On December 26, 2021 local time, historian and Yale University Emeritus Professor Jonathan D. Spence died at the age of 85 at his home in West Haven, Connecticut.
In the book "Memories of Dreams of the Former Dynasty: Zhang Dai's Glitz and Desolation", Shi Jingqian commented on Zhang Dai, a scholar of the late Ming Dynasty: "He is both a lover of history and a historian... He is like us, fond of all kinds of people, things, and things, but he is also a digger, trying to explore the deep and dark realm. Today, it also seems like Shi Jingqian's own situation — he explored the "deep and dark realm" of Chinese history by digging into details, stories, and the fates of different characters.
Author | Peach sauce
Edit | Cheng late
"Secret Garden"
"We live in West Haven and have a 3 acre garden with lots of flowers. Every time I say, let's reclaim another bed, Mr. Shi will be very tired. Often there are fawns that come to steal roses, and I will reprimand them. Mr. Shi has retired, mainly reading and writing. Promise others to write it, and hand it over and don't care much about sales. We all like to read poems and novels, and often share good passages. We also love to watch movies —American films before 1935, British films from the fifties and sixties, Italian films; the French New Wave was loved when we were young, and now we dare not look back, because they are so contrived..."
This account comes from the reporter Li Zongtao's article "The Taste of History of Shi Jingqian", and the narrator is Shi Jingqian's wife Jin Anping. In 2014, Mr. and Mrs. Shi Jingqian visited China. From Beijing, Chengdu, Xi'an to Shanghai, where the then 78-year-old Shi Jingqian, who resembled Shaun Connery, was treated like an academic star, Li Zongtao was one of the reporters accompanying him.
At that time, some media recorded such details: At an academic lecture at Peking University, an audience member directly expressed their admiration for Shi Jingqian on a question note: "Seeing you is like seeing a rock star." Shi Jingqian, puzzled by the star treatment he received in China, asked the translator: "I am a foreigner, writing and speaking in English, why is Chinese so interested in me?" His translation returned a word: "Handsome! ”
Shi Jingqian signed for book fans/Visual China
Shi Jingqian's first trip to China was in 1974, when he and a dozen Yale professors came to China for a spin. One of the math professors was highly courteous because "Chinese loved math at that time", while Shi Jingqian "had no fans". In the late 1980s, when he visited China again, at Peking University, "he was forbidden to come and go at will", and no one knew him. Around 2000, his works began to be translated into China, and as a result, he gained a large number of loyal readers, hoping to get a different interpretation of Chinese history from this outsider.
In an interview with People magazine, Shi Jingqian's first disciple at Yale and former director of the Cultural Center of the City University of Hong Kong, Zheng Peikai, also recounted Shi Jingqian's love for the garden, a "very British Briton", saying that since spring, he wore a straw hat and, like a farmer, went to the garden to cut trees and flowers; under his garden, next to a small river, it was originally a swampland, which he transformed into what he called a "secret garden".
Zheng Peikai originally planned to move to Jiangnan in the late spring of 2019, to visit the West Lake, to Zhang Dai's hometown, because it was the "cultural China" in Shi Jingqian's mind, and it was also the First Book of China he first studied, which was based on his doctoral dissertation "Cao Yin and Kangxi". "I think he probably wants to be able to go down to Jiangnan like Kangxi and Qianlong." Zheng Peikai said.
Cao Yin and Kangxi
[United States] Shi Jingqian, translated by Wen Qiayi
Republic of | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014-3
But Shi Jingqian was unable to make the trip. He suddenly fainted before taking off, a symptom of early Parkinson's disease. Two years later, he died of Complications from Parkinson's. Of course, this is a pity, but Zheng Peikai also said that Shi Jingqian "has actually been living in the context of China's entire history and culture, a very beautiful spiritual space, and it can be regarded as happiness."
A historian's "Dream of the Past Dynasty"
Zheng Peikai likes "Dream Memories of the Former Dynasty" the most, and he guesses that Shi Jingqian's own favorite should also be this one. However, it is precisely this "Dream of the Former Dynasty" that quotes Zhang Dai's works and some misinterpretations of the literature that make readers evaluate it very differently.
