressed in the title "An Odor of Verbena," symbolic both of the courage to confront the enemy fearlessly as Drusilla did in the war and of Bayard's courage to defy the code of vengeance. "Was" from Go Down, Moses tells of life on the McCaslin plantation in a different key. Uncles Buddy and Buck, the twin sons of the founding father of the estate, old Carothers McCaslin, practice a kind of aristocratic socialism in atonement for the sins of their father.On the one hand, they try to free their black slaves and refuse to live in the manor house they have inherited— both conducts untypical of plantation owners. On the other, they maintain the power and prestige of slave-holders by ritualistically lock the slaves in the big house every night and by giving Tomey's Turl, their black half- brother, a chase whenever he is found running away to meet his sweetheart on the Beauchamp plantation. In "Was," the reality of domination, the conscience of enlightened aristocrats, and frontiers humor are woven into an antebellum pastoral at once wistfully sentimental and ironic. On the whole, "Was," inscribed on the left 1 upper corner of the map, is counterpoised to "Wash" in its basic moral tone. Serving as a fulcrum between the two is John Sartoris' Railroad, a product of an aristocratic idealism which combines service to community with maintenance of a strict social hierarchy 72 dominated by plantation owners, with violence if necessary. These three features form a perfect cartographic representation of Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the Old South. While premodern Yoknapatawpha is intensively realized for the most part outside of Jefferson, in the northern part of the county, in the modern period activities tend to concentrate in and around Jefferson or converge on it. The titles of novels marked on the map include 5 . . d . n cfcu.gry, Light in. . . A ugust, The Sound and the Furv. all set mainly in Jefferson, and The Hamlet which, though set in the countryside of southeastern Yoknapatawpha, begins a trilogy which will direct the reader's attention back to Jefferson in The Town and The Mansion (both were published a decade later than the appearance of the map). To this list one must add As I Lav Dvinaf absent from the later map but alluded to in the earlier map. Taken as a whole, the modern world described in these works is more complex than the premodern world. On the one hand, there is an elegiac record of the disintegration of the traditional order, most poignantly reflected in the end of the old families such as the Compsons (The Sound and the Furv and "That Evening Sun") and the Griersons ("A Rose for Emily"). On the other, one witnesses a social life rife with white racism (culminating in the lynchings in "Dry September," Sanctuary. N. and "Percy Grimm," from Light in AugustJ; criminal activities such as bootlegging and murder fSanctuarv); the rise of Snopesism with its totally cynical ways of cheating, bullying, manipulating, killing, and subversion of traditional values; and the often 73 ineffectual rearguard struggles waged by Garvin Stevens, V. K. Ratliff and their allies. Jefferson is flanked on the north by the cemetery (present on the earlier map) and on the south by the airport, where the story "Death Drag" is set. The town is thus enveloped by actual and threatened deaths. A quick look at the earlier map where Jefferson is presented in greater detail will confirm this impression. Apart from the jail where Goodwin is lynched, Grierson's is the locale where Homer Barron is murdered by a necrophiliac Miss Emily; Miss Burden's is the place where Joanna is killed by Joe Christmas; and the Reverend Hightower's is the scene where Christmas is shot by Percy Grimm. These and other acts of violence are presented as consequences of an intricate series of causation and are probed for their motivations which arise from a complex interplay of personal, family, and social factors. The picture of the Yoknapatawphans, particularly that of the Jeffersonians, that emerges from the fiction is thus far from flattering. The massive fictional details in Faulkner fiction about such a morally confused and alienated world overwhelm many readers with a somber vision of Yoknapatawpha. Jefferson is definitely not a sacred space,^ but it is not beyond hope, either. In the Compson house, Dilsey's kitchen stands as a place of sanity, compassion, and faith in a house full of "sound and fury." The black church she attends holds out a hope that the heart can respond to. Alongside many violent murders and bizarre deaths, life is also born in Jefferson. One thinks of Lena 74 Grove's childbirth in the cabin beside Miss Joanna Burden’s house where murder and arson are committed. Lena's connection with nature offers a counterpoint to the alienated lives of Christmas, Hightower, and Joanna Burden. Even the powerful Flem Snopes is finally killed by Mink Snopes by the inevitable self-defeating logic of Snopesism. As Faulkner puts it: "The Snopeses will destroy themselves" fUniversitv 282). Cartographically, Jefferson occupies a central point in the diagonal axis running northwest-southeast across the map. On the upper end of the axis is the big woods where Sam Fathers, the last Indian, finds his final abode; where Ike McCaslin is initiated into manhood and begins to evolve a radical view of history; where Faulkner locates a space for his primitivist imagination. Between the wilderness as a sacred space and plantations and Jefferson as profane spaces, Faulkner launches a critique of culture by exalting nature. On the lower end of the axis is the hamlet centering on Varner's store where Flem Snopes begins his conquest of Yoknapatawpha and whence Snopesism starts to spread to the rest of the county. The uncheckable dispersion of the herd of wild ponies in "The Spotted Horses" is an apt metaphor for the spread of the viruses of Snopesism to Jefferson and across Yoknapatawpha. In this sense, the home base of Snopeses constitutes an evil space. Jefferson, on the receiving end of moral stances originating from both the sacred wilderness and the evil village, thus becomes an open field for clashes between good and evil, which are distributed 75 in concrete novelistic actions not along a clear-cut line but in intricate patterns woven by various forces, of which the woods where the bear roams and the countryside where the wild horses scamper are warp and woof. Now we can try to answer the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter: What are the functions of Faulkner's maps? What can they tell us beyond what we already learn from individual works? What is the status of fictive maps based on a fully realized fictional world? It is clear from the above discussion that Faulkner's fictive maps help to summarize and synthesize the large amount of fictional information about Yoknapatawpha as well as the moral visions, modulated by various tones and moods, voiced by the author. They also help the reader to locate the scenes of actions and chart movements in the fictive county, thus making it easier for the reader to concretize and visualize the fictional world. Most importantly, they can "serve as trigger devices to stimulate thought" (Muehrcke 14). This is proved by the discovery of certain inter-work symmetry and contrasts which would otherwise be buried in the massive corpus of Faulkner's work. The two examples given previously are: 1) the counterpoise between "Wash" and "Was" in tones and in the moral stances of plantation owners, with Sartoris's Railroad as a fulcrum in the middle; 2) the diagonal axis connecting the sacred woods of "The Bear" and the evil-tainted hamlet of "Spotted Horses," with Jefferson in between as the center stage for conflicting moral positions and social forces. In fact, the fictive 76 maps' potential for stimulating thought and helping explore the fictional materials is unlimited. One thinks, for instance, of the possibility of a comprehensive study of the patterns of fictive houses as geomoral constructs, which has already been tentatively explored in my discussion of Absalom! and The Sound and the Furv. One could also map the routes of movement traveled by various characters and study the configurations they make (e.g., the triangular trip of Ike McCaslin among the woods, the McCaslin plantation, and Jefferson; Snopeses' route of invading Jefferson; the Bundrens' journey of negative quest; and the closed circle of Joe Christmas's movement intersected by Lena Grove's open line of progression). All such map-based approaches to Faulkner's oeuvre demonstrate that the fictive maps cannot be taken as an inert, perhaps also reductive, reflection of his work, if not just as an interesting and occasionally useful appendage, as many readers have supposed. Both Calvin Brown and Charles Aiken's contentions that the fictive maps of Yoknapatawpha are based on the real geography of Lafayette County, illuminating as they are in their own ways, tend to obscure Faulkner's maps as fictive constructs. The idea that the fictive maps are simply a transcription of Faulkner's fiction is mistaken in a similar way. If a real map, as Muehrcke points out, "is actually a metaphor," "since the exact duplication of a geographical setting is impossible" (19), then a fictive map can only be a metaphor twice removed from the "original" geographical reality. If anything, 77 Faulkner's fictive maps are second-degree fictions, at once derived from and semi-independent of the works, thus making an interplay between the two creations not only possible but highly productive. Viewed in this light, one need not complain, or apologize for Faulkner, about the gaps between the maps and the information provided by the works of fiction. Again, it is pertinent to quote Muehrcke: "map and reality are not and cannot, be identical. . . . Most map reading mistakes occur because the user forgets this vital fact and expects a one-to-one correspondence between map and reality" C19). By the same token, one should not expect a one-to- one correspondence between the fictional information and the fictive maps of Yoknapatawpha, either. The limitless potential of Faulkner's fictive maps, which may be further adapted and extended, testifies to the argument that "a map has the many ingredients of a painting or a poem" CMuehrcke 19), the meaning of which must be explicated. Faulkner's fictive cartography creates an added dimension to his Yoknapatawpha fiction, and the value of his maps in researching and teaching his work has been generally overlooked. In Chapter III, I shall argue that Faulkner's maps, studied with his fiction, are evidence of what I call the spatial imagination— a mode of thinking which uses space or geography as a major framework. I shall also attempt to place his spatial imagination in the modernist movement to challenge and subvert the tyranny of the temporal 78 imagination. I shall further compare Faulkner's mode of spatial imagination with Shen Congwen's, with particular attention to their specific ways of constructing geomoral landscapes. This will ultimately allow me to place the two authors' regional fictions in the wider context of the negotiation, both in the East and the West, between temporal and spatial modes of the imagination in the twentieth century. 79 Notes 1 The few studies that have paid attention to the maps as part of their geographical approach to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County include the following: Ward L. Miner, The World of William Faulkner CNew York: Pageant, 1959); Calvin S. Brown,"Faulkner's Geography and Topography," PMLA 76 (1961): 445-54; Elizabeth M. Kerr, Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner's "Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil" CNew York: Fordham UP, 1969); and Charles S. Aiken, "Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction," The Geographical Review 67.1 (1977): 1-21. Another study that deals with the geographical aspect of Faulkner's fiction is William T. Ruzicka's Faulkner's Fictive Architecture: The Meaning of Place in the Yoknapatawpha Novels (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984). ^ Calvin S. Brown's article specifically compares Faulkner's later map with a Lafayette County map of 1912 (see Map 3 in Appendices) to prove that the former is based on the latter. The article also contains detailed arguments about the factual basis of various places or features in Yoknapatawpha County. ^ For a discussion of agreement or discrepancy between Faulkner's maps and his work, see Kerr, Yoknapatawpha. Chapter Two, especially 24 and 35-36. Brown argues that the later map is more accurate, i.e., more closely based on the real geography of Lafayette County (652-53). 4 It is an interesting hypothesis that Faulkner's fictive maps may have been inspired by postcards showing tourist attractions on the map of a state or region. Faulkner worked as a clerk at the post office on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford for some time. Research is required to confirm or dismiss the above conjecture. 5 Owing to the limitation of the scope and nature of this dissertation, I cannot deal with the evolution of Faulkner's moral visions over his entire career. My approach is to assume each of Faulkner's major works as an expression of one or more particular moral stances or visions which, taken together, can be mapped systematically as Faulkner does on his fictive maps. 6 "Lo!" is set in Washington DC and the Chickasaw country, which historically includes a large part of Yoknapatawpha. Strictly speaking, the story is not set in what would later become Yoknapatawpha, but there are several reasons why I include it in my discussion of Yoknapatawpha fiction. First, because the story takes 80 place before the creation of Yoknapatawpha County by white settlers, it is meaningless to make a retrospective distinction between the Yoknapatawpha part of the Chickasaw country and the rest of it. Instead, we can view the old Chickasaw country as belonging to the prehistory of Yoknapatawpha. Indeed, by putting the story outside the map of Yoknapatawpha County, on, say, an inset map, or by just assigning it to the Indian world in general, we may stress Yoknapatawpha County's connections with larger surrounding areas. This is also useful in underscoring the larger unity of Faulkner's work beyond his Yoknapatawpha fiction. ^ For the grammatical problem involved in the term, use note 5, Lewis Dabney 76-77. 8 Dabney quotes Arrell M. Gibson approvingly that "Rule descended in the female line among the Chickasaws and the Choctaws." "This would," he argues, "account for the chief's fear, for the youth would have been his heir ..." (77-78). Apparently, Faulkner felt free to alter history to suit his own artistic purpose. ^ See Dabney 76, note 4. Elmo Howell asserts, "Sam Fathers, who tells the story to Quentin Compson, has full knowledge of the facts of his birth, but because of his Indian proclivity to secrecy he keeps up the deception even when there is no occasion for doing so" (149-53). As Lewis Dabney points out, such assertion "ignores Faulkner's plot" (76). Citing stories written a decade later to explain "A Justice," and, more generally, expecting consistency in detail throughout Faulkner's numerous Yoknapatawpha stories composed during a span of several decades, may be risky. One can easily undercut the authority of Go Down. Moses! over "A Justice" with regard to Sam's family background by simply pointing to the fact that Fathers dies in 1883 according to the former book, eight years before Quentin Compson is born. This would clash head on with the plot of "A Justice," which makes Quentin twelve when Sam tells him the story; in other words, Sam is still alive in 1903 if Quentin's dates (1891-1910) given in Faulkner's genealogy is to be believed. While believing that cautious and thoughtful cross-references between various Faulkner stories may be useful, I would like to emphasize that the inconsistencies can not only be attributed to the author’s understandable fallibility, but also to his conscious choices for the specific purpose of given stories, or simply suggest the oral tradition from which the stories come. The unity of Yoknapatawpha fiction should be sought above all in its themes and overall structure. 81 1 1 For representative criticisms in this vein see, for example, Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation CBaton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1959) 130-34; and David H. Stewart, "The Purpose of Faulkner's Ike," Criticism 3 (1961): 333-42. Vickery's passage and Stewart’s article reappear in Francis Lee Utley et al, eds, Bearf Man, & God: Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear ( New York: Random House, 1964). 1^ Borges’s short story, "The Garden of Forking Path," challenges the totalizing, linear view of history characteristic of the Western imagination with the spatial imagination of the East, which is specifically embodied in the metaphor of the garden of forking paths. For further discussion of this point see Chapter III. For a discussion of the size of Sutpen's plantation, see Kerr, Yoknapatawpha 54-55. 1^ The 1972 Vintage edition of Absalorrij Absalom! has on its cover a photograph showing the silhouette of a solitary large house on the horizon at sunset (it could be at sun-up, which is less appropriate in the context of the novel). Evidently it is intended to help focus the reader's imagination on the Sutpen mansion as a central image of the work. 13 The central position Quentin occupies as a narrator is also corroborated by the fact that he is the only real victim of the Sutpen legend (Rosa was victimized by Sutpen, not by his legend; Mr. Compson's cynicism was not formed mainly as a result of his exposure to this legend; Shreve is essentially a bystander). 1® Judith Bryant Wittenberg, for example, argues that in refusing to avenge his father's death, Bayard "repudiates both the code of (vengeance) and his father, whom he understands to have been only superficially a 'hero' and whose postwar actions he thus adjudges as villainous" (160). 1^ One certainly could do an analysis of reader response to the different sections of The Sound and the Furv based on the background of readers (including socioeconomic, ideological, and psychological factors). Here I assume a reader who is well- educated, crazy enough to be interested in the sick mind of Quentin, sympathetic enough with his anguish and plight, and intelligent enough to want to figure out the whys and wherefores of his problems. If this fails to describe the reader of this dissertation, it at least fits the present writer at this moment. 82 The Bundrens set out from their farmhouse on the hilltop south of the Yoknapatawpha River, pass the Tull farm on their way westward to reach Samson's Bridge, stop at the Samson's for the night, turn back because the bridge is swept away by flood, ford across the Yoknapatawpha River near the damaged "Tull's Bridge," head north to Armstid's and stay there for the night (while trips are made to Varner’s Store or Frenchman's Bend to get Will Varner to set Cash's broken leg and to trade with Snopes), pass through Mottstown, stop briefly at an unnamed farmhouse near Mottstown, stay overnight at the Gillespie farm, and reach Jefferson in the sixth day of their journey. When mapping the trip, one needs to take into account certain discrepancies (e.g., Tull's farm is located south of the Yoknapatawpha River according to the novel, whereas both Faulkner maps show it to be north of the said river, right above Varner's store) and supply certain topographical features absent from the Faulkner maps (e.g., Samson's farm, Gillespie's farm, and Mottstown). 19 Karl Zender observes, "Faulkner's career can be described with a fair degree of accuracy as an exploration of two settings: the mansion or plantation house and the jail or prison" fThe Crossing of the Ways: William Faulknerr the South, and the Modern World [New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 19893 14-1). In Unvanquishedr while the McCaslin brothers are fighting shoulder to shoulder with Colonel Sutpen on the Confederate side during the Civil War, their unusual (in the eyes of other plantation owners) treatment of black slaves, the cooperative they found into which they pool their own land and the "little patches of poor hill land" of the poor whites and the blacks, and the better life and education they are thus able to provide to those who never had them before— all these recall similar ventures of Utopian and Fabian socialists (see 52-57). 21 Elizabeth Kerr argues that the lack of sacred space in Jefferson is indicated by the fact that the first public structure built by the founding fathers of Jefferson is the jail, followed by the courthouse, suggesting Jefferson's origin in the suppression of crimes and lawlessness (see Keystone 119). 83 Chapter Two The Construction of a Geomoral Landscape in Shen Congwen's West Hunan Fiction Since his "rediscovery" in the late 1970s in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution, Shen Congwen (1902-1988) has been steadily rising both in popular appeal and critical reputation in the People's Republic of China (PRC). After almost thirty years of neglect and even sanction, he is now discussed in the same breath as Ba Jin and Lao She in histories of modern Chinese literature recently published in the PRC.1 He has apparently regained wide recognition as a major modern Chinese writer, although his devotees would like to think of him as among a handful of the very best.^ On the contemporary Chinese literary scene, in a general atmosphere of skepticism toward and reappraisal of literary giants of the May Fourth era, Shen is, surprisingly, regarded by some scholars as one of the modern writers who have made the greatest impact on contemporary writers.^ Shen Congwen studies have grown from ginger apologies in the late 1970s to a full-scale scholarly industry at present: dozens of articles are published every year dealing with all aspects of Shen's life and work, employing a wide variety of approaches, and book-length studies and special journal issues devoted to him appear regularly.^ The thriving Shen Congwen scholarship is attributable, one suspects, largely to the general 84 trend toward reexamining and reassessing modern Chinese literature which had been seen, until recently, as little more than an overwhelming presence of realism interpreted and practiced by left- wing writers. Shen Congwen, a versatile, prolific writer-* of high distinction who departed from the "mainstream" of modern Chinese literature in many ways, offers one a chance to rediscover the colorful diversity of the New Literature of the May Fourth era and to rethink the complicated relationship in modern China among politics, ethics, art, national character, the writer's culturo- psychic structure, and his or her sense of historic mission. The past decade or so has seen Shen Congwen criticism reach an unprecedented level of achievement— both in terms of its scope and depth— since the appearance of Su Xuelin’s now classic essay "Lun Shen Congwen" ("On Shen Congwen") in 1934. Shen Congwen scholarship has moved from largely impressionist criticisms to more diversified and in-depth studies, and the preponderance of a narrowly conceived sociological approach in the PRC is being challenged by a variety of other approaches, especially that of cultural criticism.** Meanwhile, the limitations of current Shen criticism are also obvious. For example, little effort has been made to move beyond the neatly dichotomous division of Shen's fiction into "West Hunan fiction" fxiangxi xiaoshuo) and "urban fiction" fdushi xiaoshuo). It is commonplace to come across remarks like the following in Shen criticism: 85 These two different types of fiction have as their subject matters two antithetical worlds— the rural world of West Hunan, characterized by the unadorned beauty of nature and beauty of humanity, versus the urban world where human corruption and ugliness meet the eye at every turn.'’ (Han 246) Despite its usefulness as a rough categorization of Shen's fiction, such dichotomy is far too reductive to reflect Shen's work accurately. Shen's regional fiction not only functions as an antithesis to his urban fiction; it is also a complex totality encompassing diverse impulses and conflicting components. A crude application of the urban-rural dichotomy tends to simplify the meaning of the city and the countryside in Shen's work. There has also been, curiously, inadequate attention to the geographical aspect of Shen's regional work, even though he is remembered first of all as a nativist writer fxianatu zuoiiaT.^ In regional fiction, the literary use of geography has sociological, imaginative, and psychological dimensions and is particularly varied, intense, complex; it runs the whole gamut of literary expression, ranging from straightforward representation,^ lyricism, symbolism, to all kinds of structural and technical uses. Shen Congwen's West Hunan fiction offers an exemplary case in point.Further, how to assess Shen as a writer with works widely varied in moral tones, emotional slant, and style, is another issue of major theoretical implication. Critics usually cite different works by Shen to support different, or even contradictory, arguments, such as whether he is a romantic 86 writer or a realist one, or whether he is socially critical or self- indulgently lyrical. The "either-or" approach unavoidably results in a highly biased reading of Shen's work as a whole. Is there, one wonders, a way to approach a complex body of works such as Shen's which does not have to exclude or sublate certain tendencies and elements in order to arrive at a falsely unified picture of the work? In view of the current state of Shen criticism, this chapter intends to explore further Shen's West Hunan fiction in terms of its complex regional culture and relate Shen's regional work both to his strong mimetic desire and his equally powerful expressive impulse. I shall also relate his work systematically to the topography of the region via the geocultural patterns conditioned by it in order to demonstrate that Shen Congwen's West Hunan fiction constitutes a geomoral landscape, i.e., a systematic correspondence between topography on the one hand, and moral visions based on different cultural and socioeconomic conditions on the other. Meanwhile, in constructing a fictional map for Shen's West Hunan fiction (see Appendices), I shall demonstrate that a spatial approach will allow one to deal with Shen Congwen's often contradictory tendencies without having to gloss over them. To understand the geomoral landscape Shen Congwen creates in his regional fiction, it is necessary to know the basic geography of West Hunan that helps to shape the history of the region. Historically, West Hunan encompassed more than twenty counties north 87 and west of Changde, an important city in central-north Hunan (see Ling, From 103). Most of this mountainous and hilly area is drained by the Yuan River and its numerous tributaries, which were the principal communication routes linking West Hunan with the core areas of Hunan province and of China as a whole. Chinese civilization is now believed to have derived its major sources from three groups of ancient peoples, namely the Hua-Xia ^ % group in the upper and Middle reaches of the Yellow River valley, the Yi group on the coast and the Miao-Man 4 t group based in the Yangtze River valley (see Cao 8). Modern Han Chinese result from the mixing and amalgamation of all these groups, with the Hua-Xia group as the core. Three to four millennia ago, defeated by the Hua-Xia people, some Miao-Man people first migrated from the Yellow River valley, which they once occupied, to the Lake Dongting area in the central Yangzi River valley and, later, under continual pressures from the conquering armies and land-hungry Han settlers, the Miao gradually retreated to the upper reaches of the Yuan River valley in West Hunan as well as to areas further west on the Yunnan- Guizhou Plateau.^ In each case, it was by the waterways of the Yuan and its tributaries and through the valleys drained by them that successive waves of Miao and Han moved into West Hunan and settled there, bringing with them their respective cultures and in time breeding a Han-Miao hybrid culture through mutual assimilation. Thus, the settlement and cultural patterns of West Hunan were distributed from east to west, i.e., from the lower reaches to the 88 upper reaches of the rivers of the Yuan system, in a continuum of Han, Han-Miao, and Miao zones. The Han concentrated in the low- lying valleys by or close to the waterways; the unassimilated Miao tribes, called the "Raw Miao" fshenqmiaoYT occupied the mountainous highlands to the west on the borders with neighboring Sichuan and Guizhou provinces; in between the two was the ethnically mixed area where the assimilated Miao, called literally the "Cooked Miao" (shoumiao)r lived and intermarried with the Han, who, by way of reverse assimilation, had also taken on many Miao cultural traits.^ To this necessarily simplified geocultural landscape must be added other ethnic groups either living in their own compact communities or interspersed among the population in general (Shen had thought for a long time that his mother was Miao; in fact she was Tujia d- ^ , an ethnic group quite well assimilated by the Han and not officially identified as a distinct ethnic group until about 1957 [see Kinkley, Odvssev 12 and 289n.]). Born into a family of mixed ancestry (he was at least three quarters non-Han by blood) in Zhen'gan , renamed Fenghuang (Phoenix) in 1913,^ Shen Congwen spent his childhood and adolescence in various parts of West Hunan; his early life thus gave him firsthand experience of the geocultural landscape of the region. His native town Zhen’gan had been the military-administrative center of West Hunan since the 18th century. In 1911, of the three to five thousand people who lived within its walls (Kinkley, Odyssey 13), at least one third were Miao (Shen 2: 22). In the environs seven 89 thousand Green Banner fLuving) troops were stationed to keep a watchful eye on the restive Miao tribes COdvssev 13). So even in Zhen'gan, a regional center of Han power, there was a heavy influence of Miao culture, and the Han and the Miao are said to have assimilated, one to the other, like "tin and lead melt in one crucible" (Shen 2: 22). Shen's family background typified such ethnic mixture. His grandfather made a name for himself as a young general in the Qing troops and died a top military commander of the neighboring province of Guizhou. Shen's father, born of a Han father (the general's younger brother) and a Miao mother, was adopted by the general's widow to carry on the family line. Because the law forbade people of Miao ancestry to seek an official career, the Shens had to send Congwen's Miao grandmother away while pretending she was Han and dead. Congwen remembered that as a child he was taken to his grandma's "tomb" to make obeisance to her. As a child, Shen was often taken out of the city to visit his cousins in the Miao upland fifteen miles or so west of Zhen'gan. Shen's Miao relatives were of course Sinicized to some extent, but from them he learned Miao legend, which helped him to imagine the lifestyle of the tribal Miao, among whom he had never lived (Shen knew a little "market Miao" to drive a bargain; apart from that he did not really know the language). Later, as a teenager recruit of a warlord army, he moved from place to place with his unit, observing the regional culture in the cities and towns and the countryside, up and down the rivers, gaining an ever wider range of life experience, which was to 90 I become an inexhaustible treasure-house of material for his creative work. After he left West Hunan, from a vantage point of detachment in the heart of China, Shen could see the distinct identity of his native region with all its multifaceted richness and diversity. Now the geocultural landscape of West Hunan became for Shen "a kingdom of the mind" (Niven 213); add to it nostalgia and a maturing moral vision born of his numerous frustrations in the large cities and his ever deeper thoughts on the destiny of West Hunan and that of China as a whole, Shen was ready to unroll in the next quarter of a century a geomoral landscape, in which he combines a strong mimetic impulse with an equally powerful expressive need, an urge to sing praises of his native place and to state a moral vision of a reformed China. From the vantage point of today, we could say that Shen Congwen began the vast canvass of his geomoral landscape in medias res. It seems almost natural that Shen's regional fiction should have its modest beginning in pieces based on recollections of his childhood experiences in a Han-Miao cultural ambiance. The thinly disguised autobiographical stories, which include "At the Butcher's Block" (1925), "Hearthside" & (1925), "Holiday Fruit Congee" M, A #3 (1925), "Ruilong" (1925), "My Primary School Education" C1926), and "Ahan the Night Watch" (1926),^ seem to have a twofold purpose. First, by evoking childhood memories dear to his heart, these stories satisfied Shen's nostalgia for home while he was struggling in the inhospitable urban 91 world. As an emotional antidote to the moral ills, such as hypocrisy and snobbery, of which he was a victim, they also provided a solid emotional and moral foundation for his unfolding cultural visions. Second, by selling his stories of exotic customs and quaint cultural ethos to eke out a precarious living, he was also beginning to assert West Hunan as a culturally distinct region, and West Hunanese culture as a noteworthy little tradition in China’s great tradition. Artistically, these stories may be unaccomplished; their author was yet to develop a disciplined sense of structure Csee Ling From 186). However, in terms of Shen's entire oeuvre of regional fiction, they occupy an important structural position. Set at Fenghuang (Zhen’gan) and its outskirts, they deal with the Han- Miao area, touching on the Miao zone. Soon Shen was to venture imaginatively into the heart of the Miao upland to the west and move in the other directions to cover the many cities, towns, and the vast countryside outside Fenghuang County, especially downstream along the Yuan and its tributaries. The Miao stories make up the most imaginative and idealist portion of Shen Congwen’s fictional West Hunan. Most works in this group are legends or mythic tales dealing with the "Raw Miao," which include such works as "Longzhu" & (1928), "Meijin, Baozi, and the Kid" ^ -J- . £ $$^ (1928), The Shaman's Love ^ (1927), "Under Moonlight" (1932), and "Seven Barbarians and the Last Rite of Spring" '%$ K (1929). In addition, there is a small subgroup dealing realistically with 92 assimilated Miao, which includes "Daigou [Fella]" (1925), "Ajin" p«j£(1928), and "The Inn" (1929). Fengzi M, (1932, 1939) may be regarded as a hybrid form, mixing literary gazetteer, realistic style, and a more meditative or philosophical mode. Finally, episodes or discussions about the Miao appear in many of Shen's other works, notablv Alice in China nf) Shen's Miao fiction, written mostly in a romantic and flowery style, is dominated by the theme of Eros uncontaminated by Han "civilization." "Longzhu," for instance, is a story about the romantic fortune of the eponymous hero, the prince of White Ear Miao CBai*er Miao). In The Shaman's Love, a proud shaman, a mediator between God and men, is eventually conquered by his powerful love for a mute girl. "Under the Moonlight," a Miao variation on the archetypal Romeo-and-Juliet story, portrays two ill-fated lovers who take their own lives in protest of a tribal law which forbids a girl to marry her first love to whom she has given her virginity. The theme of the individual's single-minded pursuit of love, often as the supreme prize in life, is quite common in modern Chinese fiction written during and following the May Fourth Movement, which had as one of its battle cries the emancipation of the individual from the millennia-old oppression of feudalism.