Regionalism and Non-regionalism of Ba Jin’s Works

Wang Xuedong＊

Xihua University

Abstract: Modern Chinese literature witnessed the popularity of Sichuan writers like Li Jieren and Sha Ting, who were well known for their distinctive regional characters and the experiences portrayed in their works, telling unadulterated “Sichuan Stories” and depicting lives in the context of Ba-Shu culture. People even consider their works to be the modern “Chronicles of Huayang (Huayang Guo Zhi) in modern time.” However, when we look at Ba Jin, his works are not like typical Sichuan writers (such as Guo Moruo, Li Jieren, Sha Ting, and Ai Wu). He did not pay much attention to depicting the customs and lives in Sichuan, and we can seldom find the flavor of Ba-Shu culture in his works. When editing Chinese Literature and Regional Culture in the 20th Century in 1995, Yan Jiayan so commented,“To study Sichuan literature Ba-Shu culture, it is not appropriate to pick Ba Jin (though he was a great writer with great contributions)” (Li, 1997). As it were, the relationship between Ba Jin and the Ba-Shu culture is delicate. Ba Jin showed his distinctive choices and pursuit in this relationship. By studying the “regionalism” and “non-regionalism” of Ba Jin’s works, we can better understand Ba Jin and his writing. It is also enlightening for us to review the future development of Ba-Shu culture.

Keywords: Ba Jin, modern Chinese literature, Ba-Shu culture, regionalism

One

Outwardly, it seems that Ba Jin and Ba-Shu regional culture are hardly related. His works appear to be “non-regional.” In Ba Jin’s writing, we can find that the essence of his works and literary thought originated from his readings of Western literary works, and his resulting “Western flavor” is an essential feature of Ba Jin’s literary thought. As Ba Jin himself said, “Among Chinese writers, I am probably the most influenced by Western literature” (Ba, 1993, p. 492). His very first creation was typically a “Western experience.” He described it as, “I regarded Vanzetti as my teacher in the preface of my first novel Perish (Mie Wang). In such an atmosphere and mood, I wrote some novelistic plots and scenes while listening to the heavy bell of Notre Dame de Paris. My pain, my loneliness, and my passion turned into lines of words on the paper” (Ba, 1993, p. 9). Taking an overall look at Ba Jin’s writings, it is not hard to find great Western writers behind the scenes, like Rousseau,Hugo, Zola and Romain Rolland from France, Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky from Russia, and even Natsume Sōseki, Saneatsu Mushanokōji and Takeo Arishima from Japan. We should also realize that these mostly Western writers were the context for Ba Jin’s writings and the direct theoretical resources for his literary thought. For example, Ba Jin had explicitly expressed his fondness for Romain Rolland and made no secret that Rolland had shaped his thought. “His heroism influences me a lot. I used to find pleasure and comfort in his books when sadness happened…To love the truth,beauty, and life. That’s what he taught me” (Tan & Tan, 1991, p. 323). For Ba Jin, Romain Rolland was his mental tutor who taught him “to love truth, beauty, and life” and these beliefs became the backbones of Ba Jin’s literary thought. In addition, during his life, Ba Jin continued his “Western experience” by translating, which further consolidated the Western context of his literary thought.Herzen played an important role as one of the writers that influenced Ba Jin. “I translated it more than once and had the same intention each time: I need to learn how the writer turns emotions into words” (Ba, 1993). At this point, Western literature constructed Ba Jin’s thought and provided models for his writing. Therefore, after a survey on Ba Jin’s works, we can find that it is obvious that Ba Jin’s writings and literary theories were influenced more by Western culture and literature than by the Ba-Shu culture and literature.

