In 1931, a novel written by American writer Pearl Buck and based on the life of the Chinese peasant Wang Long's family was published in the United States, and the book was widely praised in American society and became the best-selling book in the United States for two consecutive years.
In 1938, Ms. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her book "Land", and the nobel prize speech of Ms. Buck pearl at that time was: "Ms. Pearl Buck, through those literary works with superb artistic quality, you have made the Western world a great and important part of mankind, Chinese people, have more understanding and recognition." ...... You have endowed us Westerners with a certain Chinese spirit that allows us to recognize and feel those precious thoughts and emotions, and it is precisely these thoughts and emotions that connect us all on this earth as human beings. ”
Pearl Buck is a very unique case in the history of literature, she was born in the United States but lived in China for nearly 40 years, and was deeply influenced by Chinese culture from an early age. But at the same time, due to her own racial and ethnic differences, she is also facing cultural exclusion and deviation that may occur in literary creation by people on the margins of culture.
Buck Pearl, who wrote in English about the social phenomena of China's feudal countryside for twenty or thirty years, sympathized with China, arguing that "I have learned to love the peasants there, who are so brave, so industrious, so optimistic and not dependent on the help of others." I decided to speak for them for a long time. However, when she presents the living dilemma of the rural people at the bottom of the society to the reader, she lacks some empathy for the peasants' hard life experience, and there is a situation that floats on the surface of the plot.
"The Land" is a fairly excellent work in the vernacular novels of the same period, the author originally intended to present a primitive ecological description with local meaning, Pearl Buck has a rich experience in the life of the bottom of Chinese society, and has a very profound and meticulous description of the survival of the peasants, she focuses on the relationship between the peasants and the land, reflecting the author's own profound discussion and sympathy for the hardships of the people at the bottom of China, and it is precisely because of the author's own foreign cultural background that this work presents a great charm with unique characteristics.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" >1, the cultural background of "Earth": Pearl Buck's Chinese life</h1>
Pearl Buck has a very deep Chinese cultural background, and it can be said that these Chinese thinking rooted in her value identity and value pursuit has almost influenced her life from a young age She was born in an American family, came to China with missionary parents, and was deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture from an early age.
Her nanny, Aunt Wang, was an important source of cultural influence in her childhood, and Aunt Wang told her many traditional ancient Chinese novels, such as "The Legend of the White Snake" and "Dream of the Red Chamber". Aunt Wang seems to have endless mythological stories, in which the gods or ghosts live in trees, stones and clouds; there are sea dragon kings, river dragon kings, and local dragon kings who are pressed into towers, which make Pearl Buck have a strong interest in Chinese culture since childhood.
In Pearl Buck's cultural enlightenment, the earliest cultural cognition of China appeared, in addition to the social reality she saw and felt herself, the rest came from these novels and folk tales, and she was attracted by the superb creative skills and vivid characters of these novels.
These life experiences and stories shape Pearl Buck's earliest Chinese thinking, and then become the creative nourishment of "The Earth", in the novel, (Wang Long's worship of the gods is influenced by this culture) Zhenjiang, where she once spent her childhood, also becomes the prototype of "the great, sprawling, opulent city" in "The Earth".
When I first read this work, I will inevitably feel a little boring. Tired of Wang Long and Alain's silent old and loveless married life, tired of its descriptions of land and labor, trapped in reading in a non-native language environment. But as the story kept going, I got to think deeper.
Some readers or scholars sometimes simply think that it is a Chinese novel with a reproduction of "exoticism" when studying "The Land", which has caused many controversies because of its author's particularity and cross-country status, so that Pearl Buck is still not included in the list of american classic writers to this day. In "The Land", Pearl Buck presents with great sympathy the China at the bottom of her society, crossing the gap between Chinese and Western cultural exchanges.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > 2, self/other: pearl buck dual identity</h1>
"The Land" has many, many cultural phenomena worth exploring. Writing Chinese society in English, translated by translators into Chinese circulating in China, is itself a kind of "cultural return". In her writing, we can see the contradiction between the "self" and the "other" in the recombination of an identity. The boundaries of the relationship between the constructor and the constructed are actually blurred. In a postmodern context, imaginary geography and history help the spirit to reinforce its sense of itself by dramating the differences between nearby and distant regions."