The first shi Jingqian book that the writer Zhang Xiangrong read was "Memories of Dreams of the Former Dynasty". His first feeling is "boring": "Anyone who has read Zhang Dai's original work, reading "Memories of Dreams of the Former Dynasty" will only produce the feeling of reading Chinese department graduates collage bestsellers." More than half of the book is quoted from Zhang Dai's original work, but Shi Jingqian collages it from his own perspective. As a result, these original texts have lost the style of the essay, nor have they clearly shown the author's intentions. ”
"Memories of Former Dynasties: Zhang Dai's Glitz and Desolation"
Republic of | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2010-9
The modern historian Wang Rongzu wrote an article entitled "Dreams in Dreams", pointing out one by one what Shi Jingqian misinterpreted Zhang Dai's original text in "Dreams of the Former Dynasty": for example, in the first paragraph of the book, "There is a square in front of Zhang Dai's residence, the moon rises at night, and the lantern is lit, which makes him deeply feel that living here is really 'no vain day', 'living in the room, communicating, and fornicating'" (Wen Qiayi translation), that is, there are two or three fallacies - "the soldier and the woman laugh with the rail, the sound and light are messy, and the ears and eyes cannot be autonomous", and Shi Jingqian understands it as "young man and woman" (young man and woman). Men and women), in fact, the women are women, not men; and the women of the soldiers in the middle of the night "the stars scatter themselves", Shi Jingqian interpreted it as "the stars disperse", using the adjective as a noun.
Wang Rongzu further raised a sharp question in "The Theory of Shi Jingqian": Is Shi Jingqian writing history or writing novels?
Shi Jingqian is indeed known for "telling stories", and some of his works are nothing more than wonderful novels to read. Zhang Xiangrong admired Shi Jingqian's "Ricci's Palace of Memory", which he believed had the temperament and structure of modernist literature. There are also people who disagree with Shi Jingqian's literary approach, and they usually quote Qian Zhongshu's ridicule of Shi Jingqian- "failed novelist".
Matteo Ricci's Palace of Memory
[United States] Shi Jingqian, Zhang can be translated
Republic of | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2015-10
Even by the standards of a novelist, Shi Jingqian is also a master of narrative. In Zhang Xiangrong's view, Shi Jingqian's writings provide an example for history writers: each of his works adopts different narrative methods and structures, allowing later scholars to feel the extent to which historians' imagination can reach and how they break through the boundaries between history and literature.
Does historians need imagination? In this regard, historian Wang Di held a positive attitude in an interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily. But Wang Di also pointed out that the imagination of historical writing has a premise, that is, whether your exposition is based on historical records or your own inferences and imaginations, you must tell the reader. Wang Di said that Shi Jingqian did just that, and in "The Death of Wang", he quoted a fragment of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" to describe Wang's dream and inform the reader of the source of this text. Through these literary narratives, Shi Jingqian renders a "sense of presence", allowing the reader to return to the historical situation.
The Death of Wang
[United States] Shi Jingqian, translated by Li Xiaokai
Republic of | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011-9
The "Sense of Presence" in Historical Writing
"Sense of presence" is exactly what Shi Jingqian is good at.
In his 2010 essay "The Making of Jonathan Spence," the sinologist Frederic E. Wakeman Jr. (along with Shi Jingqian and Kong Feili, known as the "Three Masters of North American Sinology") said that Shi Jingqian had a unique vision of detail, and that his inspiration often came from the images that popped into his mind. Wei Feide recounted a personal experience of his: In the evening, he and Shi Jingqian walked through the Wesleyan College campus in Middleton, and when he asked Shi Jingqian what he had been busy with recently, Shi Jingqian looked up and muttered, "I have found a precious historical material about the murderer of a woman named Wang... A corpse lay in the snow..."
If you have read "The Death of Wang", you will find that Shi Jingqian fixed this picture in the book with words: "Wang's body has been lying in the snow all night, and when she is found, it looks like a living person: because of the cold, there is a vivid color on her dead cheeks." (Translated by Li Xiaokai)
Wei Feide also wrote in the text that Shi Jingqian had mentioned to him that in 1382, the year that winchester College he studied at was founded in Hampshire, England, The Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang suppressed Hu Weiyong's rebellion and abolished the post of chancellor. In Weifeld's view, Shi Jingqian's way of thinking across time and space is very similar to Arnold Toynbee, an old alumnus of Winchester College and a distinguished historian.
"He saw things that most of us overlooked." Wei Feide took Shi Jingqian's "Tianping Heavenly Kingdom" as an example, and the scene of foreign merchants in Guangzhou's noisy docks described in the book was very familiar to him, because he had used the same historical materials in his earlier works. "But when I read Shi Jingqian's narration, I realized that I lacked his sensitivity to images and sounds that could impress contemporary people."
