Yu Pingbo Preface

Yu Pingbo 俞平伯. "Chong kan Fu sheng liu ji xu 重刊浮生六記序" (Preface on the re-issue of Six Chapters of a Floating Life), in Shen Fu, Fu sheng liu ji 浮生六記 (Six Chapters of a Floating Life). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1980 [1923].

A Floating History of the Book

The memoir Six Chapters of a Floating Life was originally published in 1877; I'm guessing it was one of these 19th-century editions that Yu Pingbo remembers reading as a youth in Suzhou and then completely forgetting about. The great Chinese literary critic was only born in 1899, so it's a little funny to see him in 1923 consider his own "youth" as a time past -- did people of the early twentieth century generally consider themselves past "youth" by their mid-twenties? Or perhaps, since 1923 saw the publication of Yu Pingbo's first great thesis  the history of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber, he felt that was no longer a youth but a full-grown scholar. In any case, Yu recounts hearing about the book again while chatting with two other bookish friends (in this photo from 1921, Yu Pingbo is at the very right). They reminded him about it and lent him their editions, from which he prepared a new edition that came out from a Shanghai publisher called "shuangfengshe" 霜楓社 -- 'frosty maple' publishing. (Looks like he also put out a collaborative essay collection that same year from the same publisher: Jian qiao 剑鞘 (sword and sheath), together with Ye Shengtao.) I'm guessing that this edition became the standard one, and so probably the one Yang Jiang read. This edition in the University of Minnesota library was released by People's Publishing House in 1980, less than a year before Six Chapters of a Cadre School was itself published. Thus what we have here is literature from pre-modern China and a contemporary book written in the vein of, riffing off of, and adapting the 'tropes and topoi' of the older work. Both books were clearly intended for educated readers who wanted something stylized and reminiscent of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Yang Jiang's work, though, must have had a larger audience from the very beginning, because it tackles contemporary memory and is way, way easier to read.

No marks of its maker

Most of Yu Pingbo's short preface actually praises Six Chapters of a Floating Life for its stylization. That came as a surprise to me, because I thought Yu Pingbo would be more interested in personal character of Shen Fu, as well as the historical value of Shen Fu's record. But Yu prefers to describe the sublime beauty of the piece in various abstract terms. Yu emphasizes that Shen Fu was no elite intellectual, but a mere secretary, and you wouldn't expect this sort of man to produce something so perfect. Yu quotes a proverb: "You never find what you look for; don't look, and it can find itself" 求之不必得，不求可自得. Going even further to erase the author completely from his portrait of the work's beauty, he says that Six Chapters shows no marks of the craftsmanship, but is like a beautiful crystal, lacking in "scars of ax or awl" 斧鑿痕. This abstract notion of 'beauty' is something that Yu goes on about at surprising length: he quotes Lu Ji on connection between the interior mind and the exterior world, he quotes from a Zhou Meicheng poem on the 'cloudiness' of human lives in general, and he packs in a few dense formulations that test the limits of my own Chinese. At one point he says a line for which I tentatively have "the magic of the piece is not in the arfulness of the words, but in the creation of a negative space around them" 外境似無物. He hopes we won't see such comments as yimei 溢美, exaggerated praise of beauty; the lady doth protest too much, methinks.