^ But certain features distinguish Shen's Miao stories immediately from most of such fiction about love, e.g., Ding Ling's J #£• "The Diary of Miss Sophie" I f y 4^fiiL(1928) and Ba Jin's The Family ^ (1933). Most love fiction in mainstream modern Chinese literature, 93 with the exception of certain romantic works written by writers affiliating with the Creation Society ^'| or by "neosensationists 4 f [ ," is written in the dominant tradition of realism about the Han, the majority ethnic group in China. Typically, the individuals in such works struggle to free themselves from the gender, family, and social roles prescribed by the Confucian tradition in order to make their own choice in love and in life as a whole. The modern Chinese writer accepted the notion of the emancipation of the individual as part of the Western theory of social evolution or progress. According to this theory, human society evolves from lower to higher stages, moving successively through primitive, ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Traditional Chinese society was regarded as lagging far behind modern Western society and therefore must be transformed according to the latter's inspiration if not to its exact image. Shen's Miao stories departed from the mainstream of love fiction in modern Chinese literature in that they are mainly legends and folk tales or romantic works; that they are about an ethnic minority little known and ill represented in Chinese discourse; and that they draw on a "primitive" culture, twice removed backwards from Western culture, to address the theme of the emancipation of the individual. Thus, while sharing with most other modern writers the strategic goal of modernizing China and reforming the Chinese national character, Shen turned to a seemingly unlikely native source and offered a unique cultural design, which finds its best expression in 94 his some one hundred works about West Hunan, with the Miao stories as its spiritual core. In his West Hunan fiction, Shen portrays Miao culture in such a way as to show its moral superiority to Han culture. In "Seven Barbarians and the Last Rite of Spring," the Miao refuse to accept officials appointed by the Chinese government because they see Han culture as synonymous with repression, exploitation, laziness, unemployment, dishonesty, prostitution, and other vices and social ills— in short, as a threat to Miao culture. The Miao's passionate and free pursuit of love, their sexual license, and their spontaneous and natural ways, spectacularly presented in Shen's descriptions of their exotic shamanistic rituals and their unbridled merry-making at the spring carnival, are seen as signs of their vigor and vitality, which are thought to have atrophied among the straitlaced Han Chinese who are burdened by the Confucian tradition. Shen seems to posit a causal relation between cultural burden and the expression of life force, echoing Freud's claim that civilization represses libido. This is not surprising, for Shen is known to have been well read in modern Western psychology and concurred with Zhou Zuoren A when the latter asserted that the repression of sexual desire is immoral. Much modern Chinese fiction, notably that of Yu Dafu 4? > could be seen as inspired, at least partially, by Freudianism. ^ Shen admired Yu Dafu, who befriended Shen when he was down and out in Beijing, and Yu's influence can be found in Shen's first-person fiction featuring 95 the lonely young man persona in the city (see Ling, From 187). However, despite his sympathy with this notable trend in modern Chinese literature, Shen's Miao stories again show marked differences. For the Miao, expressions of sexuality, love, and other culturally encoded pleasure-seeking activities are not simply ways, however elaborately disguised, of releasing libido; they are also religious, possessing a transcendental dimension to which Shen repeatedly refers as "divinity." Obviously, Shen Congwen's programmatic uses of Miao culture in his fiction go far beyond an interest in exotic ethnography, ^ or a sympathy with the general trend in modern Chinese literature to criticize Confucianism and champion the emancipation of the individual, or even a vindication of the down-trodden Miao to whom he traces his roots. He is actually proposing Miao culture as a way of life corrective of and alternative to Han culture. Understandably, Shen's agenda led him to an idealization of Miao culture, involving both a systematic contrast of Miao and Han cultures, invariably in the former's favor, and the creation of a quasi-religious philosophy to express the essence of Miao culture. Fengzi may be regarded as Shen's most ambitious attempt at philosophizing about Miao culture. Fengzi is an uncompleted novel with ten chapters extant. It begins with a West Hunanese youth, the frame narrator, arrived in the coastal city of Qingdao from Beijing, a fugitive from disappointed love. There he meets a retired engineer, and the two 96 form a close friendship on their shared nostalgia for West Hunan. The engineer, when he was young, had visited Miao country to investigate mineral resources. His host, a local Miao chief, introduced him to Miao customs and engaged him in many discussions of Miao culture, centering on religion. In Miao religion, God is conceived of as unique and as creator of the universe. He does not resemble the "obdurate" Christian God, so the chief claims; rather, He is nature itself, "rational, tolerant, and beautiful" (4: 346- 47). For the Miao, He not only dominates nature, but stands for justice and love as well. The Miao do not make any excessive demands on their God because He cannot be bribed or flattered. They worship Him in acknowledgment of what humans cannot achieve on their own. The ceremonies dedicated to Him symbolize "a tacit understanding between nature and men" (4: 389). It must be pointed out that this Miao God, rather elaborately detailed in Fengzi. is basically a personal invention of Shen Congwen. At the time when Shen wrote the novel, most Miao believed in animism (see Chen and Zeng 367) although Buddhism was also practiced among more assimilated Miao. (In addition, relatively few Miao people were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries.) Some scholars on Miao culture specifically deny that for the Miao the objects of worship, be they natural phenomena or human creations, suggest an all-powerful God (Chen and Zeng 373). According to Miao legend, "unlike the biblical genesis," the world was created out of cloud through a natural 97 process (Lei 406).^ It seems that Shen borrowed the conception of God as a unique creator from Christianity (the Bible was one of Shen’s favorite books).^ As for the idea of God as power, justice, and love, it could come from Christianity or Buddhism, with the latter being the more likely source when one considers the fact that Christian God (probably OT God) is described as "obdurate" in Shen's novel. Meanwhile, Shen also makes a respectful bow in the direction of science; the Miao God is said not to be competing with science and would be glad to retire from those areas where science could perform His feats, although He will always occupy an irreplaceable position in the emotional life of men. Obviously, Shen's Miao God is a fiction made from various traditions, the Miao being the least among them. What interests me here is not so much to belie Shen's fictional exposition of Miao religion as to understand why he chose to create such a religion or philosophy for the Miao. Shen Congwen’s first story about the Miao is a realistic sketch titled "Daigou [Fella]" (1925), which tells of a Miao lad forced by his father to steal firewood from a temple. The story portrays an unflattering image of the assimilated Miao. In winter 1928 and spring 1929, Shen wrote seven Miao stories; most of these, including "Longzhu," "Meijin, Baozi, and the Kid," and The Shaman’s Love, deal with unassimilated Miao. It is these stories, temporally and spatially removed, which allowed Shen to stress their archetypal character and idealize Miao culture. Apparently intended as a culmination of his Miao fiction, Fenazi begins to elaborate on the 98 Miao God, hitherto only alluded to. The first nine chapters of the work were written in 1932, and the last, the tenth, titled "The Reappearance of God," was completed in 1937. One has reason to believe that Shen's philosophizing in Fenazi is meant to provide his Miao fiction with an ontological basis. If he could not find it in Miao culture, he would create one for it.^® Thus, Shen started with presentation and representation of Miao life but ended with inventing a utopia, which is to serve as the spiritual core of his West Hunan fiction. As one moves out of Miao country, the distilled or rather half-concocted essence of Miao life comes to be identified with the virtues of plain country folk in Shen's fictional West Hunan. This identification does not seem all that far-fetched in the regional context. "In West Hunanese parlance, 'country folk' rxianaxiarenl is a euphemism for the Miao" CKinkley, "Regionalism" 164). Shen Congwen was known as "the Little Miao-zi" when young CKinkley, "Regionalism" 163), and he consistently referred to himself as a "countryman,"^1 which had an obvious ethnic connotation for those in the know. Furthermore, much of Fenghuang County adjacent to Miao country is actually a Han-Miao mixed area where many Hans have, by way of reverse assimilation, adopted certain Miao customs and ways. Building on these facts, Shen sees the non-Confucian traditions among those not specifically identified as Miao as an extension of Miao culture, or at least as compatible with it.^2 In the last analysis, whether it is historically accurate to grant Miao culture 99 such wide extension does not affect the cogency of Shen's conception of Miao culture in his regional fiction. In the overall scheme of his regional fiction, representation is always subordinated to creation. Shen Congwen's country folk are morally innocent, generous and warmhearted; they enjoy the simple pleasures of life and feel at home in nature. Works like The Border Town (1934), "Sansan" - 2 - - 2 - (1931), "The Mountain Spirit" Oi %. (1927), "A History of Ahei" R.&»HtC1928), "Collecting Bracken" (1928), "Xiaoxiao" % % (1929), "Baizi" Jfo (1928), "The Couple" £*3 (1929), "After the Rain" (1928), and "Knowledge" If? (1934) present a series of portraitures of such innocent characters. In The Border Town, the heroine Cuicui and his ferryman grandfather live in a little hut by a stream three li (c. a mile) outside the town of Chadong. The old ferryman is a veritable bodhisattva, always mindful of others' needs and yet content with what little he has. Cuicui is a daughter of nature. Her very name, rendered as "Green Jade" in Ching and Payne's translation, is given after the bright jade-green leaves of the thick bamboo groves that hug the cottage from two sides of the valley. Shen writes: Green Jade grew up in the wind and sun, so her skin was black. She saw only green mountain and blue water, so her eyes were clear as crystal. Nature had nursed and educated her, and she was as gentle as a mountain antelope, never took thought of cruelty or sorrow, and she was never angry. Whenever she saw a stranger on the ferryboat paying attention to her, she gazed back at him with bright eyes, as if she could escape 100 into the hills whenever she liked; and then, seeing that he had no dangerous intentions, she would forget about him altogether and play with the water. (Ching & Payne 192) Cuicui is so much a part of nature that it would be difficult to imagine her living in a morally complex world. In fact, it is her attachment to her own world that is the fundamental reason that prevents her from consummating her love with Nuosong. Nuosong is a town boy who makes shipping his way of living; his mobility and his frequent trips downstream, to the "bad" end of Shen's fictional West Hunan, expose him to complex social life.^ "The Mountain Spirit" is about a "crazy" country boy in a I village near Miao country. He is harmless, innocent, hard-working, and exceptionally trim. He laughs and cries for reasons others do not understand. He is courageous, fearing neither the spirits nor the beasts of prey. He is fond of flowers, the moon, singing, and watching the sky by himself— all considered odd habits by others. "Perhaps one with such behaviors is apt to be labeled a madman. To be frank, a 'looney' like this hurts neither society nor his own family, really. If our world were peopled with them only, we would probably have more peace among us" (2: 151). Clearly, the madman is a natural man par excellence; his insanity is used as a device for criticizing culture for its restrictions on the freedom of human spirit. As in Shen's Miao stories, in his country stories candid and passionate sexual love is again extolled for its expression of 101 vitality, often involving explicit contrast between Miao and Han cultures. "After the Rain" describes an amorous encounter between an educated young girl and her illiterate lover, Sigou, on a wooded hill after the rain. The girl is disturbed by a figure of speech she has picked up from some book that compares a woman to a flower which will soon wither away; even Sigou's deep love for her cannot relieve her of a vaguely sensed threat of death. Sigou, on the other hand, relates to the world, to his lover, and to the particular occasion immediately. Although the beautiful scenery cannot evoke any poem in him— for he knows none— here and now he sees only poetry, something that adds to and symbolizes his happiness. The girl decides to stop searching her mind for poems that would describe the occasion. She lets herself go and lets Sigou have his way. The lovers' natural desire and unmediated emotions, what Shen takes to be some of the characteristic features of Miao culture, turn out more powerful and human than Confucian high culture, suggested by classical poetry in the story. Sigou is prototypical of an array of virile, spontaneous, and devoted lovers in Shen's West Hunan fiction— close to the elements and far away from education, culture, and the city. Unlike the great Longzhu, these characters are small people realistically drawn. In "Baizi" he is a sailor, stopping by to visit his prostitute-love in a waterfront brothel whenever his ship comes to anchor. In "Aide-de-Camp" he is a soldier, stealing time from his busy schedule to spend with his beloved. In "A History of Ahei" 102 and "Gathering Bracken," he is Wuming, a precocious adolescent who carries on a sensual affair with the title heroine. "The Couple" may be regarded as a variation on "After the Rain"; it introduces an open clash between two cultural attitudes. The story tells of a couple caught making love on a hill in the sun and then subjected to sadistic taunting and humiliation by the villagers. The couple had stopped to rest on their way to visit the wife's parents, and were seduced by the beautiful day into doing the "silly thing." This is a way of thinking and behaving that would seem natural to the Miao or to the Sigous; in other words, it would be provided for, at least tolerated with a smile, in a Miao cultural ambiance. But it is not so for those who have learned what is shame and what Confucian rites are all about. Neo-Confucianism developed by Zhu Xi and the Cheng brothers had stringent provisions against familiarity between the sexes, especially in public, and where Han culture had prevailed in West Hunan the population would inevitably be taught such. The couple is eventually released through the intercession of a young intellectual from the city, who resents the rather cruel treatment dealt to the captives by the villagers. From the couple he learns a lesson, too, which is left to the reader to spell out. In some of his country stories, Shen Congwen voices stern condemnation of intolerance and persecution of the innocent in the name of Confucian respectability. In "Qiaoxiu and Dongsheng" & N & (1947), a young widow is caught with her lover and taken 103 to the ancestral temple of her husband's clan for a public trial. The villagers break both legs of her lover in front of her. Refusing to give in, she is finally sentenced to be sunk to the bottom of the river in accordance with the ancient familial rules. To be sure, her enemies are taking their revenge under the high- sounding pretext of protecting the honor of the clan; but the very existence of such a punitive provision in the clan and its invocation point to the repressive character of Confucian Han culture, denounced as "cannibalistic" by a whole generation of Chinese during and following the May Fourth Movement. In "Xiaoxiao" a similar fate threatens the thirteen-year-old title heroine when she, married to a four-year-old boy, is found pregnant. It is decided she be sold instead, for the Confucian idea of chastity is relatively weak among ordinary peasant folks. After she gives birth to a lovely, healthy son, however, her husband's family decides to keep her. It is clear that there is evil in Shen's pastoral country, and the reader will encounter it in many of his country stories. In "Guisheng" -j| C1937), a country boy loses his beloved to a combined force of his landlord's power and wealth and the girl's father's greed. The landlord takes the girl as a concubine not even out of lust; he is merely following the superstitious belief that having intercourse with virgins will help improve one's luck in gambling. Guisheng, who used to be shy and soft, ends up torching the landlord's and girl's houses. In "The Husband" f c . C1930) 104 many poverty-stricken men in Huang Village send their young wives to brothels in the city because such arrangements allow them to have a sizable income while keeping their husbandly titles and rights over their wives. One may attribute such distorted life to poverty caused by the breakdown of the socioeconomic machinery, as many critics have argued.^ But one must not overlook the crucial inner mechanism that morally sanctions such outrageous transaction, i.e., the peremptory patriarchal power wielded by husbands over their wives within the Confucian moral order. Looked at this way, the bankruptcy of the rural economy only precipitates a crisis embedded in the moral system by pushing the evil of patriarchal domination to an absurd extreme.^ "The Ox" ^ (1929) tells the story of Uncle Ox who nurses back to health his only ox, which he accidentally hurt in the leg, but only to have it drafted by the army. Because the friendship and sympathy between the two, man and beast, united in their common effort to wrest an uneasy livelihood, are most touchingly depicted, the reversal of fortune, not revealed until the very end, comes with the full impact of irony and pathos. The individual's fate is thus portrayed against the broad social background of political turmoil, war, and the destitution of peasants. If Shen's Miao stories are mostly eulogies of a superior Miao culture, with criticisms of Han culture usually kept in the background; then in his country stories the conflict between the two cultures as Shen conceives them is foregrounded or, in some cases, 105 even made the central concern. In his geomoral landscape, the good countryside is viewed as an extension of the Miao zone; indeed, most of it lies adjacent to Miao country. In the bad countryside prevails Confucian Han culture, which is seen as an imposition on what is natural and good from the outside. The cultural geography of West Hunan shows that Han settlements decrease in terms of their length of history and degree of cultural consolidation as they approach the Miao upland on the western border. Stories about the bad countryside are usually set in places downstream from the Miao and Han-Miao zones and close to rivers where women are sunk for being "unchaste" and whereby corrupt outside influences make inroads from the city, especially the urban centers of the nation. Along with the Han-Miao contrast, the urban-rural contrast is also introduced in Fengzi and such country stories as The Border Town. "Sansan," "Guisheng," and "The Husband." Although the exact meaning of cities and towns differs in each case, the countryside is, as a rule, more innocent, closer to nature, and therefore more in tune with the spirit of Miao culture. In fact, the city tends to be identified with Han culture, whereas the country with Miao culture. But most Shen scholars fail to distinguish "good" cities from "bad" cities, and fail to see their different positions in Shen's West Hunan fiction. While allowing for the fact that cities are rarely either purely good or utterly bad in Shen's fiction, we can still discern a tendency in Shen to idealize some cities and depict others in grim light. 106 Two primal good cities in Shen's West Hunan fiction are Fenghuang in Shen's early autobiographical stories and Chadong in The Border Town. The Fenghuang series was written between 1925 and 1928, when Shen began to tap into his native region as a source for his fiction. It seems natural that he should have first of all drawn on his native town Fenghuang, formerly Zhen'gan, as he saw and remembered it as a child. Most Fenghuang stories have thus a first- person child narrator through whose eyes the reader sees the small but important regional city at the turn of the century as if it were a fenashuhua Ca panoramic picture presenting the activity of a whole community, with which the Chinese traditionally decorate their houses on New Year's Day). Fenghuang is described as a round walled city with the Miao making up a third of the population. After more than a century of mutual assimilation, the Han and the Miao come to share similar customs and ways of life, and intermarriage is common. The bloody conquests of the Miao made in the previous centuries which brought Zhen'gan/Fenghuang into being and the hatred and hostility between the Han and the Miao are now replaced by peace and harmony. As an organic community, Fenghuang is ruled, so Shen tells us, in a hierarchical order, by gods, government officials, and "servants of gods," i.e., shamans. "Everybody is upright, god-fearing, law-abiding, and government- loving" fFenazi 4: 330). Even the soldiers are kind and merchants fair. The community demonstrates its solidarity most patently during the festivals and celebrations. 107 Simple habits and ancient rites prevail here. In spring and fall, when agricultural activities begin and end, some old people will come collect donations from residents to sponsor puppet shows to entertain local gods. When drought hits and it is time to pray for rain, children will carry on their shoulders live dogs decked out with willow branches and straws to look like dragons. In spring the spring officer, clad in a yellow robe, would go around and recite ceremonial agricultural verses. At the end of the year, the residents will dress the Nuo gods in red habits and place them in the main hall of their houses and, as they beat the gongs, shamans in blood-red clothes blow silver-engraved bull horns, wield brass swords, and sing and dance ecstatically to entertain the gods. CFenazi 4: 330-31). If the picture one gets in Fengzi is from the viewpoint of a dispassionate adult observer, then in "Ahan the Night Watch" we have a child's perception of the festivals: Have you heard of any child who does not like New Year's Day? It has been said that many beautiful festivals in China exist for children's sake. Cannot be better said. On the Dragon-Boat Festival, you drink realgar wine and watch the dragon-boat race. On the Mid-Autumn Festival you eat moon-cakes. Come the Qing Ming Festival, you have a chance to play on hills. When there is a wedding procession, you watch the dazzling dowry and the small ball which is the mouth of the suonaist blowing his instrument, and you have the "four-happiness" dumplings to eat. At a funeral, you have a white kerchief wrapped on your head; as all are on their knees listening to the monk reciting the prayers, you reach over stealthily to knock the shiny wooden fish. Afterwards, you keep dreaming of eating huanghua'er kernels. If your family throw a party at home, you use that as an excuse to stay away from school that day. If you go to the temple to redeem a vow made to gods, you will see Monk Guangxing, dressed in a red satin robe, beat the grain measure with gusto, and you may have a chance to steal some small fire-crackers and light them. But, New 108 Year’s Day is more fun than anything else and it lingers longer in your memory. (8: 103). A child's innocence, curiosity, playfulness, and natural tendency to break rules allow the narrator to have fun even where it seems inappropriate to an adult. The pleasure principle seems to encounter little resistance from the reality principle; even the dark facts of life, such as death, are transformed in his world into yet another occasion to indulge himself. Apparently, at the back of all this is a child’s inviolable sense of emotional security based on the assumption of the world's fundamental goodness, a feeling which colors Shen's fond descriptions of Fenghuang and wraps them in a pervading warmth, tempered sometimes with ironic and pathetic touches. In half a dozen stories about Fenghuang, Shen draws some forty individual characters from all walks of life. Many of them are identified by their trades, such as "sour turnips" peddlers, a private-school teacher and his wife, the water vendor, the sedan chair rental owner, the tailor, candy peddlers, monks, Miao servants, debt-collectors, local gentry, and so on. These characters exist in the fiction mainly for the social roles they perform, which, even though not detailed in most cases, add up to a social network, to a picture of a functioning community. Against this backdrop, four or five characters stand out, more or less well realized. In "Daddy" (1928) a surgeon, heart-broken from the loss of his only son, devotes himself to serving the community, 109 both out of a sense of professional responsibility and a deeper sense of social commitment. The relationship between the individual and the community is more than service performed for money; it is a human relationship first of all. In "At the Butcher's Block," the sharp business sense and oily manners of the butcher Zhicheng and his wife are the objects of comical descriptions. Yet, despite a gentle satire, their close relations to the customers and their own personal plight Cthey are childless) are sympathetically treated. In "Ahan the Night Watch," the protagonist lives on fees he collects from the residents he serves. Ahan is humble without losing his dignity. He is poor but happy-go-lucky; he knows how to enjoy the little pleasures of life that come his way. Although he is comically incompetent, he wins the heart of everybody by being loyal and loving. When he finds a little beggar lying dead in the street, he goes around asking for donations so the child could be properly buried. On New Year's Day he collects so much money and food from his patrons that he goes on a two-week self-approved vacation to get drunk with his friend the city gate keeper Second Brother Shan. He is important to the community not so much for his often unreliable service as a night watch; rather, he is beloved to everybody because he is in his way a custodian of social conscience and loving kindness that bind the community together. The social harmony and the organic nature of community are again celebrated in The Border Town, perhaps Shen's best-known work. Chadong, the border town, resembles Fenghuang in its historical lie origin and present status. Both were first developed as military fortresses in Miao country; both are, in the fictional present, seats of military-administrative organs and commercial centers to the surrounding areas (although Zhen'gan/ Fenghuang is more important). Again, as in the case of Fenghuang, Shen stresses the "good" aspects of Chadong and plays down or tries to domesticate the disruptive "bad" elements. For instance, the troops are described as on harmonious terms with the civilian population; they participate in the local festivals and help their civilian friends. The war stories about Chadong that the grandfather tells Cuicui are only alluded to. Even the tragic love affair between Cuicui’s mother and her father, a Green Banner soldier, an episode which somehow foreshadows Cuicui's own thwarted love and which could throw light on the history of Chadong and the fate of the characters, gets only a passing mention or two. Shen's attitude toward prostitution is another case in point. While the narrator admits that the trade in women and prostitution in Chadong sprang up as a concomitant of commercial development, he is more interested in showing the virtues of prostitutes. Shen writes: Because of the honest frontier customs, even prostitutes are sincere and kind. With a stranger they would charge him before proceeding to the business behind closed doors. With an acquaintance, money can often be dispensed with. Although most of them live off merchants from Sichuan, they are usually emotionally attached to sailors. If the love is deep, the couple would swear, biting each other's lips and necks, to stay chaste for each other until their next meeting" (6: 81). The narrator goes on to claim, "The frontier people put ethics before material gains and always keep their words. Even the prostitutes among them are more trustworthy than the morally aware city folks [in large urban centers]" C6: 82). It seems clear that the author carefully avoids introducing or developing any discordant elements which would undermine the pastoral tone of his work.^6 Shen's almost single-minded pursuit of beauty in The Border Town, the beauty of human feelings set against the backdrop of beautiful scenery, has been the target of much scathing criticism, which questions the truthfulness of his representation and takes him to task for deviating from the social reality that necessitated class struggle and the Communist revolution. ^ But, whether or not Chadong is a "Shangri-la" amidst the turmoils of early 20th century China, or whether Shen is accurate in representing the town, is not the issue here.^^ The importance of this work in Shen's regional fiction lies, above all, in its emotional weight. If in the Fenghuang stories the narrator's emotional security as a child derives from a vague assumption of the fundamental goodness of human beings, then in The Border Town Shen's warm and sympathetic depictions are testimony to a self-conscious, rational belief in loving-kindness and to an evolving cultural design which takes such a belief as one of its cornerstones. There is an obvious homology between Shen's fictionalization of his pleasure-filled memories of childhood in his Fenghuang stories and his careful construction in The Border Town of a "pastoral" which 112 harks back to an innocent society which may or may not have existed as Shen describes it. Obviously, the truthfulness of The Border Town is to be sought mainly in its emotional dimension. Fenghuang and Chadong, two good cities, may be regarded as the emotional center of gravitation in Shen's geomoral landscape, distinguished at once from the idealist and philosophical extrapolations in his Miao stories and from the more realistic examination of life in his other West Hunan stories, particularly those about the bad cities. The bad cities and towns are usually situated in the middle or lower reaches of the Yuan and its tributaries, downstream from the Miao upland, the good cities, and most of the countryside that contributes to the geomoral landscape of West Hunan. As river ports and commercial centers, developed sometimes from the basis of an administrative center, such as a county seat, these cities are the parts of the region most accessible to social and cultural influences from the outside. Confucian Han culture has been better established there than elsewhere in the region and is now rapidly losing ground to intruding modern culture.