This kind of behavior is a way of self-awareness of the colonial people, of course, the way the colony people are colonized may be in the form of language, power control and other new ways. But this time the cognitive culture writing was done by a Caucasian who used the form of Eastern discourse to try to closely connect Western culture through her own identity cognition. In the process, she faced a number of questions about identity and racial disparities.
【Stills】
Homi Baba once introduced a concept of "hybridity", in terms of language, culture or rights, the colonizer and the colonized are actually intertwined, and this repetitive development is to make the two sides blurred through the form of simulated discourse, thus further subverting the colonial discourse. The confluence does not lie in tracing these two origins, but in the fact that the "third space" and "third space" that allow other positions to emerge are new unrecognized worlds created by the interweaving of the two cultures, in which the shaper himself is a subject.
However, the creation of "The Land" is more complicated than the "mixed" creation, and she stands on the two identities of colonizer and colonized. While crossing the gap between Chinese and Western cultural exchanges, she fused the two identities to create a new cultural space of her own.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > 3 Colonizer/Colonizer: Exotic Thinking from the Chinese Perspective of "The Land"</h1>
In "The Land", Pearl Buck has a very clear vein, that is, she always closely unites the peasant and the land. At the beginning of the novel, it is implied that Wang Long will have children of his own after marrying his wife.
The relationship between Wang Long and the land in the novel is described in great detail, and Wang Long loves the land purely, like a mother who loves her son deeply. After the great famine, the family was forced to go to the south to survive, and the most reluctant thing was still the land, and when he left, he still had "land" in mind. The despair of surviving in the South has always been a belief that "we must return to our land.".
This description of China's original ecological small-scale farming method is very real, and in the old era, many farmers' lives were basically like this, working at sunrise, resting at sunset, relying on the land, self-sufficiency. Peter Kang once commented on Pearl Buck: "The depiction of Chinese is based on a large number of personal experiences, making an unprecedented contribution to multiculturalism. ”
In the process of creation, Pearl Buck stands in a Familiar Chinese perspective, with her Chinese thinking, trying to bring the reader into the old social China of the 200s and 3rd centuries. Her writing was undoubtedly a success.
The relationship between the "self" and the "other" mentioned above, she as a creator has two different identities at the same time in the creative process, which is a contradictory fusion. On the one hand, she is a colonizer from the so-called export of developed culture from the West, but she tries to describe the world in which Chinese peasants live with sympathetic brushstrokes, and she has a long-standing sense of identity with Chinese culture, so it is time for her to become a "self" from this "foreign" culture, not "the other".
She became a constructor and the narrator of the novel; and the Wang Long family became the narrator. This becomes a contradictory existence, in the relationship between "self" and "other", generally similar to the relationship between "colonization" and "postcolonial", and Pearl Buck is undoubtedly a colonizer from American culture, but she uses her own experience to describe the real society of China, emotional identity is more inclined to Chinese people, and become a colonizer.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > 4, the "third space" of cross-cultural narrative: cultural expression is mixed</h1>
This kind of wandering under the dual identity of the creation is obviously "mixed". She recreates the two cultures in a way that overlaps, so "The Land" is not simply an "exotic" novel, nor is it a traditional Chinese-style vernacular novel.