However, Ba Jin’s writing and literary thought are closely related to Ba-Shu culture and have distinctive “regional” features. They were rooted and grew in Sichuan. The unique features of the people and the environment there influenced Ba Jin subconsciously, becoming an inseparable part of his mind. The Western literature he enjoyed in Paris and other places just played the role of a trigger for his intrinsic attributes, which allowed him to express his nature so intensely. The “family”in Ba Jin’s Family (Jia), though it was deemed by Ba Jin as “having Chinese Flavor,” is not based on imagination but a true portrayal of his own “family.” That is to say, it is a “family” rooted in Sichuan, in the plain of Chengdu. It is a “family” in which Ba-Shu culture is deeply embedded. It is also from this “family” that Ba Jin started forming his literary thought. His explicit pursuit for “l(fā)ove”and strong belief in “truth” was indeed based on the Ba-Shu land (Sichuan). The people he had met,and the things he had experienced in Sichuan constructed the foundation of Ba Jin’s writing. He said, “My mother was my first teacher. I once said it was she who taught me the word ‘love.’ She had presented love in full…My mother passed the love on to me. I felt loved, I learned to love, and I now know I should share the love. I now want to do something for others. The connection between me and society is still the word ‘love.’ It’s the very core of my nature” (Ba, 1990, p. 15). It is his mother’s love that made Ba Jin. Also, his pursuit of truth can be traced back to the sedan-chair bearer of his family. “To quote his words, ‘the fire shall be hollow inside; the man faithful.’ Faithfulness does not mean obeying his master like a slave. What he meant was that people should live by their beliefs.That’s what my mom told me” (Ba, 1986). The sedan-chair bearer, the second teacher of Ba Jin,imparted “faithfulness” to him, which in essence was the pursuit for truth. Love was the foundation of Ba Jin’s nature, and so was the truth. Therefore, it is safe to say Ba Jin’s thought was deeply rooted in the Ba-Shu land.

The things he experienced in Sichuan became the direct sources of his writing as well. Early in 1931, Ba Jin wrote in The Torrent (Jiliu), “Here I want to present to the readers a painting depicting the past ten years of my life” (Ba, 1986, p. 4). “The characters in the book are people who I loved and who I hated. Many of the plots and scenes were what I saw or experienced in person.” “I may say, I am very familiar with the characters and their lives because I lived in a similar family during my first 19 years. They were people I met every day. Some I once loved; some I once hated” (Ba, 1993). The major novels of Ba Jin do give us a full view of his family on the plain of Chengdu. Many characters in his novels were created by taking the people in his own family as prototypes. For example, the well-known characters, Master Gao and Jue Xin in the novel Family take Ba Jin’s family members as prototypes and Yang Chimeng in Garden of Repose (Qiyuan) takes his fifth uncle as a prototype.In one way, by taking real people as his characters’ novelistic prototypes, his novels are filled with rich Ba-Shu regional culture. In another way, by recreating true stories, he revealed the despotism of a traditional, large family, the hypocrisy of feudal ethics, and the struggles of the young people. He further manifested his philosophy and belief in love.

Even more, quite a few of Ba Jin’s novels take Ba-Shu land as their background. Especially,Chengdu and Chongqing frequently appeared in Ba Jin’s novels. For example, Family, Spring,Autumn, and Garden of Repose have Chengdu as their backgrounds; Stories in Cold Nights mainly occur in Chongqing. Wei Hongqiu (2004) commented in Ba Jin and Chongqing that throughout Ba Jin’s writing career, his works in the later period of the New Democratic Revolution (1919-1949) have a close relationship with Chongqing and play a relatively important role in ripening his realistic writing style. In this sense, “Chengdu and Chongqing,” the two famous cities in Sichuan, are not only a reflection of the “Ba-Shu flavor” in Ba Jin’s writings but also the stage upon which he presents Ba-Shu regional culture. In his trilogy Torrent, Ba Jin depicted most delicately the scenes and landscapes, and the cultural customs of Western Sichuan. He described the Western Sichuan mansions, parks and tea houses, schools and temples, presented Sichuan customs of weddings and funerals, festivals and holidays, and traditions and conventions, and fully reproduced the daily lives, historical events, and the cultural ecology in Sichuan. The Sichuan folk culture had a direct impact on Ba Jin. In Literature and I, Ba Jin said, “I grew up among servants. I had heard stories from bearers and footmen when they were smoking. And I helped the bearers to fire the wood and cook.” He also admitted, “I was just writing down what I used to hear when I was young. I wrote those exciting stories faithfully.” He referred to his Yinshenzhu as adapting from the ancient Sichuan folk stories. If you research deeper into his novels , you will find that the Ba-Shu regional culture is not less reflected in Ba Jin’s novels than in Li Jieren’s.

