Dream and Life in Chinese Literature - Book Report/Review Example

Dream and Life have a tendency of dealing with the s of real life and dreams in conjunction. They incorporate other dream-like aspects like hallucinations and visions. Writers focus on the relation of dreams to waking life in order to bring interest and liveliness to their work. Dreams continue the waking life. Dreams relate to real life in that they connect with ideas that have before been in the individual’s conscience and the immediate past real experiences. Dreams lead one back into the real daily life. Dreams could also include things that people are yet to experience in real life but have had great passion and a warm interest in such things in their minds. The use of an integration of dreams and real life narratives in the story Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream by Bai Xianyong is what mainly reveals the true significance and meaning of the story. The merging of dreams and real life narratives enables readers to know that Madame Qian wedded an elderly general but did not complete the bond. They are also able to know that Qian had an affair with the general’s aide-de-camp, resulting to a single tyrist that was the only sexual experience of her life. The heroine, Tu Li-niang, in a dream, experiences an amorous tyrist with a lover in a garden. However, the lover exists in real life. The narrative tries to employ the use of dreams and real life experiences to articulate the welfare of women who have been denied access to basic human pleasures. Authors tend to be creative. It is the main aim of authors. However, if events are determined then they are predictable. When events are predictable, then theinterest in the narrative diminishes. Authors struggle for a sense of suspense, creativity, uniqueness.Unfortunately, the distinction between fictional representation and real life is that the narration work itself is fixed once it is written whereas we are not aware of what actually comes next in life. Fiction and dreams tend to stick to at least some basic conventions, for purposes of formal continuity. Real Life on the other side is not truly the same as a novel or film because even when one dies, there are alwaysothers who continue living on defying the neat trajectories of the novelistic field. Each author is then obliged to innovate a creative method of resolving the challenge of encapsulating life while still invoking attempted and real literary techniques. Bai Xianyong addresses this challenge by creating a sort ofironic narrative in that while predestination is difficult to predict, it is highly allusive to typical Chinese literature and remarkably modern. He achieves this by utilizing an integration of dreams and real life narratives.He also employs the repetition of certain critical passages for dramatic effect. Madame Qian’s status of life as a bereaved widow who never had the pleasures of conjugallife bases on the dual connotation of Mingas both “fate” and as “life”. Mingyunde mingand shengmingde mingare the same words inChinese.Madame Qian embraces her Mingas it is her life in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream”. When the reader peels back the complicated array ofallusions and networks of dreams and real life narratives in this text, one is left with an inevitable prime cause, that of the accomplishment of the prophecy. The narrative development is enhanced by the shifting back and forth between the room in which the celebration occurs and the issues of the past that the present dreams and images conjure for her in the psychological world. When the dreams from the experiences emerge and re-emerge in her mind, a certain repetitive rhythm is produced creating a sort of lyrical or musical impact on the reader. Much the way a modern poem might create an emotion of rhythm and continuity in blank verse by the repetition of important phrases so that they stop to convey meaning simply and start instead to function as formal devices in the poem. Bai Xianyong’s narrative improves by itself, working and reworking main events in her life, and returning to the soothsayer’s observations and the important term yuannie “retribution”. The alleged evil action she did was to have a short affair, but it is clear in the narrative as a realization of a fixed destiny inevitably set in motion by the bone that the soothsayer discovers. The rhythmic textual repetition also acts the repetitive characteristic of Ming textually, as if it is simply the playing out in various or later from that which has already before been determined. Ming as cultural allusion acts as a way of sealing the narrative within the larger world of that which can be referred to as the fate of the Chinese nation, since China could be seen as the nation of fate or at least the country of Ming. It is one of the fundamental challenges with traditional China. It looks human action as fixed and not contingent enough to enable a sense of individual agency. However, Bai Xianyong employs the references to this grand cultural narrative as a further method of ensuring his narrative will be clear within the cultural frame of China and not as something else, whether that is regional or diasporic. Bai Xianyong is deathly terrified that his unavoidable existence on the political and geographical margins of China will disqualify him from being considered a member of the Chinese zhishifenzi. Madame Qian’s high marginal status as the woman who lives in southern Taiwan and maintains no communication with her former comrades, the exile, is basically a constant reminder of the lost generation of Chinese scholars who fled Mainland China. While they are separated from the mainstream Chinese community and political life, the power of literature is such that by virtue of allusion they are still able to keep and their cultural identity. It takes place foremost through the use of literary allusion and a certain return of the repressed, through the resurgence of ming in the memory of Madame Qian. Thus, this manner of making sense and accounting for the present situations by returning to a prediction of her fate accomplished, ironically, is also a way of suturing Madame Qian and the general intellectual project of Chinese in Taiwan back into the cultural fold of mainland China. In fact, since the story was done during the Cultural Revolution, one could rather safely make the argument that the true continuity in Chinese cultural is through this line of development. It is not that of mainland China. Divination, then, works to reconnect the divided nation. In conclusion, authors use dreams and real life narratives in order to make the prediction of the story line difficult. The difficulty of predictions creates suspense and the drama necessary to make the narrative interesting. The use the duality of dreams and real life narratives in a story is key for contributing to the meaning to the story and making it luring. Works Cited Pai, Hsien-yung, and Xianyong Bai. Wandering in the garden, waking from a dream: tales of Taipei characters. No. 276. Indiana University Press, 1982. Read More