1. Introduction
Su Tong, formerly known as Tong Zhonggui, is a famous contemporary Chinese writer who entered the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University in 1980. He is currently a professional writer in residence at the Jiangsu Branch of the Chinese Writers’ Association and vice-chairman of the Jiangsu Provincial Writers’ Association. His middle-grade novel Wives and Concubines (Qi Qie Cheng Qun) was selected as one of the top 100 Chinese novels of the 20th century, and was transformed by Zhang Yimou into the film Raise the Red Lantern, which was nominated for the 64th Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Born in Suzhou in 1963, Su Tong experienced the Cultural Revolution when he was four years old, and although he was not yet an adult, he has some vague and strange memories, which are reflected in many of his works. In the 1990s, Su Tong began to write long novels, and published such novels as Wo de Diwang Shengya, Chengbei Didai etc. As a pioneering writer of the new era, Su Tong’s works are mainly written in Maple Street (Fengyang Shu Jie) and Toon Street (Xiangchun Shu Jie), with Jiangnan as the background, and his outstanding “classicality” and “lyricism” have made him a leading figure in contemporary Chinese literature.
In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong says, “It is easy to become desperate. So, from the beginning of the world, people create stories to put themselves into the larger world, to reveal potential patterns. To make oneself feel that even though real life is full of depression and chaos, life has real meaning and value.” (Armstrong, 2005: p. 10) Therefore, mythology is a “grand story”. The Tomb of the Neanderthal1 teaches us that myth is not a “theology” on high. It is a “truth” that exists at any stage of human existence. It allows people in different historical contexts to look at the past, to envision the future, and even to help us step outside the historical process and “glimpse the core of the truth” (Armstrong, 2005: p. 16) . This new interpretation of “myth” was born in 2005 with the Retelling Myths project. More than 40 publishers from all over the world have participated in the project, and the first author of the Chinese volume of “Retelling Myths” is Su Tong (1963-). He used the story of “Meng Jiang Nü crying at the Great Wall” as the material for his retelling and created Binu (Binu and the Great Wall).
Binu is a novel based on Su Tong’s character-driven writing style, which blends Chinese mythology with modern civilization. In 2005, his long novel Binu was nominated for the 2006 Outstanding Writer Award. Binu is the first attempt at mythological retelling undertaken by Su Tong, a fresh attempt to transcend the themes of his previous writing, an exercise in his simulated folk imagination.
When Binu’s husband, Qi Liang, is taken away to build the Great Wall, Binu cannot stop thinking about her husband and is so concerned that she rushes to Dayan Ling alone to deliver cold clothes to him. This is an act of love and concern for her husband. However, her actions were met with questions and even abuse from the people around her, who thought that Binu was mad and stupid. During her long and slow journey to Dayan Ling, Binu feels the coldness of human feelings and the ugliness of human nature. She is mistaken for a madman, a fool, a liar, a witch and an assassin by the people around her, her luggage and parcels are snatched away and her body is molested. Su uses Binu’s eyes to examine the absurd and sickly society.
As Ye Shuxian (1954-) says in his article “How Myths are Retold”, “the 19th century was the century in which Western reason declared the demise of mythology, and the 20th century was the century in which it was fully revived” (Ye, 2006: p. 16) . What then is the significance of the project of “retelling myth” in the 21st century? Furthermore, what is the reason for Su’s choice of the story of Meng Jiang Nü, which has been evolving for thousands of years and is familiar to the public? What is “new” about the text “A New Account of an Old Story (Gushi Xinbian)”? The aim of this paper is to compare the selection and construction of the ancient version of the story of Meng Jiang Nü with the text of Binu. In doing so, it explores the modern reflections on the story of Meng Jiang Nü, which has been passed down for thousands of years.
2. Definition of the Concept of “Mythology”
In the new era of Chinese literary creation, mythological narratives about fiction take on new qualities. Firstly, writers focus on selecting story structures from traditional mythological stories and reconstructing them to reflect a modern flavor. Secondly, they continue to open up readers’ perceptions of old stories. Thirdly, the author draws on symbolism and metaphor; mythological thinking and other methods to combine the ancient with the modern and to provide more depth on a narrative level. All these features of the mythological narrative reinforce the idea that the concept of myth should be more diverse and that the complexity of myth is the only way to make the study of the text deeper and more thorough.
Since the introduction of the concept of “myth” in the West, Mao Dun (1896-1981), Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), and Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) have contributed to the study of mythology in China. The concept of “myth” has not been explicitly explained in the initiation of the Retelling Myths project. This has given writers a wider scope in terms of creativity. In the discussion, this essay intends to adopt the broad concept of Chinese mythology as discussed by Yuan Ke (1916-2001) in the preface of The Dictionary of Chinese Mythology. That is, “Mythology consists of nine parts. Mythology, history, fairy tales, weirdness, folklore with fairy tales, festivals, spells, treasures, customs, and local folklore, and minority mythology.”2
3. The Story of Meng Jiang Nü
The story of “Meng Jiang Nü Weeping at the Great Wall” is one of the four great Chinese folk love stories and has been passed down orally for thousands of years. The earliest legend dates back to the Zuo Zhuan. It tells the story of Meng Jiang Nü, who traveled thousands of miles to deliver clothes to her husband and cried down the Great Wall. It is a tribute to her devotion and loyalty to love, and her determination to deliver her husband’s clothes despite the hardships and dangers. When she learns that her husband is dead, she is so distraught that her powerful cries bring down the Great Wall.