In conclusion, the “Ba-Shu characters,” “Ba-Shu events,” “Ba-Shu scenes,” “Ba-Shu images”and the frequent appearance of Ba-Shu local dialogue in Ba Jin’s novels have shown that the Ba-Shu culture was in Ba Jin’s blood.

Two

As it were, we cannot oversimplify Ba Jin’s works into “non-regional culture” (Tong, 2007). His writings and the presentations of his literary thoughts were deeply rooted in “Ba-Shu Culture” and he did not purposely add “Ba-Shu flavor” to his writings, but this could not deny the pervading presence of “Ba-Shu culture” in his underlying cultural resources. Ba Jin once complimented Li Jieren, “He is truly the historian of Chengdu. His pen revives the past of Chengdu.” Without profound experiences and feelings with Ba-Shu culture, Ba Jin would not have made such a particular comment about Li Jieren’s writings. His literary thoughts themselves were distinctively “regional.”

“I Accuse”

Ba-Shu culture has always contained rebelling characteristics. Sima Cuo in the Pre-Qin period(before 221 B.C.) once said that Shu Land was the Western land where barbaric tribes inhabited and the tyrants like Jie of the Xia Dynasty and Zhou of the Shang Dynasty happened. Chang Qu in Chronicles of Huayang or Huayang commented similarly that when the Zhou Dynasty lost its order, Shu stood out first to claim to the throne. The rebelling spirit of Ba-Shu culture has been truly and bluntly presented in the works of Sichuan writers. Bangu in his Treatise of Geography (Hanshu Dilizhi) says, “In the period of Emperor Jing and Emperor Wu (188 BC - 87 BC), Wen Weng was the governor of Shu. He found ways for people to learn and to obey the rules. For those who did not behave ethically, Shu people criticized them sarcastically regardless they were rich or not.” The aloofness of Ba-Shu culture emphasizes individuality and thus shows its fresh and passionate living style. We can find this distinctive feature in the works of writers like Li Bai and Guo Moruo. Ba Jin was an important representative of writers who illustrated the strong rebelling spirit of Ba-Shu culture.

Ba Jin’s literary thoughts first give expression to the rebelling spirit. In his thoughts, “accusation”is the most important pursuit, and many times he voiced this rebelling spirit in his works, “I will have my pen as a weapon, to charge at them, to cry ‘I accuse’ at this dying society” (Ba, 1932). He even made it clear it was the unreasonable intuitions that he accused. “Since I started my writing, I never stopped charging at the enemies. If not for attacking the unreasonable institutions, I would not have written any novels” (Ba, 1982). So we can see that the rebelling voice always guided Ba Jin’s writing, even at the beginning. The spirit of pointing at the “enemy” directly and the “rebellion” that had never stopped formed Ba Jin’s literary pursuit, which was typical of the modern Ba-Shu writers.Certainly, under the context of modern times, Ba Jin’s rebelling spirit was mainly seen as accusations and criticisms of feudalism. At this time, Wuyu, a scholar from Chengdu, Sichuan had significant influence during the May 4th Movement. His rebellion against feudal ethics and Confucian ideas directly impacted Ba Jin, who said, “I know that I am fighting by writing. I am fighting against Master Gao, the institutions he represents, and those evildoers living in such institutions. I was so familiar with them. I hate them to such an extent that I must write down my thoughts and emotions. I must write down my experiences and feelings” (Ba Jin, 1993). In this way, his rebelling spirit turned from micro feudalism to his clan and onto the people around him. His familiar characters laid a sturdy foundation for Ba Jin’s rebelling spirit and provided this spirit with more sharp and profound criticisms.

