Jiang Chengyang (Young Researcher, Simian Institute for Advanced Study of Humanities, East China Normal University)
I wrote a grassroots family history. The main line is The life experience of Lu Shouting, who is my grandfather.
In the early 1940s, Lü Shouting served as the chief of the Jiaodong village, working under the "puppet army". During this period, because of the secret protection of the "Black Eighth Road" (similar to the underground party), he was dismissed from his post as the chief of the security guard and arrested to join the army. In 1946, the "land reform" was carried out, and a middle-class agricultural component was demarcated. Then the Kuomintang Civil War broke out, and he was recruited to participate in the CCP branch. In the early 1950s, he worked as an individual carriage transporter. In 1955, he became a member of the local carriage transport company. He did not like the new way of life, perhaps his freedom was restricted, perhaps his income was affected, in short, he left an archive of injuries to public cattle. In 1958, the public-private partnership department launched a "purge" campaign, and due to historical problems and current destruction, he was beaten into a "bandit" and sent to Qinghai for ten years of transformation. During this period, he was released early and stayed on the spot for employment. He returned to his hometown in 1972 and died in 1977.
The intention of this writing is not to reconstruct the life history of a small person, although it is very important. I heard The story of Lu Shouting from his children, and the interesting thing is that each child has a unique narrative pattern, and they have very different personalities. What causes the difference in personality and memory? This is the focus of the study, but it is still not the ultimate question. My ultimate quest is to try to explore the consciousness of "life." Most of the Chinese believe in fate, believing that in the darkness, an invisible force dominates the trajectory of life. How to understand this (subconscious) consciousness? From the perspective of recollection and narration, I explore how people selectively recall and forget in order to construct a sense of balance in the conceptual world. Of course, this selectivity is highly correlated with each individual's life experience.
In the writing of family history, I have a lot of fragmentary thinking. I think we might as well summarize and sort out these reflections to form an article on historical theory. Some of these reflections are directed at specific topics of family history, while more involve a big problem: the possibility of historical writing. I mainly discuss four aspects: whether family members can write family history without emotional involvement; how case studies can obtain common values; whether historical writing is science or art; and how to understand the truth of historiography.
Group photo of the author's family
The differential order pattern of empathy
Most people are curious to learn that I study my own family history, and I know that behind curiosity is emotional resonance, and everyone is eager to know their own family history. But there is also no shortage of enthusiastic scholars who question: as a member of this family, it is difficult for you to get rid of the emotional involvement of insiders, and it is difficult to meet the objective requirements of historiography in such a written history. I didn't know how to reply for a while, until some time, when I gradually became accustomed to the awareness of consciousness, that is, the inquiry into self-awareness in the process of research, that I realized that the enthusiastic questioning of scholars was only a superficial thinking, and did not go deep into the deep structure of consciousness.
The crux of the matter is that overcoming emotional involvement and preserving the sensibility of historiography are two different things. The former is to restrain one's feelings beyond the line, beware of being dominated by emotions, and easily make obvious value judgments. In this regard, scholars' doubts about the emotional implications are self-evident. But when I talk about the sensibility of historiography, I am talking about another level of the problem, which is about how researchers capture moments, including capturing both the sensibility of the researcher and the researcher's capture of his own instantaneous thinking. I've come to realize that if I question my choice to study my family history because I'm concerned about the emotional implications, researchers are likely to miss out on writing that taps into their own sense.
In this family history study, I captured a large number of emotional moments. For example, after Lü Shouting was dismissed from his post as chief of security, he arrested Ding congjun and burned him with the army, and posterity recalled that there was a matter of setting fire to the old lady. When I recorded this history, I must have had a potential emotional entanglement (it is interesting to note that when I wrote this article, the sense of entanglement had faded, almost nothing). For another example, Lü Shouting's younger daughter, Lü Piyu, due to her special growth experience, has formed an extremely sensitive and introverted personality, because she is my mother, and when I record that she is afraid that her daughter-in-law in the city will look down on her, but she also looks down on her daughter-in-law in the countryside, I also have hesitation in my heart. When I present my emotional state of coexistence of sympathy and discrimination in the countryside, I also experience resistance. Moreover, as generations change, the resistance to that presentation becomes stronger and stronger, so that self-confession makes itself most entangled.
