As a method of historical relocation

One

In the winter of 2005, I wandered to a small second-floor bookstore in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, and pulled out "The Death of the Woman Wang" on a dense bookshelf, and after reading the translator's preface and the author's preface, I decided to buy it. The 261-page book is priced at 260 yuan (HK$) and 87 yuan at a discount. At that time, the same thick and thin books in the interior only needed a dozen pieces. I later learned that jonathan D. Spence was a prominent historian and professor of history at Yale University, and that year he was president of the American Historical Society. But at the moment of opening that book, I really didn't know anything about the author, and I was completely fascinated by this wonderful story.

With the novelty of my first visit to Hong Kong, I quickly finished reading the book.

Wang's body had been lying in a snowdrift all night, and when she was found, she looked like a living person: because the cold had preserved a vivid color on her dead cheeks.

The end of the story is like a movie screen, deeply imprinted in my mind. The woman Wang Shi wearing soft-soled red cotton pajamas, I am no stranger to. Even after more than three hundred years, the fundamental situation faced by a woman in the countryside of the north seems to have changed very little.

The Death of Wang is one of Shi Jingqian's most well-known works and the most controversial one. He once said why he wrote this work. In the late 1960s, he was writing about Kangxi. In the second half of the 17th century, Kangxi, as Emperor of China, was one of the most powerful figures in the world. He wondered what kind of life was life like for the ordinary peasants who lived at the bottom and were vulnerable to poverty and disaster, in contrast to the Lord of the people who stood on the dragon's chair. By chance, Shi Jingqian saw a copy of the Tancheng County Chronicle in the Cambridge Library in the United Kingdom. In the process of flipping through it, he discovered a story of an unnamed woman who had been ruthlessly murdered, but without further details. In the end, he relied on a county chronicle, a bureaucratic memoir, and a short story by the writer Pu Songling to construct a low-level society full of disasters, bandits, and criminal cases, and even so, the people who bear the pressure of survival have their own humble dreams.

For years, people have been obsessed with judging how shi Jingqian moves at the border between history and literature. This is naturally an interesting topic. But in the case of The Death of Wang, what ultimately appealed to me was his awareness of the problem and his changing perspective. This is also a notable feature of his later readings of his other works.

He wondered how the hearts of an emperor and a country woman shaped each other's lives in the same era; he also cared about how the two parties, who were originally in opposing positions, "conspired" to create a piece of history in the imperial power game. In his writing, the core question is always how people survive, which he regards as the "essence of history." So his problem consciousness points to a three-dimensional past, and in his own words, "the most challenging thing is how to maintain the balance of the story." Since the second half of the 20th century, the prevailing doctrines, ideologies, classes, races, genders, and various cultural criticisms have disappeared.

For example, he used the works of the short story writer Pu Songling in "The Death of Wang". In Pu's story, it is the homeless, street vendors, tricksters, and learners who are at the bottom of society, who weave strange dream experiences for them. Shi Jingqian believes that Pu Songling was the voice of some Chinese of his time, and his novels were also full of violence, and he embedded these in his own stories, using an almost montage technique to add an important internal perspective to the murder stories that lacked details. As a result, Wang's daughter gained a "golden body", from a silent natural person to a remembered "historical person".

Shi Jingqian believes that his stories have their own power: "Forty years later, people are still reading my books, not because my writing style is fashionable, but because I touch the essence of these stories." Like it or not, it must be admitted that he established a new paradigm of historical writing. That is, to take people as the core, pay attention to the feelings of human life, such as curiosity, anxiety, confusion, joy, etc., and portray the pursuit of the meaning of life; and then weave exquisite scenes with dense details, supplemented by unparalleled imagination, weave stories between the remaining historical materials, occasionally there are some jumps, and the two ends are also the cornerstones of historical facts; the foreground and background of the story, properly tailored, are melted into the narrative; theory as a method, rather than a point of view, exists in footnotes, or is simply hidden. After all, it is not impossible to say that "The Death of Wang" is a feminist historical work, but he does not mention a concept that was prevalent at the time.

Two

Thomas Babington Macaulay (800-1859), the English predecessor of Shi Jingqian, said in On History: "The best historians in modern times have deviated from the truth, not because of the temptation of imagination, but because of the temptation of reason." He criticized historians for their keenness to summarize the laws of history, even at the expense of distorting facts to suit the theory. Out of this intellectual fanaticism, historians since the 19th century, with great pride, have exhausted historical material to come up with historical axioms similar to the second law of thermodynamics. To borrow a historian's irony: insisting on finding purpose turns historians into prophets. This is really a mockery of scientific historiography.

As a result, man becomes less important in history. The times are meaningful units, and people are just passive duckweed-like beings. Historian Wang Fansen has a subtle metaphor: the whole history is like a train going forward, the driver and passengers are not important at all, what is important is only the carriage and the rail. I thought from this, then, that the man in the train that runs along the so-called laws of history becomes the "prisoner of the train"? Individual people, of course, do not exist, only plural people remain, become quantitative historical analysis of the data.

The 19th-century Rank school believed that as long as the complete historical data was mastered, the past could be objectively and truly reconstructed, and there could be scientific precision. Before Rank, McCooley had long criticized such an idea as a complete fantasy: because it was absolutely true, the most trivial things and the most insignificant details had to be recorded. Not to mention that the historical record is always just a corner, that is, it is really all recorded, a vast expanse, and each recorder has carried his own cultural background and consciousness bias, then the record is not absolutely objective. In this way, objectivity is always only a matter of degree.

