李劼人の成都描寫

Abstract

Among writers born in Ssŭ-ch'uan 四川, Li Chieh-jên's works definitely carry a lot of more local colours unique to his home town than the others. Between 1936 and 1937, he has published three historical novels, namely Ssŭ shui wei lan 死水微瀾, Pao feng yu ch'ien 暴風雨前 and Ta po 大波. In these novels, he does not describe the way of life of his characters in detail as Lao She 老舍 does. He concentrates rather on describing the background of the stories. To avoid monotonous description of the background, Li Chieh-jên resorts to the following devices. First, even though he devotes much space to describing background scenes in his stories, for example, within the length of 140, 000 words in Ssŭ shui wei lan, there are six paragraphs of more than a thousand words about Ch'eng-tu, Li Chieh-jên has always been skilful in including many objects seen from different perspectives in his rather detailed description. Second, there are always a rich variety of objects and events such as famous places and historic sites, unknown streets, restaurants, teahouses, markets, marriage ceremony, funeral and so on. Third, he sometimes describes them from a distance, and sometimes at a close-up, thus allowing many different angles from which the readers can look at the events. There are two factors, I think, which allow him to describe Ch'eng-tu vividly. One reason is that Li Chieh-jên has lived for a long time in Ch'eng-tu. While other famous Ssŭ-ch'uan writers leave their home in their youth, Li Chieh-jên has spent most of his life there. He diligently studies the history, customs, and ways of life in his home town, thus allowing himself much intimacy with the objects he describes. The other reason is that he has been deeply influenced by the 19th French literary trend which, among other things, emphasized very much the use of detailed and accurate background descriptions. He has studied in France from 1919 to 1924 and translated many French literary works into Chinese. He is in fact regarded as a translator of French literature in the beginning of his literary career. We can find obvious traces of such influence in his novels.