^ Although most of Shen's stories about the bad cities and towns concern the corruption of modern culture and the clash between modern and premodern ways of life, a couple of pieces satirize prominent old families entrenched in feudalism. "The Family Precepts of Mr. Sanbei" 5- R & * ] L | (1925) is a hilarious vignette parodying the tradition of short biographies that usually form a part of a local gazetteer. In a mock-fawning tone and a 113 cliche-laden classical style, constantly undercut by the vernacular voice of a commonsensical narrator, the piece presents a vivid portrait of a stingy, cowardly, hypocritical small-town gentleman wearing a thin veneer of respectability. The story is set in a certain city code-named C, most probably Chenkan, i.e., Zhen'gan.30 What is noteworthy about the piece is that its relentlessly satirical tone is quite rare in Shen's West Hunan fiction; particularly it is a far cry from the sunny world of his Fenghuang stories written at about the same time. One may surmise that as raw material for his literary creation Zhen'gan presented many possibilities for Shen Congwen the beginning writer. Just as it could be an inspiration for his warm, sometimes sentimental, descriptions of his native town, it could also be an object of realistic and satirical examination. That the former in fact prevailed had to do with Shen's emotional needs at the time of composition, when he was struggling in Beijing, an alien, inhospitable city, both to stay alive and to make a literary career. For Shen the Fenghuang stories provided, among other things, an emotional anchor in the changeful urban world. Later, as his geomoral landscape began to be filled in with more details and began to take shape, these stories were to create a primal good city. It is significant that Shen suppressed the name of Zhen'gan when it was portrayed in a negative light. Even if this was originally intended as a means on the writer's part to avoid complications in real life, 114 it turns out to have the effect of keeping Fenghuang pure as a good city. Most stories set in bad cities and towns, usually anonymous, in Shen's West Hunan fiction are about the impact of modern culture. "Junzi" C1925) is set in a place code-named A, which should be Anjiang ^ S x . , now Qianyang fa , according to the description given in the story. A first-class clerk in a section of the county government, Junzi is cautious, timid, a constant butt of his colleagues' malicious jokes. Nobody knows where he comes from, and he has no friend in town. Even Junzi is not his real name; it is a nickname meaning "mushroom," so called to mock his unseemly appearance. Junzi survives by nonresistance to the world, but even when he does attempt to resist or escape his persecutors, in his dreams, he is inevitably thwarted. The identityless, hopeless, helpless, humdrum existence Junzi leads is typical of petty clerks in the modern city. His name Junzi, "mushroom," is an appropriate symbol. Significantly, this satire of "stupidity and ennui among the bureaucrats" CKinkley Odvssev 106) is not set in Beijing or Shanghai but in West Hunan. Thematically and stylistically it resembles "The Pipe" (1929), which is set in an unspecified urban center outside West Hunan and constitutes part of Shen's "urban fiction." "Junzi" may be regarded as an extension into West Hunan of Shen’s urban fiction. "Unemployed" (1935), "adapted from an unknown friend's work" (6: 291), is the story of Daren, a long-distance telephone 115 operator. The newly installed telephone system, dubbed the "powerful gadgets of civilization" (285), symbolizes the invasion of modern culture into West Hunan. In fact, the project is managed by a Western company, and all the materials and equipment are imported. One would presume, with the young idealist protagonist as he first takes the job, that this would mark a major step forward in the modernization of the region. The reality is just the opposite. Every day Daren has to listen to cursing and shady deals of all kinds. In fact, this is "a central exchange of corrupt souls in the region," which exposes to Daren official tyranny, corruption, bribery, embezzlement, deception, and other immoral conducts (286). It seems that advances in technology only facilitate the functioning of the corrupt system. Unable to put up with what he sees and hears, Daren resigns from his job. "Construction" (1929) is a novella set most likely in Yuanling , also known as Chenzhou , the foremost commercial center in West Hunan. In the story the construction of a missionary university and other modern facilities brings economic prosperity to the city. Sailors, coolies, ricksha boys, peddlers, soldiers, merchants, prostitutes, and what not, people the boom- town, where poverty, squalor, crimes, and moral depravities are rife. The coolies on the construction site slave for starvation wages and are treated like beasts. As displaced former peasants, the workers are strangers to the city, to each other, and even to their own nature. On the one hand, they are victims of capitalist 116 oppression and exploitation; on the other, they persecute each other and engage in criminal activities. Here in the city, the plain, honest "country brother" is the object of ridicule and bullying for his "citified" fellows; in fact, it is a name with which one calls those who have not learned the "sophisticated" (read evil) city ways. Against this background, the story of a nameless worker is told. The protagonist, a "country brother," has firsthand experience of the evil ways of the city. Later, he is involved in an intrigue of murder and robbery. Finally, by coincidence, he runs into a moralizing, threatening American priest, drunken at the time, and is provoked into killing the priest. Ironically, the murderer is later rewarded for his hard work in building a pavilion dedicated to the priest's memory. Plainly, the story is quite weak in plot development and characterization, which may be taken as signs of Shen's artistic immaturity. But, on the other hand, one can also see that his main interest is not so much in telling the story of one or more characters as in telling the story of a city, using the individual characters as props. No wonder none of the characters in the work has a name. As a story of the unnamed city, certain background descriptions prove more important than the ironic ending of the murder case. The economic prosperity not only corrupts the "country brother" but also gives rise to ambivalent feelings among the city dwellers (as opposed to the recent migrants). Everybody, from the prostitute to the barber, understands the vital importance of large 117 construction projects to their livelihood. However, behind an open welcome attitude to urban development is a smoldering hatred of the destruction of the life they once had led. They were already descending to hell [before the boom]; now they have quickened their paces. The lost are more lost, the lazy lazier, the bad worse, the shameless even more so. They all have reason to harbor an unspecified hatred toward the future missionary structure built of money, sweat, and blood. (4: 70) This is as close as we can get in the work to Shen Congwen's direct comments on the clashes between the morally superior countryside and the depraved city, and between West Hunan and the outside world, which extends from Changde, Hankou, Shanghai, all the way to America. The Stockade C1937) is an incomplete novel, of which only Prelude and Chapter One are extant. From what we have, we could reasonably expect it to have been, if it had been completed, a work in the class of The Border Town and The Long River -^*6 (1948). The breadth of its historical conception, the vivid portraitures, and the lively, precise prose, spiced with irony and humor, which marks Shen's mature style— these all hold out hopes for a great work. But, speculations aside, the work as it is still figures importantly in Shen's regional fiction. In the geomoral landscape he was developing, The Stockade forms a near-perfect contrastive pair with The Border Town. The Stockade is "almost certainly set in Wangcun [ 3 - , 4^ ]" (Kinkley Odyssey 231),a major port town half way along the You River between Chadong in The 118 Border Town and Yuanling in "Construction." Whereas Chadong is presented as a morally innocent city, where even vices such as prostitution are made acceptable in the general milieu of social harmony, Wangcun is depicted in a grim light and harsh tone. These people [on Waterfront Street] sell food and drinks as well as opium, which benumbs the soul and spoils the body. They also offer their private parts to relieve the boredom of sailors while spreading gonorrhea and syphilis common among civilized people. Of foods, meat of piglets dead from smallpox and smelly beef offal are accepted as major meat dishes. . . . The commerce in town and the energy and morality of the townspeople are apparently going downhill, heading irretrievably for doom. (7: 182) The novel portrays the truculent, corrupt head of a tax office (compare this with the peaceful soldiers and non-oppressive officials in Chadong), a prostitute and her tricky madam (compare this with the humane and loyal prostitutes in Chadong), and a sordid street fight involving three teenagers (compare this with street fights in Fenghuang, which, as a Miao rite of passage, cultivate the bravery and manhood of boys and which follow a certain chivalric protocol). Words like "debased," "ugly," "corrupt," and "stinking" appear frequently in The Stockade, marking it as a work of unsentimental social realism. To sum up, Shen's fictional West Hunan presents a complete geomoral landscape in which the topographical features, via the geocultural patterns, are systematically exploited to express the author's literary sensibilities and moral visions. On one end, high on the rugged plateau, is the Miao zone, land where mythic tales of 119 love and freedom have taken place and God dwells among the people. In Shen's imagination, it is also a spiritual realm where idealism is nurtured. Appropriately, his style in Miao fiction is accordingly romantic, flowery, or meditative, depending on the story. Sailing down the streams and rivers that feed into the Yuan River, one first comes to the valleys and low hills where the Han live with the Miao. The country folk, also meaning the Miao in the regional context, are innocent, warmhearted, passionate in love, and at home in nature. Their way of life is seen as an extension of Miao culture. Already we feel these characters are closer to us, compared with archetypal figures in the Miao stories. As one goes deeper into Han territory, where Confucian culture has time to take firm hold, repression of healthy expressions of love and tyranny of the rich and powerful are common, often with tragic consequences. Sailing down the Yuan and its numerous tributaries, one also comes upon cities and towns, which are invested with moral import of various kinds, too. Adjacent to Miao country, on the You and Tuo Rivers respectively, are Chadong and Fenghuang, two primal good cities. Although the presence in good cities of government and commerce entails social control and vices such as prostitution, absent or negligible in the Miao upland or the good countryside, Shen makes these cities places where social harmony and loving kindness prevail. Shen is emotionally biased toward the good cities because they hold for him a most precious part of his memories or constitute a projection of such emotions. A dominant stylistic 120 feature in his fiction about good cities is lyricism. Further down the rivers, in the general direction of east and northeast, one arrives at busy port cities and towns which are economically important in the region, such as Anjiang, Wangcun, and Yuanling. These are morally bad cities where one encounters alienation, poverty, degradation, and spiritual decomposition. Typical of social realism, the author's descriptions of them are unsentimental and his condemnations severe. Further downstream beyond the bounds of West Hunan are first Changde, which is Yuanling magnified many times, and then the hinterland of China represented by urban centers like Hankou, Shanghai, and Beijing, where most of Shen's urban fiction is set. From the sketch above of Shen's geomoral landscape one can discern two sets of oppositions, namely, Han culture versus Miao culture, and the city versus the country, which may be regarded as an extension of the former pair of opposites (Ling, "Cong Miao-Han" 131). On the one hand, we have an idealized Miao culture, representing quintessential unspoiled countryside. On the other, we have major urban centers of China, usually portrayed by Shen in a light darker than many feel is justified, which let us call the City. Shen's West Hunan fiction unfolds between these two poles, with the good country and cities close to the Miao upland depicted as under Miao influence or compatible with it, and the bad cities as beachheads of the City in the region. The good cities of Fenghuang and Chadong are genetically unrelated to the City: not because they 121 have little to do with modern culture, but rather they represent for Shen citadels of emotional security in a complicated, rapidly changing world. When representation and creation conflict, Shen chose to subordinate the former to the latter. For this reason, the bad side of good cities is usually hidden or glossed over. If a story does focus on the bad side of a good city, the name of the city is suppressed. Also by the same token, Shen would not hesitate to invent a God to further his cultural design. Within Shen's West Hunan fiction as a whole, representation or realism in individual works is invariably conditioned by other considerations in his regional fiction. In this sense, his realism departs from the main trend in xianptu wenxue (nativist writing) in modern Chinese literature. Guided by an Enlightenment spirit aiming at mobilizing the peasants for the revolution, the xianatu wenxue of the 1920s was dominated by realist descriptions of the peasants' sufferings and weaknesses; mimesis or truth-seeking in the sociological sense 07 became the major mode of literary composition. By contrast, although rooted in history, Shen's geomoral landscape is, in its essence and totality, mythic. The geomoral landscape Shen presents in his West Hunan fiction is basically a synchronic structure. The historical differentiations of various cultures are spatialized to be redistributed on his fictional map according to the author's moral visions. Thus the meaning of elements in a network of contrastive and overlapping forces is determined to a large extent by the 122 relations among such elements, which may not coincide with our "commonsensical" knowledge of history. As discussed in earlier pages, most modern Chinese writers subscribed to the Western notion of social evolution, which is perceived as basically linear progression. Shen's geomoral landscape allows him to "ahistoricize" the received theory which sees society as developing progressively through various stages, from "primitive/tribal" society to slavery to feudalism to the modern period. From the vantage point of the idealized future of humankind, he is able to "go back" to Miao culture, a seemingly unlikely source for inspirations for a blueprint for the future. The history or the destiny of humankind encapsulated in his geomoral landscape thus transcends the history as it is generally understood and reaches into an ideal realm. Though generally based on "real" history and geography, Shen's geomoral landscape becomes essentially an artistic creation projecting the author's personal visions and feelings about the destiny of China and that of the world as well. Of course, the moral visions Shen expresses in his regional fiction are not to be confused with those he articulates in his nonfiction prose. For instance, his views of Confucianism are much kinder in his articles than in some of his regional stories.^3 One may want to seek an explanation in the author's evolving opinions; but we may also see Shen's fictional uses of Confucianism as obeying the internal law of his geomoral landscape which, without barring representation of history, concerns the eternal drama of good against evil and which, 123 as distilled essence of ideas, cannot be translated back "undistorted" to "real" history. Literary place has its own grammar or rhetoric. Here, drawing on Leonard Lutwack's comprehensive study of place in literature, I would like to discuss briefly Shen's geomoral landscape in terms of verticality, centrality, and a-centrality. Lutwack points out, Ancient cosmologies commonly identified three levels— upper, middle, and lower— a distinction that encouraged polarization of the extremes and ambivalence of the area in between. Differentiation of levels inevitably leads to a hierarchy of values. Thus in the Christian cosmology heaven and hell are absolutely opposed while earth has the qualities of both, the rarefication of air and the grossness of matter. (39) In Chinese culture, a similar typology exists which emphasizes the notion that high is good and valuable whereas low is bad and despicable; the idea was certainly reinforced by Buddhist and Taoist cosmologies but may have been based on more universal mental propensities of humankind.^ Anyway, in Shen's geomoral landscape, the elevation of West Hunan, descending from the mountains on its western border to the valleys and hills in the lower reaches of the Yuan and its tributaries, corresponds to a scale of descending values. Miao culture, in which Shen finds love, freedom, unsullied humanity, and God, is situated on a spiritual plateau, whereas the bad cities, characterized by exploitation, oppression, and moral debasement, are virtually living hell. In between is an area marked by clashing values, where stories tend toward one or the other end. 124 Within this scheme, horizontal physical movement is always accompanied by changes in values and emotional tones along a vertical scale. In The Border Town, the pure, moral life led by Cuicui and her grandfather by the fabled stream is contrasted subtly with life downstream in Chadong and beyond. Downstream— a movement both horizontal and vertical— implies the bad cities; the course downstream is described as replete with dangerous shoals and rapids. In fact, Nuosong's brother Dalao, also a suitor of Cuicui, dies on one of the shoals. Nuosong himself disappears downstream, causing Cuicui to hope against hope that he may return someday. Fengzi involves movements over a much vaster territory. From Beijing and the coastal city of Qingdao the story takes us to West Hunan, first to Fenghuang, which is described as good Cbut historically bad), and then to the heart of Miao country. Contrasts are made between the large cities outside West Hunan and West Hunan and, within West Hunan, between Miao country and Fenghuang as representing the city and Han culture. The trip up the Yuan and Tuo Rivers and uphill into the Miao hinterland undertaken by the engineer-narrator becomes a mythic journey to truth, love, and heaven. Centrality and a-centrality are two important categories for analyzing Shen's geomoral landscape. Shen's fiction tends to invert the centrality generally assigned to economically more developed areas and to the city as the seat of political and cultural power. By accepted standards, West Hunan is considered a backward peripheral region, compared with the more developed areas of China. 125 Within West Hunan, the city as a center commands the surrounding countryside, including Miao territory. Shen Congwen's strategic move is to portray the leading cities of China unfavorably in his urban fiction while exalting West Hunan in his regional fiction; and, within West Hunan fiction, to attack bad cities while romanticizing and idealizing good cities, unspoiled country, and Miao culture. Shen's West Hunan, though only a part of his fictional world, constitutes a complete geomoral landscape and enables Shen to challenge the centrality of China's core area, the city, and Han culture from the standpoint of the politically, socially, culturally, and ethnically marginalized. That Shen should capitalize on his knowledge of West Hunan as a frontier, of Miao country within it as a frontier of the frontier, and of Miao culture as the other of Han culture, is thus more than a gesture to affirm his regional and ethnic origins or an exercise in exoticism. It is, in its sensibility and strategic goal, clearly modern or even modernist. Lutwack remarks that "border places are preferred by modern heroes," who no longer trust the center (45). Kinkley states, "Modern taste enjoyed the frontier, the outlanders, the non- Confucian, and the multiplicity of the nation's [i.e., China's] little traditions" ("Regionalism" 164). Just as modern sensibility turns a-centrality from a drawback into a revolutionary force, Shen exploits the multiple marginality of his regional fiction to make it deeply in tune with the historical mission of modern Chinese literature to remake the national character and reform China. 126 While denying the city its strategic centrality, Shen does make various uses of the centrality of cities in his regional fiction. Centrality as "associated with rest, certainty, wholeness" CLutwack 43) is appropriate for Shen's good cities such as Fenghuang. Although, as a child, Shen enjoyed occasional trips to Miao country and regular excursions outside the walls of Fenghuang, he always returned home for love, warmth, and security provided by his family. The emotional centrality of Fenghuang dominated his memories of his early life and was transferred to his geomoral landscape via his Fenghuang stories. A central place like the bad city can also help focus the moral ills Shen wants to criticize and remedy. The city in "Construction," for instance, is a converging point for poverty, greed, hatred, and other moral degradations; it is also a living hell where the innocent suffer, are lost and condemned to perdition. The concentration in one locale of the worst that humankind is capable of is made possible by the centrality of bad cities in several of Shen's works. Finally, from the standpoint of Shen Congwen as a creative subject, one may observe a homology between his psychic landscape and the geomoral landscape he has developed. Fenghuang the good city and the country adjacent to it are intimately related to Shen's formative experiences and thus constitute an inner layer of his ego. The telling of the Miao stories as fantasies, sexual or otherwise, derives part of its motive force from his subconscious or unconscious drives toward gratifications often denied by reality. 127 Shen's caustic criticisms of the bad cities are basically exercises of a critical reason, which may be partly regarded as superego. If reason goes with subconscious drives, Shen may give us a rationally articulated idealism rooted in a lyrical mysticism, as we see in Fengzi. If the two are at loggerheads, then inconsistencies may occur, as Shen's different treatments of prostitution, sexual license, and government officials, and soldiers may testify. Such apparent contradictions do not upset Shen's geomoral landscape, however, because they are distributed in two different zones of his fictional map, i.e., in good cities and bad cities respectively. From a developmental viewpoint, Shen first tried to establish his ego through a fictional mastery of his childhood and adolescence Cautobiographical stories about Fenghuang and vicinity). Then, while delving into his subconscious (imaginative excursions into the Miao upland), he started to construct a superego supported by critical reason (realistic exposes of bad cities and countryside). Shen's geomoral landscape allows him to spatialize his various psychic impulses and tendencies and accommodate them within a complex fictional structure. If one's regional and ethnic identities can be seen as cultural constructs, then in writing his West Hunan fiction Shen was, consciously and unconsciously, engaged in forging a selfhood which would encompass his regional and ethnic identities. In this sense, Shen's West Hunan fiction is the geomoral landscape and his psychic landscape made into one. 128 To see Shen Congwen's West Hunan fiction as presenting a complex geomoral landscape based on the topography and the geocultural patterns of the region and reflecting his views, feelings, and moral visions about his native region is to construct a macroform for his regional fiction. Shen Congwen criticism has for too long suffered from two faulty approaches: viz., an unsystematic and partial approach to selected works in his oeuvre and a dichotomous scheme in which his fictional West Hunan is equated with pastoralism and romanticized country folk. For instance, using Shen Congwen’s "representative works" such as The Border Town as evidence, many of Shen's critics see his regional work as solely concerned with the beauty of human nature Cto his admirers), or as divorced from the reality of Chinese society in the 1920s and '30s Cto his denigrators).^® When dark stories are presented to some of such critics, they may be puzzled and find it difficult to accommodate such dark spots on a bright landscape.^ On the other hand, Shen's defenders often point to his "realist" regional works which present unsentimentally the social problems or moral ills of West Hunan and argue, on the basis of these works, that Shen is in tune with the mainstream of xianatu wenxue nurtured on the social realism of the May Fourth era.^® Some critics, faced with apparent contradictions in Shen's regional work, choose to explain them away by a theory of the author's evolving art or "growth." Frederick Brandauer's position is typical of such an l 129 approach and deserves a careful reading. In a review article on Kinkley's The Odvssev of Shen Congwen. he writes: Beginning in 1939-1940 with the novel Long River and culminating in 1946-1947 with the novel After Snow. Shen's last major regional work, Shen shifts into a kind of realism that contrasts sharply with the idealism of his earlier regional works. For example, the armed bandits in After Snow are no longer the knights-errant of earlier stories. "Shen calls them a new, rootless class of people, aware of new ways of getting rich without working" ([Kinkley] p. 251). Gone are the noble, innocent, and pure primitives, untainted by modern society, and in their place we see a people who have succumbed to the evils of corruption, greed, exploitation, and the opium trade. The reader is bound to ask what has happened here. Have the people of West Hunan changed or is it rather Shen's perception of them that has changed? Has Shen grown out of an earlier naive regional idealism and now finally moved into a more mature and convincing realism that recognizes evil as well as good in the West Hunanese character? C224) To be sure, there is nothing wrong in saying that the period of Shen's regional writing marked by The Long River and After Snow (1946) on two ends is dominated by realism, which contrasts sharply with the idealism of his earlier works. But to imply that in the earlier phase of his career Shen wrote only idealist regional works may distort the picture. As demonstrated above, in the earlier phase, along with his better-known "pastoral" or "idealist" works such as the Miao stories and The Border Town. Shen wrote satirical sketches such as "The Family Precepts of Mr. Sanbei" (1925) and "Junzi" (1926) and grimly realistic stories such as "The Couple" (1929), "Construction" (1929), and The Stockade (1937), all about West Hunanese. It would be more accurate to say that after a 130 certain point Shen concentrated on realist descriptions of West Hunan. Again, to say that "the noble, innocent, and pure primitives, untainted by modern society," of the earlier phase are replaced by "a people who have succumbed to the evils of corruption, greed, exploitation, and the opium trade" of the later phase similarly simplifies the true picture. No doubt, Shen's vision of West Hunan grew sterner after his two return trips to West Hunan in 1934 and 1937 and the outbreak of Sino-Japanese War in 1937. But this shift in emphasis in his regional writing is neither an abandonment or "replacement" of his earlier idealist visions nor an abrupt assumption of a style new to him. Take Fenpzi. one of his most idealist works, for instance. The first nine chapters of the book were written in 1932, before Shen's first return trip in 1934, but chapter ten of the same work, titled "The Reappearance of God," which is intended to provide a theological basis for his idealism, did not appear until July 1, 1937, right on the eve of the Sino- Japanese War. Four days later, on July 5, 1937, the first part of his The Stockade, a critical-realist work, was published.39 One can surmise that the composition of the two pieces occurred at about the same time and that the author apparently felt no problem in being an idealist visionary and a relentless social critic at the same time. Probably, he saw his two roles as mutually enhancing, as our survey of his geomoral landscape suggests. At the back of Brandauer's sharp contrast of the two phases of Shen's writing career is the widespread but mistaken view that Shen's fictional West Hunan is 131 peopled by noble savages alone; to assert that a mature, realist Shen grew out of his immature idealism is to explain away counter evidence and to dissolve contradictions in his work through a supposed process of maturation. To Brandauer's question, "Have the people of West Hunan changed or is it rather Shen's perception of them that has changed?" one could answer, "Both, and neither." Shen Congwen mentions repeatedly in works written after his return trips to West Hunan in 1934 and 1937 that West Hunan was sinking fast socially and morally.4® His shift to realism as a major mode of composition may be regarded as a response to the change he saw in the people of West Hunan, although this realism was inspired by his idealism and never implied its abandonment. On the other hand, on a more abstract level of good and evil, neither the West Hunanese nor Shen Congwen's perception of them underwent any fundamental change. While he certainly impressed the world with his lyrical, idealist writings about West Hunan and about the beauty of humanity he discovered among his fellow West Hunanese in his early career, he never was so naive as not to recognize evil in "the West Hunanese character." In his romantic Miao stories, autochthonous evil already makes its appearance. The tribal injunction in "Under the Moonlight" that a girl shall not marry her first love to whom she has given her virginity drives the lovers to suicide. In another early story, "Construction," the characters are portrayed as steeped in greed, corruption, and violence. "Construction" is certainly a lot darker 132 than The Long River and After Snow in its moral visions. In "The Couple," moral intolerance, which will lead to the drowning of Qiaoxiu's mother in "Qiaoxiu and Dongsheng" from After Snow, is already described in a terrible light. In both cases, evil is not imposed by outsiders but stems from local cultural institution. Faced with so many counter-examples to the various critical positions toward Shen’s work, one may well despair of figuring out the puzzling patterns of realism and idealism in Shen Congwen?s West Hunan fiction. An answer to such critical impasse can be found by viewing Shen's West Hunan fiction as a geomoral landscape which allows the author to spatialize the historical differences in geocultural patterns on his fictive map of West Hunan; to project various moods, emotions, styles, and moral visions onto this map; to distribute the contradictions and differences in emphasis found in his work, whether they are based on reality or his personal biases or both, in different areas of his imaginary kingdom; and to create a fictional space large enough for variety and development yet cohesive enough to be one complex fictional entity. Shen Congwen did not set out to write about West Hunan with this goal clearly in mind, but his very identity as an ethnic West Hunanese, his family background and life experiences, and his positioning in modern Chinese literature— in short, his destiny— guided him mysteriously but surely toward creating a geomoral landscape as a macroform for his West Hunan fiction. The geomoral landscape he painted over a quarter of 133 century of writing career finally presents itself as a vast fictive structure unrivaled in modern Chinese literature in scale, complexity, and, very frequently, in artistic achievement and the insights of sociocultural criticism as well. Notes See, for example, Dang Xiucheng, ed., Zhongguo xtandat wenxue CModern Chinese Literature') CBeijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1986). Chapter 10, Part I of the book is titled "Ba Jin, Lao She, and Shen Congwen," while section 3 of the chapter is devoted to Shen’s Bianchena (The Border Town). This marks a sharp contrast to the past appraisals of Shen, the most caustic and devastating of which is Guo Moruo's accusation that Shen represented "reactionary literature and art" ("Chi fandong wenyi" ["Repudiating Reactionary Literature and Art]). In her review of Jeffrey Kinkley's The Odvssev of Shen Conawen. Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker sums up Shen's treatment in this way: "Since his works have also been proscribed in Taiwan, we are faced with the curious but telling phenomenon of a writer widely regarded abroad as one of modern China's great authors who for thirty years was virtually erased from the pages of his own country's literary history" (The Journal of Asian Studies 47.3 [1988]: 599). For a detailed account of the vicissitudes of Shen Congwen's critical assessments in the canonical histories of modern Chinese literature, see Ye Dezheng, "Cong ninggu zouxiang kaifang: Duiyu guonei wenxueshi jiaocai youguan Shen Congwen pinglun de shanbian guiji de shuping" ("From Rigidity to Openness: A Commentary on the Trajectory of Changes in Shen Congwen Criticism in Textbook Histories of Modern Chinese Literature in the PRC"), Jishou daxue xuebao (Social Sciences Ed.): 26 (Jan. 1989), 21-30. Curiously, as Feuerwerker notes, while Shen was suffering from "Leftist" persecution on the mainland for almost three decades, the Kuomintang-dominated Taiwan also banned his work for political and ideological reasons. The special issue on Shen Congwen of the Taipei-based Lianhe wenxue CUNITAS^ no. 27 (1984) may be regarded as a formal gesture of rehabilitation toward Shen by critical circles in Taiwan following the trend of liberalization there. 2 Interestingly, Shen Congwen is ranked higher overseas than in China. Jeffrey Kinkley, a leading Shen Congwen scholar in the West, believes that he is comparable in merit to Lu Xun, a judgment which was not acceptable to the Chinese and had to be deleted when his dissertation containing the statement was being translated for publication in China in the mid-1980s (see Kinkley, Odvssev of Shen Congwen [Stanford UP, 1987] 285). Kinkley also writes, "In the West, Shen Congwen's most faithful readers are in the academy, and they generally agree that he is one of the half dozen great authors of modern Chinese literature" (1). Shen Congwen's devotees in China make similar claims for Shen. For a general impression see "Shoujie Shen Congwen yanjiu xueshu zuotanhui fayan zailu" ["An Abstract of 135 the Proceedings of the First Shen Congwen Symposium"], Jishou daxue xuebao [Social Sciences Ed.]: 1988.1). ^ Ling Yu, a leading Shen Congwen scholar, identifies Shen and Lao She as two modern Chinese authors having the greatest impact on contemporary literature: "Shen Congwen's nativist fiction fxianptu xiaoshuol has influenced generations of writers, whereas Lao She, the Beijing school of writers who write about the denizens of urban centers such as Beijing and Tianjin" ("Shoujie Shen Congwen yanjiu xueshu zuotanhui fayan zailu" 5). Shen is also credited by Wang Jizhi with being the fountainhead of the type of contemporary fiction which aims to achieve the quality of poetry and belletristic essays, namely shihua xiaoshuo and sanwenhua xiaoshuo (see "Shoujie Shen Congwen yanjiu xueshu zuotanhui fayan zailu" 10). 4 Apart from the Chinese translation of Kinkley's monumental critical biography of Shen, The Odyssey of Shen Congwenr simply titled Shen Congwen zhuan (trans. Fu Jiaqin [Beijing: Shishi chubanshe, 1990], Ling Yu has published Cona bianchenq zouxianq shiiie (From the Border Town to the World) (Beijing: Sanlian, 1986) and Shen Congwen zhuan: Shenqming zhihuo chana minq CA Biography of Shen Congwen: The Inextinguishable Fire of Life) (Beijing: Shiyue chubanshe, 1988); Zhao Xueyong has brought out a book titled Shen Congwen vu dongxifang wenhua fShen Congwen and Eastern and Western Cultures) (Lanzhou UP, 1990); Wu Lichang's Shen Conawen: Jianzhu renxina shenmiao (Shen Conawen: Building a Temple of Humanity) came out in 1991 (Fudan UP), and his Renxing de zhiliaozhe: Shen Congwen ZiLUfln CA Life of Shen Congwen: The j feqlgr.-S>f_.Uu.ffidOity) appeared in 1992 (Taipei: Yeqiang chubanshe); and Shao Huaqiang has published a two-volume compilation, Shen Congwen yanjiu ziliao (Resources in Shen Congwen Studies) (Guangzhou & Hong Kong: Huacheng chubanshe & Sanlian, 1991). An English translation of Shen's work, directed by Professor Wu Ningkun, is also under way. Jishou daxue xuebao. based in Shen’s native West Hunan, has so far devoted two special issues to him, 1989.1 and 1991.1-2. Outside China, important studies of Shen since Kinkley's Odvssev of Shen Congwen include Peng Hsiao Yen's Ph. D. dissertation, titled "Antithesis Overcome: Shen Ts'ung- wen's Avant-gardism and Primitivism" (Harvard, 1989), and David Der- wei Wang's two chapters in his Fictional Realism in 20th-Century China: Mao Dunt Lao She, Shen Congwen (Columbia UP, 1992). 5 Shen is a renowned "stylist" during the heyday of his writing career. Su Xuelin praises his extraordinarily lively, inventive, and various style and calls him "a magician in the New Literature," although by the latter statement she also meant to criticize Shen's frequent penchant for gimmicks and superficiality 136 (134-37). Commenting on his versatile style, C.T. Hsia has this to say: "In his maturity he has at his command not one but several styles: the limpid pastoral prose with its concrete evocation of landscape, for which he is especially noted and whose most finished example is perhaps The Border Town; the terse narrative style strongly under the influence of early Chinese redactions of Buddhist tales; the elaborate periods encompassing fluid mental impressions of the characters under description and representing a triumphant adoption of the European syntactic structure for Chinese prose" (A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917-57 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961] 207). Shen Congwen is also believed to be the most prolific of modern Chinese writers Csee Qian Liqun, Wu Fuhui, Wen Ruming, and Wang Chaobing, Zhonaauo xiandai wenxue sanshinian (The Three Decades of Modern Chinese Literature [Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1987] 320). The most comprehensive compilation of Shen's literary writings to date is the twelve-volume Shen Conawen wenii. containing over four million characters. Kinkley estimates that about 10-15% of Shen's literary output produced over a period of twenty-five years (1924- 1949) remains uncollected. A 20-volume compilation, titled Shen C.pngwfiQ-Mgji (The New Collected Work? <?f Shen.CQwerO, which includes Shen's out-of-print works and his correspondence and diaries, is forthcoming from the Yuelu shushe press in Hunan. 