Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem: Toward a Narrative Ecology of the Grassland of Contemporary Inner Mongolia

Abstract

The ecological crises of our age figure in any number of often seemingly isolated, often seemingly minor eco-narratives—from the demise of flora and fauna in various locales to micro-climatic change to the displacement of indigenous peoples whose natural (and resultantly cultural) environments have been compromised. Increasingly, imaginative literature engages these matters, seeking to plumb and activate what the pioneering environmental literary critic, Lawrence Buell, calls “environmental unconscious,” “a residual capacity … to awake to fuller apprehension of physical environment and one's interdependence with it” (Writing for an Endangered World 22). In this paper, I will examine Jiang Rong's celebrated novel, Wolf Totem (2004), paying particular attention to two mutually implicated themes: the collision between traditional minority Inner Mongolian culture and modernizing majority Han Chinese socioeconomic practices, and the consequent ecological degradation of Inner Mongolia that ensues over the last four decades of the twentieth century as indigenous Mongol values are supplanted by those of the immigrant Han Chinese.