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
[United States] Shi Jingqian, zhu Qingbao et al. translation
During his 2014 trip to China, Mr. Shi sorted out his literary roots: he liked Walter Pater and Lytton Strachey, writers who brilliantly blended literature and history; he liked Woolf and Evelyn Waugh, dickens's writing of small people and Jane Austen's wits, all of which influenced him. The first-person writing of "Kangxi" is derived from Yusenaar's "Memoirs of Hadrian".
Hadrian's Memoirs
[French] by Margaret Youssenaar, translated by Chen Xiaoqing
Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2011-3
He also mentioned some of his methodologies. For example, while doing research on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, he found something: Hungry people steal from other people's dogs, do these dogs have names? When the French attacked the Taiping Army, they set up a pool table behind the position, one group of people fought in the front, and the other group of people happily played billiards in the back. In Shi Jingqian's view, historical research is like a puzzle, and what historians do is to piece together the historical fragments they find into a complete picture. His favorite documents are private diaries and letters, because "you will instantly acquire an ability to gain the perspective of someone else, and you will become another person, to see the world and see that history through that person's eyes."
A combination of literature and history
"What we know about the couple is that in early 1671 they were married and lived in a small village eight miles southwest of Tancheng outside Guichangji. They are very poor, and Ren makes a living by working as a domestic worker on other people's farmland. Their home had only one room with a rice cooker, a lamp, a woven mat and a straw mattress. We also know that six months after the marriage, Wang lived with her husband and seventy-year-old father-in-law, but the old man finally moved to another house a mile away because he was not very good with her. Moreover, we know that Wang was alone at home most of the day; that she had her feet wrapped; that she had no children, though there was a little girl named her aunt next door; that her home faced a grove of groves; and that at some point, for some reason, with the passage of 1671, she ran away. (Translated by Li Xiaokai)
This opening chapter of "The Death of Wang", by today's standards, is a model for non-fiction writing. Of course, because it uses history as the subject, it should be called "historical non-fiction writing".
Historical nonfiction writing is a concept that has emerged in recent years. Regarding the difference between historical non-fiction works and historical academic works, according to Zhang Xiangrong's understanding, there are two levels: First, whether to adopt academic standards. In historical nonfiction, literature can be used as a methodology. Second, whether to express the author's views and emotions. The views expressed by writers in historical nonfiction may seem less important in academia, even some common sense, but for the purpose of dissemination to the public, writers will still adopt them.
Earlier, when Shi Jingqian and historian Lu Hanchao talked, they also talked about the difference between "literature" and "fiction". Shi Jingqian argues that when we use the word "literature"—whether it refers to "literature" or "literature," we use it to convey a quality, a judgment, or how to make up a sentence; when we use the word "fiction," it means a method that does not have to be based on facts except for being reasonable in a broad sense. Combining history with literature and combining history with fiction are not the same thing.
In Shi Jingqian's view, literature is a philosophical tradition, "so if I combine literature and history, it just means that I have a passion for the writing style of historiography... I try to build a book on such a structure that it is accurate on one level and expresses feelings on another, and gives the story a richer context. It's like using art to bring historical writing closer to art to achieve deeper results. ”
In this sense, Shi Jingqian can be said to have demonstrated the possibilities of historical non-fiction writing through his own writing. For example, in "The Death of the Wang Family", how does a small person like Wang Shi, who only occupies a few lines of words in the historical materials, make her appear real and credible? Shi Jingqian's approach is to give emotion to this character through the text of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" in the same period and in the same region.
As early as 2005, the media person Zhuang Qiushui wrote an article proposing that Shi Jingqian's work is a typical non-fiction writing in the West - "it uses a more imaginative method to investigate history, it allows the author to integrate himself into time; it also allows the author to look at the characters and events narrated from the perspective of a bystander."
Shi Jingqian (right) won the Lionel Gerber Prize for Literature/Visual China
Shi Jingqian told Lu Hanchao that he and "Shizu" Fairbank were different in that Fairbank's purpose was to assist U.S. policies (such as his book "The United States and China"), "and the goal of my writing is to encourage people to understand China." "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."
"Forty years later, people are still reading my books, not because the way I write is fashionable, but because I touch on the essence of these stories." In 2014, Shi Jingqian said so.
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Author 丨 Peach Sauce
Editor 丨Cheng late
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