The “rebellion and accusation” in Ba Jin’s literary thought does not merely mean destroying feudalism. His final goal was to “construct,” to re-create a new value, to re-present a new kind of life.He commented on the world-famous masterpieces like Les Misérables and Resurrection, “Writers absorb warmth and light from people and then use these to warm, lighten and encourage others. I was encouraged by those works. They offer me energy and power” (Ba, 1993). The value of literary works is not only to rebel “against evil,” but also to give people power and to direct a way toward happiness.As he said, “It also strengthens our belief in a better future, a better future for humankind” (Ba, 1990).Keeping these thoughts in mind, he wrote, “All my years’ efforts, my labor-consuming books, and my living purpose are to help. To help everyone embrace the spring, to lighten every heart, and help every life to reach happiness and for every anxiety to be released by freedom” (Ba, 1983). The rebelling spirit of Ba Jin referred to all humans, to his motherland, his fellows, the truth, righteous love, the future and hope, and to the sacrifices he made for this career. The spirit of rebellion and the pursuit of love were such strong emotions that Ba Jin denied himself as an artist. He’d rather his writings be seen as publicity.

Burning Heart

Ba Jin’s rebelling spirit was so strong that his literary thoughts presented the feature of being passionate. Being passionate and exciting are typical of Ba-Shu people. Modern Ba-Shu writers share such a feature as well. As Liyi said, “For the most explicit presentation of regional culture, we can see the commonly shared ‘youth and passion’ in modern Sichuan writers. Guo Moruo’s ‘forever honest and heartily’; Li Jieren’s ‘bursting with energy like a tiger or a dragon’; Sha Ting’s ‘utter sentences with emotions, always exciting’ and Aiwu’s ‘enthusiastic like fire’. Ba Jin was no exception. His passionate manner of treating people and writing left a great impression - ‘When we were talking,he expressed his opinion excitedly. He would speak until he couldn’t find more words. Then he would frown and end his speech with ‘That’s truly…’ ” (Li, 2010). Therefore, from the perspective of personality, Ba Jin exhibited the distinctive features of Ba-Shu regional culture.

Ba Jin was one of the most representative writers who showed the passion characteristics of Ba-Shu people in their writings. “Passionate literature” was what he valued greatly. First, we can see this in his “exciting experience” of writing. In Torrent, he wrote, “I would get emotional while writing.Sometimes I threw away the pen and walked up and down around the room; sometimes I read out loud what I had just written; sometimes I sighed and shed tears; sometimes I got angry and sometimes the agony caught me” (Ba, 1993). This can be compared to Guo Moruo’s “exciting experience” of poem creation. However, although they both were influenced by Ba-Shu culture and presented vivid life passions, Ba Jin’s passion was more closely related to his cultural focus. That is to say, Ba Jin’s passion was the full reflection of his “l(fā)ove” and “hatred.” “The love and hatred, the sadness and happiness, the suffering and sympathy, and the struggle and hope that I experienced, rushed to my paper. I wrote fast. The fire in my heart calmed down with my writing. Finally, I could close my eyes with peace again” (Ba, 1982). The origin of his passion was his love and hatred. He was searching for the salvation of his soul by expressing personal love and hatred via passion. In Ba Jin’s literary thought, he believed that the core of literature was to present passion and enthusiasm. “A writer holds his ‘burning heart high’ in his every work” (Ba, 1956). This statement proves that Ba-Shu culture was running in Ba Jin’s blood.

The passion, in another way, led Ba Jin to an extreme thinking style. In his view, the value of“passion” even surpassed the literature itself. “I am too passionate. There is something more powerful than art that attracts me. It’s going to drag me away from literature whenever possible” (Ba, 1989).This attitude brought the passion and enthusiasm of Ba-Shu culture to Ba Jin’s literary writings in a much evident way.

