The Tradition of Telling and the Desire of Showing in Ge Fei’s ‘Fictional Minds’

This paper examines Ge Fei 格非’s attempt to reconcile the inner world oh his characters and the outward reality in his in his recent trilogy, Renmian taohua 人面桃花 (Peach Blossom-beauty, 2004), Shanhe ru meng 山河入梦 (Mountains and Rivers Fall Asleep, 2007) and Chunjin jiangnan 春尽江南 (End of Spring in Jiangnan, 2011). Since his novel, Diren 敌人 (The Enemy, 1991), Ge Fei has focussed on the individual search to negotiate between his/her own subjectivity and the objective world around. Pesaro tries to show how the author, in depicting history and the reality as perceived by these fictional centres of consciousness, tends to gradually move from an indirect approach to a direct one. Chen Zhongyi 陈众议 (2012) points out the inner contradiction of Ge Fei’s style, which he defines as ‘classical’ (gudian 古典) and ‘avant-garde’ (xianfeng 先锋) at the same time, actually, as Pesaro points out, a sophisticated merging of both styles rather than a contradiction, ‘the sublimation of some modernist techniques within a more traditional, essentially Chinese, narrative frame.’ Ge Fei choses to narrate the human mind in its complexity and in its constant interaction with the outer world by combining traditional subjectivity and implicitness with modern devices such as stream of consciousness, the descriptions of actions and objects, and the use of poetry to represent emotions and mental activities. Thus he creates a completely new and independent narrative style, achieving both continuity and discontinuity with Chinese tradition.