However, intergenerational change seems to be only a symptom, and instead of understanding these entanglements in terms of the emotions involved, it is better to analyze self-consciousness itself. For example, why is self-confession the hardest? Because it's hardest to know yourself? Perhaps, only by capturing and presenting instantaneous feelings in the stream of consciousness can people be true to themselves. The hardest part of being true to oneself may not lie in whether people have the courage to face it, but because most people have lost their keen ability to catch it. Everyone is torn apart by the external self and the inner self, but few maintain the ability to be sensitive to capture and present the tearing state of consciousness.
People often have such feelings, and the people closest to them are the most unable to understand themselves, whether this is really because the emotional involvement interferes with understanding. Scholars who are well-intentioned to question this study are quite convinced that objective research needs to pull away emotional distances. The question is whether researchers can confident that they have a better understanding when confronted with people who can pull back emotional distances. For example, compared to Lü Shouting's children, Lü Shouting can make me pull away emotionally, after all, I have never met him. Compared with Lü Shouting, Zhao Baoyuan, the commander of the "puppet army", can open up the emotional distance even more. But it is difficult for me to say that my understanding of Zhao Baoyuan is better than my understanding of Lü Shouting, and my understanding of Lü Shouting is more than that of his children. Furthermore, it is difficult to say that the understanding of Lü Shouting's children is better than the understanding of self.
Insiders and outsiders are relative, and this difference is often extremely subtle, and I have gradually realized it through years of interview experience. For example, as a young person returning to his hometown and living with his parents for a short time, all bitterness is a personal experience, and this experience seems to need no words to convey. While chatting with other elders in the family, this empathy is weaker. Chatting with other fathers and fellow countrymen, my mental state was noticeably relaxed, and that self-presentation seemed to imply a sense that all I needed to do was to give greetings or sympathy in small talk. It is advisable to borrow the reference of Mr. Fei Xiaotong's "differential order pattern" and give this subconscious name, which I call "the differential order pattern of empathy".
This habitual subconscious, when it enters the researcher's reflection, it is not difficult to find that the opening of the emotional distance does bring a sense of research convenience, because of the natural emergence of a strange feeling. Most people are like this, and they often turn a blind eye to the people closest to them and do not hear them. But on the other hand, this kind of research convenience is also likely to be mixed with misunderstanding, only because the emotional distance is widened, inadvertently reducing the inner burden of the researcher's Zang Neg character, and at the same time, it seems to weaken some empathy experience.
In short, the so-called getting rid of emotional involvement and pulling away emotional distances is likely to make researchers weaken the experience of empathy, and also miss the opportunity to dig deep into self-awareness, and then make historical writing lose warmth. I believe that academically trained researchers usually have a cultural consciousness and can deal with the problems involved in emotions. If the researcher has the ability to keenly capture self-awareness and has the ability to find strangeness in the habit, then he can better deal with the relationship between emotional involvement and historical sensibility. In fact, there are a few influential works in family history research, all of which are written by members of the family, such as Lin Yaohua's "Golden Wings", Zhou Xirui's "Leaves", Li Jie's Shanghai Home: Palimpsests of Private Life, etc.
Fragmentation: Space or Spirit?
It must be admitted that the fragmentation of current historical research is becoming more and more serious. How case studies can achieve common value needs to be rethought. Taking this family history study as an example, I would like to talk about three points of experience.
First of all, family history should be a study of overall history, which requires a time span and involves many aspects of politics, economy, culture, and military. For example, in "Golden Wings", through the narrative of life history, Lin Yaohua strung together many major political events, such as the Xinhai Revolution, the warlord scuffle, the agrarian revolution, the War of Resistance Against Japan, etc.; strung together important historical processes, such as the expansion of trade in the Minjiang River Basin in the 19th century, the rise of modern transportation industry, the process of local militarization in the late Qing Dynasty, and the rise of the modern education system. Similarly, in my family history research, through the life story of Lü Shouting, I have run through major events and historical processes such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War, "Land Reform", joining the army, public-private partnership, "purge", and collectivization. In today's fragmented research, scholars can certainly study specific issues in detail, but they cannot let readers form an overall grasp of the times. For example, there are enough bricks and tiles produced in the academic community, but few people design buildings with excess bricks and tiles.