6 Some of the best examples are Ling Yu's "Cong Miao-Han wenhua he Zhong-Xi wenhua de zhuangji kan Shen Congwen" ("Shen Congwen from the Perspective of Clashes Between Miao and Han Cultures and Between Chinese and Western Cultures"), Zhao Xueyong's Shen Conawen vu dongxifang wenhua (Shen Congwen and Eastern and Western Cultures), and Zhao Yuan's "Shen Congwen gouzhu de xiangxi shijie" ("The World of West Hunan Invented by Shen Congwen"). ^ Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Chinese original are mine. 8 The geographical or spatial dimension of modern Chinese literature has been generally overlooked in favor of temporal or diachronic studies, e.g., literary histories and biographies, not to mention a crude sociohistorical approach to texts. To redress this imbalance, one would naturally think of applying a geographical or spatial approach to nativist writers first of all, and Shen would be a perfect choice. For a full treatment of the significance of emphasizing the spatial dimension of literature to counter the often tyrannical presence of the historical mode of imagination, see Chapter Three below. ^ For the sake of analysis, I presume that we can isolate the representational aspect of a work and talk about it as such, with 137 the caution that pure, straightforward representation is rarely, if ever, found in literary writings. As Leonard Lutwack argues persuasively, "the literal and geographic aspect of place is always under the strain that all literature feels to attain to the condition of poetry, of symbol, and it is difficult to avoid the proposition that in the final analysis all places in literature are used for symbolical purposes even though in their descriptiveness they may be rooted in fact" (31). I® See for example Kinkley's article, "Shen Congwen and the Uses of Regionalism in Modern Chinese Literaturer" Modern Chinese Literature 1.2 (1985): 157-83. Linguistically, the Miao belong to the Miao-Yao branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. At present, the Miao are scattered over a vast area in Southwestern China (population: c. 7.4 million) and some Southeast Asian countries, such as Burma (10,000), Laos (> 200,000), Vietnam (> 400,000), and Thailand (c. 200,000), as well as many countries in Europe and America, including the U.S.A. (100,000) (population statistics are from Shi Chaojiang [see below] except the figure for the Miao in China, which is taken from a communique issued by the PRC State Bureau of Statistics regarding the 1990 census, 13 November 1990). The Miao in Southeast Asia, known as Hmong in the Western literature, came from China during the Ming-Qing period (14th-early 20th century). (Large-scale Miao migration to the West has occurred only in the past few decades). Both out of necessity and choice, the Miao tend to found settlements in mountainous or hilly country. This settlement pattern bespeaks the historical oppression the Miao suffered, their freedom-loving tradition, and their general poverty as well. For detailed accounts of the Miao, see Hu Qiwang and Li Tinggui, eds., Studies in the Miao (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1988); Shi Chaojiang, "Miaology: A World-wide Discipline," People's Daily (overseas ed.) 21 November 1989; relevant sections of Kinkley's The Odvssev of Shen Conawen: Shi Qigui, A Report on a Field Investigation of the Miao in West Hunan (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1986); and You Zhong, A History of Ethnic Groups in Southwest China (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1985), particularly, 88-91, 282-88, 503-15, 683-96. 12 One example of reverse assimilation is provided by Shen Congwen in his autobiographical story "My Primary School Education" (1926). Shen writes: "The Miao are unpretentious; they have guts and are always ready to fight. Of late these traits have become a common virtue among the boys of Fenghuang City" (2: 22). Shen's story goes to great length depicting the constant fights among the boys as a healthy rite of passage, connived at if not always encouraged by their parents. At that time, the Han made up about two thirds of the city's residents (2: 22). This means that the Han 138 boys, who constituted a clear majority, had taken on the Miao custom. 13 See Hunan sheng zhi fdi'er juan); Dili zhi CRecords of Hunan Province fVol. Ill: A Gazetteer^ Part II, p. 578. The term fenghuang first appeared in Fenghuang ting (military-administrative unit) in 1704, with its headquarters in Zhen'gan. In 1913, Fenghuang ting became Fenghuang xian (county), and Zhen'gan became Fenghuang as a result. Unless otherwise indicated, I follow Kinkley's English translation of the titles of Shen Congwen's works in his The Odvssev of Shen Congwen. I3 Zhou Zuoren, one of the forerunners of modern Chinese literature, advocated a "humanist literature" and a humanism which is "secularism based on individualism" (221). Yu Dafu, a major writer during the same period, argued that "The most important achievement of the May Fourth Movement is the discovery of the individual" ("Introduction," Zhonaguo xinwenxue daxi: sanwen erii Compendium of the New Chinese Literature: Essavs Vol. II], 5). It must be pointed out that during the May Fourth period, "feudalism" and "Confucianism" were considered virtually synonymous, interchangeable terms. In this chapter, "Confucianism" is used in this May Fourth sense, referring to its function as a feudalist ideology. It is outside the scope of this study to distinguish between the theoretical potential of Confucianism and the more mundane and deplorable effects of its historical (ab)uses. 1® Psychoanalysis was a regular part of the intellectual fare of the Chinese public in the 1920s and '30s; works by Freud and Havelock Ellis were readily available in Chinese translation. For a general account of the influence of Freudianism, see Yin Hong, "Fuluoyidezhuyi yu 'wusi' langman wenxue" ("Freudianism and the Romantic Literature of the May Fourth Period"), Zhonaauo shehui kexue 1989.5. The most "Freudian" writer of this period was of course Shi Zhicun. See Wu Fuhui, "Shi Zhicun’s Admiration for Western Psychoanalytic Fiction." 17 For Shen's interest in ethnography, see Kinkley, Odvssey 112. Kinkley points out, "As early as 1926, Shen Congwen was using the reasoning of Western mythographers and anthropologists to explain folklore motifs" (112). Because of the close affinity of Han and Miao in terms of their cultural and ethnic origins, the Miao cosmogony may well be related to the Han belief that fli, meaning air or breath, is the 139 basic element of the universe. In the case of Han cosmogony, again, no creator is postulated or suggested. ^ Shen’s familiarity with the Bible can be inferred from the fact that the Bible (Protestant, in vernacular Chinese translation) is one of the two books he brought to Beijing from Hunan in 1923 (see Kinkley 80), and biblical echoes are found in his works, although he never became a Christian. (Despite the widely accepted belief that Shen left Hunan for Beijing in 1922, Cheng Shan argues convincingly in a recent article that the departure occurred in summer 1923. See "Shen Congwen li Xiang shijian kao" ["A Study in the Time Shen Congwen Departed from Hunan"), Jishou daxue xuebao (Social Sciences Ed.) 1991.1-2, 213-16.) 2® Ling Yu says in a different context that "the culture of West Hunan per se could not nurture a Shen Congwen with a modern rational spirit" ("From Miao" 132). By the same token, Miao culture itself, as part of West Hunanese culture, could not provide Shen with all the elements needed for creating a God compatible with Shen's design for reforming Chinese national character. In a personal essay titled "Water and Clouds: How I Create Stories, and How They Create Me," published in 1942, when he was already a famous writer and a university professor, Shen declares: "I'm a countryman. Wherever I go, I bring my own yardstick and my own balance. I never fit in the general society very well" (10: 266). It is clear that for Shen "countryman" is a self characterization suggesting a reasoned position in life. 22 For instance, Taoism, admittedly part of Han culture, could arguably be related to Miao culture when traced back to its Chu origin. Whether Chu was founded by the Miao is still under debate, but the kingdom definitely included within its territory the Miao area in Hunan and elsewhere (see He Guangyue, "The Expansion and Evolution of the Domain of the Chu State"). Some of Shen's stories have been related to Taoism (see C.T. Hsia's explication of "Hui Ming" for instance [200-201]). 23 For a detailed spatial analysis of The Border Town, see my paper "Between Place and Space: A Psychogeographical Reading of Shen Congwen's The Border TownT" presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast, Las Vegas, November 15, 1991. 24 For example, Hu Yinqiang attributes the tragedy to "government exploitation and dire poverty caused by natural calamities" (23). Ling Yu opines: "'The Husband* reveals a shocking 140 picture of trampled human dignity and debased humanity in the low classes. It exposes the sinful inhumanity of the socioeconomic system" (From 234). 25 For an elaboration of this argument, see my article titled "Chuantong fuquan shi'erfude de beixiju: Chongdu Shen Congwen de 'Zhangfu'" ("The Tragicomedy of Patriarchal Rights Lost and Regained: Rereading Shen Congwen's 'The Husband'"), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue ygnjiu (Studies in Modern Chinese Literature^ 1992.2: 99- 113. 2® Ling Yu considers The Border Town "not a strictly realist work," for in presenting social relations "it shows only good, but not evil" (see "Cong Teyi shijie li tansuo mei de yishu" ["The Art of Exploring Beauty in an Extraordinary World"], review of Shen Congwen xiaoshuo xuan (Fiction of Shen Conawen: Selected Readings) and Shen Congwen Sanwen xuan (Essays of Shen Conawen: Selected Readings. both from Hunan renmin chubanshe in 1981, Dushu 1982.6, 54). Commenting on the characters in The Border Town and other works, Liu Xiwei has this to say: "His feeling for the beautiful makes it unbearable for him to analyze [them], for he is afraid to expose the ugly side of human nature" ("Bianchena yu 'Ba jun tu'" [1936], reprinted in Shen Congwen vaniiu ziliao, ed., Shao Huaqiang, vol. 1, 64-70), 68. 27 Ran Yiqiao, for instance, claims: "The moral and aesthetic perfection that the work [i.e., The Border Town] confers on the characters and the milieu is a far cry from the tumultuous and cruel social realities of the 1930s. This shows the author's apathy to the political reality of the day" (362). A more extended discussion of The Border Town along similar lines is found in Sun Changxu and Liu Xipu, "On the Ideological Tendencies of The Border Townr" Studies in Modern Chinese Literature 25 (1985): 152-63. 26 The essential truthfulness of Shen's descriptions of the social conditions and mores in the Chadong area is vigorously affirmed in Ling Yu's From the Border Town to the World (see 238- 40). 2® The term "modern culture" here refers to a form of mixed culture made of Western influences and semi-traditional elements, typified by the culture prevailing in Shanghai between 1912 and 1949. It is described as "semi-colonial, semi-feudal" in histories written in the People's Republic of China. Some scholars object to the uncritical use of the term in Shen Congwen criticism. Qin Zhixi argues in a recent article: "Urban culture [as Shen Congwen 141 understands and criticizes it] can be considered modern only with reference to West Hunan culture. . . . But, the fact is that Chinese urban culture during the 1920s and '30s was, at best, pre-modern; it had barely crossed the threshold of [the age of] modern industry. Such urban culture can hardly be considered progressive, nor can it be equated with modern civilization" (177). A detailed examination of the appropriateness of the term "modern culture" in the Chinese context and its various implications goes beyond the scope of this study. (For more information on the modernity of Chinese cities during the above-mentioned period, the reader may want to consult Zhou Guocheng's A History of Modern Chinese Economy'). Aware of the controversial nature of the term, I use it as a shorthand for a form of culture prevailing in the most developed coastal cities of China during the 1910s through 1940s. Shen Congwen writes at the end of the piece: "C County is probably located in Hunan, but I'm not sure where in Hunan" (8: 5). Jeffrey Kinkley not only judges the setting to be Fenghuang, i.e., C(Z)hen'gan, but sees Sanbei as modeled on one of Shen’s "ubiquitous distant relatives" (Odvssev 106). I want to add to the opinion of Kinkley, whom I admire for his vast knowledge of Shen Congwen's life, two textual clues. The first is provided by the initial of the city given in the text, C, which I believe stands for Chen'gan, in an older form of romanization, which in pinyin will be Zhen'gan. (The use of the initial of a romanized place name was a common practice in modern Chinese fiction.) The second clue has to do with Sanbei, who reminds the reader of a character named Lord Jiabei in "At the Butcher's Block," a Fenghuang (Zhen'gan) story completed within two months of the publication of "Sanbei." In his "family precepts," Sanbei advocates "piecemeal purchase," e.g., buying a pound of meat at four different shops in order to get better and more meat than is otherwise possible. Lord Jiabei also practices this trick of "piecemeal purchase" (see 2: 63). Besides, according to Chinese naming tradition, Sanbei and Jiabei could very well be brothers or cousins. Therefore, either Sanbei and Jiabei were conceived as one character, or they were intended as distinct characters of the same family, both in terms of genealogy and character traits. This is not a moot point if we consider the fact that Shen's stories often purport to add up to a comprehensive picture of a community by cross-references of characters and events in different stories. 31 Shen Congwen's description in The Stockade gives a quite clear clue to the town where the story is set: "This wharf/port is named "X cun" (literally, "X Village"), under the jurisdiction of X Prefecture. It is located in the middle reaches of the You River," two hundred H [i.e., one hundred kilometers] or more upstream from 142 Yuanling, and some two hundred li downstream from Chadong (7: 180). Wangcun is the only sizable town in the location described above. 32 see Yang Jianlong, "Jianlun ershi niandai xiangtu wenxue de jiben zhuti" ("A Brief Discussion of the Basic Themes of the Nativist writing of the 1920s”), Shanghai shida xuebao (Philosophy & Social Sciences Ed.) 1990.2: 116-119. 33 in "To a Professor," collected in Letters Never Mailed (1935), Shen Congwen criticizes the addressee for his failure to learn from his reading of Confucian classics the golden mean fzhongvongT. the spirit of dedication to truth, and an empathy with others (11: 311). In "A Position," collected in Candles Extinguished: A Sequel (1946), Shen praises Confucianism's contributions to the great national spirit, which include "earnestness," "fortitude, courage, and enterprise," and "public mindedness" (12: 358-60). The different assessments of Confucianism on Shen's part may have been caused by his evolving thinking, but they also have to do with the different generic requirements on fiction and the article. 3^ Lutwack observes that "the more successfully places are integrated with other literary elements in a text, the less mimetic records of places" (29). In Shen's regional fiction, the mimesis of individual stories is subordinated to the mythic dimension; so in its totality, West Hunan fiction is much less mimetic than its component works are. in Metaphors We Live Bv. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss the social and physical basis of "up" and "down" as orientational metaphors. They give the following explanation for "Good is up; bad is down": "Physical basis for personal well-being: Happiness, health, life, and control— the things that principally characterize what is good for a person— are all up" (16). For the idea that "virtue is up; depravity is down," they give the following as its physical and social basis: "GOOD IS UP for a person (physical basis), together with a metaphor that we will discuss below, SOCIETY IS A PERSON. . . . VIRTUE IS UP because virtuous actions correlate with social well-being from the society/person's point of view that counts" (17). Short of a similar study in Chinese metaphors, it is not possible to assess definitively the validity in Chinese of the specific points and examples given in the above-mentioned book. But my intuition and some empirical and linguistic evidence available to me suggest that their arguments will hold in Chinese. In other words, there are certain fairly universal conceptual tendencies based on shared human experiences. For details of Lakoff and Johnson's discussion, see Chapter 4 of the above book (14-21). 143 36 Besides Han Liqun’s essay quoted above, Wan Lintong's argument below is typical: "Shen Congwen's realm of art comprises two parts, viz., "the world of West Hunan" and "the urban world," which are presented as an antithesis. Representing vigor and vitality, West Hunan is permeated with panegyrics of humanity and the solemnity of morality, and is one with beautiful nature, whereas the urban world symbolizes corruption and degeneration and is shot through with vulgarity, hypocrisy, debasement, and the filthiness of moral decay— in short, a nauseating world. These two sharply contrasted worlds function as two poles of human nature and morality; the beautiful versus the ugly. In Shen Congwen's work, urban civilization stands for the negative side of human nature and morality, while the rural realm, filled with religious mysticism, barbaric virility, and primeval force, and of a piece with the landscape of limpid streams, moving clouds, and wooded hills, represents the positive side of human nature and morality” (Wenvi lilun yaniiu 1988.2, 66). 3^ In her review of Kinkley's The Odvssev of Shen Congwen. Ellen Widmer, after noting that "Kinkley's research is thorough enough to identify certain episodes and characters in which darkness predominates," expresses the wish that "[h]ad Kinkley's interest been more in literary purpose and less in Shen's life and region, he might have done more to resolve the paradoxical appearance of those dark spots on the bright Hunan landscape, which he himself has set before our eyes" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.2 (1988), 559. 3% See, for example, Yang Jianlong, "Jianlun ershi- niandai xiangtu wenxue de jiben zhuti," Shanghai shifan daxue xuebao: zhesheban 1990.2, 116-17. The first nine chapters of Fenazi were published in Wenvi vuekan between April and June (Kinkley 405-406), while Chapter Ten appeared in Wenxue zazhi on July 1, 1937 (Kinkley 419). The Stockade fXiaozhaO appeared between July 5 and August 9 1937 in Guowen zhoubao in five installments; it remained unfinished because of the war (Kinkley 419). 4® Shen writes in The Stockade (1937): "The Commerce in town and the energy and morality of the townspeople are apparently going downhill, heading irretrievably for doom" (7: 182). In his 1942 preface to The Long River, he writes of his impressions of his journey back to West Hunan in 1934, after a long absence: "Superficially, it is to be expected that tremendous progress has been registered everywhere, but, if one pays close attention, one 144 could easily discern a tendency toward decay amidst all the changes. Most strikingly of all, that bit of honesty and plain beauty of humanity that had survived in rural society, has all but disappeared. In its place we see a pragmatic and philistine approach to life nurtured by society over a span of nearly two decades" (7: 2). 145 Chapter Three Shen Congwen and Faulkner in Perspective: Geomoral Thought, Spatial Form, and the Geopolitics of Regional Writings One very important way in which humankind uses geography involves the association of space with emotional, ethical, ideological, and cultural states or significances, from the affective projection onto the environs of basic human desires and emotions such as fears, joys, sorrows, awe, and reverence, to systematic inscriptions of entire ideologies or ways of life in landscapes- For lack of a better term, I choose to call this mode of thinking "geomoral thought.Pathetic fallacy in rhetoric is a common instance of geomoral thought, but geomoral thought as a whole, manifested in such divers discourses as geography, religion, mythology, allegory, travel writings, and other genres of literature, and reflected in our daily life, is yet to be fully explored and conceptualized. The tradition of geomoral thought goes back in human history probably as far as the moment when humankind began to make a conscious distinction between "good" and "evil" places. A good place, among other things, would provide one with ample food and a haven from wild beasts and the fury of the elements, hence a place where one felt secure and blessed and had a sense of belonging. An 146 evil place, on the other hand, would expose humans to endless privations, hardships, and dangers; it was indeed an accursed space to run away from if one could. In the Bible both of these fundamental geomoral spaces figure importantly and are overlaid with rich religious and cultural meanings. From the barren desert to the fertile valley, from Egypt where the Jews were held in thralldom to the Promised Land beyond the sea and the mountain, from the lands through which the disappointed Jews wandered to the Temple in Jerusalem, which embodied the Israelites' most cherished hope of salvation— in short, in and between these contrasted geomoral spaces the Bible unfolds the eternal human drama of struggle, despair, and hope. In ancient times geomoral thought is often grounded in ethnocentrism. The opposition between self and other is patently marked geographically. Mircea Eliade puts it well: One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of "other world," a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, "foreigners" (who are assimilated to demons and the souls of the dead). (29) However, not only in tribal societies does one encounter the idea that "relative order is connected only with the tribal territory, which is surrounded by and permeated with a mysterious and pernicious force" (Akhundov 34); similar ideas also persist in 147 fairly well-developed civilizations. The ancient Chinese believed that they occupied the center of the earth, surrounded by barbarians: to the east by the Yi j| , to the west the Rong ^ , to the south the Man, ^ to the north the Di . The barbarians were feared and despised; the cliche that "He who is not one of us cannot be trusted" ffei wo zulei. ai xin bi vi ) has been quoted throughout Chinese history to bolster xenophobia. Some Chinese went so far as to regard non-Chinese as subhuman and below human— i.e., Confucian— treatment.^ The ancient Greeks and the Romans had their barbarians: the boundaries between their civilizations and that of savagery also divided the morally desirable from the morally detestable. The ancient people lived in a world that encompassed both the natural and the supernatural realms; their landscape was essentially mythical. Akhundov points out, "In certain ancient cultures Cfor example, in the old forms of Japanese Shintoism) the mythology of the tribal territory and significant landscape features became a mythology and definition of space itself" C173). In ancient Greece, for example, mythology inscribed itself in the entire Greek landscape, from Mount Olympus where the mighty Zeus and other gods dwelled to the sea where Poseidon made his home, from the sky where Hyperion and Phoebe roamed to forests and streams haunted by the numerous goddesses and nymphs. Each part of the landscape was thus blessed or cursed, governed by specific gods or open to conflicts among them; each evoked from humans a certain emotion or mood, 148 demanded from them a special ritual response, and revealed some truth about human nature. In China, the best example of mythical landscape can be found in the Shan hai iing fThe Classic of Mountains and Seas'), a geographical work which blends many realistic descriptions of the Chinese world with legends and myths about the peripheral and faraway lands inhabited by gods and fantastic creatures. Mythology can be read as a projection of human desires and a refraction of political and moral orders of contemporary society. Inasmuch as an anthropomorphized nature allows such desires and orders be rewritten on the landscape, the landscape itself becomes a mythological language. In the Chinese tradition, geomoral thought figures prominently in several genres of literary and geographical works such as travel writings, landscape poetry, and the gazetteer ffanpzhi ). In travel writings, landscapes are imbued with mythical, political, moral, religious meanings and often become an "objective correlative" of the emotions and visions of the authors. In Ma Dibo's C C.E. 1st century) "Fengchanyi ji" ■»£* C'Record of the Imperial Sacrifice to Heaven and Earth"), for example, Mount Tai appears as a sacred mountain where the emperor came to offer ritual sacrifices to heaven and earth, to confirm his position as the son of heaven with the heavenly mandate to rule and to pray for blessings on his empire.^ Because of the mythic import it was given, Mount Tai was incorporated into the official ideology of the state; it was both mythologized and politicized. 149 In Confucianism, the landscape became a natural analogue and symbol of the gentleman CjunziT. In the Analects, Confucius says, "The wise delight in the river; the benevolent, in the mountain. The wise are active; the benevolent, tranquil. The wise enjoy life; the benevolent, longevity" (see "Yongye" ^-%0. Rivers and mountains, two most commonplace landscape features, are thus linked with moral and personality categories. In the chapter titled "Youzuo" ^ in Xunzi -5- . Confucius is credited with an elaborate analogy between the gentleman fiunzi) and the big river. When asked by his disciple Zigong why the gentleman must not miss any chance to contemplate a big river, the master says: A big river benefits the sentient beings without setting out to do so, and this is grace. It adheres to the principle of flowing downward, whether this means running a straight or winding course. This reminds us of the uncompromising character of righteousness. It comes to us inexhaustibly, like the Way. If there is a breakthrough in the waterway, it never fails to follow through it with a rapidity emulating echoes, faltering not even at a gorge miles deep. This is bravery. It fills up depressions and holes so they are level with each other, as the law should be practiced. Once the depressions are filled up, it does not overdo it, and this is equity. Weak as it may appear, its water reaches into every nook and corner; there can be no closer observation of things than this. It cleanses whatever is plunged into it and makes it ever fresh. Finally, not a milliard twists and turns can prevent it from heading east, and this is supreme willpower. These are the reasons why a gentleman should not pass up any chance to contemplate a big river. (524-26) According to Confucius, the gentleman finds his own ideal image in the big river, or rather he recreates his own image in it. 150 Confucius's attribution of the gentlemanly qualities to the landscape had a far-reaching influence on the geomoral thought of succeeding generations of writers. In the travel writings of Bao Zhao C 4127-466), Han Yu ( 768-824), Liu Zongyuan 773-819), Wang Anshi QZJ% 1021-1086), and Gong Zizhen C J ll ^ 1792-1841), for instance, vivid descriptions of landscape are overlaid with the emotions and visions of a Confucian scholar- statesman. Bao Zhao's "Letter to Sister Written When Coming Ashore at Dalei" is a good example.^ The commentary by Ni Qixin et al is worth quoting: When describing mountains, Bao Zhao made them so human-like that one could sense the heroic spirit of noble warriors contending with each other. When describing the scenery of plains, he brought out the nostalgia of a lonely wanderer. When he came to lakes and marshes, he colored his depiction of the waters, weeds, fish, and birds with sighs about the snobbery and chaos which fill life. Writing about the great river gave him an occasion to raise anxious questions to Heaven, which may be read as a figure of his attempt to penetrate the opacity of history. ... In fact, this is a lyrical piece of parallel prose fpianwen J > f j ^ ] about the landscape; it voices the ambition and contending spirit of a high-minded figure oppressed by the feudal nobility fmenfq ft ]. C24-25) Bao Zhao's lyrical projection onto the landscape of a Confucian personality at once worldly-wise, sensitive, inspired by an unquenchable spirit of public service and yet not without a light touch of the tragic, would become a cultural and generic paradigm for countless landscape writers after him who similarly suffered setbacks in their political careers. 151 The other two major Chinese traditions, Taoism and Buddhism, also leave clear imprints on travel writings. Tao Hongjing's C 452-536) short piece, titled "Da Xie Zhongshu shu" ^ ("Reply to the letter from Mr. Xie the Zhongshu" [official title during Southern dynasties (420-589)]), paints in forty characters an exquisite scenery of Southeast China. It conveys such pure appreciation of natural beauty and such spontaneous delight and wonderment that one nearly takes it for ideologically free. But the description "yujie zhi xiandu i.e., "the capital of immortals fxianrens or senninsT in a world of sensuous desires fvuiie. or kamadhatulr" reveals its full cultural underpinning: after all, the scenery so described is a Taoist paradise in what the Buddhists characterized as the lowly world of desires and pains.® Its contemporary political implications aside,® this little essay clearly instills a Taoist element into Chinese aesthetics about landscape and gives the Chinese landscape a Taoist tinge. Bai Juyi ( 772-846), Ouyang Xiu (g^fe^ 1007-1072), and Su Shi ( 1037-1101), all first-rate poets, continued this tradition; they wrote about their experiences of the landscape with distinct Taoist and sometimes Buddhist sensibilities. "Caotang ji" ( i£j "My Thatched Hut," [817]) was written after Bai's unfair demotion by the Tang court, but there is little in it that could suggest a disgruntled temper. His poetic description of the "thatched hut" (in fact, a villa), its well laid-out garden, and its scenic environs convey a spiritual serenity, 152 taste for nature, a detachment which some would call escapism. Similarly, Ouyang Xiu's famous "Zuiwengting ji" ( L> "The Pavilion of the Drunken Old Man") was written after his demotion and it is nevertheless replete with delight in the beauty of nature, the conviviality of feasting his friends at the pavilion, and the joy of sharing the joys of his companions. The essay ends on a Taoist note echoing Zhuangzi's fabled debate with Hui Shi on the joy of fish.^ Now, the pavilion, having been rebuilt many times since, stands as a material embodiment of Ouyang Xiu's geomoral vision. In "Hou chibi fu" ( \ "Second Prose-Poem on Chibi"), Su Shi writes of a crane that flits by his boat in the Yangtze River as he sails downriver one moon-lit night in early winter. That night he dreams of a Taoist priest dressed in a robe made of feathers who asks if Su enjoyed his tour of Chibi. Then it dawns on Su, still in his dream, that the priest is the crane that had flown by the boat last night. He wakes up, but sees neither the crane nor the priest. Recalling Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, the double negation Cin which the crane proves an illusory form of the priest who turns out to be an apparition in Su's dream) tantalizingly invites a further negation, namely, that the unreality of the priest is itself an illusion on the part of Su Shi, and ad infinitum. Su's adroit variation on Zhuangzi's butterfly dream lends a radical dream-like quality to the whole landscape as well as to life. Here the writer as a landscape observer is no longer detachable, not to say detached, from the observed landscape: the landscape is as much 153 a mental state as the mind is a receptacle of the deeper meaning of nature. On top of the apparent Taoist transcendence of the distinction between the subject and the object, Su also seems to exhibit the (Chan/Zen) Buddhist vision that the negation of dichotomy and the further negation of the negation, and so on, finally allow one to approach life and nature without biases or neuroses and to enjoy them for what they are.** One may indeed not wish to go so far as Su in his spiritual exercise on the landscape, but, having read Su Shi, who visiting Chibi would fail to recall Su's two famous discourses on Chibi and view the scenery as a geomoral landscape both private to the writer and shared by all who have inherited this cultural legacy? In its long course of evolution, Chinese nature poetry or landscape poetry has similarly inscribed on the landscape various ideologies and Weltanschauungs: a Confucian scholar's passion or pathos, a Taoist recluse's carefree life, Buddhist exercises in spiritual enlightenment, and all sorts of emotional stances and moral positions.® Often carved on stone tablets or written on scrolls to be hung in temples or pavilions, many of such poems become an inseparable part of the Chinese landscape.-*-® Traditional Chinese geographical writings are rich in geomoral thought. In Li Daoyuan's or 472-527) monumental Shuiiing zhu ( Annotations of the Book of Rivers), some five hundred historical anecdotes, legends, stories, and myths are woven into otherwise objective geographical descriptions, centering on 154 rivers in China and neighboring countries. As a result, the landscape Li meticulously and objectively depicts comes to full life, not in the narrow sense of "pathetic fallacy" but as a repository of China's rich cultural and literary traditions.11 Shuiiinp zhu influenced the evolution of an important genre of geographical writing called difanqzhi. or the gazetteer1^. The gazetteer is a kind of encyclopedic writing on a specific geographical area, such as a province, a prefecture, a county, or even a town or a village, and it covers the customs, folklore, literature, dialect, cultural sites, celebrities and significant events of the area as well as its political history.15 Based on detailed descriptions of the local topography, social and cultural conditions, and the life and mores of even the most ordinary people, the gazetteer gives the area it treats a specificity and individuality which is blurred or simply ignored in official historical discourse. Over the centuries, commissioned by the authorities and sometimes initiated by local scholars or gentry, some 10,000 gazetteers, containing over 100,000 volumes have been written, covering virtually every part of the country.