Literature, History, and Narrative: A New Historicist Reading of Yan Geling's "Celestial Bath"

Once again I wave at Beijing,I want to grab her collarAnd shout out loud;"Remember me forever, Mama Beijing!"

At last, I have grasped something.Who cares whose hand it is—I won't let it go!For this is my Beijing,This is my last Beijing.

—Shi Zhi, "This Is Beijing at Four-o-eight,"
written on Dec 20, 1968

The relationship between history and literature has long been a key element in literary studies: Marxism, old historicism, and new historicism all relate text to context, and comparative literature as a discipline has stressed literary history and textual analysis. Since the 1960s, there has been an increased emphasis on the role of history in the study of literature and culture. Beginning in the 1980s, new historicism has made significant contributions to comparative and world literature, history, and culture. This article discusses Yan Geling's short story "Celestial Bath" by combining text and context and taking a historical approach to textual analysis; the discussion takes Aristotle into account, and also follows Fredric Jameson's advice to read history through the text and narratives. I have chosen Yan Geling as the subject of this study because she is an overseas Chinese writer who, by definition, lives in a comparative or double context.

The disciplines of history and literature are different in terms of methodology, but what they have in common is that both deal with types of narratives. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau asserts, "What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative" (287), and Fredric Jameson has made a similar observation:

[H]istory—Althusser's "absent cause," Lacan's "Real"-is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form. …

(82; emphasis in original)

Both agree that what one reads in historical books is in fact a kind of narrative, and not necessarily what indeed happens in the past; furthermore, they agree that no one, except for witnesses to the event, has access to history without textualized narratives.

In Poetics, Aristotle provides the classic outline of the disparity between literature and history. Aristotle contends that poetry, the earliest form of literature, which can be expanded to include all literary productions, is more universal and more general than things as they are because "it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity" (32). Aristotle declares that the historian, not the poet, writes about what has already happened, whereas the poet's task is to write about what could happen. For Aristotle, poetry is a more philosophical type of writing and a higher form of writing than history, because "poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular" (33).

One point of Aristotle's perspective on history may require some clarification. For Aristotle, historical writing deals with that which has happened. This seems to suggest that historical writing is objective as it describes events in the world. According to the poststructuralist perspective of historiography, however, historical writing may not necessarily be as objective as it should be or is supposed to be. In the preface to The Content of the Form, Hayden White points out the differences between narrative discourse and historical representation:

narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications.

(ix)

What White emphasizes here is that all narratives are merely a kind of discourse, and that all discourses must contain a kind of ideology. This point of view is certainly true in the case of a writer's creation of fictional worlds. In the creation of a fictional world, the author may draw upon the actual world by borrowing facts or anchoring the fictional story in a historical event or series of events...