Second, although the study of overall history involves a lot, it should not be exhaustive as much as possible, but there should be a key hidden line. The value of this hidden line lies in breaking through the narrow pattern of a family and reflecting the larger level of group survival. In the case of my family history research, this key hidden thread is the food relationship of the twentieth century.
In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip II, Braudel divides history into three levels: one is the history of a long period of time, an almost static history, that is, the history of the relationship between man and the surrounding environment; the second is the history of society, groups and groups; and the third is the history of events, that is, the traditional history, that is, the history of the individual. He warned that history on a personal scale is just a wave on the surface of the sea, it is touching and emotional, but the world is only a dragonfly to the depths of history. "We have to figure out these hidden, often silent, huge currents of water beforehand, and long-term observations reveal where they flow." Sensational events are often only the epitome of these broad fates, and can only be explained by them." ([French] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean And the Mediterranean World in the Era of Philip II, translated by Tang Jialong and Zeng Peigeng, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2014, p. 10)
In the case of Twentieth Century Chinese Rural History, "grain" is the deep current that drives the fate of individuals. According to Kong Feili's analysis, a breakthrough in the way grain is obtained is a key symbol of China's transition from the imperial system to the modern state. (Kong Feili: The Origin of the Modern State in China, translated by Chen Jian and Chen Zhihong, Beijing: Sanlian Bookstore, 2013, pp. 73-102) The constant changes in land relations and the agricultural tax system determine the changes in the relationship between the state and the peasants, and also affect the changes in the relations within rural groups, which affect the fate of each individual. Through this family history study, I will run through the key events of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, such as the Kuomintang's grain requisition, double reduction and capital increase, land reform grain requisition, mutual assistance and cooperation, and unified purchasing and marketing.
Finally, the greatest value and the greatest difficulty of the case lies in how to "cross the worldly river and reach the other side of the spirit" (Yan Lianke). The so-called fragmented questioning is nothing more than "how typical and representative can the history of a family be?" "This question is very reasonable, nowadays micro-empirical research is often caught up in specific cases and cannot be detached, while historical research needs grand care." But I came to realize that most of the scholars who questioned "fragmentation" did not raise their understanding of grand concern to the spiritual level. Most scholars believe that as long as the object of study is large enough, the problem of "fragmentation" is overcome. This is simply an understanding of "fragmentation" and "wholeness" on a spatial scale, without realizing that the true commonality is not an expansion at the spatial level, but an expansion that erases differences. So, how do true commonalities come to fruition? It needs to transcend to the spiritual level, that is, to cross the worldly river and reach the other side of the spirit.
The ultimate exploration of my research is the consciousness of thinking about "life." Fatalism is the problem of the other side of the spirit, which has the characteristics of the region and the times, and at the same time transcends the limitations of the region and the times. I am trying to show that fatalism arises from the absurdity of man's state of being, and that the generation of fatalistic consciousness is also creating absurdity, and it realizes the rebellion against absurdity by creating absurdity. The absurdity of the consciousness of life lies in its selective construction, by forgetting this creative power, turning a blind eye to certain facts that are exactly happening. But it is not absolutely negative, not absolutely opposed to free will. The reason why the consciousness of "life" is absurd stems from our rational consciousness, and for the believer, where reason fades, the subconscious mind appears. In the face of cold absurdity, the only viable resistance may be self-deception. In a sense, this vibrant subconscious fundamentally determines the activity of human life. (Remnant Snow: The Castle of the Soul : Understanding Kafka, Beijing: Writers Press, 2019, p. 103) It is this selective construction in the subconscious that achieves a balance in the conceptual world, so that people can fight against the absurdity of the world and live.
This is obviously a philosophical question, which is enough to arouse the reader's sense of empathy and sympathy, and to arouse the reader's thinking about his own life and consciousness. In this regard, historical writing requires the study of living history. The history of living points directly to the other side of the spirit, such as fatalism, the concept of life and death, and other issues.
History Writing: Science or Art?