^ The enormous research value of the gazetteer is becoming increasingly clear to scholars in all fields, including humanist geographers.15 For the purpose of this study, suffice it to say here that landscape, as a participant in and molder (not just the passive setting) of the myriad local cultural activities and as a spatial carrier of the tradition, acquires a geomoral dimension in the 155 gazetteer. The cumulative effects of the events recorded in and (re)created by the gazetteer are visible to any culturally aware observer contemplating the landscape. Shen Congwen's West Hunan fiction not only consciously echoes the gazetteer tradition but also attempts to continue it in a modern form.^ In the West, from its fountainheads in the Bible and Greek mythology, the geomoral tradition continued through the Middle Ages into the modern times. I shall confine myself here to a brief sketch of its manifestations in selected modern works of fiction. In the 19th century, with vigorous industrial and commercial growth, the urban centers increasingly became the object of novelistic attention.^ In novel after novel, Dickens creates London and Balzac Paris as two exemplars of the modern urban world where individuals, caught in the labyrinthine social network, driven by ambitions and fears, led by hopes real or false, live out their private dramas of life as part of the life of the City. London and Paris emerge as two expansive geomoral landscapes sharing many characteristics of modern capitalist metropolises yet firmly rooted in the differing specificities of English and French cultures as well as the topographies and idiosyncratic characters of the two cities respectively. One can list other famous fictional geomoral landscapes: Hardy's Wessex as a ruined countryside mysteriously ruled by Fate; Zola's mine as a proletarian Hell governed by naturalistic laws of society and biology; Joyce's Dublin as a chilly city of alienation, triviality, and quiet despair; Mann's Venice as 156 a torrid town of decadence, decay, and death. On this side of the Atlantic, Willa Cather's windswept Nebraska frontier, Mark Twain's swollen Mississippi River, Dreiser's boisterous Chicago, Lewis's mediocre Zenith, Fitzgerald's glamorous Long Island, Hemingway's wounded Big Two-Hearted River, Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Katherine Anne Porter's Texas, Eudora Welty's Morgana, Mississippi, and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha— these and many other stories about American places, real or fictive, present in their totality a complex geomoral landscape which weaves together the "real" geography of the United States with a literary geography. The American landscape would be much poorer, if still fully meaningful, without such a geomoral landscape. Despite the fact that geomoral thought has a long and pervasive tradition both in Western and Chinese cultures, geomoral thought— indeed the spatial imagination as a whole— has been all along subordinated to the temporal or historical imagination. Michel Foucault puts it memorably: A critique could be carried out of this devaluation of space that has prevailed for generations. Did it start with Bergson, or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic. ("Questions," 70) Certainly, the privileging of the temporal/historical imagination over the spatial/geographical imagination started well before Bergson. In the West, the advent of the Christian age ushered in 157 an era in which history was completely subjected to religion. "The prophetic writings of the Old Testament see history as directional movement toward a messianic end. The medieval Christian view, best formulated in St. Augustine's Citv of God, conceives history as the drama of the redemption of man" CAmericana 242). History thus understood is no longer a parallel field of knowledge to geography but a totalizing sphere to which geography is subject and into which it often disappears. One could cite numerous examples to show that the geographical dimension of human experience was severely depressed or even suppressed in order that a spiritualized approach to history may be exalted. W. D. Davies argues that in Judeo- Christian thought the land [of Palestine], Jerusalem, and the Temple were taken up into a non-geographic, spiritual, transcendental dimension . . . became symbols especially of eternal life, of the eschatological society in time and eternity, beyond space and sense. In such strata [of Judeo-Christian thought] the physical entities as such— land, Jerusalem, Temple— cease to be significant, except as types of realities which are not in essence physical. C366) Another instance of subordinating the spatial dimension of human experience to the temporal or historical dimension is the European discovery and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. This i unprecedented geographical movement was incorporated into and subjected to Christian theology. The Europeans saw the New World as a new Eden set aside by God for His chosen people so that they might have a new start, as an "unoccupied" space where European institutions could be transplanted, with the native Indians, if they 158 stood in the way, to be either Christianized or annihilated.*® Marx and Engels in their secular way also privileged history over geography. In The Communist ManifestoT they regard the West's discovery of the New World and its global colonial expansion as a stage of capitalist development; the keynote is one of celebrating the integration of the planet into a European-led world system of capitalism, which in turn paves the way for a messianic Communism. As Edward Soja points out, Marx saw geography "either as an external constraint or as an almost incidental outcome"; it was little more than what Marx called an "unnecessary complication" (Soja 32). One could go on citing further examples. Eventually one cannot but feel that "Western philosophical tradition [has] rigidly separated time from space and intrinsically prioritized temporality to the point of expunging the ontological and epistemological significance of spatiality" (Soja 119).*^ History has a tendency to be abstract, to elevate itself onto the level of historiography, or philosophy of history. While concrete historical records necessarily involve geographical descriptions, more "sophisticated" historical narratives are often guided by metaphysical or spiritual principles or goals, as the writings of Comte (positivism), Kant and Hegel (idealism), von Herder, von Humboldt, and von Ranke (historicism), and Marx and Engels (Marxism), among others, amply testify. The result is predictable: theory suppresses the geographical dimension. Theory, be it historiographic or otherwise, often has a claim to 159 universality; in other words, it aims to eliminate its original geographical reference or conveniently forgets it. The current spread of Western theory in humanities and sociology to the Third World and the resistance it sometimes encounters both hinge on the question whether the geographically based differences in cultural traditions and sociopolitical institutions between the Western and non-Western countries count when one talks about theory. The question needs to be answered as there is a clear tendency in the West to pass Western history as world history, and Western theory as universal theory. A comparable situation of exalting history over geography existed in China. Chinese fascination with history and treasuring of historical records can be best exemplified by the "Twenty-four Official Histories" fershisi shOT composed in a span of over two thousand years and covering over four millennia of Chinese history continuously. In traditional China, the study of history was an essential part of a gentleman's education, from which the student learned the lessons of history and drew nourishment for his Cor, occasionally, her) moral character as well as literary competence. Traditionally, the Chinese regarded history as an enactment of the Tao, variously interpreted by Taoists and Confucianists. In the typical formulation of Confucianism, the dominant ideology in traditional China, heaven mandates the emperor, the "son of heaven," to rule his subjects benevolently until he loses the mandate by tyrannizing his people and provoking a revolution. This ethico- 160 political order survived the dynastic cycles, disregarded geographical configurations, and took on the character of an immutable truth. Again, ideology easily subordinated geography to history. Official Chinese history is what the historian saw from the capital, often in a Confucian light; it is centered on dynastic fortunes, the vast empire conceived as a mere stage upon which moral and political dramas were enacted. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this brief and unavoidably reductive review of a history of the privileging of historical discourse over geographical discourse, both in the West and in China, with two recent quotations. The American writer Guy Davenport writes in his essay "The Geography of the Imagination" C1981): History and geography are inextricable disciplines. They have different shelves in the library, but they cannot get along for a minute without consulting the other. Geography is the wife of history, as space is the wife of time. (4) Wang Hui, a Chinese historian in Taiwan, writes in a prefatory passage to Zhpngguo . . UshjLriill CThg, Hi stor 1 CfllJaflflflEf l Phy. P.f-China, 1979): "Geography is a stage for history; history is the backbone of geography. To study history or time without paying attention to geography or space, is to miss much that is intriguing and authentic" Cl)- It is interesting to note that both authors, while purporting to champion the role of geography in the human imagination or thought, end up making it passive, secondary, and subordinate to history. Davenport's conjugal metaphor would make a 161 good target for a feminist critique of the traditional subjugation of Mother Earth to Father Time, of the concrete to the abstract, of the physical to the spiritual. However, from time to time, the totalizing tendency of official history meets resistance from geographical or spatial discourse. In traditional China, the precept that "All under heaven is the king's realm; even the remotest frontiers are subject to him" ("Putian zhi xia, mo fei wangtu; shuaitu zhi bin, mo fei wangchen" reflected the all-encompassing, transcendentally grounded royal power which recognized no ruptures or variations in the supposedly homogeneous, unproblematic geographical space assumed by official dynastic histories. Yet this view of the Chinese world from the center of power was challenged by the popular saying, "The mountain is high and the emperor faraway" C"shan gao huangdi yuan" v l ' i j f r j JL^ 1^, ), which suggests that geographical distance indeed makes a difference, that space cannot be politically uniform and undifferentiated, and that one may as well take the law into one's hands and be one's own master if the emperor is faraway. A more elevated variation on the popular saying, "that a general far afield may choose not to obey the royal order" ("Jiang zai wai, junming you suo bu shou" $ % )> was often invoked to disregard orders from the emperor so as to allow the embattled general a free hand in commanding his army. Again, spatially based difference modifies the purported ' absolute consistency of royal power. 162 The most important counterbalance in Chinese culture to the totalizing tendency of history is the gazetteer tradition. Although diachronic narration is also present, the basic organizing principle of the gazetteer is geography. It is considered a "lateral Cor synchronic) narrative mode" Cheng de xushu fanafa), in contradistinction to the "vertical Cor diachronic) narrative mode" Czong de xushu fanafa) adopted by official dynastic history Csee Zhang Shunhui 99). The relationship between official history CZhenashi) and gazetteer Cfangzhi) tells us much about the power relations between the center and the provinces which are reflected in the relation between the historical and the spatial discourses Cor at least spatialized historical narrative if one regards [portions of] the gazetteer as regional history). Traditionally, the gazetteer is looked upon as offshoots or branches fpanp wen ^ 5^_ ) of official history CZhang 99). Indeed, one could argue that gazetteer writing was in most cases sponsored by the court, that it was modeled on official history Cat least in its historical narrative section), and that the writers of both genres were scholars trained in similar classical traditions. While granting official history its hegemonic position in the whole of Chinese discourse, one must not lose sight of the subversive elements in the gazetteer. The regional perspective adopted by the gazetteer may sometimes indicate significant alternative ways of looking at certain historical events or figures. The sheer amount of detail often at the grass-roots level in a gazetteer allows one to 163 construct a more credible picture of the true social and cultural conditions of the region. As one expert on the gazetteer puts it: Therefore, as historical material, the gazetteer in fact possesses a truthfulness and comprehensiveness in its presentation of the geographical and historical conditions of a region which surpasses those of official history. The gazetteer is simply more credible, detailed, richer in its reference value and less distorted in representing reality. (Jin 105) Chinese gazetteers in their totality form a spatially or geographically based other to official historical discourse; it resists the latter's attempt to reduce it to a mere supplementary source of information and often emerges as a corrective or alternative to official historical discourse. In the West, spatial thought sometimes unexpectedly asserts itself even where the historical imagination appears to be fully in charge. Let us take the case of Marxism. As already demonstrated above, Marx generally stressed historicism to the neglect of geography. This emphasis is crystallized in his emblematic historical materialism, which outlines a succession of modes of production through human history. Marx divided world history into four modes of production: "Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois." Jonathan Spence, after remarking that "the sequence has both chronological and analytic meaning in the European world," shrewdly notes: But the "Asiatic" mode is a geographical one; it lies outside the time sequence of the other three. And although Marx wrote that the four modes represented "progressive epochs in the economic 164 formation of society," in reality he followed Hegel in placing China (and India) outside the development of world history. Asiatic modes had in no way been subsumed into later development— they had merely limped on alongside them. (183) What this logical loophole caused by the geographical "inconvenience" reveals is the limit of Marx's totalizing historical scheme grounded in Eurocentrism. Even in our time when phrases like "the global village" are readily pronounced to indicate an (increasingly) integrated world system built on reduced scales of physical distance, the geographically mediated uneven development continues to fragment what otherwise would be a neat historical pattern, thus making the task of writing a world history a thorny problem.^2 In America, spatial thought seems to play a more conspicuous role than in Europe. In the United States, a sense of shared Western heritage and cultural continuity with Europe, and with England in particular, did not prevent the thirteen British colonies from seeking independence. Unlike many other independence movements in history, British North America did not argue for secession on ethnic and linguistic grounds, not even mainly on a religious ground. Rather, it built its case on ideological differences, such as American belief in democracy and freedom versus British monarchy and oppression, American spiritual purity versus English corruption and decay, and so on, and all such polarized social, moral, and spiritual qualities are aligned with an obvious geographical difference, i.e., the New World versus the Old World. The Atlantic 165 was not just a geographical barrier; it also marked a rupture in Western history. Many American nationalists followed Thomas Paine in "equating America's wide spaces with freedom and opportunity," and "free man in free space" became the essence of the ideology of the American Revolution (see Gidley and Lawson-Peebles 2; Bush 27). Even well into the 19th century, geography still "figured more frequently than race in the ideology of American nationalism" (Curti 393). The growth of the American nation was very much a process of geographical expansion. The idea of Manifest Destiny was invented to give such expansion an aura of historical legitimacy. From sea to shining sea, the immensity of the space of a continent impressed itself deeply on the national consciousness of the young republic through geographical explorations and surveys,^ military expeditions, the spread of settlements on the ever expanding frontiers, and the construction of transcontinental railroads. The vast frontiers ever extending westward became a reservoir of myths, which James Fenimore Cooper, among others, tapped in his Leatherstocking tales, which in turn augmented it. Commenting on Cooper's Leatherstocking heroes, R. W. B. Lewis has this to say in his classic The American Adam: I call such a figure the hero in space, in two senses of the word. First the hero seems to take his start outside time, or on the very edge of it, so that his location is essentially in space alone; and, second, his initial habitat is space as spaciousness, as the unbounded, the area of total possibility. (90) 166 In time the American West has nurtured such national myths as the beliefs that "the immigrant came hither [the West] to escape history, despite the injunction that escape from history is impossible" and that "the American people are a people in space rather than a people in time" (Jones 388). Even a still operative, though weakened, temporal imagination inherited from the Old World could not suppress an exuberant spatial consciousness, of which Congress minutes and laws, geographical works, travel writings, in addition to imaginative literature, were its divers expressions and promoters. Even the creation of the federal system of the United States suggests this spatial awareness. Local autonomy and state power were not just derived from the ideal of democracy and freedom; it also bespoke an understanding of the geographical variations unavoidable in the space of a continent and the social and cultural differences that attended them. In the U. S. of today, where a powerful economic machinery and a pervasive media network create an enormous centripetal force, the existence of distinct regional cultures despite McDonalds and Madonna testifies to the geocultural diversity cultivated by people or simply surviving against large odds. As Clive Bush perceptively argues, "the problematics of space . . . is at the root of American ideology" (see Gidley and Lawson- Peebles 4). Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha and the American South at the back of it can be viewed in this history of spatial thought in the U. S. 167 Forceful assertions of spatial thought are also evident in modernist movements in Western literature, characterized by a rebellion against the tyranny of temporal thought, a utopian desire to escape history and time, and an almost "perverse" yearning for pure spatiality and structure in literary work. Since it is not possible to delineate this development in great detail because of the scope of this dissertation, I shall confine myself to a brief sketch, drawing on the work of James M. Curtis, Joseph Frank, and Ricardo G u l l o n . ^ One could begin with modern challenges to the Newtonian and Kantian notion of uniform absolute space and time. The intellectual atmosphere that gave rise to the work of William James, Henri Bergson, and Albert Einstein,^5 which in different ways pluralizes, subjectivizes and relativizes time and space, had a great impact on the literary community. Mallarme’s Un Coup de des fA Throw of Dice [1897]) was an extreme effort to achieve pure spatiality in poetry through graphic disposition. Apollinaire's Galligrammes (1918) and concrete poetry continued this tradition. In Britain, leading Imagists like T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound promoted spatiality at the expense of the temporal imagination. As a result, "the denial of historical time soon became a common concept among the British avant-garde" (Curtis 166). Pound declares, "All ages are contemporaneous" (5). Eliot argues that the whole of European literature "has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (4). E. M. Forster puts it bluntly: "Time, all the way through, is to be our enemy" (21). Wyndham 168 Lewis, who Curtis thinks is "a typical Modernist not only in his rejection of time but also in his preference for space, has the following to say: But the Time conception of Bergson seems to us entirely to misrepresent the role of Space, and, as it were, shuffle and transpose their respective "realities." So what we seek to stimulate, and what we give thecritical outline of, is a philosophy that will be as much a spatial-philosophy as Bergson's is a time-philosophy. (427-28) For Lewis, space has more reality than time, and the timeless mind, "is more at home . . . with Space" (428). Perhaps through a misreading of Bergson, Curtis believes, modernists came to see time as implying "determinism, evolution, social progress, and the like, in short, all things against which they were rebelling" (165). "If time represented the old world," Curtis continues, "space represented the new; they proclaimed themselves proponents of space and structure, not time and sequence" (165). It was in this historical context that Joseph Frank's seminal article, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" (1945), put forward an enormously influential theory to account for modernist work. Through a concrete analysis of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Wasteland, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Frank argues that modern literature is characterized by "spatial form," which, "in its simplest sense designates the techniques by which novelists subvert the chronological sequence inherent in narrative" (Smitten 13). Traditionally, literature as a verbal art is considered temporal in nature; only the plastic arts 169 are thought to be based on the spatial principle.^® Frank discovers that this is no longer true in modern literature. He argues that Proust had learned that to "experience the passage of time ... it was necessary to rise above it and to grasp both past and present simultaneously in a moment of what he called 'pure time’" (26). He continues: But "pure time," obviously, is not time at all— it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space. And, by the discontinuous presentation of character Proust forces the reader to juxtapose disparate images spatially, in a moment of time, so that the experience of time's passage is communicated directly to his sensibility. (26-27) Using Eliot's Wasteland as an example, Frank demonstrates that the lack of explicit transitions and logical connections in modern poetry forces "the reader to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" (15). In other words, modern poetry forces the reader "to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time" (12). Similar techniques are used by Joyce in Ulvsses so as to "give the reader a picture of Dublin seen as a whole— to recreate the sights and sounds, the people and places, of a typical Dublin day. ..." (19). In the United States, Frank's theory of spatial form has been hailed as the first paradigm of modernist criticism, and its explicatory power is amply testified by the continued enthusiasm in applying and extending the theory.^ In Europe, independent of 170 Frank, interest in theorizing about literary spatiality has also been remarkably strong. On the Chinese side, studies in literary spatiality have been few and far between, and the hue and cry against the tyranny of time that we have heard in Western modernism are largely absent. No doubt, both phenomena have to do with certain historical circumstances and mechanisms of Chinese culture, but it would be a daunting task indeed to describe in detail the forces at play here. Therefore, I will content myself with a brief consideration of two questions. The first is the tradition of "spatial form" in Chinese literature. Although the temporal imagination in the form of official history has been dominant in China as it has been in the West, the spatial imagination has never been suppressed in China to the same extent as it has been in the West. The totalizing tendency of traditional Chinese ideologies seems weaker compared with that in the West. The few major reasons that would immediately come to mind include the following: that Chinese tradition was syncretic; non- hegemonic modes of thought such as Taoism and Buddhism were not actively excluded or suppressed by Confucianism (a Confucian gentleman could also practice Taoism and Buddhism without appearing to be dishonest or intellectually specious); that both Taoism and Buddhism contained within themselves a strong tendency of deconstruction; that there was no dominant theory of a unidirectional, teleological movement of history comparable to that found in the West. Classics such as the Dao de iina CTao Te China) 171 and the Yt iing (1 Chinp) have profoundly influenced the Chinese way of thinking. Both works may be considered spatial works par excellence. In his famous Foreword to Gary Baynes's English translation of Richard Wilhelm's German translation of the Yi iing (The Book of Changes’ )t Jung remarks: The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching [i.e., Yi chinglt seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence [also termed "synchronicity" elsewhere in the texts; see iv] seems to be the chief concern of this particular mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. (ii-iii) Jung may have overstated the case, for the Yi iing. though influential in Chinese culture, is but one tradition among an array of contending and complementing traditions. But he does reveal an v important aspect of the traditional Chinese mind, which seems weak Cas the Westerner would say) in causal thinking and yet delights in sporting itself with chance, coincidence, or synchronicity, as many vernacular tales from the Ming-Qing period indicate.^ If time is present at all in the Dao de iing. it is absorbed I into a perennial circular movement of the Tao, which is above all manifested spatially in anything and everything, rather than unfolding itself through a temporal or historical process. The Chinese "see the cosmos as a self-contained, self-generating, 172 dynamic process, with all of its parts interacting in one harmonious, organic whole" (Lin 249). This world view influenced the structure of Chinese narrative. To quote Lin Shuen-fu again: Instead of arranging events in a linear causal chain, the Chinese view them as forming one vast, interweaving, "recticular" relationship or process. Events are no longer described as causally linked: they are simply connected or juxtaposed side by side as if by coincidence. Thus the temporal sequence of the cause-and-effect relationship is instead spatialized into a dynamic pattern of juxtaposed concrete "incidents."3® (250) Lin supports the above contention through a det ailed analysis of the classical novel Ju-lin Wai-shih CAn Unofficial History of the Scholars [1803?]), challenging Dr. Hu Shi(h)ij]i^, a key figure in the literary revolution of modern China, who claimed that "The Scholar does not have a structural framework. It is entirely a series of short stories lumped together. As Lin points out, Dr. Hu's view represented the Western standpoint, i.e., what I call in this dissertation the temporal imagination, typically embodied in the 19th-century Western novel (see Lin 246-48, 252). Hu was by no means championing Westernization qua modernization all by himself; he led a whole generation of Chinese intellectuals in repudiating Chinese literary tradition and in promoting the "wholesome" and "progressive" ideas of literature from the West, particularly from the English-speaking world.^2 Ironically, while the progressive and revolutionary Chinese were eagerly embracing the West, the rebellious modernists in the West found in traditional China a treasure house of inspirations. This 173 phenomenon in which both China and the West "were shedding their own traditions while each being drawn to the discarded tradition of the other" has been dubbed "cross-inversion" fduini x i a n x i a n a T - 3 3 Pound's fascination with traditional Chinese culture and his use of classical Chinese poetry in his Imagist poetics at a time when both came under heavy fire in May Fourth China, is a good example.^ Viewed in this broad context, Shen Congwen’s spatial thought, which owed much to the native tradition, made him closer to certain modernist writers in the West than to a good many of his fellow writers in May Fourth China. That is perhaps one of the reasons why Shen always appeared ill at ease when placed in the May Fourth tradition dominated by the Western historical discourse of progress and development. Certain characteristics of the Chinese language also contribute to "spatial form." Chinese does not have tense; time is indicated by adverbials or inferred from the context. Chinese words are often not marked for any part of speech: the same word can be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and so on without changing its form. Chinese sentences could do without a verb (not ellipsis). The Chinese also use much more ellipsis than speakers of Western languages (e.g., the frequent omission of personal pronouns), making it a highly contextual language. These and many other features are fully exploited in classical poetry, and there spatial form flourishes. The Chinese genre of Huiwenshi ( circular poem), in which one could read the same line in either the usual 174 sequence or backwards and making perfect sense either way, is an extreme example. Let us take one line from a circular poem by Su Dongpo. If we read it one way, we have chao shui an lanq xue shan qing ("tide follow dark wave snow mountain tumble"), which can be translated into English as "At the heels of dark waves the tide rolls in— snow mountains tumble down"). If we read it backwards, we have aing shan xue long an shui chao ^ ("tumble mountain snow wave dark follow tide"), which may be rendered as "Avalanches of foaming waves darkly chase the tide." Though somewhat gimmicky, huiwenshi achieves pure spatiality by doing away with the conventional notion of time. Canonical poems like Meng Haoran’s ( 689-740) "Xu Jiande jiang" "Stay Overnight at the Jiande River"), Liu Zongyuan’s "Jiangxue" ("Snow River"),35 and Ma Zhiyuan’s ( 2, 1250-1324?) "Qiusi" ("Autumnal Thoughts") approximate pure landscapes, with the temporal dimension pushed way back in the consciousness of the reader. When such poems are translated into Western languages, they are given a temporal dimension absent in the original.35 Using Liu's "Snow River" as an illustration, Yip argues that the cinematic techniques, including montage, used in the poem "re-present our experience of the various dimensions of an intense moment, the full extent of this experience depending on the simultaneous presence of all the objects before the mind's eye, as if we were appreciating a Chinese landscape" (63).3^ Yip goes on to generalize from the spatial structure of Chinese classical poems: 175 Obviously, we cannot read Chinese poems with the temporal concept prevailing in the West, where the mechanical classification of time, centering on linear development, is a product of the over- intellectualized law of causation. (57) Wai-lim Yip further demonstrates convincingly that the above- mentioned qualities of classical Chinese poetry, especially landscape poetry, parallel the tendency in modern Anglo-American poetry to transcend the analytical and logical nature of the English language and to pursue the plurality of meaning.^ One cannot fail to be impressed by the remarkable similarity Yip's description of the spatial structure in Chinese poetry bears to Joseph Frank's presentation of spatial form. Frank begins his exploration of the spatial form with a quotation from Pound, "An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (11). Here one recalls Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance," the latter rendered from Li Bai's (Po) "Yujie yuan % \ I n both poems, the techniques of condensation and suggestion are realized in a brief image or scene: The first poem juxtaposes, haiku-like, the images of "faces" and "petals" without stating the ground on which this takes place, while the latter presents the court lady's futile waiting for her lover in two apparently disconnected tableaux unified however by the space of a royal boudoir both as a setting and as a place institutionally predisposed to disappointed love. Both in terms of their visual impact and the demands they make on 176 the reading and interpretation, the two poems may exemplify Frank's notion of spatial form. Thus, by imitating and adapting traditional Chinese (and to some extent Japanese) poetics, Pound, as well as many other modernists, brought Chinese (and more generally Eastern) "spatial form" into the modernist poetics of the West. Viewing the situation in historical perspective, one may argue that there is a certain convergence of spatial thought between the East and the West, which to a certain extent (yet to be determined) is causal, i.e. involving transmission and reception of influence. The notion of cross-inversion, advanced by Chen Sihe, is worth a careful examination. Let us first take a look at modern Western history. Over a period of several centuries, with the disintegration of feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism, Western powers had succeeded by the turn of the 20th century in establishing, for the first time in human history, transoceanic empires and thereby projecting Western cultural influence into all corners of the earth. A powerful, imperialist West, smug with its vast wealth and cultural superiority, confident of its positivist view of history, optimistic about the omnipotence of science, and arrogant toward all the backward nations of the world, began to meet challenges from within. Following the impact of Darwin, Marx, i Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and a host of other thinkers, a wave of modernist rebellions started to shake traditional values and modes of thought at a time when Western power and self-confidence appeared 177 to be at a peak. Questioning or rejecting the metanarrative of progress, the modernists embraced a fragmentary, plural, uncertain, subjective, or mythic world, drawing for their nourishment on revolutionary theories of psychology, society, and nature, on ancient myths, on non-Western cultures— in short, on all the hitherto unknown or marginalized or suppressed discourses. The reassertion of spatial thought in modernist literature was in tune with this general modern trend of reassessment and reshuffle of cultural values. The widely current term "avant-garde" catches only one direction of the modernist movement, which in fact is also rear guard— if one thinks of its conservative backward movement— and "lateral guard" (if such a term exists)— if one thinks of its reaching out of Western culture to other cultures for inspiration. In other words, one cannot talk about modernism only in terms of forward movement (or backward movement) within the frame of a linear conception of history, as it is still widely so conceived in literary history. Non-Western culture acted on the Western imagination from outside the sequence, however ordered, of Western history. Here the often conveniently omitted geographical factor comes into prominence. As in the case of Marx's "Asiatic mode of production," the incorporation of Eastern cultural influence in Western modernism represents a successful challenge mounted by geographical discourse to historical discourse. Faulkner's regional work, written with space as a first principle of organization and with its "conservative" or even "retrograde" views,^ can be 178 situated within the context of this general assertion of geography against history. His modernist innovations are the more easily recognizable features of this inadequately explored modernist stance. In the East, history followed a different course. China and other Oriental countries, if they escaped the fate of being reduced to the colonies of Western imperialism, nonetheless learned a painful lesson from their humiliating defeats in the hands of the Western powers. After the Opium War, the Chinese were rudely shaken awake from their dream of the Celestial Empire, and in time it dawned on the patriotic elite that, in order to survive Western aggression, the only option China had was to imitate the ways by which the West acquired its strength. The Chinese started with military modernization under the slogan of iianiia lipao ( iJLf-p] ^ "heavy armors plus powerful cannons") and then moved on to other Western-inspired modernization programs, ranging from that of industrial development to reforms in education, literature, and political structure. Eventually, most Chinese intellectuals had come to the consensus that there were inherent problems with traditional Chinese culture, although there was disagreement about the precise nature and extent of the problems and accordingly different solutions or remedies were proposed. And they argued too that, to modernize herself, China must adopt the Western view of history, characterized by an essentially linear progression toward certain more desirable or perfect ends, which can be found in 179 Christian, positivist, Darwinian, or Marxist historiography. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, which had among its leadership both Marxists like Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao and liberals like Hu Shi, was a revolt against Chinese tradition staged by intellectuals who had accepted Western theory of progress and committed themselves to modernizing China according to certain Western models. May Fourth discourse, of which literature is a vital part, is basically a discourse of progress. Catchy phrases like "the historical trend" Clishi chaoliu )> "the great tide of history" Clishi dachao and "the great wheel of history" Clishi julun all suggesting an irresistible forward movement, became emblems of this metanarrative. Although almost all major literary movements in the West were introduced to China in the early 20th century, the general conditions of Chinese society at that time determined that it was realism, supported by a positivist conception of history as linear progression, rather than modernism, which challenged and questioned it, that became the dominant trend in modern Chinese literature.^- ® Most Chinese writers of the May Fourth era and their spiritual heirs, whether they were Communists or "bourgeois" liberals, subscribed to this grand narrative imported from the West. Few writers ever went against it. Shen Congwen, however, departed from this trend by creating in his West Hunan fiction a mythic kingdom inhabited by the Miao and plain country folk, and from this space he derives a primitivism, in the form of an idealized Miao culture, to challenge the May Fourth 180 metanarrative. His regional fiction is also arguably an assertion of geography against history. Both Shen's West Hunan fiction and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha series represent an assertion of spatial thought or geographical discourse vis-a-vis the hegemonic power of history and time. I have argued above that temporal or historical discourse has always been privileged over spatial or geographical discourse both in China and the West, although the specific mechanisms by which this works differ in the two traditions. In the last analysis, the relative power of discourses Coi" genres of writing) within a hierarchically ordered system of discourses, i.e., a culture, reflects the distribution of power within that culture. One only needs to look at the struggle for power and prestige among various literary genres both in China and the West to see this.Essentially, the power relations underlying official history and regional geography are those between the power center and the subordinate regions, those between the idea and the body. Official history Ce.g., national history) is written by the power center or individuals identified with it, and the power center, though located in a specific geographical place or region, manages to transcend its geographical base to become an index or signifier of history. This semantic distortion of geographical concepts by power is patently exemplified in the curious double meaning of the word "region" and its derivative "regional." As Raymond Williams points out, because "regional" is generally taken to mean "inferior," cities such as New 181 York and London are not usually perceived as being part of a region, even though they obviously are.^ Eudora Welty complains that "regional" is a "careless term, as well as a condescending one" and "an outsider's term" (548). Obviously the outsider who is thought to have more power is not himself defined by any region; he is geographically abstract and aligns himself with history and the universal. James Cox's discussion of New York illuminates the way such semantic shift occurs. "New York," he remarks, "was at once intensely American, international, and modern ... it was the essence of naked American energy," and it was identified with "the tradition of the new" (770), a clear indication of its historical orientation. Cox goes on to argue: Far from representing a region as Boston had done, it was the very antithesis of the regional— a consuming threat against which the regional spirit would have to define itself as best it cold. The relationship of the regions to this city would have to be resistance. New York might publish them but it would not nurture them. (770) The centripetal force exerted by New York on the "regions" is the historical force working toward national integration (at the back of which is the adhesive and leveling function of capital and market and the nationalist ideology associated with it); the centrifugal force generated by regional resistance weakens and retards this impulse toward homogeneity, making uneven development and diversity a stubborn reality. The history of the American South since the Civil War has been one of unceasing interactions and clashes between the two forces. A similar situation existed in China: West Hunan 182 was under intense pressures for integration from centers of power— from the provincial capital of Changsha and the metropolises of Wuhan and Shanghai.^ In both instances, regional fiction as a geographical discourse symbolically resists the historical discourse. In Shen's case, his work deals with two kinds of pressure for integration, both the political and economic integration initiated by the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government and commercial infiltration (which tended to be right-wing), and the ideological integration represented by the largely left-leaning May Fourth discourse which resisted foreign power and their Chinese collaborators. This explains why Shen criticized both the right and the left and ended up being liked by neither. (Regional history has a duality. As regional history, it is geographically based history, hence partakes of the characteristics of geographical/regional discourse; as regional history, it is a division of the larger national history, hence shares with superordinate history a similar tendency to disregard a further subordinate spatial or geographical unit. A fuller treatment will be found below in the section on the geopolitics of regional writings.) According to the model of cross-inversion, a major modern Chinese writer and a modernist writer in the West would probably go in opposite directions in terms of their historical orientations and the attendant aesthetic implications. Shen Congwen, by diverging from the mainstream of modern Chinese literature, becomes a parallel to Faulkner. Shen's debts to Western modernism are many. For 183 instance, he experiments with the stream-of-consciousness technique in his urban fiction (e.g., "Hong" ["The Rainbow"] ). He uses symbolism extensively in his fiction. He also uses Freudian theory to support his description of sexual freedom among West Hunanese country folk. One could in fact compile a list of modern or modernist features shared by Shen Congwen and Faulkner and then build a comparative study on it. But such point-by-point comparison is less meaningful unless a general systemic approach is assumed. In cross-cultural studies, often superficial similarities turn out to have different meanings within respective systems while apparently dissimilar phenomena may perform comparable structural functions.^ In the following pages, my comparative examination of Shen Congwen and Faulkner will be carried out on the basis of their most significant similarity, namely the prominence of spatial thought which culminates in the making of vast and sophisticated geomoral landscapes. The most salient feature of Shen's and Faulkner's geomoral landscapes is the spatializing of history or time, by which history is turned into myth. I have argued above that Shen's and Faulkner's regional fiction is itself a spatial or geographical discourse that challenges the historical discourse. Within the two geomoral landscapes, (regional] history is spatialized. In Shen's fictional West Hunan, the history of the region— beginning with the ancient Chu state in the first millennium B.C.E., followed by a continual process of Han conquest and colonization and Miao resistance and 184 retreat, and ending with contemporary changes brought about by infiltration of modern (Western) culture as well as the dynamics of old forces— is spatialized on the basis of the geocultural patterns conditioned by the topography of West Hunan. From west to east, the Miao zone, the Han-Miao mixed zone, and the predominantly Han zone, overlaid with a further distinction between city and countryside, correspond to different historical periods, or stages of social development, viz., the tribal, the feudal, and modern capitalist (semicolonial). Moving through these zones the reader has an impression of traveling through history, as the engineer does in Fengzi as he journeys from the coastal city of Qingdao, once a German concession, to West Hunan, up the Yuan River system, across the Han and Han-Miao zones until he reaches the heart of Miao territory. Once arrived at the "beginning of history" in Miao country, one is in a timeless, mythic realm governed by God. Shen Congwen's "primitivism" is thus anchored in myth, outside history; the insertion of myth into history has the effect of reinterpreting history, setting it in creative tension with its mythic other, if not totally nullifying history. Myth does not intervene in history necessarily in a forward or backward direction— in other words, linearly— as many people incline to believe (see Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster's definition of primitivism in Chapter I). In the fictional region of West Hunan, it is spatially present, juxtaposed with history and its various forms of stratification. Although it may have a spiritual priority over other zones in 185 history, it makes no attempt to reduce them but instead allows them to enter into a dialogic interaction which is practically denied in real life. Hence the peculiar effect of Shen's West Hunan fiction as a whole: a scrupulous realism framed by an unmistakable mythic ethos. To emphasize the mythic character of Shen's spatialized regional history in his fiction is not to deny Shen's recognition of inexorable historical changes. The timeless existence in Miao country is sometimes threatened by descriptions of the historical pressures on the Miao and even of corruption of Miao life. In the Han zone, the changes are taken even more level-headedly. Shen writes in The Stockade, a novel set in Wangcun, one of his evil cities: "The beautiful 'past' is but a tale, a legend. The world has moved ahead never to return" (7: 183). One may argue that the juxtaposition of myth and history in Shen's West Hunan fiction seems to suggest Shen's ambivalence as he stands between the mythic, spiritually superior past represented by the "backward area" and the morally degenerate, "progressive" present that the more developed area stands for. Outside fiction, Shen also wavered between the May Fourth ideology of progress and its narrow, unidirectional, linear conception of history. He shared with it denunciations of the pernicious practices of feudalism, and he even criticized West Hunanese for resisting progress (see West Hunan 9: 333, for instance). On the other hand, he deplored the corruptive influence of progress on the morally innocent West Hunanese (see his Preface 186 to Long River 7: 2-8). No matter how his admirers try to make him out to be a "May Fourth" writer,4^ Shen will always be ill at ease in others' shoes. In fact, to his fellow writers, he more often than not appeared to be a rear guard, an apologist for the "backward." Shen was not cowered; he defended his "backwardness" by appealing to Zhuangzi: Two thousand years ago, Zhuang Zhou appeared to be lagging behind so many of his contemporaries. Now those eloquent counselors and deadly generals are stone-dead, every one of them. Only one ill- dressed, freewheeling, ordinary-looking man in his prime years remains standing before us, that outmoded man whose "Autumn Flood" and "Horsehoofs" you and I read. Cl®' 60-61) Shen's broad view of history deconstructs a narrow conception of what constitutes progress. Again, the timeless, mythic other of history is invoked to balance a heedless, headlong rush toward "future." Shen's spatialized regional history allows him to encompass the diverse traditions that influenced him, including the May Fourth ideology, without settling for a neat synthesis. (More on the heterogeneous nature of geomoral landscapes below.) Faulkner spatializes the history of fictional Yoknapatawpha County— which may be taken as an epitome of American Southern history— somewhat differently. In his geomoral landscape the association of space with particular historical periods and their characteristic ways of life is less apparent than in Shen's. Still, with due allowance for the reusability of fictional space on a map, a given space may be prominently linked with a certain work or works 187 featuring one, sometimes several, ways of life representing certain historical periods. Thus "Issetibbeha's [realm]" north of the Tallahatchie River on top of the map represents the primordial past of the land on which Yoknapatawpha County is to be created. The northwestern sector of the county where the Indian stories are set generally corresponds to the Indian era immediately preceding the founding of the county, with the big woods symbolizing both the primeval Indian existence and its destruction as a result of the encroachment of white colonial culture. The antebellum white history which officially begins with the founding of Jefferson is represented by the family histories of big plantation owners such as Sutpen, MaCaslin, Grenier, Sartoris, located in three corners of the county (except the southwestern, which remains blank) and the central north. Compson's holdings in central county is to be swallowed up by an expanding Jefferson as the history of the family extends into the modern period. The southeastern part of Yoknapatawpha, emerging on the ruins of old Grenier's plantation, is home to white yeomen farmers and destitute peasants known as "white trash." Among other things, by supplying to modern Yoknapatawpha a viciously energetic Snopesism, this area becomes a transition between traditional rural society and modern commercial society. Jefferson certainly has a history of its own; its historical position is both relative to other areas of Yoknapatawpha and absolute in terms of county history as a whole. For instance, relative to the northwest of the Indian "plantation," Sutpen's 188 Hundred, and the big woods of Sam Fathers and Ike, it represents white civilization and law and order (symbolized by the courthouse and the jail). To the aspiring country folk in the southeastern sector of the county, Jefferson is a modern city. In terms of fictive county history, it is a converging point for various historical eras and ways of life, the now and the future, depending on one's standpoint in the fictional world. The roads that meet at Jefferson link the divers historical stratifications with their consequences, represented by the county seat. When Ike travels from his family estate in the northeastern sector of the county or the big woods in northwest county to an existence in Jefferson of disengagement and cynicism ironically inspired by his idealism, or when Flem journeys from Old Frenchman Place to move up the social ladder in Jefferson, fired by the passion to make it by hook or by crook, both are searching in the city for a desirable future for themselves. For Ike it is to unravel history or stay out of its dangerous play, whereas for Flem it is to make history, to make the fortune of one self-made man embody the very spirit of modern Jefferson, to make his personal history a part of regional history. Another striking example of spatial movement translated into time travel is found in Quentin's trip from Jefferson to the Sutpen's in 1910. Accompanied by Rosa, who is more of a relic from the past than anything else, Quentin goes there to see Henry, a wanted criminal from the past come home to die. What Quentin sees is nothing short of the tragic consequences of the entire family 189 history of the Sutpens, with its network of causal chains shrouded in mystery, which Quentin tries to fathom, with the help of others, by retracing history. That Quentin lives in modern Jefferson (of which his education at Harvard is an extension) but has his heart in Sutpen's Hundred, i.e., in the past of the South, produces an unbearable temporal dislocation in him, which he can only wishfully transcend by stopping his watch (in The Sound and the Furv'). The pressure for the spatialization of Yoknapatawpha history partly comes from the fact that Faulkner's fictive maps collapse four historical periods— the Indian era, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the modern times— in one cartographic representation. As I have discussed in the previous chapter, Faulkner's idiosyncratic practice violates the convention of reference maps and his maps can be more fruitfully read as thematic maps. In other words, within each of the four worlds, one may have sufficient temporal consistency to use the maps as reference maps, whereas in their final conflated form, the maps lose much of meaningful historical orientation and consequently give prominence to the moral visions and ways of being derived from history but somewhat transcending it. In the realization of the four historical worlds, the reader witnesses a sophisticated literary realism at work, while from the temporal disruption resulting from a successful strategy of spatialization, the reader experiences the whole of Yoknapatawpha fiction as myth. 190 Within the general framework of spatialized history, Shen's and Faulkner's geomoral landscapes are enriched by an abundance of spatial structures and extensive uses of spatial form. Shen's spatial awareness is manifested, among other things, in his choice of titles for his work. As one critic points out, Shen is fond of using space for titles of his works, such as The Border Town. The Long River, "Vegetable Garden” ("caiyuan" |j[ gj )} "The Inn" ("Llidian" ), "On a Mountain Path" ("Zai shandao zhong" % ^ xf ), "A Rural Town" C'Xiangcheng" ^ */&*), and "In Another Land" C'Zai bie yige guodu li" $‘ 1 " Si 5L ) CXiang 45). Considering the importance of titles to the meaning of literary works, Shen's heavy use of spatial titles is significant.This technique is also extended to subheadings within larger works as a structuring principle for such works. Shen's West Hunan stories are distinguished by a general tendency to paint landscapes or environments, to which his characters sometimes appear to be subordinate. Shen's longer works, The Border Town and The Long River, devote so much textual space to geographical space that they impress the reader more as stories of West Hunan towns and country than as stories of their heroes and heroines, as their titles suggest. The spatial descriptions slow down the progress of the plot, weakening the temporal dimension of the work. As a matter of fact, in both works, the plot itself is relatively simple and undramatic. One may argue that in a sense, the action of the works I becomes an excuse for presenting a broad landscape, both natural and j i i 191 cultural. No wonder one of the epithets Shen is frequently given is "a painter of the landscape and mores of West Hunan" (xianaxi fenptu renaing hua 3 4 0 «j).4? In terms of plot, the episodic structure of many of Shen's work makes him closer to the native tradition of fiction, such as Rulin waishi. than to the more tightly knit, temporally streamlined fiction developed under Western influence in the early 20th century, the kind of work Dr. Hu Shi would champion against traditional Chinese works often characterized by allegedly "loose" structures (i.e., more spatial than temporal).48 Faulkner's spatial form occurs in a different context; it derives its energy and inspiration from the Western modernist movement. Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form has been frequently applied to Faulkner's work.According to Eric Rabkin, Faulkner's narratives are "the ones best described as spatial" (see Smitten 26- 27). Rabkin extends Frank's theory by introducing the term "paratactic plot" in which "one event is juxtaposed to another without connections being drawn" (97). By this criterion, The Sound and the Furv with its four separate parts, or four retellings of the essentially same story, has a paratactic plot. Since none of the first three sections of the novel presents an adequately comprehensible version of the story, the reader is forced "to suspend judgments . . . until all three come together as a single synchronic structure: this structure is paratactically juxtaposed to the fourth section to show the contrast of successful womanly 192 action, but a success inaccessible to the white man" (Rabkin 98). Absalom. Absalom! is also a typical work of spatial form. In this novel, four major narrators set to uncover the truth about Sutpen and his family, each limited by a lack of access to information, burdens of emotional problems, personal biases, or any combination of them. The plot line is fragmented, time sequence disorderly, and, as "the narration shuttles to and fro, joining together events from all stages of the story," the reader has to save piecemeal interpretation and detection and wait for the very end of the novel, which "coincides with a thematic thrust that somehow illuminates all the preceding action and lends it meaning" (Vidan 143-44). In other words, the reader has to put every bit of information in a narrative jigsaw game and hold all pieces simultaneously in his or her mind's eye in order to understand the work. One may also find spatial form in novels made from short stories, such as The linvanquished and £q Down. Moses. whose status as novels or story cycles has been a subject of contention. In such works, episodic structure or contrapuntal techniques create a fragmented, paratactic effect when one tries to take the work as a whole. Comparing the spatial form of Shen's and Faulkner's work, one may say that Shen's "spatial form" springs mainly from a spatial tradition in which time is a secondary or inconsequential consideration (as in the gazetteer and landscape poetry), whereas Faulkner's is characterized by a struggle with time and a desire to tame tyrannical time so as to allow otherwise suppressed possibilities to be played out. 193 The idea of spatial form could conceivably be extended to the entirety of Shen's and Faulkner's regional fiction, but by so doing we would probably stretch the semantics of the term too far away from what Frank originally intended it. I would rather discuss the inter-work relations within Shen’s and Faulkner's regional fiction as yet another feature of their geomoral landscapes. The readiness with which Faulkner created novels out of previously published short stories or linked novels into a trilogy (i.e., the Snopes series, comprising The HamletT The Town, and The Mansion') or other groupings (e.g., The Sound and the Furv and Absalom. Absalom!, both of which have Quentin as a major character) suggests the flexibility of the geomoral landscapes as a fictional macroconstruct. The moral and artistic integrity (not in a shallow sense of unity or uniformity) of the geomoral landscapes already create a pre-given field of meaning, and any text inserted into it acquires a narrative force or effect which the text itself does not possess in isolation. I am lees interested in the debate about whether works like The Unvanquished are novels or story cycles. I tend to see them as proof that all works represented on the geomoral landscapes are by nature interrelated to a greater or lesser degree. It is possible, in fact, to collect all the Quentin stories together in one volume, and the critics would probably set about discovering paratactic or contrapuntal relations among its various parts. This would be totally legitimate. But when one sees Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction as constituting one vast geomoral landscape, one can 194 c discover supra-work connection and meaning without having to resort to any existing formal structural frame. If necessary, one creates it. As a matter of fact, one fruitful approach to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga is to see it as a system of stories both horizontally and vertically ordered. The formal textual boundaries in the form of published works make it easier for us to approach this gigantic complex of works but should not limit our freedom of action. One thinks of the freedom of moving about in a fictional universe represented by Faulkner's fictive map where textual boundaries are always traversable. The flexibility of geomoral landscapes can also be interpreted as its expansiveness. Shen's fictional West Hunan, for instance, is expansive enough to accommodate any number of stories Shen— or any writer, for that matter— cares to write. First, fictional spaces are reusable both within the same temporal-spatial unit and the same spatial unit extended through different temporal divisions. One thinks here of Fenghuang as a city warmed by the narrator's childhood memories (same temporal-spatial unit) and Miao territory as both mythic realm and historical realm (same spatial unit varied by temporal differences). Second, the possible fictionally usable spaces within a geomoral landscape are numerous. Because Shen's fictional West Hunan's close ties to the real geography of West Hunan, one could always wonder, while looking at the map, whether Shen has written about a certain place or at least mentioned it. I i This is not such an unreasonable curiosity, given the fact that Shen 195 knew the whole region so intimately and that Shen's work can be regarded as a literary gazetteer in the venerable fangzhi Cgazetteer) tradition. Shen himself at one point announced a plan to write a series of ten cities in the region, with a Dickensian master title . S . h f Cheng ji fA Tale of Ten Cities Chadong, featured in The Border Town, and Wangcun, featured in the unfinished The Stockadef are to be among the ten cities. One has the impression that the expansiveness of Shen’s fictional geomoral landscape comes mainly from its extension while Faulkner’s owes it more to an intensive use of fictional spaces. The geomoral landscapes created by Shen and Faulkner are characterized by heterogeneity. For instance, it is inaccurate, to say the least, to call Shen's fictional West Hunan simply a "utopia," a country inhabited by noble savages who live by instinct and in harmony with nature, or an epitome of "semifeudal, semicolonial" China racked by oppression and exploitation.^® West Hunan as a geomoral landscape encompasses all of the above but cannot be reduced to any single formulation or judgment. Shen's fictional West Hunan, taken as one spatial construct, is a combination of a number of subordinate geomoral spaces, which, roughly speaking, are created on the basis of three geocultural zones, viz., the Miao, the Han-Miao, and the Han zones, complicated by a further distinction between the city and the country. Each of these geomoral spaces evinces a certain dominant moral stance, I emotional bias, and thematic concern, often matched by a particular 196 stylistic register as well. Viewed as distinctive spheres of meanings, these geomoral spaces assign works set in them a sort of pre-given meaning which one cannot find in the work in isolation— a situation we also witness in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. In other words, these geomoral spaces inform individual texts and contextualize them, although they are also made possible by the individual texts. It must be pointed out that geomoral contexts are fictional constructs. They may draw upon the social, cultural, and historical context of the "real," i.e., nonfictional, world, but they are essentially products of the imagination. It is also worth emphasizing that the said geomoral spaces are not rigid grids by which one can categorize Shen's works mechanically. We must allow both for transitional zones and pockets that belong more closely with another zone than the immediately surrounding one. In fact, it is the (potential) insertion of work into a somewhat incompatible geomoral space that creates new tension in the geomoral landscape as a whole and thus calls for a certain local adjustment or even overall reconfiguration. All in all, the basic pattern of Shen's geomoral landscape as I have established in Chapter II will stand even if one introduces a work like After Snow (see Note 50). Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is also a complex geomoral landscape. The projection of four historical periods or worlds onto essentially one fictive map, in other words, the spatialization of various historical stratifications in a single cartographic figure, creates 1 i i one formal plane on which heterogeneous elements, while retaining 197 certain references to their worlds of origin, can enter into dialogues and interactions with one another. As a result, Yoknapatawpha as a fictional universe becomes half mythic and half mimetic. The component spaces of Yoknapatawpha, inhabited or traversed by characters with different moral orientations and ideologies and marked with various moods and emotional timbres, become, in Foucault's words, "heterotopic" places, namely, a single place which contains "several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible" (25).*^ For example, the forest in northwest Yoknapatawpha is at once a sacred space where the Indian spirit is shrined, a hunting ground where white males can prove their manhood in the chivalric tradition, a place where Ike is initiated into the spirit of the wilderness, and a space destined to be destroyed by white culture and subjected to intensive economic exploitation, with all the social structure it entails. On the fictive map, the forest gains its meaning by reference to other geomoral spaces. To the north of the forest is Issetibbeha's primordial Indian world (the forest in fact merges into it); to the east, the McCaslin estate with its unspeakable ancestral sins and the benign aristocratic practices of its subsequent owners; to the west, Sutpen's Hundred with its legendary founder’s ambition for a dynastic plantation, his ruthless willpower and awesome energies, and his crimes against humanity; to the southeast, Sartoris, a symbol of aristocratic idealism with its moments of heroism and noble-mindedness mixed with its sordid, relentless action. 198 Encapsulating Yoknapatawpha history, Jefferson, lying to the southeast of the forest, opposes the latter with another heterotopic space containing something of all the above-named geomoral spaces. It is here that white administration is founded on Indian soil; that Compson acquires one square mile of good land from the Chickasaws with a horse and starts one of the leading families in the county; that culture turns wilderness into a cityscape; that Ike retires, after the destruction of the forest, to the legacy of Sam Fathers, the moral debts of old Carothers McCaslin, and a life of romantic rebellion against the establishment ironically vitiated by personal ineptitude, ambivalence, and disengagement. The forest is filled with many voices and their echoes. By using it as a home base for his primitivism, Faulkner's voice is also tinged with various connotations of this ensemble of voices. That he finds himself in a position resembling Ike's therefore is quite comprehensible. While sharing features such as the use of spatialized history and spatial form, expansiveness, and heterogeneity, Shen's and Faulkner's geomoral landscapes differ in several important ways. For example, Shen's fictional West Hunan covers a much larger area than Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha,^ but is less intensively covered; in other words, Shen's fictional geography is more expansive than Faulkner’s but is less densely populated. Apart from the fact that CO Shen's regional corpus seems somewhat smaller than Faulkner's, this is largely due to the bigger space Shen had at his disposal. This difference probably contributes to the impression that Shen's 199 fictional West Hunan resembles a scroll of landscape painting or fengshuhua whereas Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha more resembles a theater house where one play after another is staged within a relatively compact space. A more significant difference has to do with the issue of mimesis or fictionality, i.e., how closely the author, and the reader, identifies the fictional world with the real world, or to put it differently, how far the author fictionalizes the regional materials at his disposal. The geography of Shen's fictional West Hunan is deceptively similar to real West Hunan. Shen uses real place names extensively and sometimes refrains from naming a place instead of conferring on it a fictitious name. The impression created by such practices, reinforced by his nonfiction works like Xiang xing san^i ( 5$ ^6 Discursive Notes on a Trip Through H,um rQ, Xigngxj fWest Hunan' ) , and Conawen zizhuan CConawen's Autobiography*} t effectively conceals the fictionality of his regional fiction or weakens it in the reader's eyes.