Can She Say No to Zhang Ailing? Detail, idealism and woman in Wang Anyi's fiction

Abstract

This article is a study of aesthetic idealism that characterizes the fictional works written by the contemporary Chinese writer Wang Anyi during the 1990s. I start with a comparison of Wang Anyi with Zhang Ailing, arguing that Wang's ambivalence towards Zhang's aesthetics of details is translated into a dilemma the former faces in her own writing. On the one hand, Wang Anyi appreciates Zhang's passion for life's details. Wang's own works show a high penchant for details. On the other hand, Wang is critical of Zhang's aesthetic leap from the sensuous (detail) to the nihilistic (meaning). Wang's anxiety over the ultimate value of detail can be attributed to her ideological allegiance to a May Fourth leftist tradition as well as to her awareness of the derogatory association of detail with women's writing in China. So in what way can Wang Anyi say no to Zhang Ailing? How does she try to steer clear of the danger of ‘materialistic’ trivialization that she sees lurking in details? I observe that in Wang's fiction there is neither a full embrace of idealism nor a total rejection of detailed realism à la Zhang Ailing. Instead, Wang Anyi treasures the use of details as a signifying practice to embrace her idealism. In her 1990s' fictional works, Wang Anyi's effort to circumvent the dichotomy between detail and idea is complicated by her attempt to use details to reconstruct pictures of the past. There are several aspects to this issue. First, although nostalgic details in Wang Anyi's ‘memory stories’ help to give expression to idealistic longings of the author, they also tend to conspire with the official ban on the discourse of the traumatic socialist past. Second, while details are regarded as important in sum total, they are actually relegated by the writer to a secondary place as mere constructing materials to serve the function of bringing out the larger idea. In terms of actual narration, the highly ‘authoritative’ voice often suppresses the depth of individual subjects in her fiction. Third, Wang's ambiguity with regards to details and ‘feminine materials’ affects her characterization of women. A reading of Wang's two fictional works, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge) and Fu Ping (Fu Ping), demonstrates that the writer's instrumental approach tends to render female characters stranded between allegorical figures and individual subjects.