The Monster That Is History
Headnote: As my dear raietta has so kindly pointed out to me that, yes I've been neglectful as regards my LJ entries and this is unacceptable. Also with reference to a comment made by dear budgie, who said that I only came up in LJ when I was drunk, I hope this entry will prove that I do sometimes keep my head clear from alcoholic influence... :)
The subject is in fact the title of a book that I'm now reading, written by David Wang, who's a Taiwanese scholar. The book is about the modernity and monstrosity of the modern Chinese literature with the backdrop of the analysis and re-construction of history.
Oh but then you don't need to bother yourself with the book. All I wanna talk about is Wang Kuo-wei, a major scholar of Western and Chinese subjects in the late 19th and early 20th Century. His "Horizontal theory" is still a much talk-about aesthetic thinking for Chinese literature and art criticism.
Wang died on 2nd June 1927 - he sank himself in the Lake Kunming of the Summer Palace in Beijing after he was devoid of all hope and faced with nothing but the doom of the Qing Dynasty. He was so depressed by the changes and invasions in and out of the country that he thought it was only right that he should die with the dynasty. Before he killed himself he left a death note saying that:
Aged fifty years old
Lacking only death
After the world changed so
No more humiliation would hold*
(* this is a poor translation, but as I can't find any better quotes... sorry if this sounds funny)
I remember a teacher of mine once commented that, Wang was the very typical example of the intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty, where the knowledgeable scholars could no longer hold onto their precious virtues and traditions in face of the collapse of kingdom and damnation of foreign invasions. And death to him was very much a comfort, for he had nothing else but the past...
The Qing Dynasty lasted about 300 years and though it ended in ruin, it had Wang Kuo-wei as its mortuary objects at the end...
History and violence and narrative and death of a poet.
I wonder who, in the future, will kill himself for a lost cause when the time comes...
The subject is in fact the title of a book that I'm now reading, written by David Wang, who's a Taiwanese scholar. The book is about the modernity and monstrosity of the modern Chinese literature with the backdrop of the analysis and re-construction of history.
Oh but then you don't need to bother yourself with the book. All I wanna talk about is Wang Kuo-wei, a major scholar of Western and Chinese subjects in the late 19th and early 20th Century. His "Horizontal theory" is still a much talk-about aesthetic thinking for Chinese literature and art criticism.
Wang died on 2nd June 1927 - he sank himself in the Lake Kunming of the Summer Palace in Beijing after he was devoid of all hope and faced with nothing but the doom of the Qing Dynasty. He was so depressed by the changes and invasions in and out of the country that he thought it was only right that he should die with the dynasty. Before he killed himself he left a death note saying that:
Aged fifty years old
Lacking only death
After the world changed so
No more humiliation would hold*
(* this is a poor translation, but as I can't find any better quotes... sorry if this sounds funny)
I remember a teacher of mine once commented that, Wang was the very typical example of the intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty, where the knowledgeable scholars could no longer hold onto their precious virtues and traditions in face of the collapse of kingdom and damnation of foreign invasions. And death to him was very much a comfort, for he had nothing else but the past...
The Qing Dynasty lasted about 300 years and though it ended in ruin, it had Wang Kuo-wei as its mortuary objects at the end...
History and violence and narrative and death of a poet.
I wonder who, in the future, will kill himself for a lost cause when the time comes...