4. Binu’s Post-Modern Theory or Narratology
The mechanism and value of “myth revival” embodied in Binu. In terms of the mechanism and value of the creation of Binu as a work of mythological retelling, in her article “The Construction of National Identity and the Ambiguity of ‘Historical Memory’—A Look at the ‘Retelling of Myth’ in Binu”, Yin Manting compares Gu Jiegang’s study of the story of Meng Jiang Nü in the early twentieth century with Su Tong’s “retelling” of the story of Meng Jiang Nü in the twenty-first century, starting from two ways of constructing national identity. The difference between these lies in the fact that Gu Jiegang follows the principle of primordialism3, i.e., “searching for national identity from national origins” (Yin, 2008: p. 133) , focusing on the continuity of the past. Su Tong, on the other hand, focuses on the “evolution of tears” to “dissolve the sense of history” in order to embody the philosophy of folklore. However, Yin Manting believes that this approach does not completely “dissolve history” (Yin, 2008: p. 135) , but relies on the connection with the past Meng Jiang Nü’s story to find national identity by evoking memories. According to Yin, even though Binu is a “new tradition”, it makes use of “historical memory” in shaping modern national identity. Also, questioning whether Binu can truly serve the purpose of “retelling” is Ge Hongbing and Rolf’s article “Myth: How Can It Be Retold?” They are skeptical of “retelling myths”, arguing that the focus of “primitive thinking” in “myths” lies in the “law of interpenetration” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1997: p. 69) , the law of similarity and the law of contact, and that Binu does not have these “magical powers” Besides, the core of Meng Jiang Nü’s story, “weeping” and “tears”, is full of “modern thinking norms” (Ge & Rolfe, 2007: p. 86) . It is believed that the “unity of man and god” in Meng Jiang Nü’s story has been transformed since Su Tong chose the folk perspective. But as Su Tong says in the preface of Binu, “I wrote this book to a large extent to revisit an emotional life from the folklore”. Perhaps his aim is not to make the story of Meng Jiang Nü “divine”, but to make “the heavy reality fly”. (Su, 2006)
The above studies of Binu have defined the text in terms of the concept of “myth”. However, other researchers have applied the theory of “New Historicism” and regarded Binu as a “modern extension” of the history of the “Meng Jiang Nü story”. In Liu Jingjing’s On the Hidden Feminine Consciousness in the Writings of Su Tong, Ye Zhaoyan (1957-), and Li Rui (1950-) “Taking the Retold Myth, Binu, Houyi, and The Human World as Examples”, Su Tong’s “class myth deconstructs the central (male) discourse of old history” (Liu, 2011: p. 7) . The process of the main character—Binu, from holding back her tears (not letting them flow out of her eyes) to finally releasing her repression and crying over the Great Wall, reveals the awakening of women’s sense of individuality.
5. The Textual Interior of Binu
A mythological retelling is a scholarly study by writers based on mythological traditions, nor is it simply a rewriting and reproduction; it is based on the author’s imagination and creative style, and gives new meaning to the myth. The current study of Su Tong’s Binu is basically based on two aspects: the value of mythological retelling and textual research. Most of the studies on the text of Binu are based on post-present agency theory or narratology.
For example, in his article “Free to Write the Spiritual Fairy Tale of Mankind: A Reading of Su Tong’s Long Novel Binu”, Zhang Xuexin (1963-), a renowned scholar who has devoted himself to the study of Su Tong, argues that the textual structure of the novel is closed, and that the depiction of “tears” adopts a “strange Chinese box”4 structure. In addition, the journey of Binu’s tears is the process of clashing with the “wall of humanity”, and the final collapse of the “wall” represents the “tenderest tears” solving the “hardest dilemma of life”. The article “On the Narrative Art of Su Tong’s Novel Binu” by Wen Xian and Zhao Shujun clearly discusses the typicality of Binu as a text of “retelling myth” from three aspects: the combination of light and dark in the narrative structure; the role of narrative imagery, i.e., the function of the “tears”; and the narrative language, i.e. color and rhetoric.
In terms of narrative perspective, Su Tong explicitly stated in an interview with China Newsweek that he “tries to keep his thinking as close to the folk as possible”5. Since then, many scholars have interpreted the mythological imagination of Binu from the perspective of the “folk”. Wen Quan’s article “The Power of Tears: On the Mythic Imagination of Binu’s Folk Survival” emphasizes the “folk tendency” approach. Unlike other studies, Wen Quan starts from the historical prototype of Meng Jiang Nü and carefully compares the details of the story, including the changes in the names of the characters and the differences between the focus of the mythical legend and Su Tong’s text. However, this text does not compare the inheritance and development of the story of Meng Jiang Nü in various versions. Wen Quan argues that Binu is a variation of folklore, and that the dichotomy between “folk” and “official” narrows the “writer’s diverse imagination of the richness of life itself”. (Wen, 2008: p. 32)
Some researchers have fused “mythological retelling” with “narrative perspective” For example, Wu Yiqin’s (2007: p. 75) article “Dancing in Handcuffs: A Review of Su Tong’s New Work Binu” evaluates Binu from three perspectives: the interpretation and reshaping of the mythological subject, the exploration and proliferation of the mythological meaning, the difficulty of the narrative and the limits of the imagination. He argues that what makes Binu becomes a well-rounded character is the interpretation and description of “gender”, “emotion”, “heart”, and “destiny”. He argues that the realism is an important factor that distinguishes Binu from other stories of Meng Jiang Nü, and that Su Tong uses the method of decomposing the characters’ actions to make Binu become Binu. Unlike other scholars, Wu Yiqin has carefully interpreted the deeper meaning of the two actions of “crying” and “walking” Finally, in terms of the limits of imagination, he points out that the greatest regret of Su Tong’s novel is that it does not explain the other main character, Wan Qiliang, which “weakens the temperature of the love story” (Wu, 2007: p. 78) . This is also the reason why Su Tong’s novel is too realistic and lacks mythology.
Overall, most studies of Su Tong’s Binu have focused on the meaning of mythological retelling, the use of new historical criticism to interpret folk narratives, and the imagery of “tears” in the text. However, in the case of Binu, which is subordinate to the “new mythology”, there is a big debate on whether the critical method of “new historicism” is correct or not. In my opinion, the core of this debate is whether Binu really “dissolves” history. To discuss whether “history” has been “dissolved”, it is necessary to compare the text with the many stories of Meng Jiang Nü in history and to explore the point of “retelling” in order to truly understand the core of Binu. In addition, some scholars have interpreted Su Tong’s “folklore of myth” from the perspective of narratology. In my view, the “folklore of mythology” espoused by Su Tong in his text can be regarded as a “new thinking” in writing. How does “new thinking” combine “mythological thinking” with “folk thinking”? This is the key to the interpretation of Binu.
6. The Funeral Ceremony of Qin Su
Archetypal Criticism emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. It was influenced by James George Frazefs (1854-1941) theory of cultural anthropology, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1861)’s theory of “collective unconscious” psychology, and Ernst Cassirer’s symbolic forms. In his book Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Northrop Frye (1912-1991) shows that “archetypes are symbols that can be communicated, so archetypal criticism is concerned primarily with literature as a social phenomenon, trying to integrate individual poems into the whole of poetry”. (Frye, 2006: p. 152) In this way, Archetypal Criticism can provide an alternative method of studying Binu’s mythological thinking.