The novel constructs a bizarre "third space" under pearl buck's eyes that does not completely restore Chinese society, which is also where pearl buck works are controversial. At the time of the publication of "The Land", some left-wing writers in China made some comments, and Mr. Lu Xun also said: China's affairs are always done Chinese, so that the truth can be seen, that is, as Mrs. Booker once welcomed in Shanghai, she also claimed that China was like the motherland, but looking at her works, she was the position of an American female priest who grew up in China... What she felt was nothing more than a superficial situation. ”
American readers who were influenced by traditional American culture could not fully understand the significance of land for Chinese at that time, and the theme of land and the simple character of Chinese peasants resonated with American culture in their hearts, and "The Land" was widely praised.
But in fact, the impression of the United States and even European countries on the Chinese at that time was actually quite rigid, and they generally believed that Chinese decadent, backward, ignorant and numb. Ross believes that the Chinese nation is a people who are bored and do not know how to enjoy life, so Chinese are "indulged in the double evil of opium consumption and gambling."
The analysis can also be seen that there are indeed some differences in narrative expression across cultures in the novel text. Thus creating a "mixture" of cultural expression. Although Pearl Buck lived in China from a young age and knew a lot about Chinese culture, differences in race and living habits were inevitable. Chinese certain traditional habits seem to be an innate inheritance, rooted in bones and blood that have not changed for thousands of years, and are rarely reflected in "The Earth".
For example, "The Earth", which depicts the life of peasants, lacks the expression of Chinese agricultural time, and the twenty-four solar terms are the compass that guides China's agricultural life, which is of great significance to agricultural production. The four seasons and the twenty-four solar terms can be said to be important symbols of Chinese farming culture, but it is difficult to see this time expression with unique cultural significance in the novel text. In the author's pen, time only shows the meaning of the transformation and flow of spring sowing and autumn harvest, without the expression of the four seasons. There is a scene in the book where Wang Long and Alain have been harvesting rice, and Pearl Buck simply attributes the reason why the rice grains are very full to the fact that the summer rain is abundant and the autumn sun is warm.
However, if as a traditional agricultural farming, it will not only be a simple cycle of spring and autumn sowing, farmers will pay attention to the rainy season of the valley, and the rain of the valley is the best time to sow seedlings and pick melons and beans. The arrival of the valley rain festival means that the temperature rise is accelerated, which is greatly conducive to the growth of cereal crops. Time is the cultural detail of everyday life, and Pearl Buck, as an American, cannot have the cultural cognition of such details. The same time problem also appears at the beginning of the novel Wang Long took Alan home, saw the green peach listing decided to buy a few green peaches for Alain, the book explains that the green peaches are listed in the early spring, there is a time error here, even if the peaches are generally ripe around June and July, they can be listed, in such an early spring season, there will be no green peaches on the market.
As mentioned above, pearl buck is in the context of the relationship between colonization and colonization, which is harmonious and different. In the face of "the siege of cultural differences", "The Land" became a cultural "heretical" novel that reflected the reality of China in the 1920s and 1930s and had a Chinese mindset.
From this point of view, this cultural difference is immeasurable, neither the "other" nor the "self", but a third textual expression in three-dimensional space. This goes beyond history and reality to a certain extent, but it is a powerful form of writing, not a mistake, but an unrecognized form of expression, the creative power of the "third space".
"The Land" is a world in the eyes of foreigners living in China, and in her eyes, China's local society is like this, which is an "imaginary museum" with a difference in otherness, the result of the collision and assimilation of the exchange of two different eastern and western cultural concepts. The creator is a subject, and the novel text she carries is a subject, so "The Earth" as the subject is not only a form of knowledge, but also a shaping of the body and soul.
Standing on a foreign territory, Pearl Buck integrates Eastern and Western cultures, and shapes his own foreign and Chinese thinking, forming a flesh-and-blood work. The struggle, diligence, hard work, and bitter sorrow of the Chinese peasants jumped on the paper, and the indomitable struggle of these hard-working people is not only an inertia, but also an embodiment of the commonalization of the human spirit.
Therefore, the "Earth" trilogy has changed the fixed view of Westerners on Chinese in general, and enhanced the image of Chinese, so that the cultural concepts and connotations embodied in this work still have very profound thinking value to this day.