The Prosaic and Provincial History of an Epic Revolution

ABSTRACT Li Jieren’s (1891–1962) novel sequence Ripple on Stagnant Water (sishui weilan 1935), Before the Tempest (baofeng yuqian 1936) and Great Waves (da bo 1937) recounts the last days of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) in Chengdu, the capital of its frontier Sichuan province. In a double-layered narrative, it recreates, on the one hand, the affective and social transformations of a provincial city following the ‘New Policies’ of a dying empire and, on the other, the great agitations leading to the riots of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (1911), which launched the revolution that ended China’s imperial history. This essay studies Li’s structural juxtaposition of epic events with prosaic details of a fin-de-siècle life world. It suggests that, in the search for the narrative possibilities of the ‘historical real’ of a seminal event, Li’s novel cycle inscribes monumental revolution in the process of a communal world change and, in this way, opens up a new direction for the development of the modern Chinese novel. His prosaic vision and narrative of an epic event in spatial-descriptive form demonstrates an original conceptual and formal possibility that is all the more significant because of its loss in the second half of the twentieth century.