In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that “myth” is the product of “ritual and dream in a form of verbal communication” (2006, 152). In the context of mythology, the text of Binu must be examined from the perspective of “ritual” The concept of “ritual” is also explained by Frye. He regarded ritual as an “imitation of nature” and it contains a very strong element of what we call “witchcraft”. “This attempt to regain the consciousness of what is no longer possessed is the hallmark of human rituals, which also contemplate the changes in the chronology of the year and try to imitate with great precision the movements of the heavenly bodies and the growth of all things.” (Frye, 2006: pp. 170-171)
The use of mythological thinking in Binu is mainly reflected in Qin Su’s “burial ritual” and Binu’s “burial ritual” for herself Qin Su’s burial ceremony is the climax of the book. After being discovered by the lord of the handpicked army that he had sneaked into his room to spy on him, Hengming Jun decides to force him to die to save himself from the court, while the other disciples persuade him to kill himself by promising to let him return to his hometown with rich after his death. But Qin Su was unmoved and insisted on arranging for living persons to be his wife and a son and to wear the best funeral clothes to ensure his glory after death. In The Archetypal Model of Chinese Mythological Cosmology, Ye Shuxian points out that “the mythological cosmology model is based on the concept of three concepts: the nether world, the concept of the earth as contained in water and the concept of heaven and earth, which is the root of the sun” (Ye, 2003) . “The basic assumption of mythology is the concept of everything has a spirit, i.e., that all natural phenomena have life and emotions similar to those of human beings.” (Xie, 1989: p.183) “Combining the two, Qin Su firmly believes that he needs to give his “soul” a rich life in the human world after death, even if he did not enjoy it during his life. And “the origin of a great number of customs of mourning, and enduring as those imposed on widows among certain primitive peoples cruelly and completely, is to be found in the enduring interpenetration between the dead and that which is mysteriously linked to him” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1997: p. 322) . In Qin Su’s burial, this so-called “interpenetration” (Hu Shen) is realized through the Binu and Deer Man Boy (Lu ren) who are not related to him. Likewise, “interpenetration” is manifested in the “female clay figurines” that accompany Qin Su.
In his study of Chinese mythology, Wu Tianming admits that “for the Chinese, it seems that there are only two major events in heaven and earth: one is to go out to make a living, and the other is to return to one’s hometown” (Wu, 2002: p. 132) . The purpose of “returning to one’s hometown (gui gen)” is to “return to one’s life (gui sheng).” Although Qin Su does not follow the usual theme of “the soul returning to the mother’s womb in search of rebirth”, his “soul” appears in the side of the text. When he learns that the people of his hometown are unwilling to accept him, “the black-lacquered coffin is silent, and the soul of Qin Su rustles and moans inside” (Wu, 2002: p. 132) . “The black-lacquered coffin could not hear the consolation of others, and a sad soul, unable to control itself, began to brew a huge storm on the bullock cart.” (Wu, 2002: p. 132) At the same time, “returning to his hometown” is one of the main reasons why Qin Su is determined to return to her hometown even though she has turned into a ghost. However, the stubborn Qin Su is reluctant to cry in the coffin because of the obstinacy of Binu in the funeral procession.
“Binu heard the sound of a man’s suppressed cries fom deep inside the coffin, the ghost of Qin Su was crying inside, the voice carried a hint of guilt, also carried a hint of stubbornness, repeated a sad command to Binu: go to the Qi Lidong, go to the Qi Lidong, go to the Qi Lidong!” (Su, 2006: p. 126)
The coffin and his wife and children (Binu and the deer man boy) are transported from Bai Chuntai to his hometown Qing Yunguan, which is also in line with the “resurrection myth” of “the return of the soul to the hometown (hun gui gu li)” This plot is similar to Su Tong’s Rice in which the main character Wu Long eventually dies on a train full of rice to his hometown. The similarity also applies Su Tong’s specialty of “escape” to the text of Binu, echoing Binu’s journey to find her husband, which is actually another form of “escape”.
The burial plot is full of “mythological thinking” and returns to reality with the ruthless revelation of the ugly state of “human beings”. When the people of Qi Lidong see the coffin of Qin Su, they first “look full of contempt and hostility” (Su, 2006: p. 126) and then want to take away the clay figurines that accompany the burial; then some people start to calculate that “the window will be their daughter-in-law and the boy will be their son” (Su, 2006: p. 130) , and they even plan to use the coffin to put “three catties of oat noodles” (Su, 2006: p. 130) . At last, the old people of Qi Lidong concluded that “The wife and children of Qingsu are free to stay and go as they wish, but the deceased Qingsu is not welcome. There is no place for a thief s grave in the Qi Lidong!” (Su, 2006: p. 130) Qin Su wanted to place his hopes in the afterlife, to make up for his present life by returning to his hometown and living in peace after his death, but his relatives did not allow a dead man to live there. Frye believes that “satire has two indispensable things: one is wit or humor, which is based on outlandish fantasies or feelings about weird and absurd phenomena; the other is to have an object of attack” (Frye, 2006: p. 326) . Here, Su Tong uses the people’s imagination of how the coffin is used to attack their irony of “human life is not as strong as that of a dog” (Su, 2006: p. 130) . This echoes the dark line of the novel, that is, the brutality of the ruling class has completely eroded the people’s acceptance of normal human ethics and even lost the basic moral concept of accepting “dead relatives” Their imagination of “coffin use” is a reflection of the lack of basic material security and the loss of “humanity”.
7. Binu’s “Burial” Ritual
There are several descriptions of Binu’s burial rituals, which seem absurd and unsuccessful, but Binu’s extraordinary sincerity compels one to consider the mythological thinking behind them. “The ritual of the dead is also a collective representation-based system governed by the law of interpenetration.” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1997: p. 293) Binu had to bury himself during his lifetime because there was no one to bury him. According to Frye’s archetypal theory of mythology, the ritual itself contains an element of witchcraft. “If witchcraft is to be understood in the sense of any action that requires a mystical connection, a secret force, then there is hardly an action among the more developed peoples that do not have some degree of witchcraft in it.” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1997: p. 287) Therefore, “witchcraft” plays an important role in primitive thinking. The initiator of all of Binu’s actions was blamed on the prophecy of the Chai Cun’s witch, and the phrase “you will die of illness on the road” (Su, 2006: p. 16) became Binu’s eternal obsession. On her way to and her husband, whenever she senses that she is about to die, the first thing she thinks of is to and a suitable grave for herself. In this way, “witchcraft” as a part of “ritual”, governs people’s attitude towards people and things and determines their behavior in Binu.
