Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (review)

The three nouns in Ban Wang's subtitle are not three items arranged as if on a shelf, but three forces locked in a strange kind of combat. It is not "trauma plus memory plus history," but "trauma versus memory versus history." "Memory ensures identity and relates the individual to a past, personal and collective, that feeds relevance and identity to the present. . . . The strong need for memory at present is a sign of the severing of vital connections under commodity exchange" (p. 218). But "when history is infected with trauma, its temporal scheme is put out of order. Normal history writing flounders on traumatic memory" (p. 114). "Trauma is thus what shatters the received repertoire of language, narrative, and meaning" (p. 115). The chapters of this book attempt to narrate recent Chinese cultural activity—mainly fiction, film, and cultural theory—as just such a "shattered" history.

Readers of Ban Wang's The Sublime Figure of History (Stanford University Press, 1997) will recognize some features of that book: the breadth of genres considered, an urge to link artistic production to social conditions (while avoiding the reductive causal schemes that so often go with such a desire), and frequent allusions to Walter Benjamin's writing. If the earlier book ran at times to the "Germanic"—opting for the abstract and the prophetic over the specific and concrete—this book tilts the proportions even more heavily in favor of wide-gauge rumination. Wang's ambition, it seems, is to establish the intellectual framework that will explain and definitively contextualize the cultural production of the last twenty-five years, while all the time staying shy of any unifying narrative, any linear causation. Trauma and fragmentation become his descriptors for that missing unity: explanation works when it predicts the failure of explanation.

Where Wang is genuinely illuminating is in his accounts of such elusive motifs as "memory," "experience," and "nostalgia"—modes of narration and framings of content that affect contemporary Chinese people in general, not just writers and filmmakers: despite evident downgradings in the status of the intellectual, the technical and thematic choices of present-day authors find immediate resonance with the "schizophrenia" (Meng Yue's term) of ordinary historical awareness. Consider the traumatic factors: the Cultural Revolution, the transition to a market economy without representative institutions of government, and the current rush to "globalization." When a large part of contemporary experience does not exist for official history, and another large part of it is inconvenient for the purposes of consumer culture, no wonder the past breaks out in the shape of ghost stories, nostalgic desires, or vague utopian stirrings. The fiction writer Wang Anyi and the filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang are the central exhibits in Wang Ban's survey of a multiply distorted contemporary historical consciousness, with further discussions of Eileen Chang, Zhu Tianwen, Han Shaogong, and others.

Among the three terms in Wang's title, locked in an endless game of "scissors, paper, rock," the one that offers a possibility of escape is "history." But for reasons that the reader can only guess at (is the author, too, a part of what he describes?) this "history" is vague, indefinite, a concept rather than a field of particulars (Wang has a great deal to say about History, almost nothing about history). That Wang is aware of the distinction is not in doubt: "As in Benjamin, auratic art came to the rescue of experience, so the burden of history [in contemporary China] fell to the domain of the aesthetic. . . . History writing in the 1980s did not aim to investigate or reconstruct the ways things really were, or to recall marginal or suppressed memories. It was to seek a language, a form of articulation, in order to make sense of history" (p. 107; the corresponding footnote 32, on p. 267, shows a faint interest in the activities of "social scientists...