Tablets of Memory: Towards a Literary and Historical Study of Guanzhui Bian (Limited Views)

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Ever since its publication in 1978, Qian Zhongshu's (1910-1998) Guanzhui bian (GZB) has been hailed as the crowning achievement of a literary career that produced some of modern China's most original fiction, essays and literary criticism. While both Western and Chinese scholars have written at length on Qian's much read and copiously translated novel, Fortress Besieged, they have been more hesitant to approach a work of scholarship that appears so broad in scope and strange in form as to escape all conceivable definitions. There are some notable exceptions; Ronald Egan (1999), Monika Motsch (1994) and Tiziana Lioi (2014) have all laboured to introduce Qian's scholarship to a broader Western audience. Although more prolific, Chinese language scholarship has largely confined itself to examining specific periods of Chinese literary history and philosophy in the light of Qian's insights, and rarely tarries to consider the broader implications of GZB for Chinese literature as a whole, or the discrete influences on its composition. As Zhang Longxi writes, so far there has been very little critical assessment of Qian's scholarship to give it the credit and appreciation it deserves." (2013)My overarching research question will seek to address this commonly acknowledged gap in our knowledge. Primarily, I am less interested in what GZB tells us about Chinese and world literature than in why this encyclopaedic work of scholarship should have assumed such a unique and elusive form. Subsidiary questions include, but are not limited to, how was the original manuscript composed and how did it evolve? What people and institutions (most notably Oxford University) had the greatest influence on Qian's literary development and his later work? etc. My research methods fall into three broad categories. The first entails an unprecedented review Qian's personal archives, which have only recently been published in full by Shanghai Commercial Press (2018). These 78 volumes of facsimiles contain nearly all of Qian's hand written and typed reading notes from the time he arrived in Exeter College Oxford in 1935 until shortly before his death in 1998. I will attempt the first ever analysis of how Qian drew from his sea of notes when composing GZB. With a comprehensive record of his private reading, I also aim to construct a biography of Qian's inner life, and explore how it resonates with the spirit and particulars of his magnum opus. In doing so, I am most interested in how Qian's private memories, in the form of his notes, shaped his efforts to forge cultural memory, in the form of GZB. The second category is twofold: letters and institutional research. Though a private man, Qian was a formidable correspondent and maintained epistolary relations with many notable scholars and writers, both Chinese and foreign. These letters, however, have yet to be examined in any depth. By collecting all of the correspondence scattered throughout Qian's biographical paraphernalia and appealing to his former contacts in China, Europe and America for additional materials, I hope to throw new light on his life and scholarship. My institutional research at Oxford University will focus on the English Faculty and Exeter College during the mid 1930s, where Qian took his B.Litt. degree and established many of the interests that would feed into his later fiction and scholarship. The third and final category is comparative in nature. In the cosmopolitan spirit of Qian's scholarship, I aim to assess whether the defining aspects of GZB (i.e. eclecticism, multilingualism) can be identified in the work of other major writers faced with similarly precarious circumstances, or with the responsibility of preserving a dying literature. In the first instance, I intend to examine the existential impulse for encyclopaedic learning in writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Ezra Pound.