Binu’s burial ceremony was grand and elaborate. She took out her only valuable silver pin so that the deer man boy could be his gravedigger and cover her with earth after her death. But how to and a suitable piece of land to bury herself became her problem. She had to observe all the funeral rituals and was even worried that no one would cry for her in advance, despite the taboo. The plot of choosing a grave for herself may seem comical and absurd, but Binu “in the night she looked carefully at the cemetery she had chosen during the day, what a wonderful place, by the water by the road, a virgin land formed by the fall of the riverbed, far from the horrible tumultuous cemetery, not far from the prosperous Baichuntai (Su, 2006: p. 16) .” This careful consideration reflects the sincerity of her approach to rituals. She follows the analogy of the mythological thinking of “measuring things by oneself (yi ji duo wu)”. Starting from self-perception and social experience, she “mixes subjective projection of illusionary experience as an important reference for the intuitive copying of experience of nature and society” (Deng, 1992: p. 173) . Binu reassures herself by burying her symbolic “gourd” in advance, and treats it in a more ritualistic way. She first plucks a gourd from the mulberry tree that she cherishes as a symbol of her husband, and then “kneels down to wash it in a jar of water” (Su, 2006: p. 21) , after which she holds the gourd in her hands, which she “dresses with great care, with a piece of half-used silk at the top and a red thread pendant tied to the bottom” (Su, 2006: p. 22) . Finally, she carefully selected the gourd and buried it under a willow tree half way up the slope.
In this way, the rituals of Serenity and Binu’s own death are not only rich in “mythological thinking” but also in the reality of the “new mythology” text. Moreover, when this element is combined with the “folk”, a feature of the “retelling” text is created, namely, the “Folklore of myth (shen hua min jian hua)”.
8. The Folklore of the “Human-Bestial Coexistence”
As the story of Meng Jiang Nü in the twenty-first century, Binu focuses on the varied forms of “crying” and the process of “seeking a husband”, but there is no clear indication of the specific direction of the wall that broke down. In the text of Binu, Su Tong still uses “sending cold clothes to her husband” as the root of the journey to and her husband, which is reflected in the folklore of many regions. In Hankou, Hubei Province, Hongwen Tang has a special engraving of the Clothes for the “Weeping Husband Scroll (song yi ku fu juan)”.
The storyline in the scroll is: “Fan Qiliang of Lingbao County, Henan Province, lost his husband at an early age and his mother married Meng Jiang, a Jiang family girl, when he was 18. A few days after the marriage, he was dragged away to build a city. Fan’s mother was missing her son s and she died three years later, so Meng Jiang wrapped her clothes and went to Shanxi. On her way, she is guided by the ghost of a grandmother and is enlightened by an immortal to search for her husband s bones after reaching the Great Wall by dripping blood.” (Gu, 1983: p. 68)
The storyline of Binu has many similarities with this legend. For example, Qi Liang starts out as an orphan and is later adopted by a widower who owns nine mulberry trees, San Duo. On her journey to and her husband, Binu is accompanied by a frog transformed into a blind woman who has lost her son, and the frog helps Binu escape from disasters several times. The addition of this mother (frog) character is rare in many versions of the story of Meng Jiang Nü.
The mother (frog) embodies the principle of “mutual transformation of frogs and humans (wa ren hu bian)” in Chinese mythology. The relationship between “frogmen interchange” can also be seen in Tibetan fairy tales, and Qian Mingzi (1994: p. 297) believes that whether it is the result of indigenous or ethnic cultural exchange, frogmen interchange “will have its social background, cultural background and ecological environment”. Drawing on this tradition of Chinese mythology, Su Tong also adopts the characteristics of the “frogmen’s interchange” of “the same thing and the same feeling of heaven and man (wu wo tong yi/ tian ren jiao gan)” (Deng, 1992: p. 59) . This is an unconscious act caused by the “indiscriminate nature of the subject and object of thought” (Deng, 1992: p. 59) in mythological thinking. In order to “make cultural and psychological identification with the gods and the ancestors” (Deng, 1992: p. 59) , the mythology is combined with the cult of reproduction, and the “divine order” and the “human order”, i.e., the “natural structure” and the “social structure” are integrated into one. In order to find her son, who was conscripted to the north, the blind woman turns into a blind frog and follows Binu on her journey. Although she became a frog, she kept her “blind” feature. This is the “morphological analogy (xing tai lei bi)” in mythological thinking. Even though the frog and the woman who misses her son do not have anything in common, they both share the characteristic of “blindness” in form, so they can be compared or even treated as the same. In the book Cultural Theory of Fertility Worship, Zhao Guohua explains that the ancient ancestors of Qing Hai and Gan Su used the frog as a symbol of the womb. Fu Daobin also found similar traces of frogs in excavated documents, sites, and literary works from various regions, arguing that frogs are associated with “the beginning” in ancient literature, that frogs are the ancestors of humans, and that “humans are born of frogs” (Fu, 1990: p. 150) . The frog personifies the wa, or “frog god (wa shen)”, who is the first grandmother of mankind. Thus, the cult of the Nüwa naturally evolved from the “frog cult (qing wa chong bai)” Whether it is the moon myth that emerged from the frog cult or the mother goddess that emerged from the frog myth, the frog has always been a symbol of beautiful women in Chinese mythology, even women with a maternal glow. Therefore, the purpose of this “object-human symbiosis (wu ren tong gou)” in Binu is to realize the great power of “motherhood” In the human market, when some boys were about to rob Binu’s parcel, the blind frog jumped out and was treated as a witch by the people, which scared off the people in the human market, and even Binu gained dignity. The power of the frog represents the power of motherhood in the “human-animal symbiosis (ren shou tong gou)”, and she saves Binu from the danger as a “mother” and becomes her weapon.
“Because of the mythological mindset, man often sees himself as a part of nature and nature as nature with a human face.” (Deng, 1992: p. 78) This “human-animal symbiosis (ren shou tong gou)” is also manifested in Binu in the form of the “horse people (Ma ren)” and “deer people (Lu ren)” of Bai Chuntai. These two so-called “human beings” are the main feature of Binu. In Chinese mythology, the “dragon is a horse (long wei ma shuo)” has existed for a long time in many ancient texts. Many scholars, including Wen yi duo (1899-1946), believe that “the keynote of the dragon is the snake” (Xie, 1989: p. 239) , and that “the snake has a strong life force, and the old snake can come back from the dead after its skin is molted” (Xie, 1989: p. 239) . This half-human, half-animal mysterious cultural symbol towards “dragon” proves the historical fact that “the social nature of culture or the social consciousness of culture is extremely prominent in the culture of primitive peoples or ancient cultures” (Xie, 1989: p. 239) . Su Tong, on the other hand, recreates the helpless plight of the “half-human, half-beast (ban ren ban shou)” that was the traditional symbol of Chinese culture befogs the ascendancy, under the ruling class.
The lowest of the Bai Chuntai’s visitors are the “horsemen (Ma ren)” under Heng ming Jun, and the only dream of the underage “deer men (Lu ren)” boys is to become such a group of horsemen, “which is the simplest life that boys can think of in terms of food and clothing” (Su, 2006: p. 55) . Walking into Bai Chun tai, “most of the horsemen have already reached adulthood, and at first glance, they appear to be a group of tough, strong young men, but when you look Hengming at their backs, hips, necks, and bare legs, they all look magically horse-like” (Su, 2006: p. 68) . The primitive people had envied or worshipped the animals that embodied non-exhaustive magical functions and powers, and regarded them as gods or even as ancestors or blood-related ancestors without any basis; they “imitated their movements to achieve some kind of fantasy utilitarian purpose in a kind of imaginary empathy or internal imitation and external imitation, attempting to integrate with those superhuman qualities and characters or to carry out the so-called cultural identity” (Deng, 1992: p. 79) . Therefore, in the primitive thinking of mythology, imitating the actions and behaviors of animals is a kind of transcendent thinking, but the “horse man” and “deer man” in Binu place them under the cruel class rule and expose the modern status quo of people’s livelihood. While tens of thousands of 0ne white horses are sent to fight with the army, the master of Bai Chuntai invents “human for horse (yi ren wei ma)” to satisfy his own personal desires in order to satisfy the idea of “ride or die (bu qi she wu ning si)” (Deng, 1992: p. 77) . By practicing the horse’s pace, the horse’s breathing, even the sound of the horse’s neighing, and the horse’s gallop through psychological perception, the youngsters felt humble because they could not behave like real horses. They have been domesticated for so long that they have lost their dignity and moral code as human beings. When they are ordered to run on the drawbridge, they find that they are not riding without a human on their backs, and the weightless running makes them uncomfortable. The “deer men” and “horse men” were original “playthings” used by the king to ride and shoot for entertainment. However, they were artificially divided into classes, causing internal strife. When the master ran out of wooden arrows for riding, the deer men sincerely asked the master to ride them with real arrows in order to “gain the upper hand over the defeated horsemen”. In the end, both the deer men and the horses die by the iron arrows. It can be seen that when the original thinking of “imitation” is placed in the modern class conflict, the thinking is deformed and even people lose their original “nature”.
9. The Use of Folk Resources
According to Bakhtin Michael (1895-1975), “the fantasy of folk creation is a fantasy of reality. This fantasy never goes beyond the material world of reality, and it does not use anything from the ideal world of the other world (bi shi) to make up for the shortcomings of this world (ci shi), but spreads out in time and space, and it can feel this wide space and time and use it extensively and profoundly” (Bakhtin, 1998: p. 356) . The use of “this world” is expressed in the use of folk resources in Binu. In the interview, Su Tong confessed that “the most important characteristic of folk imagination as I understand” is to go beyond the reality to solve the problems in reality, and it has a pragmatic purpose. The so-called folk life does not need to think, but desperately needs to vent. Emotions such as resentment, anger, fear and confusion accumulate together, making life heavy. Life itself offers no outlet for complete relief but imagination, which can deny a hopeless reality and produce a hopeful one. (Su & Wang, 2006: p. 40) Therefore, his folkloric thinking is also close to reality.
The main difference between the text of Binu and other Meng Jiang Nü stories is the expansion of her journey to and her husband, focusing on the difficulties on the way to find him, and the main character’s use of tears to overcome everything and cry over the Great Wall. The story is structured to focus on the archetypal motif of “the search for the husband (xun fu)”. This single-line structure in space and time is what Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) calls the “Zhong Guo Tao He (Chinese box set)” (Vargas, 1999: p. 86) . This inspiration comes from the influence of the Xi opera Meng Jiang Nü, “Passing through the Gate (guo cheng men)”. In the play, Meng Jiang Nü cries out to the soldiers guarding the city about her suffering on her journey to find her husband, singing out the suffering of each month from January to December. The gates of the city are opened by her tears, one by one. The novel is structured in the form of a “pass (guo guan)”, with a subheading instead of a “barrier”. This not only pushes Binu towards “The Great Wall” in terms of plot, but also allows the protagonist to accumulate the power of “crying” and finally achieve the result of “crying down the Great Wall (ku chang cheng)”.
The folklore of Binu also manifests itself in the use of traditional musical forms. In the chapter “Persuasion to Death (quan si jing)”, Baili Qiao wants to make Qin Su die of shame. This dialogue between Baili Qiao and Qin Su is similar to the “xue” of the Suzhou Pingtan performance. As the art proverb goes, Xue is the treasure of books (xue nai shu Zhong zhi), and “no xue can be a book (wu xue bu cheng shu)” (Zhou, 2000: p. 121) . Traditionally, there are four performance techniques in Suzhou Pingtan: speaking, xue, playing, and singing. The “xue” is the comedic and farcical parts of the performance, with the meaning of “gags and laughs”, similar to the “cracked jokes (dou bao fu)” in comic operas.
Bai li Qiao sang, “Thief who stole the cow, heaven forbid you, earth forbid you, you stole my cow, the sun will kill you, the river will drown you, you can’t walk to the door, a lump of earth will trip you up!”