I agree with Hayden White's positioning of history as the intermediary between science and art. ([American] Hayden White: Postmodern Historical Narrative, translated by Chen Yongguo and Zhang Wanjuan, Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2003, pp. 33-62) The so-called science, that is, empirical research to explore the truth of history, while art is to create a sense of strangeness and create a new perspective on the cognitive world, which integrates the unique temperament and temperament of the individual.
First of all, empirical research is the basis of this family history writing, which is carried out through archival inquiries and field interviews. The process of archival searching made me realize that family history writing is very fateful, because not all families can leave archives, even if only sporadically. This process also suggests that not all family stories are worthy of academic writing, and it is clear that only stories with rich twists and turns can sustain a large-scale study.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing grassroots research is the lack of information, especially the lack of written archives. Natalie Davis encountered this dilemma when she wrote The Return of Martin Gayle: local information is extremely rich, but the historical data of specific people is only scaled and half clawed. Davis's approach was to try to discover the world they might have seen, and how they might have reacted, with the help of other sources from the localities of the same period. (Natalie Zemun Davis: The Return of Martin Gale, translated by Liu Yonghua, Peking University Press, 2015, p. 16) As far as my family history is concerned, the archives are also scaled and clawed, but all deal with key events, such as the record of Lü Shouting injuring livestock during a public-private partnership in 1956; and the trial of Lü Shouting during the "purge" movement in 1958. Although the direct material is only this, in The Davis way, through extensive access to the archives of relevant events, combined with multiple interviews, the historical context can still be roughly restored.
Natalie Davis and The Return of Martin Gayle
The key to field interviews is multiple rounds of interviews. I keep interviews at least once a year, mainly individually, and sometimes look for opportunities to chat en masse. The advantage of individual interviews is that it creates a relatively private conversation space, with less ideological concerns on both sides and easy in-depth interviews. This avoids the problem of group chat: individuals often have to take into account the emotions of the other to cater to the overall emotional atmosphere. This difference shows the subtlety of the interaction between identity and narrative: when chatting in a group, the individual narrative needs to take into account its role in the family, because the role corresponds to the individual's conventional norms of words and deeds.
But group chat is essential. On the one hand, the common memories and prompts of many people inspire more details about past memories and correct each other's memory mistakes. On the other hand, as Li Jie put it in her shanghai family research, "Small talk between family members or trusted neighbors can provide a rare atmosphere of honesty, comfort, and humor, and their small talk creates a more diverse historical narrative than the official historical narrative." [Jie Li, Shanghai Homes, Palimpsests of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 148]
Repetition is essential, and any repetition creates new differences, which are reflected in the narrator's point of view: even when I don't expect more from a topic, I always inadvertently hear unsolicited stories from the narrator; and through repeated fieldwork, even if the interviewee lies for the first time, the discussion of the same topic in the third or even seventh interview may reflect the real experience of the interviewee; (Yunxiang Yan, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 11) There are more subtle reasons why individuals change their cognitive judgments over the same period of history in the past. Especially when the individual has recently experienced a turning point in his life, his account of the past may change, in order to re-recognize his identity. （Elliot G. Mishler, Narrative and identity: the double arrow of time, in Discourse and Identity, edited by Anna De Fina, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Bamberg (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41）
For the listener, the value of repetition is that many details that previously felt scattered and can be omitted will taste a kind of vivid vitality when listening to the narrator's repeated mentions and their own independent memories afterwards. Many times, researchers resonate with the content of the interview, not at the moment of first hearing, but long after aging. It is the inadvertent transmission and experience of the living vitality that makes the micro-historical narrative no longer just a "fragment" that confirms or subverts the grand narrative.
The preliminary work of my research was mainly to check the files and interviews, which built a solid foundation for the whole research. In the later stages, I thought more about the issue of artistic presentation. I have an association about a mode of film shooting, which currently exists only in my imagination, that is, the subject of the film, the shooting tidbits, and the post-event film review are integrated to form a new film. It aims to break through flat narratives, or two-dimensional narratives. This narrative is characterized by a God perspective, in which history is overlooked. What I tried was three-dimensional, multi-layered historical writing. This writing mode needs to bring "I" into history, appearing in two links: shooting tidbits and post-event film reviews.
