October 18, 2005

Ba Jin dies. Literary giant and one of the last direct links to the anarchist movement in early 20th century China, Ba Jin (a.k.a 李芾甘, Pa Chin) is perhaps best remembered for his trilogy 'Family ". When the Snow Melted.
posted by Abiezer_Coppe 18 years ago
  • I was going to post this earlier, A_C. But I knew you'd do a better job.
  • Please do bring any links you've got Wolof - I was surprised by how little I could about him in English online (though plenty of mentions of theses in bibliographies). I can't claim any great familiarity with the man - we read some of his short stories in class years back and I have bought and started 'Family' (家) but never finished. I know many Chinese friends who felt that he had a better claim to being the first Chinese Nobel laureate rather than Gao Xingjian. His life seems to me to exemplify what Orwell wrote in Literature and Totalitarianism:
    I hardly need to point out the effect of this kind of thing upon literature. For writing is largely a matter of feeling, which cannot always be controlled from outside. It is easy to pay lip-service to the orthodoxy of the moment, but writing of any consequence can only be produced when a man feels the truth of what he is saying; without that, the creative impulse is lacking. All the evidence we have suggests that the sudden emotional changes which totalitarianism demands of its followers are psychologically impossible. And that is the chief reason why I suggest that if totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world, literature, as we have known it, is at an end.
    Certainly one of my favourite Chinese authors and a contemporary of Ba Jin's, Shen Congwen gave up writing fiction after 1949.
  • I very much enjoyed "When the Snow Melted", is that an excerpt from a novel or just a short story? I wish I understood Bohe's motivations a little more, though. Like the reasons he wanted to go back to China, and what prompted his altered views of domesticity.
  • Geremie Barmé on Dissenting from Ba Jin.