^4 On the other hand, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is entirely fictive, so much so that its ties to the real geography of Lafayette County are often overlooked. Comparing the two fictional worlds, one has the impression that Shen's fictional West Hunan encourages one to identify it with real West Hunan, whereas Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha encourages one to separate it from Lafayette County. But why? Perhaps the two authors' respective physical and psychological > distance from the regional materials they worked on played a 200 decisive role here. Shen left West Hunan at the age of 19 and, except for a few short visits back home, he was to live as an "internal expatriate" in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai until his death at the age of 86. Paradoxically, while the lack of chance for personal growth and resentment at the social turmoil he saw in West Hunan motivated him to "run away" from the region in the first place, his nostalgia for West Hunan was intensified by his long absence from it. As a struggling writer in the inhospitable urban world, Shen had to fall back, for emotional support and moral anchor, on his memories of a pleasant and innocent childhood as well as the uncorrupted country folk he knew well. This mechanism of psychological compensation in time evolved into a reasoned stand: Shen not only defended the people and culture of a backward, peripheral region but held it up as a moral example for the rest of the country to emulate. He became a self-appointed spokesman of West Hunan. To bridge the gap that separated him from his native region, he had all the reasons to bring it close by making it seeming authentic. Faulkner, on the other hand, spent most of his life in Oxford, Lafayette, Mississippi, except for trips and short residences elsewhere. His problem was different from Shen's. To discourage close identification with his real world would allow him to write freely; to distance himself from his work by imposing on it an unmistakably fictional frame created for him the necessary imaginary space. As a Western man, an American, writing in times of 201 turbulence and rebellions— one thinks of the Great War, the Roaring '20s, the Great Depression, then the Second World War, and through these years the upsurge of modernism in literature and art, followed by the swing to the left in the '30s; in addition to these, the inexorable process of social change in the South as a result of its defeat and the rise of Northern influence, and the backlash it provoked as Twelve Southerners took a stand— Faulkner too looked to his region for some kind of spiritual anchorage. Hence a strong mimetic desire disguised in a fictional structure. Underlying both Shen's and Faulkner's attitudes toward their native region is the existential ontology expounded by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Buber argues that human existence involves "a primal setting at a distance" from the world Cobjectification) in order to "enter into relations" with it. Without the initial ontological alienation, human consciousness would be impossible.®® On the other hand, without the will to relate, alienation would produce anxiety and meaninglessness.®® Regional writers like Shen and Faulkner seem to amplify such existential dilemma. They need to distance themselves from their regions, as well as distancing the regions from the nations of which the regions are a part, before they can relate to them in a fully conscious and meaningful way. In other words, one needs to be an exile, enforced, self-imposed, or simply imagined, from one's region in the first place in order to return to it with a love born of deprivation, if not desperation, with a clear eye for its 202 potentials, its limitations, its inalienable value as one’s own region, one's very roots, a sort of magnified self. In this sense, all bona fide regional fiction takes on a flavor of the author's autobiography. In terms of existential or ontological spatiality, Shen and Faulkner arrived at a similar position with regard to their native regions by apparently opposite routes. An important spatial or geographical approach to Shen's and Faulkner's regional fiction— indeed, to regional literature in general— is to place it in a wide context of geopolitics or politics of regional cultures within a complex national tradition. In the following pages, keeping within the scope of this dissertation, I will delineate an outline by which this topic can begin to be addressed, so as to shed further light on Shen's and Faulkner's regional work. That literature has a political dimension, which may assume forms ranging from explicit propaganda to more subtle political messages to a mere potential to be enlisted in political causes, is not news. I propose that literature also has a geopolitical dimension, by which I mean that literary works individually or collectively can serve the political purposes of a geographical region or has a potential to be so used. Of the two terms, politics and geopolitics of literature, the former appears to include the latter logically. However, without an explicit conceptualizing and use of the latter term, the difference between the two is often 203 obscured. The political dimension of literature not specifically oriented geographically deals with such issues as they are related to social classes, ethnic groups or races, ideologies, women and other sections of the population, as well as to legal, economic, or other aspects of society. The geopolitical dimension of literature has to do with such issues as literary nationalism and literary regionalism of various scales and orientations; in each case, a political agenda, explicitly or implicitly based on the interests of a geographical region, is present. Let us first take a brief look at American literary nationalism, which is an aspect of American nationalism. In U.S. history, as elsewhere in the world, nationalism is closely bound with the nation-building process. American literary nationalism, while putting itself at the service of the cause of independence during the Revolution, was essentially concerned with the making of a distinctive national literature, with achieving literary independence from England, after the U.S. had already gained political independence. It was felt that without a separate national literature embodying a unique American spirit, the newly acquired American identity could not be consolidated and completed. From the beginning, however, American literary nationalism was compromised by the lack of a native language different from that of England. This fact led some to argue that "Americans could expect no distinctive literature" (Hedges 189). Because of this handicap, American literary nationalism was forced early on to seek 204 "Americanness" in other quarters, such as American subject matters, themes, or style, which were all based on a simple but crucial fact that America as a geographical entity plays a major role in making American writing uniquely American. In line with the revolutionary discourse in general, St. John de Crevecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) celebrates the American new man who enjoyed freedom and prosperity, once freed from "servile dependence, penury and useless labor" under the British monarchy. Furthermore, Crevecoeur stresses the need to write about what the writer knows intimately and use the language of ordinary speech, making the letters not elegant but "smell of the woods," and by so doing he puts forward what Hedge calls "the kernel of a theory of American style" (187-88). Significantly, the link between American soil and American style gave the "kernel" a chance to strike roots, sprout, and blossom instead of floating around as a pure idea. During the same period, the question of creating an authentically American literary landscape was also raised. In the November 1815 issue of The North American ReviewT the magazine's editor complains that scenic descriptions in American poems owed more to "the study of classical poets" than to familiarity with the native landscapes (Hedge 189). At issue here was as much a matter of originality, as Hedge sees it, as a need to construct America's own distinctive literary landscapes. After the new nation's political decolonization, a literary decolonization— both of the mind and of I the land as it was perceived— was on the agenda. In short, American j 205 literary nationalism owed its vitality to America as a sovereign geographical entity and to a ceaseless pursuit of nativity. It is hardly surprising that the "history of American literature is now commonly conceived as an evolution toward indigenousness" (Hedge 190). The American South pursued its sectionalism and its distinctive literary identity in a similar way. As in the case of American independence from Britain, there was no radical racial or linguistic basis for Southern secession from the Union. The South made its case on the ground of its unique culture and ideology established in a separate geographical area which was the South. The divergent courses of evolution of the two sections can be traced to their different beginnings. While Massachusetts, the leading New England colony, was peopled by Pilgrim Fathers through resistance to Stuart tyranny, Virginia, the foremost early settlement in the South, was colonized by those whom Jefferson in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) traced to the heroic Saxon migrants and conquerors (see Hedge 193). In his famous essay "Reconstructed But Unregenerate" (1930), John Crowe Ransom holds that the peculiar tradition of the South was determined by those who "came out of Europe most convinced of the virtue of establishment" while in other parts of the U.S. the dominant strains "came out of Europe feeling rebellious toward all establishments" (12). Ransom goes on to link the South with European conservatism and agrarianism marked by a respect for nature and an emphasis on human 206 relationship, and the North with the "Great Progressive Principle" and industrialism dominated by a never-ending pursuit of profit at the expense of human dignity and happiness.-^ Allen Tate more specifically relates the South to the pre-Revolution France of the 18th century, with its "amiability and consideration of manners," its Code of Honor, and its patriarchal family on the land ("Profession" 520-21).^ In time a distinctive literary regionalism grew alongside the evolving Southern identity as a whole. By 1840 the increasing divergence of economic, political, and social conditions [between the North and the South] had created a specifically Southern literature reflecting the distinctive concerns and attitudes that were to survive as constituting elements of Southern literature in later eras. (Werner 81) This divergence, sparked by slavery and secession, later erupted into a bloody war between the two sections in the 1860s, with far- reaching consequences for the South. Four years of war efforts reinforced the evolving Southern identity and left for posterity a legacy of guilt and humiliation mixed with memories of heroic moments and nostalgia for a romanticized Old South. The defeat of the South did not end Southern identity, as many predicted or were worried. While the Northern victory and its subsequent domination did put an end to the South's aspiration for a separate political identity, it also had the effect of directing the Southern energy to other ways of asserting and defining Southern identity. The spectacular upsurge in literary and cultural activities between 1920 and 1950 known as the Southern Renascence, of which Faulkner's work 207 is one of the crowning achievements, could be regarded as a sublimation of or substitution for the Southern desire for a distinctive identity once violently expressed and thwarted in the fire and blood of the battlefield.5^ The Southern Renascence not only grew and blossomed on the rich soil of the Southern tradition, but also actively recreated and greatly enriched it. In order to make a case for a distinctive Southern identity, many Southerners explored and theorized about Southern culture, contrasting it with the dominant American culture to show its difference and even superiority. In their Introduction to I'll Take Mv Stand, the Twelve Southerners, headed by Ransom, oppose a Southern way of life to "the American or prevailing way of life," i.e., "Agrarian versus Industrial" (ix). While arguing for the South's right to live its own way of life in the face of the encroaching American way of life, which they equate with the evil of capitalism, they actually make a case for the moral superiority of the South. The Southern historian C. Vann Woodward compared the American national character with that of the South, shaped by their respective experiences, and concluded that, whereas "America" was characterized by abundance, success, moral innocence or complacency, abstraction, rootlessness, and a future-oriented way of life, the South was marked by poverty, defeat and frustration, guilt from knowledge of evil, fear of abstraction, and an attachment to place and community C556-59). Woodward believes that from a world perspective, the American experience was unique but the Southern 208 experience is truly universal (560). He goes on to suggest that "[i]n their unique experience as Americans the Southerners should not only be able to find the basis for continuity of their heritage but also make contributions that balance and complement the experience of the rest of the nation" (555). According to the Southern apologists, the South may be a politically subject, economically backward region, but its culture, purged of the evil of slavery, is morally superior to the rest of the nation. In terms of the geopolitics of culture, the rivalry between the South and the rest of the Union was not settled once for all on the battlefield. And in this rivalry, literature has always played an innocuous but important role. American literature, as is true of any complex literary tradition, has an inbuilt geopolitical dynamics, sometimes inadequately phrased as "regionalism." To comprehend American literary history in its full complexity and richness, one not only needs a diachronic perspective but must trace its spatial dimension through the shifting relations among its various geographically based component parts. Thomas Daniel Young approaches this issue by noting a puzzling literary phenomenon: "For some reason that no one seems to understand completely, at specific periods in the nation's history many of the most significant literary figures seem to have resided in the same geographic region" (261). Young then traces American literature's shifting center of gravitation over the past two centuries. From 1790 to 1830, New York (with Washington Irving, 209 James Fenimore Cooper, James Kirke Paulding, and William Cullen Briant) was the literary capital of the United States. From 1830 to 1860, Boston took over, with such major writers clustering around it as James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Concord), and Herman Melville (Pittsfield, Massachusetts). From 1860 to 1900, no discernible center emerged. Then from 1912 on, Chicago became important through the congregation of writers like Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and many others associated with Poetry magazine. From 1920 to 1950s, the center shifted to the South, which coincided with the Southern Renascence, with its dazzling array of talented writers, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Taylor, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, and a host of other names. The South, still economically and politically poor, found itself the richest region in the United States literarily. Faulkner's rising critical reputation, multiply and complexly determined as it was, had done much to elevate the standing of Southern literature within American literature as a whole. Shen Congwen's regional fiction can be similarly placed in the history of the geopolitics of regional traditions in China. That Chinese culture has always been divided into subcultures based on geographical regions, often involving linguistic or even (sub- )ethnic differences as well, is apparent to anybody who is willing 210 to put aside the notion of a "monolithic" Chinese culture.®® The dawn of Chinese civilization has traditionally been traced to the Yellow River valley of the third millennium BCE, marked by the mythic (some would say semi-mythic) reign of the Yellow Emperor. Recent archeological work and research have challenged this picture of monogenesis of Chinese civilization with a theory of polygenesis. More and more evidence points to the possibility that early civilizations in the Changjiang (Yangtze) River drainage basin are the oldest in what is today’s China, predating the civilization of the Yellow River valley by several millennia.The realms of "Southern barbarians" turn out to have been a predecessor of and a possible source of influence on the culture of Zhongvuan 0^ (literally "Central Plains," i.e., the core area of the early Chinese world in the Yellow River valley). Although China has become a unified country in the course of history, the modern provinces based on the domains of ancient kingdoms (especially those of the Warring States period) still retain clear cultural differences from each other. It is customary today to refer to a province in a shortened form by its corresponding ancient state. Regional affiliation, since it often involves quite radical differences in language (even to the degree of mutual incomprehensibility), customs, and sensibilities, usually occupies a more prominent position in the Chinese mind than in the American mind (with the possible exception of the South). However, by far the greatest regional difference exists between the North and the 211 South of China, the origins of which may be traced to the ancient distinction between Zhonavuan and the "Southern Barbarians." The most important of the "barbarian" state in the South was the Kingdom of Chu (Hth century?-223 BCE). Chu was essentially a non-Chinese state, although part of its ruling family may have originated in Zhonpvuan.^ At the apex of its power, its territory extended from the east and southeast coast of China all the way to Yunnan, almost equal in size to the whole of the Chinese world under the Zhou dynasty. Chu led East Asia in its technology of bronze casting, weaponry, embroidery, lacquerware, silk products, painting, architecture, music, and the art of coinage. The philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi, later known as Taoism, and the lyrics of Chu represented by Qu Yuan and Song Yu, collectively known as Chuci CThe Songs of the South*), contributed two important traditions to Chinese culture as a whole.^ Chu culture reached the heyday of its glory from late 6th century to early third century BCE, rivaling that of contemporary Greece in the West. In 223 BCE, Chu was conquered by Chin Cfrom which "China" is derived) and incorporated into the first unified empire in Chinese history. In recent years, the increasing recognition of the achievements of Chu culture has led to moves to rewrite ancient Chinese history, hitherto dominated by the ethnocentrism of Zhonavuan which has tended to belittle the achievements of Chu culture. Now one can say that "the traditional treatment of the Chinese states in Zhonavuan as representing the mainstream of ancient Chinese history is unfair" (Mei). 212 After Chu's entry and absorption into the Chinese world, the Shiiing (a collection of some three hundred poems composed in Zhongvuan mainly in the first millennium BCE and edited and canonized by Confucius) and the Chuci became the dual fountainhead of the Chinese literary tradition.®^- Yet the basic cultural differences between Zhonavuan and Chu have survived in the two bodies of work. The Shijina as part of the Confucian canon, which is concerned above all with ethics and human relations, is considered a primary example of realist work in Chinese literature, while the Chuci. allied with Taoism in its shamanist roots, becomes an enduring source of inspiration for the romantic and fantastic imagination. The ancient geopolitics of Chinese culture made Confucianism and the $hijing from Zhongyuan the mainstream of Chinese culture, and Taoism and the Chuci from the conquered "semibarbarian" state of Chu a secondary tradition. Some modern Chinese believe that this historical outcome has done the Chinese imagination a disservice. Han Shaogong, a vibrant contemporary West Hunanese writer, admires the romantic, transcendental, and artistic Chu culture and deplores the prosaic rationalism and monolithicness of Zhonavuan culture.®'* Han attributes his avant-garde work portraying dreamy, mythic, and magic-realist worlds to inspirations from Chu culture.®® In modern times, the legacy of Chu culture can be found not only in the classics of Taoist thinkers and the Chuci. but also in the historical Chu realm in South China, especially in West Hunan. 213 Whether the state of Chu was founded by the Miao is still under debate, but the kingdom definitely included Miao territory. In his work Shen Congwen notes many affinities between the folklore of West Hunanese Miao and ancient Chu culture. In his celebrated travelogue West Hunan, he superimposes the historical cultural landscape of Chu on the modern landscape of West Hunan and portrays West Hunan as a cultural heir to Chu culture. Shen traces the modern thanksgiving ritual dedicated to the Nuo gods to ceremonious offerings to gods described in the Chuci T and the ending particles fxie and hehexie in verses sung in chorus by country folk to the ending xi ^ in Chuci Csee "Zhao hun"). He sees in the embarkation ceremony and boating songs of West Hunanese sailors echoes of ancient Chu customs. As he travels along the Yuan River, he is repeatedly reminded of the melancholy poet Qu Yuan sailing up the river singing of the gods and spirits of nature. Even when no specific reference is made to Chu culture, Shen writes of prehistoric "hanging coffins" on cliffs, knight-errantry, witchcraft, voodooism, pantheistic worship, love affairs between gods and humans— in short, of "a mixture of savagery and mystery" that pervades the land (9: 340). "West Hunan owes its mystery to its particular ethnicity," Shen concludes, "The imagination of the ancient Chu people must have been nurtured on this land to give birth to such touching poetry. We need to keep this environment if we are to preserve this imagination [and poetry]" C9: 363). In West Hunan Shen's double mission to "correct common misconceptions of his home region and to restore the 214 legacy and charm of the decaying Chu culture" CD. Wang 21) finally produces a landscape both realistic and mythic. For Shen Congwen, identifying West Hunan as a modern heir to Chu culture and claiming himself to be a descendant of the Chu people are not merely poetic conceits. While they do add exotic flavors to his work and his personality, they serve, more crucially, the strategic goals of affirming the lost cause of Chu and placing the losing cause of West Hunan in historical perspective so as to save it before it is too late. In the Preface to West Hunan. Shen writes about how the ancient barbarians of Jing fJingman ^ ), presumably related to the Chu and the Miao, were driven by the Han from their homeland and forced to retreat to the wilderness of West Hunan. In the chapter on Fenghuang, he quotes from Fengzi to repeat his condemnation of the bloody suppression of the Miao by the Manchu court. In the last chapter of the book, titled "The Miao Question," Shen again reminds the reader that the Miao "had once been treated as barbarians to a man" and discriminated against (9: 414). Shen goes on to criticize pointedly the corruption, ignorance, and arrogance of officials appointed from outside the region (they would be called "carpetbaggers" in American Southern parlance). He demands that "West Hunan be returned to West Hunanese" (9: 414). Without refusing outside help, he nevertheless asks the officials, whether they are local or not, "to give up their conquerors' mentality, a tradition going back for over two thousand years" (9: 414). This is the most explicit demand for West Hunan autonomy that 215 Shen has ever made in his writing. Shen’s connection with historical Chu clearly serves geopolitical goals as well as imaginative purposes. In Shen Congwen's and Faulkner's regional fiction one may discern certain general geopolitical patterns. In both cases, a dominated or peripheral region is represented and created in fiction to continue a marginalized tradition, to help define the regional identity, and to further the regional cause, however defined. In resisting the central, national, official, or mainstream version of history, Shen and Faulkner adopt a similar strategy of falling back on their native regions, which are created out of the specificities of their geography and the history which the land bears, molds, inscribes, and remembers. The fictionalized regional history is based on massive details of regional culture, often exotic and neglected by official history. It does not matter whether the regional culture in question was not long ago backed by an aggressive program of nation-making (as tn the case of the American South) or is remotely connected to an ancient civilization (as in the case of West Hunan). What matters here is a desire in each case for recognition of a separate regional identity, the history and myth of regional culture being both the rationale and the means for achieving the recognition. In both the U.S. and China, talks of secession and autonomy of any region within the boundaries of the nation have always been sensitive and sometimes politically dangerous. But the same impulse which has led people to seek a 216 separate political status through confrontations may be diverted to other channels of expression, such as cultural and literary activities. Shen and Faulkner chose regional fiction. Viewed in the geopolitical context, both Shen's and Faulkner's self-designation as "countryman" takes on an added meaning. In Shen's case, by calling himself both a "countryman" Cthe label in West Hunanese context means the Miao) and a "Chu" at different times, he identifies himself with a defeated, downtrodden people, and to speak for them is to challenge the power center invested in mainstream culture and located in the developed core area of China. In Faulkner's case, by adopting the self-styled epithet "countryman," he aligns himself with the agrarian South in opposition to the industrial North. The power relations between the hegemonic national center and a dominated or marginalized region are reproduced in the distinction between the city and the country, between history and geography, and between regional fiction and "non-regional" national literature. It must be pointed out that both Shen's and Faulkner's geomoral landscapes are complex constructs which at once reflect the external power relations between the "region" and the center, and recreate them internally. One thinks of the distinction between the city and the countryside, and between the Han zone and the Miao land inside Shen's West Hunan; of the difference between Jefferson and its surrounding country, and between the Indian realm and the white settlement in Faulkner's geomoral landscape. In the regional "center of power," history imitates the larger patterns of national 217 history and imposes itself on the geography of primitive, backward land, which is outside history (such as Huawai zhidi "realm beyond civilization," inhabited by Miao tribes) or prior to history (e.g., the primordial forest of the Indians in what will become Yoknapatawpha). In both realms, at least in certain fictional moments, Shen and Faulkner find a geomoral space, a pure geography, to support a "primitivism" to resist the inexorable but morally questionable march of history. The geopolitics of regional fiction is thus fully inscribed in the geomoral landscapes Shen and Faulkner respectively create. Perhaps it is the right moment now to compare briefly Shen's and Faulkner's regional fiction, which culminates in the creation of sophisticated geomoral landscapes, with analogous or related genres in Chinese and American literatures respectively. First, let us compare Faulkner's work with two types of writing that pay special attention to the spatial dimension of human experience: the Leatherstocking tales by James Fenimore Cooper and the local-color writing which immediately preceded Faulkner's work. In Cooper's tales, despite a passion for wilderness and a euphoria engendered by its almost limitless possibilities, the space never quite transforms itself into place. In other words, the experienced space, representing freedom and spiritual values, is yet to solidify into an inhabited space, a mature cultural site which is the product of intricate weavings of geography and history. The 19th- and 20- century local-color writing, which in some way anticipated 218 Faulkner's work, no doubt "puts a premium on the idiosyncrasies of habit and custom in a particular place" (Skaggs 221), often a fairly well established community in the South and the Midwest at that. But, as Merrill Maguire Skaggs points out, "What much local-color writing achieves, then, is not so much the delineation of distinctive locales as of several social types" (221). Thus, in the South Virginia signals gentry and gentry-imitating blacks; North Carolina signals somewhat melancholy but self- respecting tar-heels, a word which by the end of the century means not shoeless intransigents but hardworking yeomen; Georgia and Arkansas both signal a cracker, which means an amusing provincial; Tennessee signals mountaineer as Louisiana signals Creole, at least until one is informed otherwise. (221) Although local-color writing in their totality contributes significantly to the geomoral landscape of the South, it is marred by stereotyping and a lack in a fuller synthesis of place and character in the matrices of history and culture. By contrast, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction does not aim to produce mechanically the link between characters and the lived space. Both the variety of characters and their intricate relation to geography and history render Faulkner's geomoral landscape infinitely richer and livelier than local-color writing. It seems that any discussion of Shen Congwen's regional work easily invites the label xianptu wenxue. or "native-soil writing," in modern Chinese literature. While recognizing that Shen's work does represent a crowning achievement of this genre, I would like to 219 emphasize an important but often neglected difference between the two. Native-soil writing came into being in the 1920s under the encouragement of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature. It claims a group of talented young writers each writing on his or her native place: e.g., Xu Jie C 1901- ), Xu Qinwen ( 1897-1984), and Wang Luyan C 1901-44) on east Zhejiang province, Peng Jiahuang C 1898-1933) and Li Jingming 1905- ) on central Hunan, Tai Jingnong ( iK 1903- ) on Anhui, and Jian Xian'ai ( ^ 5b 1906- ) on Guizhou. At their best, all these writers provide an ethnographically detailed depiction of rural life oppressed by feudal patriarchy, racked by the breakdown of law and order, and bankrupted by a failing economy. Inspired directly by the May Fourth Movement, native-soil writers became "the first realist school in the history of modern Chinese fiction" (Yan 54). However, constrained by a realism eager to serve the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society, native-soil writing of the 1920s never penetrates very deeply into the intersection of geography and history in the various specific fictional locales. In other words, its particularity resides more in the observable ethnographic details than in any unique cultural ethos and moral visions stamped by the peculiar geocultural entities under description. Its status may be compared to local-color writing in American literature. In the 1930s, some native-soil writers, such as Ai Wu and Duanmu Hongliang, began to introduce mythic elements in their writings, but none went as far and high as Shen in his construction of a vast and rich geomoral landscape which cannot be conveniently subsumed under a narrowly interpreted May Fourth tradition. Nowhere else in modern Chinese literature geography resists history so stubbornly and successfully. It is not accidental that Shen represents a significant variation on, if not a complete departure from, the mainstream of modern Chinese literature. But, even without the benefit of a detailed knowledge of modern Chinese literary history, readers both in China and abroad can appreciate Shen' work, which is at once earthily particular and universal in its mythic appeal. Shen's achievement in regional fiction bears out Lu Xun's argument beautifully: the more localized literary and art works are, the more they become international This is also true of Faulkner's work. 221 Notes See note 8 in Introduction above for the meaning of "moral" as in the coinage "geomoral." 2 In Guovu (written c. 3rc| to 5th century BCE), Zhou Fuchen said, "The Di are pigs , wolves, and jackals. No concessions should be made to them" (see Guovu [Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978] 51). Wang Fuzhi (1619-92) wrote, "As for the Barbarians [the Yi and the Di, referring to the Manchus here], it is not inhuman to wipe them out, not unrighteous to rob them, not perfidious to trap them. This is because faith and righteousness apply to human relations, not to alien species" (see Dg Tongjian lun vol. 4 [Gouxue zhenglishe, 1936]). It was not until the mid-20th century that the Chinese abolished the use of characters denoting various ethnic minorities that contain the radical of dog, which denotes animals in general. ^ An excerpt of "Fengchanyi ji" appears in Zhongguo gudai vouii xuan. 2 vols., eds. Ni Qixin et al (Beijing: Zhongguo luyou chubanshe, 1985), 1: 1-7. ^ Bao Zhao's work and commentary can be found in Ni Qixin et al 15-25. 5 During the Southern Dynasties, amidst general social disorder and instability and in the wake of a decline in the influence of Confucianism, both Taoism and Buddhism attracted large followings. The exact nuance of the relation between Taoism and Buddhism in Tao Hongjing's short essay requires much longer treatment than is warranted by the present study. An extreme form of Taoist, as welt as Buddhist, impact on landscape poetry is found in xuanvanshi ("metaphysical poetry"), which is didactic to the point of obscuring and obfuscating landscape descriptions altogether. 6 For Taoist and Buddhist practices as an escapist stratagem for writers, scholars, and officials during the chaotic times of Northern and Southern dynasties (386-589), see Zhou Guocheng's Zhongguo tongshi (A General History of China). 2 vols. (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1980), 379-84. 2 See "Qiushui," Zhuangzi. An English translation, titled "Autumn Floods," can be found in Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York : Columbia UP, 1964), 96-110. 222 ® In the Madhyamika school of Buddhist philosophy, a technique called "four points of argumentation" is used to arrive at emptiness or sunvata. "By the use of this method of argument, a dharma as being, as nonbeing, as both being and non-being, as neither being nor non-being are all refuted and proved to be untrue" (see Wing- tsit Chan, trans. and comp., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy [Princeton UP, 1963] 359). For a summary of the Madhyamika school, the reader may wish to consult Wing-tsit Chan 357-69, especially 360-61, and Shantideva's A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Wav of Life (Dharamshala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1979), Chapter 9 (130-77). Also relevant here is the famous Chan/Zen Buddhist parable: In the first year of practice, a practitioner sees mountains and rivers as distinct and self-evident categories; in the second year, mountains and rivers are no longer what they seem to be; in the third year, he /she sees that mountains are mountains and rivers. Neither an unenlightened belief in the absolute nature of things as they are nor an unreflected insistence on their emptiness holds water. Su Shi was profoundly influenced by Chan Buddhism. ® For an excellent, comprehensive study in Chinese nature poetry, see Wang Guoying, Zhongguo shanshuishi yanjiu (A_S±udy_ln Chinese Nature Poetry). (Taipei: Lianjing, 1986). 