情感金庸(1/2)

This three-year project begins where my current MOST project on Wong Karwai’s The Grandmaster leaves off as it attempts to address the core definitive element of xia missing from Wong’s movie because of the decline of the martial arts spirit in modern Chinese history. Using Jin Yong’s novels as my main references in conjunction with the Freudian notion “the oceanic feeling,” I seek to explain the semantic conflict between sociability and reclusiveness inherent in the idea of jianghu while also probing into the shifting dialectic between xia and jianghu, or between individual and community. As a counter-tradition in Chinese history renowned for its antagonism against the conformist tradition typical of a shame society, martial arts fiction is arguably the most “romantic” genre due to itsnon-conformity, which provides the reader an escapist utopian fantasy. Jin Yong,the most celebrated author of the new school of martial arts fiction after the May Fourth Movement, is particularly adept at envisioning such escapist utopias with various aesthetic crafts. My study of Jing Yongr departs from past critical trends by understanding xia not as a fixed identity but as an affect that traverses subjective boundaries. During the first year, I shall employ psychoanalysis,reader-response theory, and speech act theory to explicate how Jin Yong deploys performative language in his depiction of, say, scenes or martial arts moves to call on his readers to abandon their selfhood so as to disperse into the fantasmagoria of the wuxia world and, in so doing, realize the ideal of seclusion.The second-year research will turn to individual texts to unravel how the oceanic feeling contradictorily informs the construction of the notion of jianghu. By engaging with the “Condor Heroes” trilogy, I intend to trace how its meaninggradually evolves from a symbol of reclusiveness to a deeply negative communitarian form due to its ggressiveness, whose saturation of the text by the end of the threequel Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber nearly drowns out its protagonist’s individual consciousness before he manages, only with great difficulty, to finally reclaim it. As a follow-up, the third-year project will work on how the propensity for self-abolition in late Jing Yong is reconceptualized inDemi-Gods and Semi-Devils as the Buddhist notion “no self” (anatta). By Correlating this notion with the Freudian oceanic feeling, I shall spell out why characters’ overlapping dispositions, purportedly construed as a characterological failure, should be deemed instead an achievement by virtue of the novel’s Buddhist reinterpretation of the communitarian social relation under shame culture as karma, which helps to create out of the novel’s ambiguous allegorical referentiality a Buddhist mode of sympathy. The three-year project, in sum, willtackle how xia qua affect manifests itself in the reader, the texts, and the author’s Buddhist thought respectively to account for how Jin Yong achieves an ideal state of reclusiveness through an intricate dialectic between individual and community.