“Qin Su sneer, my grandfather’s generation only steal cattle. I have stolen everything, but not thenv cattle, it is useless to sing to me to persuade me to die.”
“Bai li Qiao also realized that he couldn’t be bullied. He blinked and improvised the exhortation, and went on singing, Qin Su, Qin Su, you’re a nuisance. The wind in summer does not blow you, the wind in winter blows you to death, the women in the East village do not look at you, the ghost in the west haunts you, you live better to die, better to die!” (Su, 2006: p. 90)
Qin Su said, “I serenity walked for three days and nights in the wind and snow when I ran to Bai Chuntai, I would let the wind blow me to death? I’m afraid of ghosts pulling me? If any ghost pulls me, I’ll catch him and roast him on the fire and eat him.” (Su, 2006: p. 90)
In summary, the “folklore of mythology (shen hua min jian hua)” in Binu combines the “human-animal identity” of traditional mythology, using the concept of “deer, horses, and frogs” to represent the current situation of people’s livelihood. In addition, the text also perfectly integrates folk music and arts to “look at reality” in the way of “folk imagination”.
10. The Identity of Binu
The retelling of Binu is not only expressed in “thinking” but also in the identity and behavior of the main character, which is characterized by the retelling of “mythology”. Binu is a “woman from the bottom” with “divinity” As for the identity of the protagonist Binu, the book begins with the statement that “Binu is a gourd” (Su, 2006: p. 10) . The “gourd” as a primitive image is rooted in many stories of ancient mythology. Carl Gustav Jung argues that “primordial imagery occurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Thus, it is essentially a mythological image” (Carl, 1987: p. 120) . In biology, “gourd” is a vining herb characterized by strong attachment, climbing and vigor. Among them, attachment and climbing are called “servility” The word “slave(nu)” is derived from female (cong nv cong you) and refers to a person who has been convicted of a crime, implying the ancient perspective of gender relations and class. On the one hand, this “dependency” is highly consistent with the image of women in feudal society; on the other hand, the “slave(nu)” in the name Binu also comes from it. This also explains the difference in the way male children and daughters are named in Beishan.
“When boys were born, their proud fathers looked up at the sky and saw the sun, moon and stars, birds and fish, and whatever they saw was their son’s name. The father must leave the house thirty-three paces, so as to escape the bloodshed. They walk thirty-three steps towards the east with their heads bowed, what is on the ground, that their daughter’s name but the origin of the daughter still appears low and lowly…and its future fate is inexplicably distressing.” (Su, 2006: p. 7)
Wen Yiduo has analyzed 49 Fuxi Nüwa stories in his Fuxi Testimony (Fuxi Kao) and believes that there are two major features in the storyline with the gourd: one is as a tool to avoid water, and the other is as material for the creation of man. (Wen & Tian, 2006: p. 55) In addition, Xiao Bing (1933-2022) found in the Dai and Yi myths that “the gourd or melon may have a similar association(lei si lian xiang) with the woman’s abdomen or womb” (Xiao, 1986: p. 374) , and that “the original images of the Nüwa, Fuxi, and Pangu were all melons, the product of the gourd totem in the south, where grasses and trees flourish” (Xiao 1986: p. 368) . The gourd thus serves as a symbol of the mother and represents the strong fertility of women. The union of the gourd and the Binu is based on the principle that “everything has a spirit (wan wu you ling)” and “symbiosis with humans (tong ren gong sheng jiao gan)” (Deng, 1992: p. 113) . This primordial thought also “reflects a certain knowledge of the nature of things or contains a rational understanding of the world around us and of man himself” (Deng, 1992: p. 35) . This justices Binu’s act of “burying the gourd is tantamount to burying oneself”. The symbolic nature of the “gourd” also adds a “divine” meaning to the image of Binu.
Secondly, the image of the husband “Qi Liang”, which corresponds to Binu, is also taken from the original imagery. The image of “Qi Liang” is the transformation of a mulberry tree. According to the Tai Ping Yu Lan, “Confucius’ mother in the tour of the Great Water, sleeping and dreaming of the Black Emperor to invite her, said, you must be in the empty mulberry breast, feel if the sense, born in the empty mulberry mound” (Li, 1966: p. 9) . Here, the mulberry tree is associated with life, and the story of the living mulberry tree can be found in the I Ching and the Lu Shi Chun Qiu. The story of the gourd hanging on the tree in Binu is similar to “Binu married to Qi Liang” (Su, 2006: p. 10) . In one sentence, the combination of Binu and Qi Liang is described. Some scholars think that the sweetness of their marriage is not seen in the text, so the motive of “sending cold clothes for a thousand miles (qian lian song han yi)” after Binu is not sufficient. However, the author believes that Su Tong’s reference to their identities is evidence of the sincerity of their love. According to some scholars, among the twenty poems in the Book of Songs that deal with mulberry trees, twelve of them mention that mulberry trees play an important role in the rendezvous of men and women. (Wen, 2010: pp. 155-156) Thus, the mulberry tree is not only a symbol of life, but also a testimony of love. This is why Su Tong says, “It was the fate of the gourd and the mulberry tree that Binu married Qi Liang” (Su, 2006: p. 10) . The day that Qi Liang disappeared, it became the beginning of Binu’s journey to and her husband. This kind of search, once put into the “fatalism”, becomes a journey to and the “soul”, which has nothing to do with life. Therefore, Su Tong has already explained this truth to us at the beginning of the story with something that is well known in Tao Cun. “So many men in Peach Village died in their hometowns, but only the death of Qi Liang was known to everyone in the seven counties and eighteen counties” (Su, 2006: p. 10) . Therefore, the author focuses on the difficulties and hardships faced by Binu on her way to and her husband, and the final “crying over the Great Wall” is only the inevitable result.
The “difference” of Binu can also be seen in the other people on the way to and her husband. When the women of Tao Cun heard that Binu was going to seek her husband for a thousand miles, “some of them were jealous, but they didn’t care to be jealous and even one woman took the lead and spat at Binu’s house, so the others followed her example and spat at Binu’s figure” (Su, 2006: p. 13) . At the human market (ren shi), Binu thought that there would be people like her who would be willing to go with her to Dayan Ling, but her actions were once again treated as crazy by the women. On the official road, the deer man boy snatched Qin Su’s robe and made Binu realize that even the “youths” who are supposed to be innocent have lost their basic “humanity”.