1® In China many scenic spots and temples have collected over centuries numerous stone tablets with inscriptions of poems or essays describing the landscape or commemorating significant events. Known as beilin. literally "a forest of tablets," these enduring texts are a patent reminder of the textuality of the landscape and its layers of cultural sedimentation. H For a compilation of stories and legends in Shuiiing zhu. the reader may consult Zheng Dekun, Shuiiing zhu aushi chao CAn Anthology of Stories from Shuiiina zhu) (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1974). 12 Djfanazhi or fangzhi also has a prominent historical component. The reader may consult Tienwai Lin's "Lun fangzhi zhi 'shi' 'di' liang yuan jiqi fazhan" ("On the Origin and Development of 'Shili' [History] and 'Ti' [Geography] in the Provincial Records [i.e., the gazetteer]"), The Journal of History /Guoli zhengzhi daxue lishi xuebao 7 (Jan. 1990): 197-211. 13 See Zhang Shunhui, "Yi diyu wei jizai zhongxin de fangzhi" ("The Gazetteer as Records Centering on Geographical Regions"), in Zhonaauo difangzhi zonglun (A General Introduction to Chinese 223 Gazetteers') (Changchun: Zhongguo difang shizhi xiehui and Jilin sheng tushuguan xiehui, 1981): 99-106. For further reference, see the above-mentioned book and Zhongguo difang shizhi luncong fStudies in the Gazetteers and Local History of China') (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984). I4 These are estimates made by Jin Enhui in "Guanyu jiaqiang Zhongguo difangzhixue yanjiu chuyi" ("Preliminary Remarks on Stepping up Chinese Gazetteer Studies"), Zhongguo difangzhi zonglun 164. See, for instance, Chen Zhengxiang, "Fangzhi de dilixue jiazhi" ("The Geographical Value of the Gazetteer"), Chapter 2 of his book Zhongguo wenhua dili CA Cultural Geography of ChinaT (Taipei: Muduo, 1982): 23-58. Shen Congwen was well aware of the gazetteer tradition and its influence on his own writing. Sometimes he makes references to fangzhi in his fiction (see for instance "Caosheng" ("Straw Ropes"), 1: 73). Substantial portions of The Border Town, The Stockade, and West Hunan are written in a style which is both geographically and ethnographically detailed but somewhat general in the portrayal of individual characters, giving the impression that the place takes precedence over the characters in such cases. West Hunan especially reveals the author's ambition to write a modern-day literary gazetteer for West Hunan. 1^ See relevant chapters of Raymond Williams's The Country and the Citv (New York: Oxford UP, 1973). 16 For a discussion of the view that America was an Eden or Utopian New Earth, see Cecelia Tichi, New World. New Earth: Environmental Reform In American Literature From the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), ix. For a discussion of the European tendency to see America as empty space, see Leo Marx, Foreword to Views of American Landscapes, eds. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), xv-xvi. Marx writes that, because the native Americans were savages, "their presence scarcely contradicted the Europeans' notion that in the New World, before their arrival, nature was all— or virtually all"; in other words, by "disregard^ing] the indigenous culture," they could regard it as unoccupied, unowned land. Heidegger asserts the primacy of time in Being and Time: "Dasein's constitution and its ways to be are possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality, regardless of whether this entity 224 occurs 'in time' or not. Hence Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality" (418). Soja also notes: "The particular emphases of [Western philosophies] may differ, but the encompassing perspective is shared. An already-made geography sets the stage, while the willful making of history dictates the action and defines the story line" (14). 20 The article on "History" in Encyclopedia Americana points out that "'World history,' so called, has been mainly the history of Western or European civilization, beginning with its antecedents in the ancient Near East and continuing through its period of virtual world dominance in modern times" (226). 21 See Shi iina (The Book of .Sonets). "Bei shan" in the "Xiaoya" section. 22 For a contemporary study of the uneven development in the world, see Immanual Wallerstein's Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979). For a discussion of problems in theoretical models for world history, see Chapter 28: "The Enigma of World History" in Ernest Breisach's Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1983): 396- 403. 2^ For a discussion of the impact of exploration on the creation of the American West and the national consciousness as a whole, the reader may consult William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966). 2^ James M. Curtis, "Spatial Form in the Context of Modernist Aesthetics," Spatial Form in Narrative, eds. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), 161-78; Ricardo Gullon, "On Space in the Novel," trans. Rene de Costa, Critical Inquiry 2.1 (1975): 11-28; and the paradigmatic, seminal text by Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" (1945), in The Idea of Spatial Form" (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991) 31-66. 2^ See William James, "The Perception of Space" (1887); Henri Bergson, Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1887); Einstein, "Die Grundlage des Allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie" (1916). 26 Lessing's Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) is an extended argument based on this modal distinction. He wrote, "It is true that painting and poetry in 225 their Imitations make use of entirely different means or symbols the first, namely, of form and color in space, the second of articulated sounds in time— if these symbols indisputably require a suitable relation to the thing symbolized, then it is clear that symbols arranged in juxtaposition can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; while consecutive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive" (qtd. in Frank 7). 27 The most useful volume on spatial form is a collection of essays titled Spatial Form in Narrative, edited by Jeffrey Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Cornell UP, 1981). This book also contains a bibliography of works on spatial form, totaling some three hundred items. The enduring popularity of Frank's work may be indicated by the publication of his book The Idea of Spatial Form (Rutgers UP, 1991), which includes his essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" as well as two polemical articles. 28 in Europe, Gaston Bachelard (La poetique de I'espace [1957]), George Poulet (Les Metamorphoses du cercle [1961], and Gerard Genette (Figures I, II, & III [1966, 1969, 1976]) are among the best known theorists of literary spatiality. Henri Lefebvre’s La production de I'espace (1974-VThe Production of Space (1991) is also a major work on space and spatiality. For an account of the development of literary spatiality, see Ricardo Gullon’s "On Space in the Novel," Critical Inquiry 2.1 (1975). 29 See my paper, "Coincidence as a Narrative Device in the San van liang pai." presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, June 19-21, 1992. 9® Lin’s original note refers the reader to Frederick W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Knopf, 1971), 27. Elsewhere in his article, he refers to another work by Mote, "The Cosmological Gulf between China and the West," in Mote and Buksbaum, eds., Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture (U of Washing P, 1972). In his essay "Toward a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," Andrew Plaks points out, "In view of the general tendency of the Chinese literary tradition to evince a relative emphasis on spatial patterns alongside of temporal rhythm as models for narrative shape, it is extremely significant that the language of many of the above critical discussions derives directly from the terminology of art criticism, and from that of landscape painting in particular" (333- 34). This is very interesting if one bears in mind the traditional separation of the spatial and verbal media of artistic expression in 226 the West (Lessing) and Frank's rejection of it. The above essay also contains insightful comparisons of the temporal and spatial dimensions of Chinese and Western narratives. 3^ The citation from Hu Shi is contained in his "Chinese Literature of the Last Fifty Years" in Hu Shi Wencun CWorks of Hu Shi~) (Taipei: Yuandong shuju, 1961) vol. II, 233-34. The English translation is Lin's (Lin 246). 32 In the late 1920s and early '30s, Hu Shi issued a radical call for "wholesale Westernization" fquanpan xihua~). but he later replaced the controversial slogan with "wholehearted modernization," somewhat modifying his position toward the native tradition. For a discussion of Hu's "wholesale Westernization" and its polemical context, see Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1960) 332-33, note h. 33 See Chen Sihe, "Zhongguo wenxue fazhan zhong de xiandaizhuyi" Shanghai wenxue 1985.5. The article also appears as a chapter in his book Zhonaguo xinwenxue zhengtiguan (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1987). 34 For a study in Pound's use of classical Chinese poetry in his Imagist poetics, see Wai-lim Yip's Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1969). 33 "Jiangxue" is very difficult to translate. The Chinese original is simply "River Snow," which does not make good sense in English. An adequate English rendition would be "Snow by the River" or "Snowing on the River," both being extrapolations from the original. In fact, the Chinese reader does not bother about the distinction. To say "snowing on the river" would introduce a process, a duration, hence a temporal dimension, which is completely muted in "River Snow." 36 See Wai-lim Yip's comments on the two poems in his article "Yufa yu biaoxian: Zhongguo gudianshi yu Ying-Mei xiandaishi meixue de huitong" ("Grammar and Expression: The Affinities Between Classical Chinese Poetry and Modern Anglo-American Poetry"), in Xunqiu kua Zhona-Xi wenhua de gonatona wenxue guilu fin Search of Common Poetics Between Chinese and Western Cultures'! (Beijing: Peking UP, 1986) 49-56. The English translations of Meng's poem by Herbert Giles, W. J. B. Fletcher, Witter Bynner, Arthur Christy, and Soame Jenyns all have to expand on the original by supplying tense, personal pronouns, possessive case, and temporal-logical connectors to make them conform to the convention of English. It was this 227 inherent restrictions of the English language that Pound tried to transcend in his own Imagist experiments. See, for instance, the famous Fenollosa paper edited by Pound: The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936, 1969). 37 For a discussion of the impact the Chinese characters had on the director Sergei Eisenstein, who is credited with inventing montage, see "The Cinematographic Principle and the Chinese Ideogram" in his book Film Form and Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda CNew York, 1942). 3** See the second part of Yip's essay, which sketches the development in Western poetry of various theories and techniques to loosen, if not escape totally, the grip of traditional poetics. The third part of the same essay deals with the convergences and divergences between classical Chinese poetry and modernist poetry in the West. 39 For a description of Faulkner's "reactionary" position see Frederick Crews, "The Strange Fate of William Faulkner," The New York Review of Books 38.5 (7 March 1991), 47. For a detailed discussion of why realism dominated in the new literature since the May Fourth Movement, see for example Qian Liqun et al, "Introduction: The Basic Character and Historical Position of Modern Chinese Literature" in Zhonaguo xiandai wenxue sanshi nian CThe Three Decades of Modern Chinese Literature. 1-17, especially 10-11. 4-1 In traditional China, wen, or nonfiction prose such as political or philosophical essays, was ranked over shi (mostly lyrical poetry), which in turn was above £i (originally song words) and gii (originally arias in operas), with vernacular fiction definitely on the lower rungs of social prestige. The basic reason for this is fairly clear: for wen was associated with the expression of the Tao fdaotong. the sociopolitical order) and the practices in its services (see Liu Xie [Hsieh], The Literary Mind and the Carving of Draaons fWenxin diaolonal. bilingual ed., trans., annot., and introd. by Vincent Shih [Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1983) 5); .shi was a venerable canonized genre of literary expression which could be traced to the first millennium BC; £i and gn, although they resembled shi in their musical or singing origins, they were relatively more recent in becoming respectable literary genres, having not totally shed their association with public entertainment; whereas baihua xttioshuo. or vernacular tales, still being told by 228 professional story-tellers to largely illiterate audiences, was something from which the literati who wrote wen and shi wanted to distance themselves (although many would relish it in the private). In the West, the canonized literary genres originated in ancient Greece, e.g., the epic, the lyric, and drama traditionally enjoyed high prestige. The novel did not become a fully respectable genre until the 19th century, a fact which may have something to do with the consolidation of the bourgeoisie as a class, if one follows Ian Watt's contention that the novel is essentially a bourgeois form (see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe. Richardson and Fielding [Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957]). Interestingly, when the novel had gained respectability in England, France, and other European countries in the 19th century, the short story was just beginning its journey to acceptance and prestige. It began, geographically, from two then peripheral parts of Western civilization, the United States and Russia (Edgar Allan Poe, Melville, and Mark Twain in the U.S. and Chekhov, Gogol, and Turgenev in Russia were all important early practitioners of the genre, with Poe and Chekhov being the most seminal). If one prose genre is arbitrarily linked with one country, one would not hesitate to call the short story, in Frank O'Connor's words, "a national art form" for the U.S., and England would more likely be identified with the novel. (O'Connor's words are quoted in A. Walton Litz's Preface to the First Edition of Major American Short Stories [New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975, 1980]. The reader may consult Litz’s 1974 Preface for an elaboration of O'Connor’s view.) 42 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed., (London: Fontana, 1983) 264-66. Also see James H. Maguire, "The Canon and the 'Diminished Thing,'" American Literature 60.4 (1988): 650. 43 See Kinkley, The Odvssev of Shen Conawen. passim. 44 For an instance of the former case, see Pauline Yu's discussion of Western poetry and Chinese shi in her essay, "Alienation Effects: Comparative Literature and the Chinese Tradition," The Comparative Perspective on Literature:Approaches to Theory and Practice, eds. Clayton Knoelb and Susan Noakes, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 162-75. Heh-hsiang Yuan expresses a similar opinion in his article, "East-West Comparative Literature: An Inquiry into Possibilities," Chinese-Western Comparative Literature: Theory and Strategy, ed. John Deeney, (Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1980) 1-24 (see p. 2 especially). For an instance of the latter case, see my discussion of the comparable role played by mimesis and tao in Western and Chinese traditions of literary theory in a paper titled "The Mirror and the 229 Way: Originary Metaphors in the Western and Chinese Theories of Literature," presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC), University of California, Berkeley, June 1-4. 1989. See, for example, Yang Jianlong, "Jianlun ershi niandai xiangtu wenxue de jiben zhuti," Shanghai shifan daxue xuebao: zhesheban 1990.2, 116-17. 46 Alastair Fowler points out in Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) 92: "Titles have received little critical attention. This is unfortunate, in view of their importance in modern literature, where, as Wayne Booth says, "they are often the only explicit commentary the reader is given"' (see Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983] 198, note 25). A more recent contribution to what Gerald Genette calls "title science" is his article "Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature" in Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 692-720. 47 This epithet often occurs in critical works, for example, in Wu Baisuo's "Duju fengcai de ’shanmin yishujia,' chunpu juanxiu de xiangtu fengqing hua" ("An Exotic Artist from the Mountains and his Natural and Beautiful Paintings of West Hunanese Landscape and Customs"), Wenvi shenghuo 1982.8; He Yiming's "Chunmei de renqing fengtu hua" ("Plain yet Beautiful Paintings of Landscape and Mores"), Xiaoshuo iianshana wenku: Zhonaauo xiandai iuan CAppreciating Fiction Series: Modern Chinese Literature Volume) vol. 2, ed. Wang Yao (Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986) 424; and Yang Yi, "Xiangxi fengtu renqing de chuse huajia" ("An Outstanding Painter of West Hunanese Landscape and Mores"), Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi CA History of Modern Chinese FictionJ (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988) vol. 2, 612. 46 See Andrew Plaks's essay "Toward a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative" for a discussion of the relation between the spatial and the temporal in Chinese narrative and its structural implications. 49 For studies of Faulkner and spatial form, see the following dissertations: Edward L. Corridori, "The Quest for Sacred Space: Setting in the Novels of William Faulkner," DAI 32 (1972): 5224A; John Michael Lannon, "William Faulkner: A Study in Spatial Form" DAI 33 (1973): 5184A; Hilayne E. Cavanaugh, "Faulkner, Stasis, and Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,'" M I 38 (1977): 2783A-2784A; Kathleen Lenore Komar, "The Multilinear Novel: A Structural Analysis 230 of Novels by Dos Passos, Doblin, Faulkner, and Koeppen,” DAI 38 (1977): 2101A. 5® For a reading of Shen's fictional West Hunan as Utopia, see Peng Hsiao-yen (Xiaoyan), "Shen Congwen de utuobang shijie: Miaozu gushi ji xiangtu gushi yanjiu" ("Shen Congwen's Utopian World: A Study in His Miao Tales and Country Stories"), Zhongvang vaniiuvuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu jikan 1 (1991): 385-412. For a reading of the West Hunanese as "noble, innocent, and pure primitives," see Frederick P. Brandauer, "Regionalism and Modernism in the Life and Works of Shen Congwen," review of The Odvssev of Shen Congwen. by Jeffrey Kinkley, Modern China 15.2 (1989): 215-36. Puzzled by the tough, opium-dealing bandits in Shen's After Snow (1947), Brandauer asks: "Have the people of West Hunan changed or is it rather Shen's perception of them that has changed? Has Shen grown out of an earlier naive regional idealism and now finally moved into a more mature and convincing realism that recognizes evil as well as good in the West Hunanese character?" (224). For a discussion of Shen's regional work that focuses on his realist exposes of the dark side of West Hunanese life, see Yang Jianlong, "Jianlun ershi niandai xiangtu wenxue de jiben zhuti" ("A Brief Discussion of the Basic Themes of the Native-Soil Writing of the 1920s"), Shanghai shifan daxue xuebao: zhesheban 1990.2: 116-17. This constitutes the third principle of what Foucault calls heterotopia, which is defined as real places that "are simultaneously represented, contested, and invented" (24). For a detailed discussion of heterotopia, see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" ("Des Espaces autres"), trans. Jay Miscowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27. 5^ The historical Greater West Hunan as Shen Congwen portrays it in his regional work comprises over twenty counties west and northwest of the city of Changde in central-north Hunan province and covers some 60,000 square kilometers (c. 23,000 square miles). Today, West Hunan Tujia and Miao Autonomous Zhou (Prefecture) includes eight counties and two cities, with a total area of 21,400 square kilometers (c. 8,000 square miles) (see Hunan shengqing f~The State of Hunan Province)f comp. Statistics Bureau of Hunan Province, [Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1989) 535-36). As Ling Yu points out, the drastic reduction in size of West Hunan reflects the historical Han encroachment on and assimilation of ethnic areas fFrom 103-04). The fictionally realized West Hunan covers about 15,000 square miles if one uses the map attached to Kinkley's book. On the other hand, Faulkner writes in the legend to the early map that Yoknapatawpha has an area of 2,400 square miles, although this is larger than the map indicates. Lafayette County upon which 231 Yoknapatawpha is based, measures 679 square miles (see Kerr, Yoknapatawpha 28). 53 Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga comprises 14 novels and some 30 stories, and this body of works represents the bulk of his oeuvre (five novels and some stories are not about Yoknapatawpha). Shen's West Hunan fiction counts eight completed, near-completed, or incomplete novels and novellas and close to one hundred stories and sketches collected in many volumes. Although classified as nonfiction, Shen's autobiography and two volumes of travel writing, Xianqxinq sanji (Discursive Notes on a Trip Through Hunan). Xianqxi (West HunanJr should also be included in an extensive discussion of his regional fiction. Shen's work outside regional fiction is very extensive: apart from his novels and short stories about city life, he produced a large quantity of literary criticism and essays. In addition, he was also a distinguished scholar in art history and antiques. His monumental work, Zhonaguo fushi vanjiu (A Study in Ancient Chinese Clothing and Adornments). (Hong Kong: shangwu yinshuguan, 1981), was written at the request of the late Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. For a study of Shen's contributions to scholarship, see Wu Guangping, "Shen Congwen zai Zhongguo dangdai xueshushi shang de gongxian" ("Shen Congwen's Contributions to Contemporary Chinese Scholarship"), Jishou daxue xuebao: shehuikexue 1991.1-2 (special issue on Shen Congwen): 201-07, 170). 54 Congwen zizhuan (Congwen's Autobiography') has all along been taken as strictly nonfictional writing, a kind of authentic literary autobiography. Scholars like Kinkley and Ling Yu freely drew on it to reconstruct Shen's life. But recent scholarship shows that Shen's autobiography is highly selective in detail, with crucial events and people omitted from the work, and "creative" as well. As Wang Jiarong points out, it "blends fiction with truth" (98). For a provocative study on the topic, see Wang Jiarong's "Congwen zizhuan xinshuo" ("A New Analysis of Conawen's Autobiography'"). Jishou daxue xuebao: shehui kexue ban 1989.1: 96- 103. 55 See Martin Buber's essay, "Distance and Relation," trans. R. G. Smith, Psychiatry 20 (May 1957): 97-104. Buber's essay is discussed in Marwyn S. Samuels, "Existentialism and Human Geography," Chapter II of Human Geography: Prospects and Problems, Eds. David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels (Chicago: Maaroufa, 1978) 22- 40. 5® Marwyn S. Samuels explains: "On the one hand, distance, or estrangement, alone appears to have no purpose other than itself. In this sense, man is confronted with an elemental dilemma of 232 meaninglessness wrought by alienation. On the other hand, the situation of estrangement is fraught with the potential for relation, for only by means of distancing is relation feasible" (27). 52 For a detailed Southern criticism of the "Great Principle of Progress" see Lyle H. Lanier's "A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress," included in Twelve Southerners' I'll Take Mv Stand. 5^ To cite leading Southern apologists for an idea of the self-image of the South is not to gloss over the inequity of slavery in the South and hence the historical justice served by the victory of the North in the Civil War. But as many Southern scholars have pointed out, "If Southern sectional identity were dependent upon slavery, then the loss of the war and the end of slavery should have destroyed that identity. They did not" (Rubin Jr., American South 4). In fact, the conflict between the North and the South which culminated in the Civil War involved a much broader range of differences than commonly acknowledged in history textbooks. 5® Tate speculated that the consumption of the energy of the Southern elite in politics was one of the reasons that held Southern literature back (see his "The Profession of Letters in the South"). Once this energy was diverted into other areas of endeavor, say literature, it would help to promote these areas. 5® Several recent articles have focused on this subject: Wang Shida and Tao Yajing, "Dangdai Zhongguo wenhua de diyuguan," Shehui kexue 1987.8: 30-35, 72; Huang Jinhui, "Changjiang liuyu wenhua de tezheng jiqi dui minzu xingge de yingxiang," Shehui kexue 1987.8: 36-39: Han Yangmin, "Zhongguo fengshu wenhua yu diyu shiye," Lishi vaniiu 1991.5: 91-105; and Sun Longji, "Zhongguo quyu fazhan de chayi: nan yu bei," Ershivi shiji / Twenty-First Century 1992.4: 15- 28. A more accessible work in English on this topic is Leo J. Moser's The Chinese Mosaic: The Peoples and Provinces of China (Boulder and London: Westview P, 1985), 51 See a symposium titled "Changjiang liuyu shi Zhonghua wenming faxiangdi?" Liu Zhiyi et al, Lishi/ Historical Monthly 1992.5: 7-73. 52 For a discussion of the ethnic affiliation of the Chu people, see Wen Chongyi, Chu wenhua vaniiu (Studies in Chu Cultured. (Taipei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 1990), 2-4. 233 63 The Shan hai iina. which preserves much Chinese myth and folklore and has had a great influence on both fantastic literature and geographical writings in the Chinese tradition, has been linked to the early shamanistic tradition by Lu Xun and has been commonly assigned to the Ch'u literary realm and compared to the rather mysterious poetic work 'T'ien-wen' [in Chuci~] (Durrant 671). The Shiiina also retains the regional differences of Zhonavuan at the time. The Guofeng section of the Shiiina. for example, comprises fifteen groups of songs, each featuring a quo (i.e., fiefdom or principality) under the Zhou King. See Han Shaogong, "Wenxue de gen" ("The Roots of Literature"), Zuojia 1985.4: 2-5. 66 For a discussion of Han Shaogong's work, see Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, "Shenhua, Menghuan, Chu wenhua" ("Myth, Dream, Chu Culture"). Menava 1988.2: 66-69. 67 There is a tension between the mimetic impulse and the drive toward mythos in West Hunan. David Wang points out, "But when Shen Congwen maps out obscure towns and rivers and rationalizes bizarre morals and manners, he risks explaining away the mysterious aura that makes [the] Chu culture what it is" (21-22). However, the other way is also true: the presence of the mythic has an impact on the realism of the work, which is usually classified as "nonfiction." By giving the work deeper resonances, the myth as history effectively serves Shen’s regionalist agenda. 66 See Lu Xun’s letter to Chen Yanqiao (April 19, 1934), in lu Xun shuxin ji (Beijing: renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1976) vol. 1, 528. 234 Epilogue The Beginning of Ramifications Before I bow out of this prolonged engagement with spatial thought and Faulkner's and Shen's regional fiction, I would like to outline briefly the potential uses this dissertation may be put to. Several concepts and approaches that I have developed in this dissertation may have a wider application than Shen or Faulkner scholarship. First, the notion of geomoral thought may be applied to a greater range of texts either in the Chinese or Western tradition, so as to help establish the geomoral tradition on a firmer basis. Since it spans many discourses, the geomoral tradition will provide one more connection between literature and other modes of expression, and this will put more critical means at the disposal of the reader. The concept of geomoral landscape may be applied to any writer whose work constitutes a significant inscription of ideas, emotions, or moral visions on the landscape. A body of work read as a geomoral landscape allows it to be approached and analyzed in many new ways. Geomoral landscapes, both fictive and real, can be combined and connected to make larger ones. In fact, one measure of the literary and cultural achievements of a country lies in the extent and richness of such textualized landscapes. Both individual geomoral landscapes and their regional or national aggregates will 235 be useful pedagogical devices for studying the literary texts of which they are representations. More work needs to be done in comparing spatial form in the Western and Chinese traditions. Grounded on different philosophical and aesthetic assumptions, the two strains of spatial form will contribute much toward establishing a universal poetics based on the relation between spatial and temporal imaginations, which are among the most basic categories of human thought. It would also be interesting to determine the extent Chinese spatial form influenced Western modernist poetics and the meaning of the convergence between the Chinese and Western varieties of spatial form. In terms of methodology, such inquires will combine parallel studies with influence studies. The geopolitics of regional cultures and literatures within a complex national tradition is a vast topic that needs to be addressed with more precise concepts. A regional approach to literature with a geopolitical awareness may help reveal the way a national literature forms its canon. Attention to the shifting relations between regional literatures and between regional literatures and the canon of national literature may give us some clue to the vicissitudes of the reputation of individual writers or the fluctuating standing of a whole body of work. Literary geopolitics is a useful concept in writing the literary geography of a region or nation. Once literary history and literary geography are brought into a necessary relation of balance and 236 complementation, our knowledge of a literature will be more refined and less biased. 237 Works Cited Aiken, Charles S. "Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction." The Geographical Review 67.1 Cl977): 1- 21. Akhundov, Murad D. Conceptions of Space and Time: Sources. Evolution, Directions. Trans. Charles Rougle. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1986. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. Preface by Andre Maurois. 1962. 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SutpCn's | U mi• H uttdrt G R A N T SartorU flanialbrt' £s(jiy* 4 ml. Church, which Vbarr . $u.tptn, rodajast i* , *]Uyer£HdJtiJki&Jtrk^ ivhrft Christmas u > a & kitted* ' Miss tfc&nna Burden's, where Cnrtslmas killed Mies Bardot, # where > U'era grove's child was bony ^b u n house where Temple Drake testified, and Confederate Monument which B eniu had to pXss on hie JLB'FT >idt / Sa tvmiU whtrtByron Bunchjlrft smd*M§rwt ‘\ f i M ist %cta Coldfleldi - '} Ub M ottstO W n, where Jason Cbmpson lest his niece's trail,ana where Jn se Bundren and his bows had to g o in Order to' reach fiJJerSOtt P I N H I L L S / 0 I'4 TAX-JL**^ ^ v V i » m McCallums, where young Bayard Sarlorit went V when his grandfathers /heart failed in the car wreck. * * * " P I N E '' Where old Bayard Sartoris died in young Bayard's car '(fohn Sartoris' Statue&IJfigy where, r . his railroad, and cemetery where they J d d u Bundren a t last •~*Belle Mitchell's sJialsto*t Mouse ^ “ -Benbow's - fa il where Qoodwln was lynched where he can watch buried ff"O ld Bayard Sartoris' \ bank., which Byron Snopes \ \ robbed, which Tlem \Snopis later became K president f H I I L L S Comps oris, where they sold the pasture . to S \° could go S u r a i t ' s *Jrmstid» Bridge which washed awau n. . <■ S ifiVM V E 1 - A T u l l i ' ' * ^Varner's store, where Tien Snopes qot his sta rt * soUnse Su-ndren and. his \ U l u r u , , , — ~ sen's couldsnot truss ii K’Uh \ \ ^ . JO . ' : • Uddic's ' J 8 end „ . ' Old Trenchman. TlaceX . Tlundren's which Tien Snopes u n . \ J3UnareK* loadedonMenryArmstid andSurateh and where “ Popeye killed Tommy JEFFERSON, YOKNAPATAW PHA COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI Area, 2400 square miles. Population: Whites, 6298: Negroes, 9313. W illiam Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor. (From Absalom, Absalom!, New York, Modern Library, Random House, 1951. By permission of the publisher.) 254 MAP 2. 1 S S E T I B Bte] H A ’S *Z/iuntinaJt fishina ca m p v rfie rtW a sh : T ~SkllUSSutbCn. Later owncdby ^ \W A SH <„ W l \ rHB BEAK. 7^rT\ a ju s tic e fdm drti \ r e d LEAVES ^ATCHXE CBfstCKASAV ABSAUBlM, A B S A L O M / TW| *VVfierclyl82alus people had learned to call i t ’'the Planut^n'uxf D jwtfc Ae the whitemendid^ L A T E N T Tiwdeno rEftC^GRJMVli [cJmSartoris' ’ P^utrvat /UcGuIu Edmonds,. WAS UN VANQUISHED Saxtons ■VERjftNA 'SANCTUARY here Lee Goodwin was failed neJJJ^chedjT H E SOUHD ^onmtor&Mik-AHU T H eT f t G H T dSI I y ' f y [ ^ ‘ T.,lkiridr w hichJason x'F U TK V AUGUST ^i U*r ^vW s w a p f > ? i JEATH■ JRAG amcehcrstj the last fngmaftrfwhich Jason nr s< M incrdrtobe< xm efrc& JEFFERSON a n d V O K N A P A T A W P H A C O U N 1 Y %Adississibbi *945 SPOTTED' HOUSES THE HAMLET dVarners&ossftaJs Old Frenchman place■ 'Tawm ' - 4 . : ■ J M OLD M AN the convict 4 grcw~ a man Asimhed 4 wot transported ■ f o r the restofyuslife topayfirit" M ap by W illiam Faulkner 255 M A P 3. ( Brovs/n i £ 40 Faulkner's Geography and Topography Vo J e f f e r s o n a n d Y o k n a p a t a w p h a C o u n t y , M i s s i s s i p p i , 1 9 4 5 256 MAP 4 . <5ce K '^k ty , 0^v-s-s& y ) ' Laifeng^ _ '~ "7 ' ^ DLongshan V H U B E I / , V \ - - t C : „ . *v r \ ( j 1 . 77-77' SPIRlT\^SpL13I£J»Y' COUNTRY' / ,7 ^- Yongshun Q 77 ' k S IC H U A N j. A Bam tan < 3* ' ? 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V v e s - f < \ S <*■ ^ e o M o r » { L a n ^ s c ^ e , • & qo4 ci+^ A S<\4 ci+y Q provincial aipi-fa.1 Yuan i i -1 Mi«.o z«»e. I t Han z»ne I. FenjWuang 2. £A«4o««j 3, S', lt/MjcVLYi 6 - d t a n ^ d e 7 . C h a n ^ s t a 260

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Asset Metadata

Creator Chang, Sheng-Tai (author)

Core Title Geomoral landscapes: The regional fiction of William Faulkner and Shen Congwen

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,literature, American,literature, Asian,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-739814

Unique identifier UC11344514

Identifier DP22561.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-739814 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP22561.pdf

Dmrecord 739814

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Chang, Sheng-Tai

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA