Layers of China

Reading Qui Xialong's Red Mandarin Dress. I was about to note something, but then checked and see that I have made the same point here in reference to an earlier novel of his.

My point was, basically, that everything in his novels seems to take place between layers of reference: to class, history (especially the Cultural Revolution), and classical Chinese literature, or more modern culture referring back to the latter. Everything is somehow refracted.

I would say as well that in Peter Hessler's work, especially Oracle Bones, this same impression is present, namely that all of Chinese daily life is somehow tied up with the past, both immediate and distant. I guess that's true of life here too, we just experience it differently because it is the water within which we swim. I guess the question would have to be whether this impression is an effect of my distance from Chinese culture, or it is somehow peculiar to and tied up with it.

(Reading on, a couple of days later, it occurs to me that I am just in a sense dusting off the whole concept of intertextuality here, the idea that we are all always ("always already", as we were once wont to say) living in and through a set of texts. This is all too clear to me, sitting here in Larchmont on the couch, gazing at George Sr's walls of bios of Churchill and JFK and books about the Great War, while Graham at the foot of the couch scrolls through endless Web discourse about the alternate worlds that capture his undying fancy. The theoretically-inclined humanists were on to something deep, they have just failed to sell it well and convincingly, and it is all too easily forgotten from deep within The Struggle to propagate our class and assure our children's place within it).

Who the heck knows? It's a cold and grey day outside, and mostly I'm just happy to be here on this Larchmont couch, truly one of my happy places, looking out at the Long Island Sound, after a brutal day picking our way up the 95 corridor yesterday.

Time to put this infernal laptop down.