Abstract
Two widely read Chinese novels of the past 20 years—Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (1990) and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004)—echo Henry David Thoreau’s proclamation (in his essay “Walking”) that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” These texts, which reveal their origins in journals, present highly personal quests for what remains of the wild in China; turning their backs on Beijing, the authors search for validation of a belief, expressed by Thoreau and other environmental writers within a Romantic tradition, that a people in close contact with the wild maintain a strength, earthiness and vitality not found in urban cultures; and that close contact with the wild, especially with wild animals, has a spiritual dimension. These compelling Chinese quests yield different results, inevitably depart from Thoreau’s 19th-century optimism, and make complementary statements on what modern China risks losing as it progressively, and in the name of “progress,” eliminates the wild.
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Notes
Xingjian, G. (2001). Soul mountain (M. Lee, Trans.). New York: Harper. All references are to this edition.
Rong, J. (2008). Wolf Totem (H. Goldblatt, Trans.). New York: Penguin. All references are to this edition.
Thoreau, H. D. (2007). Walking. In J. J. Moldenhauer (Ed.), Excursions (p. 202). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. All references to “Walking” are to this edition.
“Walking,” p. 206.
Thoreau, H. D. (1992). In W. Rossi (Ed.), Walden (p. 199). New York: Norton. All further references to Walden are to this edition.
Cf. Harding, W. (1959). A Thoreau handbook (pp. 98–100). New York: New York University Press; and Aldrich Christie, J. (1965). Thoreau as world traveler. New York and London: Columbia University Press.
Cheng, A. (2000). Humanity as a ‘part and parcel of nature’: A comparative study of Thoreau’s and Taoist concepts of nature. In R. J. Schneider (Ed.), Thoreau’s sense of place: Essays in American environmental writing (p. 207). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; cf. also Simon, G. (1973). What Henry David didn’t know about Lao Tzu: Taoist parallels in Thoreau. Literature: East and West, 17, 253–274 (cited by Cheng).
Walden, pp. 203–205.
Christie, p. 147.
Ibid., p. 150.
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, Vol. VIII, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906, pp. 220–221.
“Walking,” p. 222.
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, Vol. VIII, p. 221.
A comprehensive list of endangered species appears in Gao’s discussion of the Shennongjia reserve, created in 1983 (p. 363); this list includes the leopard, white bear, civet, muntjac, masked civet, serow, golden pheasant, giant salamander, and several others.
Matthiessen, P. (1978). The snow Leopard. New York: Viking.
Walden, p. 115.
Soul Mountain, p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 111–112.
Thoreau, H. D. (1985). In R. F. Sayre (Ed.), The Maine woods (p. 646). New York: Library of America.
Wolf Totem, p. 434.
Walden, p. 65.
Abbey, E. Desert solitaire (1971). New York: Ballantine; in an often quoted passage, Abbey writes that “Love flowers best in openness and freedom” (p. 29). Also linking Desert Solitaire, Soul Mountain, and Wolf Totem is Abbey’s painful recognition that “most of what I write about in this book is either gone or going under fast” (p. xii). Several passages in Soul Mountain (cf. p. 364) concerning the Three Gorges Dam parallel Abbey’s despair at the closing of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.
From Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (p. 5).
Buell, L. (1995). The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of the American culture (p. 144). Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Soul Mountain, p. 109.
Wolf Totem, p. 281.
“Walking,” p. 202. In one of the first paragraphs of Walden Thoreau says of his young townsmen: “Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in” (p. 2).
Wolf Totem, p. 266.
In “Walking” Thoreau provides a critique of English culture and English literature, arguing that when England lost the wild in nature she lost the wild man within: “Her wilderness is a green wood—her wild man a Robinhood. There is plenty of genial love of nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct” (p. 208).
Wolf Totem, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 43.
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Dollar, J.G. In wildness is the preservation of China: Henry Thoreau, Gao Xingjian, and Jiang Rong. Neohelicon 36, 411–419 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0010-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0010-8