It is very interesting that Shi Jingqian seems to continue the narrative tradition since Macaulay. He received a systematic British education, attending boarding school as a child, entering Winchester College, one of the oldest public schools in the UK at the age of 13, and then at Clare College, Cambridge University, specializing in British history. His alumnus, George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), argued that history could not deduce universally applicable causal laws like the natural sciences. He once said a passage that can be used directly to describe Shi Jingqian's historical writing:

In its unchanging nature, it is "a story." Around this story, like flesh and blood around bones, there should be many different things going through it—the portrayal of the characters, the study of social and cultural movements, the exploration of possible causes and consequences, and anything that historians can use to illustrate the past. But the art of history is always the art of narrative, which is the most basic principle.

During Shi Jingqian's studies at Yale University, his interests turned to Chinese history. He studied Qing dynasty history with Mary Clabaugh Wright (1917-1970), a student of The Chinese expert Fairbank. Mary Rui recommended him to Fang Zhaoyao, an expert in Chinese historiography in Australia. Fang took him into the standard academic world in a Chinese-style way, with a master and an apprentice, and gave him a meaningful Chinese name, Shi Jingqian. "Shi", taken from the initials of his surname, is also his true color, and the meaning of this name is even more profound: to pay tribute to the great Chinese historian Sima Qian, to become an equally remarkable historian.

It was Sima Qian who established the paradigm of Chinese historical writing: the Ji chuan style as the main body of historical writing. In the words of Qian Mu: "One of the greatest things about Chinese history is that it can take people as the center. Of course, the problem that arises from this is the tendency of pan-moralization, which attributes the rise and fall of history to human words and deeds and moral qualities. Since the late Qing Dynasty, Chinese historians have resented traditional history, calling it the "genealogy of emperors and generals," focusing only on political systems and dynasties. In 1902, Liang Qichao published The New Historiography and Introduction to Chinese History, denouncing this tradition of writing history. Since then, the proportion of people has declined, the social weight is rising, and by the 1920s, Fu Sinian and others proposed a "new historiography" to establish a scientific historiography like biology and geology. Later materialist historiography believed in the determinism of historical laws, that man was only a product of the times, and that a single person was like a marionette.

I think that Shi Jingqian's historical writing is a combination of traditional Chinese chronicles and British narratives. He rediscovered the man in Chinese history, the man in the structure, who was not an isolated being, nor a god who decided to do anything, nor a term for being stripped of flesh and blood, but a person living in social culture. Thus, his writing has a universalist quality, a methodology. In Shi Jingqian's own words: "We can tell stories in any existing way." There is no reason why you can't analyze the motivations of politicians in a psychoanalytic way. You can assume that this political figure was influenced by some theory and event, or that he experienced some important event in his youth, such as when they witnessed the murder of their father or mother. This is exactly how we live, and it is the way people have lived for thousands of years. ”

Three

A good historian must have enough imagination in order to establish connections between historical materials of nonlinear causation and to be meticulous in the narrative. But he had to control his imagination and limit it to the material he found. In Shi Jingqian's book about Zhang Dai, the lantern is a very important image, and it is inspired by Zhang Dai's memories. In "Tao'an Dream Memories", Zhang Dai said that when he was a child, he was carried on the shoulder of a family servant to look at the lantern; in his memory, the first thing he remembered was the light of the lantern. What Shi Jingqian is criticized for is that he sometimes goes out of his control and allows his imagination to run wild and construct scenes in another time and space. It is not difficult to understand that a person has mastered a subtle skill, and to endure it is definitely a test of human nature.

In my opinion, there is no more reflective of Shi Jingqian's talent in historical writing than the wonderful work "The Death of Wang", which is a height that pure rational analysis cannot reach. This can be said to be a kind of historian's "intuitive power" or "understanding". When he looks at the ordinary material, he already has a picture in his mind, and his mind is connected with the past, as if he has entered a "meta-universe". He describes his experience of finding stories: "I am interested in stories that are hidden in the history of reading, as if it were the feeling that those histories are waiting to be discovered. In the preface to The Death of the Wang, he uses the word "summon", as if using magic to summon a dragon. In an interview, he mentioned that one of his favorite passages was the last paragraph of the preface to "The Death of Wang". In that passage, with a hint of trepidation, he depicts the impact of discovering this story on his soul.

I felt the impact. A year after reading The Death of Wang, I published a book review in a newspaper's book review section called "Historical Reconnaissance of Shi Jingqian," which should have been one of the earliest articles to recommend his book in the public media. When I say that he "allows the author to immerse himself in time," I am deeply moved by this connection to history. Entering the writing within the characters, the situation gives birth to its own understanding and expression of the crux of the problem, and uses structure to present a moral environment. I think that's the deep reason why his writing about Chinese history has become so popular overseas. After all, most of his historical figures are meaningless to readers in other cultural contexts.

In an interview with another historian, Lu Hanchao, Shi Jingqian expressed his goal with great clarity:

Even though my books look a bit like popular books as people call them, I always provide readers with a professional and more in-depth reading list, telling them where to go next, and hoping that they will develop their own interests. I want to inspire people's desire to learn more about China...

He is very sober about the influence and impact of his works, but Chinese many of the world's debates about him seem to be of little significance.

Wei Feide believes that the most brilliant of Shi Jingqian's works is the last scene of Hong Xiuquan's book: inside and outside the barracks, busy Western merchant ships and soldiers gazing at the night light and listening to signals, the author integrates his perspective into the wide-angle lens of the treaty port and the battlefield, which is a multi-dimensional tension between fiction and fact. In my eyes, the most wonderful thing, in addition to the end of "The Death of the Wang Family", is that hundreds of years later, the author of "The Emperor and Xiucai" returned to the historical scene and most truly arrived at the small private school that was once looking forward to the side of Anren Road. I think that is the source of understanding, and the essence of history emerges.

(The author is a writer and producer)