Leaving the World to Enter the World: Han Shaogong and Chinese Root-Seeking Literature (review)

When the contemporary Chinese cultural industry fell under the spell of a commercialized, entertainment-oriented popular culture, it would seem that rootseeking literature (or search-for-roots literature, as rendered elsewhere) with its idealism and sense of mission was, indeed, as remote as the imaginary locales where it purportedly searched for the essence of Chinese culture and literature two decades ago. Like so many other literary trends that flourished in the heady days of the 1980s, root-seeking literature, too, came and went. But no matter how we may smile at its proponents' naive faith in the power of literature to shape social development, the trend has earned a place in post-Mao literary history. And so has Han Shaogong, whose 1985 article "Wenxue de gen" (Roots of literature) has been credited with starting the trend that excited China's literary imagination in the mid 1980s.

Mark Leenhouts' book Leaving the World to Enter the World: Han Shaogong and Chinese Root-Seeking Literature is testimony to the staying power of Han as an important writer and to the trend he is often associated with. It offers one of the most comprehensive studies to date of Hans literary writings from 1985 to 1995. Leenhouts spells out his agenda and methodology in a succinct introduction. To counterbalance an "extrinsic" approach in the existing scholarship that usually emphasizes Hans role in root-seeking literature based on selective texts from a sociopolitical point of view, Leenhouts focuses on the "intrinsic" aesthetic qualities—motifs, narrative forms, and themes—of Han's oeuvre that allow his stories to stand on their own as structured, coherent, and meaningful literary constructs. This critical strategy will help, Leenhouts hopes, to correct not only the "one-sided" picture of Han Shaogong as a representative of root-seeking literature but also some of the conclusions about that trend. On the textual level, much can be learned from Leenhouts' persuasive and meticulous analysis.

The first chapter examines the inception of roots literature and the ensuing debates. Root-seeking literature was not a movement, Leenhouts contends, let alone a well-conceived one with systematic theory and coherent practice—a conclusion also reached by other critics and indeed by Han Shaogong himself, who cautions that "putting one label on all of [root-seeking writers] is a bit awkward."¹ Leenhouts points out that writers such as Wure Ertu, Zhang Chengzhi, and Zheng Wanlong use their ethnic identity as the basis for exploring China's cultural identity while others emphasize culture as an alternative to Maoist uniformity by zooming in on the lives of the ordinary people. His conclusion is that root-seeking literature "moved literature away from narrow socio-political engagement by stressing the much broader cultural aspect of literature and by advancing its aesthetic ambitions and that it paved the way for the experimentalist literature of the 1980s and 1990s by its search for identity and the ensuing emphasis on subjective expression and language" (p. 14). Leenhouts holds that Han Shaogong developed a more nuanced view of Chinese tradition over the years. The exaggerated dichotomy between Chinese national literature and the West in his essays in the mid-1980s gave way to a more softened attitude that stressed creativity in opposition to a superficial imitation of the West. Moreover, "there is a relationship of opposition, struggle, and distrust" between what Han propagates in his essays on root-seeking and what he portrays in his fiction. In the essays Han may still be "China-obsessed" as a public intellectual, but as an individual writer he is more concerned with literary creativity (p. 24).

Leenhouts demonstrates Han's creativity in the next three chapters, concentrating on such literary elements as plot structure, narrative perspective, and recurring images and motifs. The theory of "complementary bipolarity" and "multiple periodicity" put forward by Andrew Plaks in his study of the...