“Tell the Truth”

Ba-Shu culture has always tended to emphasize literature and history, thus showing a pursuit for the truth. In the history of Ba-Shu culture, quite a lot of writers and historians have their positions.Liu Xianxin, the great scholar on modern Shu literature, holds that “Shu writers value the truth. Their writings may be above the reality but won’t be empty” (Liu, 1996). Meng Wentong thinks that “During the Song Dynasty, historical literature was rich, even richer than those in the Han and Tang dynasties.Historical works and local chronicles from middle Shu were vibrant.” The richness of historical records was a characteristic of Ba-Shu culture and the reflection of its historical cognition of seeking the truth and being realistic.

Among modern writers, Ba Jin was one of those who had clear cognition of “historical records.”The well-known Family, Spring, and Autumn, which take his own life as their contexts, are an integrated historical record of his family stories. Many of his works emphasized “realness.” He often mentioned the faithfulness to history in his novels when he discussed them. For example, Fourth Ward depicts real events. “I wrote down the true stories. I did not simplify them or modify them”(Ba, 1997). Cold Nights is also a book about things that happened in his real life. “Wang Wenxuan seems to live in the same building with us. He walks through the street where we walk, and he listens to the daily noise that we listen to…I know those. I would walk on the Minguo Road back and forth many times a day. I was thinking while walking; I think about the past eight years and then the things that happened around me recently” (Ba, 1997). Ba Jin took “being real” as his writing standard. He advocated “telling the truth,” and had his collection A Book Telling the Truth (Jiang Zhen Hua De Shu) published. Although in this period, Ba Jin’s pursuit of “being realistic” had upgraded into “telling the truth,” his writings still had prominent realistic characteristics. Therefore, most of Ba Jin’s works are rather documentaries. He wrote to record his experiences. Being documentary and realistic can be found in all his works.

One step further, based on the “cognition of seeking truth,” he constructed a “l(fā)iterary form of seeking truth.” To put it in his own words, the spirit of “telling the truth” is the “truth” of distinctive appeals for values. The appeal for “telling the truth” not only includes the historical truth, the reality,the emotional truth, but also the value of truth. He said, “Telling the truth, for me, doesn’t mean the truth or the right statements. I say what I want to say, and I say what I want to say in the way I want to say it. That’s telling the truth” (Ba, 2003). Only by adhering to such interpretations of the value of truth, could Ba Jin advocate “l(fā)eave my heart to my readers.” “I have no secret skill. I said, I left my heart to my readers” (Ba, 1991). In this way, his “telling the truth” was consistent with the macro theme “l(fā)ove” that he kept mentioning. He turned back to the theme he was so concerned about. The only difference was that the loving objects were changed into “the readers.” The “cognition of seeking the truth” presented the spirit of “telling the truth” and formed his unique writing style. His writing thus had touching and heart-shaking power.

Three

As discussed above, Ba Jin’s literary thought was both “anti-regional” and distinctively “regional.”This is a topic worthy of attention and consideration.

In the aspect of “regional” writing, Ba Jin had a different relationship with Ba-Shu culture as compared to the typical modern Sichuan writers like Li Jieren and Sha Ting. Or, to put it in other words, Ba Jin and Ba-Shu culture had a new form of relationship. Writers like Li Jieren and Sha Ting express Ba-Shu culture directly in their works’ narration, images, and figures. However, it was more important for Ba Jin to present the “Shu cultural spirit” embedded in specific Ba-Shu regional living environments and cultural backgrounds. When studying Ba Jin’s selection of cultures, we find that he was not satisfied with presenting the traditional Ba-Shu culture. He showed great appeal in exploring and recreating the Shu culture.

