MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “Literary Shamanism in Liu Qing’s Fiction of Northeast China,” by Qi Wang. This is Qi Wang’s third publication with us on regional writers of Northeast China. She previously published “Shadows and Voices: Shuang Xuetao’s Fiction of Northeast China” and “Frozen Waters and Deathly Wells: Ban Yu’s Fiction of Northeast China.” Below find a teaser for the new essay; to read it in its entirety, go to: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/qi-wang4/. My thanks to Qi Wang for this important contribution to the study of regional writing in China.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Liu Qing’s Fiction of Northeast China
By Qi Wang
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright February 2022)
Reading History through Words (唇典), Liu Qing’s 刘庆 ( b. 1968) ambitious novel from 2017 that recounts the major historical vicissitudes in northeast China throughout the twentieth century, is an intriguing experience.[1] On the one hand, despite winning the 7th Dream of the Red Chamber Award: The World’s Distinguished Novel in Chinese, one feels rather surprised by the novel’s apparent lack of sophistication in style across a total of 485 pages.[2] The prose is verbose and feels frequently like a somewhat crude draft in need of more work. Its broad range of characters—shamans, villagers, independence fighters, bandits, and communists—demonstrates an excessive repetition in expression and predictability in emotion. Few of the characters in the novel’s vast cast display a truly distinct personality, unique speech, or particular forms of behavior or reaction—of which highly accomplished examples can be found in Shaanxi Opera (秦腔, by Jia Pingwa 贾平凹) and certainly Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦, by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹).[3] In History through Words, the characters tend to feel like one person who assumes assigned roles by merely wearing different masks; there is little effort to craft convincing diversity through speech patterns, personal habits, or reactions emerging organically from a personality rather than imposed by situations from without. Regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or a specific scenario at hand, most characters tend to speak in the same impassioned and urgent tone.[4]
On the other hand, these complaints of mine are accompanied by an equally persistent sense of fascination that propels me to read on. The novel possesses, or seems possessed by, a strange charm, a pulsating vital force enabled by a plenitude of elements from nature: animals, birds, and plants are all indefatigably addressed by their proper names in the text, and they coexist with the human characters in a literary imagination permeated with vivid metaphors that are inspired by these nonhuman life forms as well as by the physical environment. The piling upon each other of nature and nature-inspired metaphors gives rise to a literary universe whose layered uniformity and emphatic homogeneity become tantamount to a passionately elegiac statement about the loss of nature and innocence in the process of modernization. Despite what might be lamented as a lack of modernist sophistication in character building, the novel succeeds in creating a unique literary style and performing an urgent voice, both of which, as we shall see, are shot through with inspirations from traditional shamanism of the region. This essay focuses on the significance of that employment of an apparently outmoded cultural form, not only in the story but also in the structure of the writerly imagination. The novel, however crude in execution at times, exemplifies a thought-provoking strategy of multitude and plenitude, exercising ecological consciousness and enabling tradition and nature to play a role more central than mere atmospheric backdrop on the stage of modernity. When considered within the lineage of northeastern writers such as Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良, Xiao Hong 萧红, and, more recently, Chi Zijian 迟子建, whose works have invoked shamanistic elements, Liu’s novel marks impressive progress in experimenting with traditional cultural legacy by internalizing it to produce a peculiar literary form that becomes a book-long ritual of literary shamanism. Tradition and ecology, shorthanded in this case as shamanic vision, are mobilized in an attempt to reframe the structure of looking and narrating. [READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY HERE]