“It was at this point that Binu began to run wildly. After running far away, she saw a few round shacks on the road…and remembered that this was the human world. The sun was swaying gently on the plain…, and by the last warm light, Binu saw the shadow of a small deer in the distance. The boy’s figure disappeared, and it was a deer, a deer was standing on Qin Su’s coffin.” (Su, 2006: p. 13)
The deer-man boy is driven completely crazy by money and society in the basic thinking of “human-beast (ren shou tong gou)”, preferring to become a “deer” rather than a “human”.
11. The Metaphor of “Crying”
The action of “weeping” is the nodal point of the story of Meng Jiang Nü, which is discussed as the main point in many Meng Jiang Nü stories. Since the middle of the Warring States Tan Gong added “Qi Liang died, his wife faced his bier in the road and cried for sorrow” (Zheng & Kong, 1999: pp. 204-305) so that the story of Meng Jiang Nü add emotional color. This is how the “weeping and mourning” in the story began. In Mencius, it is stated that “the wife of Qi Liang of Hua Zhou was good at weeping her husband and changed the custom of the state” (Zhu, 1941: p. 17) , and it is also mentioned that the custom of Qi was good at singing weeping tunes. In The Anatomy of Criticism, Frye argues that “myth is the art of embodying sameness through implicit metaphor” (Frye, 2006: p. 326) . Unlike the previous stories, Su Tong’s Binu story uses metaphor to show crying. All the people living in the northern mountains cannot cry with their eyes. But “The permission to cry is roughly defined by age, and children are no longer allowed to cry once they learn to walk” (Su, 2006: p. 6) . So “in order to get the permission to cry” children “are willing to give up the joy of standing” (Su, 2006: p. 6) . “The nature of “crying” is “an expression of emotion” (Vingerhoets, 2013: p. 22) and the fact that “standing” is given up in front of “crying” as a basic human ability shows that the right to “express emotion” is more important than the ability to stand. The grown-up child can only look to the gods and witches for a solution to the problem if he wants to have both. So, in addition to their eyes, Beishan’s daughters learned how to cry with various organs. Some of them cried with their ears, some with their lips, and some with their breasts. Only Binu cried with her hair. The tears that flowed from her hair were “sour and smelly” (Su, 2006: p. 9) .
According to Ding Ling (1904-1986)’s Criticism of the archetype of the story of Meng Jiang Nü, among the basic storylines of the story of Meng Jiang Nü that have been passed down to the present day, “diving into the water for martyrdom (tiao shui xun jie)” (Ding, 1993: p. 98) has become a fixed storyline in the structures of the story. In mythology, the reason for choosing “diving to die” is that “water has always belonged to the lower level of the human world, where people are in a state of chaos or dissolution after their physical death, that is, they return to the inorganic world.” (Frye, 2006: p. 226) Therefore, when people die, their souls often float through the waters or sink to the bottom. This “water”, which Frye calls an “oracle”, does not exist in the text of Binu. The power of “water” is also discussed in the classical Chinese text Dao de jing. (Lu, 2013)
“Nothing in the world is as soft and weak as water and yet in attacking what is hard and strong, there is nothing that can surpass it.”
(Tian xia mo rou ruo yu shui, er gong jian qiang zhe mo zhi neng xian. yi qi wu yi yi zhi)
天下莫柔弱於水, 而攻堅强者莫之能先, 以其無以易之。 (Gao, 1996)
Water can overthrow the powered because of its softness and weakness. Su Tong chooses to use “tears” to achieve the effect of “substitution”. Tears denoted “water”, and Binu’s greatest reason for crying over the Great Wall with tears is the power of the “water” metaphor.
Like water, the “tears” produced by crying represent two special meanings. “First, it refers to women; second, it expresses a kind of entangled love and love barrier between men and women” (Liu, 1996: p. 88) . For Binu, as a woman, crying is not only a physical act, but also a weapon to fight against difficulties on her journey to and her husband. Binu’s tears, as the power of water, are a weapon to awaken her “humanity”, which solves the suffering of human existence. When the deer people robbed Binu of her parcel and the clothes she brought to Qi Liang at Bai Chuntai, Binu started to scream and cried silently with her breasts in a coma. Unlike the deer people’s tears, which had a “slightly salty taste” (Su, 2006: p. 53) , Binu’s tears had a bitter and sour taste. The deer people recognized the tears from Binu’s milk as the same as their mother’s tears on the night before they left home, both “women’s tears” (Su, 2006: p. 53) . Binu’s tears and cries made the deer people “remember their homeland and the burden, conscience, filial piety and virtue that a child hates” (Su, 2006: p. 63) . In the end, the four deer people called out to Binu, “Mother! Grandma! Sister!” (Su, 2006: p. 63) The humanity of four deer people in the depths of their bestiality is discovered and they remember their way home.
The tears of Binu not only save her from being robbed by the deer men, but also awaken the deer men who have been oppressed for a long time and have lost their humanity, using the softest “tears” to destroy the long domestication of the Bai Chuntai. This is a mockery of the ruling class represented by Bai Chundai, and a “return” to the true nature of “humanity” On the way to send Qin Su’s body back to her hometown, Binu and the young man encounter the guards searching for her, and she suddenly bursts into tears, which scares off the guards, who think it is a “tear arrow” On the way to and her husband, the weak woman Binu has no weapons and faces a thousand miles of hardship, she only has “tears” This “tear” is a symbol of Binu’s “willpower” and “her own strength”.
When Binu finally reaches the Great Wall, she learns that the stones have buried him alive, and the sorrow buried deep in her heart Anally gushes out. Not only that, but the rocks on the roadside are also all in tears with her, every wind that blows is whimpering and baskets are shedding tears, everywhere Binu goes, no one is spared. In the end, the mountains trembled, and the Great Wall was broken by tears. Binu finally finished her journey to and her husband with tears in her eyes. The tremendous power of tears not only resisted the wall but also challenged the taboos of the people beneath the northern mountains. The wall represents not only the plight of the oppressed but also the plight of the ruling class like “Lord Shang guan Qing”. Binu’s act of “weeping down the wall” is a solution to the problem of human suffering as a whole. The feminine power contained in has been manifested in all the “Meng Jiang Nü stories”. However, the difference is that the ancient story of Meng Jiang Nü, in which “weeping and mourning (ku zhi ai)” is the main point, focuses on the “chastity of women (nü zi zhen jie)” or the “husband as an outline of the wife (fu wei qi gang)” principle of etiquette and law. Binu’s weeping not only incorporates ritual and law but also has a real practical purpose. As a weapon for women’s survival, it solves everyone’s existential dilemma, and at the same time awakens the resilient will of real “human beings” to rise up in the face of society’s absurdity and emptiness. In this way, Binu is no longer a “subservient” woman, but a woman who has redeemed herself, which contrasts ancient mythology, perhaps that’s why Su Tong chose her to represent such female rebellious spirit. With her tears, she rebels against the cruel social reality and the cold heart, and becomes a “goddess of the individual”.
The metaphor of “crying” expresses not only the praise of Binu but also the purification and inspiration of others. For the deer and horse people of Lan Caojian (lan cao jian), it is a way to trigger their homesickness; for the ruling class of the Five Grains City, “tears” is a “medicine” to cure their diseases; for the people of the Five Grains City, “tears” is a “mirror” to expose their hypocrisy and even lies, so that they have to honestly tear themselves away from their true nature as “human beings”.
12. Conclusion
The “new mythology” of the mid- to late-1990s is a “reconfiguration of the ideal of existence and spirituality” (Ye, 2010) . The Best book in the project A Short History of Myth provides “a passionate and intelligent defense of the indispensability of myth to human culture” (Ye, 2007: p. 53) . Ye Shuxian argues that the ultimate function of myth and ritual is to help people “face the crisis of death and nothingness”, but that “modern man reveres reason alone without myth” (Ye, 2007: p. 52) , so that modern man inevitably often falls into despair. The text of Binu is reconstructed by using the primitive thinking of mythology, but “the purpose of virtualizing a divine existence is not to return to the classical world of mythology, but to inspire modern people to get rid of the dullness and anxiety of the ‘wasteland’ of modernity and to regain some sense of spiritual freedom” (Ye, 2007: p. 47) . Therefore, Su Tong adds modern class concepts and people’s existential dilemmas to the primitive thinking, and writes the story of Meng Jiang Nü, which belongs to “modern people”. The uniqueness of Binu is that it adds modern thinking to the “mythological thinking” and incorporates the current situation of people’s survival into it. The law of interpenetration (hu shen lv), the spirit of all things (wan wu you ling), and the homogeneity of man and beast (ren shou tong gou) are combined with realistic factors in the text, making Binu an exemplary work of “retelling myths” in the new mythology. In addition, the metaphor of “crying” and the symbol of identity are used in the folk imagination to express the reflection on “original humanity” from the perspective of “women from the bottom”. Binu is not a simple personal story, but about the plight of human survival. The courage and strength of the main character to overcome difficulties are also common to “modern human beings”. Binu truly realizes the function of helping people to overcome the current social and survival problems and emphasizes the nature and quality of being a “human being”.
Glossary
Bai Chun tai 百春台
Baili Qiao 百里橋
ban ren ban shou 半人半獸
bi shi 彼世
bu qi she wu ning si 不騎射毋寧死
ci shi 此世
cong nv cong you 從女從又
Dayan Ling 大雁嶺
dou bao fu 抖包袱
fu wei qi gang 夫為妻綱
Fuxi Kao 伏羲考
Fuxi Nüwa 伏羲女媧
Hengming Jun 衡明君
Hongwen Tang 宏文堂
Hu Shen 互滲
hu shen lü 互滲律
hun gui gu li 魂歸故里
gui gen 歸跟
gui sheng 歸生
guo cheng men 過城門
guo guan 過關
ku chang cheng 哭長城
ku zhi ai 哭之哀
lan cao jian 蘭草澗
lei si lian xiang 類似聯想
long wei ma shuo 龍為馬說
Lord Shang guan Qing 上官青大人
Lu ren 鹿人
Lü Shi Chun Qiu 呂氏春秋
Ma ren 馬人
Meng Jiang Nü 孟姜女
nu 奴
Nüwa 女媧
nü zi zhen jie 女子貞節
Pangu 盤古
qian lian song han yi 千里送寒衣
Qin Su 芹素
qing wa chong bai 青蛙崇拜
quan si jing 勸死經
ren shou tong gou 人獸同構
ren shi 人市
shen hua min jian hua 神話民間化
song yi ku fu juan 送衣哭夫卷
Suzhou Pingtan 蘇州評彈
Tai Ping Yu Lan 太平御覽
Tan Gong 檀弓
tian ren jiao gan 天人交感
Tao Cun 桃村
tiao shui xun jie 跳水殉節
tong ren gong sheng jiao gan 同人共生交感
wa 媧
wa ren hu bian 蛙人互变
wa shen 蛙神
wan wu you ling 万物有灵
wu ren tong gou 物人同構
wu xue bu cheng shu 無噱不成書
wu wo tong yi 物我同一
xing tai lei bi 形態類比
Xue 噱
xue nai shu Zhong zhi 噱乃書中之寳
xun fu 尋夫
yi ren wei ma 以人為馬
yi ji duo wu 以己度物
Zhong Guo Tao He 中國套盒
NOTES
1Homo neanderthalensis was a prehistoric human being who lived in the Paleolithic period.
2 Yuan Ke, 2013 , “From Narrow-Sense Mythology to Broad-Sense Mythology,” ed. Yuan Ke, Preface to The Dictionary of Chinese Mythology and Legend (Beijing: Beijing Union Publishing Company).
3The term “originalism” is represented by Johann Gottfried Herder and has been defined by many researchers in different ways. In summary, however, the centralized meaning contains the same definition, namely, that ethnic identity is fixed, homogeneous, and exogenous. In Chandra Kanchan, 2012 Constructivist theories of ethnic politics (New York: Oxford University Press), 136.
4 Vargas Llosa, 1999 (Mario), calls the writing of “a main story that gives rise to another or several derived stories” the “Chinese box”. Vargas Llosa Mario, Cartas a un joven novelista, trans. Zhao Deming (Tianjin: Baihua Wenyi Press), 86.
5 Luo Xuehui, 2006 , “Su Tong: Tears are a power of grief to the end,” China News Weekly, September 4, 68.