The so-called film subject is the main story line of family history. Historians often overlook a thought: whether researchers can suspend their existing knowledge of historical facts to present a sense of strangeness in writing and reading. In other words, why don't historians assume a childlike state, not just as writers themselves, but also as potential readers. I mean, the researcher writes a sentence that may contain some kind of historical "knowledge," and the researcher may be content to think that the reader should know about this "knowledge." This phenomenon can either be said to be the hegemony of the researcher's thinking, or it shows that he himself is not aware of all this, and is not aware of the limitations of the times implied here. It is important to note that current and future readers will not feel comfortable thinking that they "should" know some historical "knowledge."
Filming tidbits refers to the integration of file checks and interview experiences, and here it also involves the introduction of phenomenology and the subconscious. "We have to recognize what a great prospect will be in front of artists once they finally give up showing things as we see them," Gombrich said. (E.H. Gombrich: The Story of Art, translated by Fan Jingzhong, Yang Chengkai, Nanning: Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2015, p. 181) He tells us that art is not only about what you know and see, but also about what you feel. For example, in the face of archives and interviews, it is fun to capture the interaction of thought. Man cannot be a prisoner of historical data, such as archives, and crawl under its guidance. To be detached from it, even to be playful with it. I mean, when a person is confronted with historical data, his mind will flash a variety of thoughts in different moments, and they are whimsical and fleeting. Historians who pursue objectivity are happy to keep digging in the mountains of historical materials, exhausting their lives and leaving a small pile of rubble around them. They don't realize that fleeting thoughts that flash through their minds are more important. Colinwood said: "True beauty is by no means subjectivity and objectivity in the sense of subjectivity and objectivity, it is the discovery of the mind in objectivity." ([English] Colinwood: Principles of Art, reprinted from Colinwood: The Concept of History, translated by He Zhaowu and Zhang Wenjie, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2003, p. 17)
How phenomenology enters the writing of literature and history, how words evoke hearing, touch, taste, and all such sensations, and how to capture everything that extends from these sensations. These questions deserve the consideration of historians. Proust presents the possibility of this kind of writing with the capture of involuntary memories. (The so-called involuntary memory refers to the past, evoked by the sense of chance acquisition of the present, which is given by unexpected objects, such as the taste of dessert, the sound of a spoon hitting a wall, and the past is hidden in this object.) See Proust: Remembrance of Water Years, translated by Li Hengji et al., Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 2008) The generation of narratives means the interruption of non-self-help memories, which means that people are withdrawn from phenomenological intoxication. It seems that it is difficult for people to capture the involuntary memories of others, and it seems that they can only experience the unconscious and subconscious of others in a way that plunges into the depths of their own consciousness. But there is no need to despair, and the "twists" in the narrative — dreams, slips of the tongue, confusion of memories, random mental associations, etc. — still have catch value, and what is superfluous to the information is likely to have a meaning in the words. (Variations of Typical Therapies, in Jacques Lacan: The Collected Works of Lacan, translated by Chu Xiaoquan, Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2019, p. 323)
In other words, researchers need to realize that awareness of self-awareness is a more fundamental, reflective, practical movement. A poetic work not only presents the final product, it can also present the process of this movement. I thought that writing should be like the rings of a tree, showing traces of the author's thoughts at different times, even if it is only for a moment. But this is not very realistic, the annual rings present a sense of clarity, and people's thinking at different times has long been mixed together. In fact, chaos is the more real state.
The so-called post-mortem film criticism is the self-confession of historical researchers, and repentance does not mean guilt, but the perception of the powerlessness to pursue the truth. In this family history writing, this so-called post-mortem film review not only implies the intervention of "I", but I also fictionalize a person who listens to my story. From my point of view, I read my own previous writings, and the old texts occasionally evoke new feelings, which is an impulse to make my own commentary. At this point, I put the fictional friend on the scene to complete this new reflection in the form of dialogue. The process is a bit like painting on a photo, creating layer by layer. Is it far from the truth? Such questions do not seem necessary to be asked.