Ba Jin’s literary thought was rooted in, and beyond the Ba-Shu culture. It was “anti-regional.”Thus, it can be said that Ba Jin’s thought presented a universal “China’s Insight,” which was more than just a concern for a “Ba-Shu Insight.” The Western characteristics of Ba Jin’s literary thought reached readers after Ba Jin’s filtering. “I had been translating Turgenev’s novels since the 1940s. I translated over and over again until 1974. Did I then become Turgenev? No, of course not! But I cannot deny their influences, which happened before I noticed them. Even though they were ‘unconscious influences,’ the influences from others, from books, like food, needed to be chewed and digested to be adsorbed” (Ba, 2000). Although the Western resources (as represented by Turgenev) had a direct and vital influence on Ba Jin’s thought, they were “chewed” by Ba Jin before being finally “digested” and “absorbed”. The “chewing-digesting” was a mutual process,containing Ba Jin’s personal experience and cognition. Therefore, the understanding of Ba-Shu culture in Ba Jin’s thought was related to macro “Chinese characteristic” and “Chinese issues.”“My exploration is different from other writers’. I never thought about the writing methods, skills,or techniques. All I care about is one thing: How to live better, how to be a better man, or how to make contributions to my country, my society, and my people. In a word, all of my writings have purposes” (Ba, 2000). He inquired into how to live, be a good man, and benefit the country and society by writing.

Hence, the cognition of “anti-regional” in Ba Jin’s writing shows distinctive universal and intercommunity concerns, instead of mere thoughts on particularity and regionalism. In his works, he cared about not only how people in Sichuan lived, but also how Chinese people lived. He meant to settle the “Chinese issues.” He once said, “However, I wrote not only about my own family. I wrote down the history of all the bureaucratic landlords’ families” (Ba, 1993). For this, some scholars pointed out that, “Ba Jin emphasized more the universal meaning of writing, and a kind of value that was beyond regions. Gao Mansion contains less ‘Sichuan flavor’ as compared to Li Jieren’s He Mansion and Huang Mansion from The Great Wave (Dabo). From the big family in Chengdu of modern times to the turbid and declined rear area of war, the meaning of Ba Jin’s remembrance of his hometown eventually went beyond his native land, and to the whole of Chinese society and its people.It engendered the traditional Chinese society and the living style of traditional Chinese people” (Li,2010). His writings aimed at being a contribution to China, to Chinese society, and to all Chinese people. Ba Jin mentioned the Gao Mansion of Family as “the kind of family which can be seen all over the nation” (Ba, 1985). But he also said, “Every one of my works answers to the calling for light.I’ve said, ‘Readers’ expectations spur me on.’ I thought back and forth, and all I care about is one theme: how to live better, how to be a better man, and how to make contributions to my country, my society, and my people. So, all my writings have purposes. They are never the result of sentimental imagination” (Ba, 1993).

The focus of Ba Jin’s literary thought was not on such “Ba-Shu Insights” as a hometown or native land. He presented a kind of “China’s insights.” Thus, from the perspective of Ba-Shu culture, Ba Jin’s literary thought contained both the specific Ba-Shu characteristics and the universal Chinese characteristics, which were combined into a new unique style.

To discuss the relation between Ba Jin’s literary thought and Ba-Shu culture, we should also take into consideration another important question regarding the “regionalism” and “anti-regionalism”dichotomy. That is, how to coordinate the “l(fā)and of abundance” and the “basin thought” in studying Ba-Shu culture. To put it more specifically, how do we keep its charm as being a “l(fā)and of abundance”while endeavoring to rush out from the “basin”. Hence, as a writer who held fast to Ba-Shu culture as well as surpassed it, Ba Jin made significant contributions to breaking through the limit of Ba-Shu cultural spirit. Ba Jin’s literature provides an important path which can allow us to pass through the dilemma of “l(fā)and of abundance” and “basin” and to help us get out of the “basin,” to reconstruct modern “Shu culture,” and to empower Sichuan with international “regional” force. In this sense,to study Ba Jin’s literature from the perspective of Ba-Shu culture is actually to construct regional culture, especially to walk a “Ba Jin” way out of the Shu Land and into the world for the “anti-regional”part of a modern regional culture.