Abstract
This essay deals with a special text-type in postmodern Chinese fiction which radically deviates from all conventional forms of narrative. Appearing as a “short story” but in the form of a schoolboy’s spontaneous scripts and absent-minded scratches, it presents everything naturalistically in a non-fictional mode. By presenting trivial characters and uneventful happenings in random pieces that constitute a new form of narrative, its author artfully shows rather than tells that life is more realistic in the eyes of a child and is richer, more colorful and meaningful in fragments. With newness on almost all levels of linguistic and narrative presentation, the story practices eventful narration in process narration by interweaving fragments into a highly coherent discourse of fictional narrative. While there is hardly a theme or obvious message in most of the individual pieces, the story as a whole implies undertones of the satire on many aspects of school and family life. This avant-garde literary experiment not only refreshes the reader’s schema of literature and adds to their experience of literary reading, but also contributes to the making of postmodern fiction by enriching the concept of narrative, the definition of narrativity, and ultimately the notion of literature.
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Notes
Yunnan University Literary Seminar, No. 23. (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4e5288220100rtjl.html).
National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (2012), p. 16. By the way, this is an annual review on literary works, which classifies this short story in the category of “fiction and web fiction” rather than that of “children’s literature”.
The original “files” are not numbered, and they are numbered here only for convenience. There is no definite or indefinite article in Chinese, and none is used in the translated titles unless there is a numeral “one” in the original.
Tolstoy (2000), p. 1.
Levinson (1983), p. 54.
Fowler (1981).
Sell (2000).
Duchan et al. (1995).
Levinson (1983), pp. 68–93.
Lodge (1992), pp. 193–194.
Esslin (1961).
Tolstoy (2000), p. 1.
Hühn (2010), pp. 1–13.
Ibid, p. 3.
Ibid, p. 3.
Booth (1961), p. 3.
All the excerpts are my own translation. A big problem for my analysis is the difficulty of presenting samples of Xu’s text in equally “bad” English, since a lot of original sentences are not strictly acceptable according to standard Chinese grammar but acceptable by grammatical logic in spoken Chinese discourse.
These four characters are very complex in the number of strokes, with the same radical meaning “devil”, obviously beyond a little schoolboy’s knowledge.
Genette (1997), pp. 1–2.
Chatman (1978), p. 248.
Shklovsky (1965), p. 13.
Hutcheon (2003), p. 117.
Hutcheon (2003), p. 10.
Ibid, p. 10.
Ibid, p. 116.
My own translation. Ma (2004), p. 3.
For a detailed analysis, see Feng (2008).
Ge (1989), p. 2.
Shklovsky (1965 [1917]), p. 5.
Segal (1995), p. 4.
Wilde (2000), p. 3.
Culler (1975), p. 113.
Prince (2008), pp. 19–27.
Prince (1999), p. 43.
Genette (1988), p. 19.
Sternberg (2001), pp. 115–122.
Todorov (2007), p. 27.
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Feng, Z. Spontaneous scripts as fictional narrative: an innovation in postmodern fiction. Neohelicon 43, 73–88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0331-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0331-3