From the reader's point of view, this fictional friend interrupted me from time to time, questioned the authenticity of my writing, or explored my way of writing, which added another level to the whole research, that is, I discussed many historical and philosophical issues with this friend. When the reader reads this family history, he can switch the identity of this virtual friend at will, either as the reader himself, or as purely the author's self-talk, or as a reader, someone other than the author. I later realized that this virtual friend had brought unexpected value, and his presence made many of my conversations more natural and lifelike, rather than rigid written language.
The confession of historians may face a question: Can man repent absolutely? Wasn't Rousseau's confession a deeper cover-up? It's really playful, and it reflects the endless search for oneself. In The Confessions, Rousseau traces the "true self" through recollection and narration, in what sense does this "self" approach "real"? Starobinsky's comments are quite insightful, and I might as well quote directly:
The ego is not a stillness that I can never reach; on the contrary, I am the anxiety itself, which forbids me to rest. It was in the process of getting rid of what I had previously regarded as a primordial giver (which had just been given and was immediately withdrawn) that my own truth was revealed, and I thought I had found my "true self" in it. Thus all my actions, mistakes, fictions, and lies manifest my nature: I am truly this unfaithful state, a state of departure from the equilibrium that is always attracting me but always avoiding me. There is no madness or delirium that cannot be absorbed by the wholeness of the self. All aspects of wholeness are equally dubious and illegal, but the whole they constitute lays the indelible value and legitimacy of the subject. That is why everything must be told, confessed, exposed, so that a unique being can emerge from that incomparably complete chaos. ([Switzerland] Jean Starobbinski, Transparency and Obstacles: On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Wang Wei, Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2019, p. 115)
Field interviews
Truth: Clarity? multivariant? chaos?
Many of the above reflections will be related to one question: how to understand the truth of history. The perception of this issue involves the researcher's view of history and also affects the possibility of historical writing. Modern and contemporary historical research is facing a special situation: historical materials are not scarce, but too many, and the truth is becoming clearer and clearer, and at the same time, it is becoming more and more diverse and chaotic. In the past, empirical research mostly believed in the possibility of historical restoration, and in the way history was written, it tended to draw clear conclusions, in short, the pursuit of clarity of historical truth. However, it is impossible to completely restore historical facts, and the actions of historical researchers are nothing more than to do their best to approach the so-called historical truth. This process of family history research is also the process of gradually shaping my personal view of history.
The so-called pluralism is to recognize the limitations of a single perspective on historical cognition, so as to present the historical scene together from as many perspectives as possible. In fact, at the beginning of the whole study, my question was how to deal with the problem of multiple cognitions: why children who grew up in the same family formed very different personalities and memories. Mark Bullock emphasizes that history is about understanding, not judging. (Mark Bullock, The Skills of Historians, translated by Huang Yanhong, Beijing: Chinese University Press, 2011, p. 131) When I took this attitude and tried to explore different individuals, I gained a deeper understanding of the plight of the so-called Rashomon.
In fact, when people recall the past, they often express themselves with the help of others. For example, Lü Shouting's children's narrative of Lü Shouting has its own emphasis, but the image of Lü Shouting in their mouths is quite consistent with the temperament of each of them. Lacan argues that the unconscious needs projection, and that the subject assumes his history through the words of others. (The Role and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in Jacques Lacan, Selected Works of Lacan, p. 246) Similarly, Deng Xiaoman argues that self-consciousness contains a self-deception essence. Self-consciousness is the consciousness of seeing oneself as an object and at the same time seeing the object as oneself. Man's sense of self requires him to believe in his own narrative, and he is the true self only if he sees an object as his own. And when he does this, he actually knows that the object is not his true self, and he is actually capable of resisting temptation or rebelling against authority. But if he really refuses temptation and rebels against authority, he will feel great emptiness and helplessness, feel an abstract solitary self, and feel panic because he has lost all objects. (Deng Xiaomang, "On the Self-Deceiving Nature of the "Self"," World Philosophy, No. 4, 2009, pp. 110-117)
The pluralistic view of history is not only reflected in how to understand individual memories and individual consciousness, but also in the construction of the story of this family history, I also construct as many perspectives as possible, avoiding the perspective of an all-knowing and all-powerful God. For example, I will take into account the different perspectives of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, village cadres, Lu Shouting personally, etc., and I will jump out with the virtual friend from time to time to comment on the history I am telling, which is also another perspective. I am particularly aware of the absence of children's perspectives in the writing of past history. Children in specific historical situations have a unique understanding of the historical events around them. The impact of these specific events on children's temperaments is also enormous, and even linked to their later historical cognition. Historians' construction of children's perspectives, relying on the memories of witnesses, naturally combined with a certain imagination, is understandable, why abandon pluralistic presentation?
