Reading Memories in the Drizzle

Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg

doi:10.22439/cjas.v39i2.6366

Abstract

This vignette presents Yu Hua´s novel from 1991 and analyses two different interpretations of the novel with fifteen years between them written by the same prominent critic, Chen Xiaoming. The first interpretation was written in 1992 when China was in the early stages of economic reform. The second was written in 2007 when deep-going social changes had affected the life of the individual. By comparing these two essays, I aim to show how a literary text may act as a catalyst for bringing out existential issues at stake at a particular point in time.

Highlights

Memories are as much about the present as they are about the past
Among others, Kierkegaard and Camus, he implicitly argues that only individual memory is existentially valid and stresses that Yu Hua’s use of the first-person child narrator is not about relating a childhood past, but serves to project a uniquely individualised point of view, uncontaminated by preordained linguistic discourse
We may understand how individualisation on the structural and personal level may create the conditions for a change in reception, or with Iser (1978), for a different performance of the literary text, one which resonates with a somewhat different mood, a mental climate open to interpretations rooted in subjective experiences of precarious existence and aloneness

Summary

Introduction

Memories are as much about the present as they are about the past. When we remember, the past is not preserved, but reconstructed based on the present (Halbwachs 1992). The novel is at the same time a detailed and sensitive description from the inside of the mind of a lonely child, and a keen and almost detached presentation of private life in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution period, as observed by this outsider-figure who is simultaneously at a distance and part of it all.

Results

Conclusion