PhD Progress: Ye Hanyin's MA

An example of the Chinese aesthetic of "all mixed in" (yunji): Xiao Huisong, "The Grace of Earth" (bronze), from this page

One of the things I have to do to get this writing project done is: read similar writing projects by previous students. This is a task that is always both interesting and painful, because I alternate between feeling in kinship with my fellow writers and in competition with them. I alternate between thinking their writing is much less incisive than mine and thinking that I can't possibly read as well or as much as they can.

That's normal, I'm guessing.

One graduate student thesis of great interest is from Taiwan, by a girl named Ye Hanyin. I'm very impressed in some ways by the thesis -- it takes on the full scope of Yang Jiang's writings, which ranges from drama to translation to fiction to essay, so there are a lot of bending the mind around to try to read some very disparate types of material. In other ways, of course, I don't see Hanyin's writing as having the same insights that I have had, and so she seems inferior. But at the end of the day I think I just like the virtual community created by having in my hands the words of someone else who spoke on the same thing I am speaking on.

A few notes on what I read today:

I'm going to be reading from Ye's three chapters on the essays of Yang Jiang. Today I read a small section from the first of these chapters called "The 'Invisibility'　Perspective for Creative Writing." "Invisibility" (yinshen) refers here to Yang Jiang's own self-description in the essay "The Cloak of Invisibility." But where my reading of the essay emphasizes that Yang Jiang wished to avoid ambition and take an "lowly and insignificant" place in society, and that this helps her to intuit what other people around her were thinking and feeling, Ye's take instead emphasizes the form of Yang Jiang's writing:

In her essays, we often cannot see the author’s own happiness, anger, sadness or sorrow, for she selects a cool, collected writing perspective. No matter what the theme, her laughs show no teeth, and her anger makes no sound.

Ye often describes this writing style as a kind of "distance," though it is one through which the reader can intuit the true feelings of the author:

But this writing distance by no means creates coldness, because even though the pieces document the facts objectively 客观地纪实, still we can see the sincerity of the author.

The representative example of this is in Yang Jiang's representation of suffering in life. She speaks of it simply, coldly. "He held my hand and said, 'That was the telephone. Your father is already dead.'" Ye (and, I remember now, others) praise such lines for the great affective force they have by keeping the pain held in reserve. The hint at what she must have really been feeling is enough to give us something which we feel is the truth, as Chinese readers. (Sorry for pronoun confusion -- I'm trying to identify as a Chinese reader.)

Now, here's sort of a random idea that I will try working into my dissertation chapter's conclusion tomorrow:

If we return to Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, we can see that the idea of "latent" (yin, the prefix for yinshen, "invisible;" this is also a female-gendered) expression occurs in the 5th-century work Wen xin diao long (Literary writing and the carving of dragons). In chapter 40, Owen translate and explains the verse as an opposition between “latent” (yin) and “out-standing” (xiu)in poetic language. The “latent” is definied as “the layered significance beyond the text;” the term "beyond" here shows the special value to Liu Xie and his followers, that the "latent" indicates deeper truth; this truth is the affect (qing); it is the “truth” (yi) of the writing.

Developing the idea further, Sikong Tu’s eleventh “category of poetry” is the category “reserve” (hanxu) which praises the category by saying,

Though the words do not touch on oneself,
It is as if there were unbearable melancholy.
In this there is that ‘someone in control,’
Floating or sinking along with them.

(This sentiment has been applied to Yang Jiang many times, not only above, but in Hong Zicheng as well). Here, what remained a vague sense of affect as a mode or something in Liu Xie’s formulation is more clearly an affective subject.

Again, the representative example of this aesthetic form is the technique of reserving expression of unhappiness to encode the intensity of the unhappiness. As Owen says, "[U]nhappiness is revealed as the ground on which one speaks of something else.”(328)

Thus we get back to Ye, who used her section to point out that Yang Jiang gives us the feelings of unhappiness through reserve; or as I like to put it now, Yang Jiang writes so that we intuit the unhappiness there. The technique here is actually quite traditional, though Ye does not seem to know it. She does end her section with an important quote by someone named Chen Yali who has an article from 2002 about the "wisdom" in Yang Jiang's essays. The quote praises Yang Jiang's reserve (hanxu) using the very same term that Sikong Tu wrote about in the 9th century: “be reserved, mixing it all in; contained, and not exposed” 含蓄蕴籍、含而不露. This phrase can't possibly have started with Chen, and shows that somehow I've come round with two lines of thought to much the same place. More on how this works when I figure it out.