The chaotic view of history related to pluralism is also manifested in the presentation of history. Pluralism itself means chaos, but chaos is also reflected in the technique of storytelling. I have tried my best to dig up historical materials, hoping to construct the story richly and meticulously, which is a necessary stupid task of empirical research. But when it comes to considering the presentation of art, the idea is not smart. First of all, there are always unverifiable details, as long as it is not the lack of key content, researchers do not have to worry about it. Secondly, even if the parts that can be examined in detail, researchers must not deliberately create roughness and fractures. In the history of art, this question has been thought about. Art historians have found that both paintings and sculptures tend to be more beautiful and powerful than fine finishes. Because only works that are highly imaginative can arouse people's imagination. Those rough and uncertain places are filled by the viewer's imagination, and compared with the effect that the artist strives to achieve, the imagination is at least more satisfactory to the viewer, if not more accurately. This is why Impressionism later gave people the impression of bold innovation. It can be said that behind the lack of retouching, what is hidden is mysterious skill and intelligence. (E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Psychological Study of Pictorial Reproduction, translated by Yang Chengkai, Li Benzheng, and Fan Jingzhong, Nanning: Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2012, pp. 168-177) In addition to the process of story construction, the research is also presented as openly as possible, avoiding explicit conclusions. In short, the writing of history is like an artistic construction, which requires the joint participation of the appreciator. The way you look at it is the way it exists.
Art and Illusion: A Psychological Study of Pictorial Reproduction
The pluralistic, chaotic view of history may stem from my preoccupation with grassroots history. Grassroots history is not positivism, and researchers cannot and do not need to seek the same rigorous certainties as they do in the case of a leader's chronology. This in itself is the reality faced by historical research, and its depth also hides subtle differences in the consciousness of researchers. That is to say, in the face of grassroots and leaders, the psychological burden of researchers is different. It is as if the life history of a leader should be filled with clarity, while the life history of the grassroots acquiesces to the space of imagination. This unnoticed difference in consciousness itself implies the weakness of grassroots status, and even in the writing of history they are at best presented in a vague image. But on the other hand, I suspect that certainty does not accomplish man's historical presentation, but rather stifles the pluralistic possibilities of man's state of being. As Calvino said, "Once the image in memory is fixed by words, it is erased." ([Italian] Calvino: The Invisible City, translated by Zhang Mi, Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 2006, p. 87) This sentence breaks through the paradoxical unity of memory and forgetfulness. In this regard, the grassroots that are lucky to remain on the archives and are vaguely presented are indeed lucky.
Afterword
The reader may be able to appreciate that this article proposes some thoughts, but the most important thing is to call on researchers to capture self-awareness. Why did I gradually develop this kind of thinking? Perhaps it has something to do with studying one's own family history. As a member of family history, when I was writing this family history, I was really exploring what I was exploring. I realized later that, in the final analysis, I was exploring myself, where I came from, and how I became who I am now. The Arabic proverb says, "A man is more like his own time than his father." ([French] Mark Bullock: The Skills of Historians, translated by Huang Yanhong, Beijing: Chinese Min University Press, 2011, p. 53) In fact, people are not only like their parents, not only like their own times, but also can find the source of personality and subconscious from past times.
I realized that don't try to find the truth about history from the outside. The meaning of pluralism and chaos can only be experienced from within oneself, not history itself. When we live, to experience, to think about the state of being, the truth changes because of us. Of course the truth will change, but only when we change will the truth change. So we are actually on the path of solitude, which is the path of exploring ourselves, not just history itself.
Finally, this article also discusses the possibility of historical writing, but history is insoluble, and it calls for the emergence of pluralistic and artistic writing.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhong Yuan
Proofreader: Yan Zhang