Finding "self" Through Memory Writing

Finding "self" through memory writing

---- Reading on Han Shaogong's "Gui Qu Lai"

Melody Yunzi Li

In Han Shaogong's "Gui Qu Lai", we find a compelling example of how "self-identity" can be constructed through memory writing. This is a first-person account of the narrator's visit to a village, where he was called and treated as another person "Ma Yanjing". The accounts of the villagers tell the story of Ma Yanjing, a hero in the village who has killed a villain and has made cultural contribution to the village. While winning the favor of villagers as someone else, the narrator, Huang Yexian, feels confused and has lost his self-identity. The villagers' recollection of Ma Yanjing's life places Huang in the limbo of his own "self", a paradoxical state between Ma and Huang. The title "Gui Qu Lai" represents this paradox in which the question "Who goes/comes" is projected. The whole story is inseparable from the contradiction of the two "self"s, The image of Ma Yanjing constructed through villagers' memories makes the narrator at once the embodiment of this legendary figure, at the same time, his own memory tells him he is not Ma but Huang. These two forces come into being in his heart, which helps him reconstruct his self-identity. Although it involves confusion and torture, the conflict of two "self"s at last constitutes a powerful combination, as the last sentence in the story presented.

In his brilliant article "Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies", Astrid Erll adopts John Locke's theory of identity and summarizes that, "identities have to be constructed and reconstructed by acts of memory, by remembering who one was, and by setting this past Self in relation to the present Self" (219). Literary narratives, as acts of memory, shape one's identity by offering a picture of the Self consisted of scenes of the past Self. In "Gui Qu Lai", it is through the memories of the narrator and villagers that the narrator's self is defined and constructed. The past self of Ma Yanjing told by the villagers has given him a new identity. He starts to observe his true self in this unfamiliar context, "as if this body were very unfamiliar, very strange...only the naked self, my true self" (102; my translation), he begins to "consider all these". The repeated emphasis of the loss of identity reveals the fact that people easily lose self-consciousness in an unfamiliar world. The question that arises is whether people can find their "genuine self" in a historical context. In this way the main task of Xungen Wenxue is given recognition: to seek the root of cultural identity through literature.

To conclude, this short story

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