History in a mythical key: temporality, memory, and tradition in Wang Anyi's fiction

Ruptures of the social fabrics accompany China's rapid pace of development and its integration into the global market, severing the connection between cultural memory and history. Increasingly abstracted into economic, administrative, and exchange processes, the matrix of meaning and values that used to connect individuals to society and the past to the present has lost its self-evidence and cohesive power. In the emergent society of consumption and mass media the older Marxian notion of history as social and political practice is receding from public purview and China's past is being dissolved into spectacles. The 1980s critique of the grand narrative was taken over by the liberal-consumerist erasure of history under the spell of global capital. Cultural production has exhibited a downturn to the immediate and the everyday, to consumptive practices and frivolous pleasure. In opposition to this there arose a striving for renewed engagement with history, an intensified attempt to seek possibilities in the past for understanding and responding to swift changes. Wang Anyi's fiction epitomizes a serious engagement with history. This essay focuses on the mythical motif in Wang's fiction that draws on memory, associated with legend, folklore, and tradition, to critique the accelerative thrust of modern history. The novel Reality and Fiction (Jishi yu xugou) represents a poignant attempt to invoke a primordial history steeped in myth. The short story ‘Marriage of the Fairies’ (‘Tianxian pei’) illustrates the way memory can be a strong resource that binds a group into a community under the exigency of change as well as a critique of modernity.