The Mutually Comprehensible Experience People Get from Literature

　“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.[1]” People share experiences in many ways. Literature is one of them, and it is often used to reproduce the experience of reality experienced by writers and turn it into an aesthetic experience that can be mutually shared by people. The way human experiences things may have changed a lot after the First Industrial Revolution and is still changing while many aspects of Industry 4.0 appear clearer today than when the concept was presented twelve years ago.[2] In the following excerpt from Molten Iron (鐵漿) written by Chu Hsi-ning (朱西甯), it is shown that the train system may have been one of those inventions that made people feel that the modern era was coming:

“Who would want to rush to Peking in a day? Rushing for your life? It took three hundred and sixty suns to make a year and it was too much bother to remember all the months. Even remembering a birthday, it was only necessary to say that it was at the time of the harvesting of wheat or at the flowering of the soya bean. The ancients had divided night and day into twelve hours; that was already complicated enough without dividing it again into eighty - six thousand and four hundred seconds. That would be meaningless![3]”

The concept of timing in minutes or even in seconds was something new to the people then. Nowadays, students take it for granted, but it is difficult to imagine that Confucius asked his students to gather at 10:00 in the morning to have a lecture because that was not how the world worked back in the day. The system of trains shows the ability of the control of time of human, and from then on, everything seems to be calculatable at a higher level of precision. Now, human travels at a higher speed than ever.

　Now, let’s board the train. What happened when human was finally used to this (new) technology? Was there any new experience? The understanding of lights, colours, and reflections may have also influenced how writers compose. In Snow Country (雪国), Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成) wrote:

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl’s face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.[4]”

In this excerpt, Shimamura is on a train, thinking about something while staring at the window, which reflects the image from one side and lets him see through to another side. The fast-moving outer world and the static inner world blend. Human had no experience like this before. After trains were introduced, human could travel at a faster pace as if the world moved at a more rapid speed. Some may experience his or her inner self has trouble catching up to the pace of the world which is definitely getting faster and faster.

　Human experiences things differently now; we can time finer than a second, measure smaller than a millimetre, etc. When the smallest countable unit gets smaller and smaller, the same things experienced by human seems to be happening for a longer duration. As it is easy to imagine from the excerpt mentioned previously written by Chu Hsi-ning, when time was counted in seasons, the reference value, a week would not be considered a long duration; in contrast, when the arrival of trains is measured in minutes as it is nowadays, a week is a very long time to wait. Week is a timing system created by human. If we were in the point of view of the system, it is the human (whose mind) that moves dramatically slower. Can we argue that the general public’s mind is in the least sharp state in human history?

　The final phrase of the excerpt from Snow Country wrote, “Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.” In the story, Shimamura is staring at the window but actually a beautiful girl’s reflection on the window. We may be able to say that, at the same time, the enjoyment of the beauty of a woman from a man, or vice versa, may still exist no matter how the world changes.

　As science progresses, human seems to be able to take control over the world and keep changing the world; however, there are perhaps several things that have not changed throughout the time. Take the following excerpt for example:

“A white horse. A black horse – both horses were dripping sweat. His body was covered in horse sweat. His eyebrows became greenish blue, his eyes like black circles of burning fire, the beads of sweat continuously dripping from his forehead to his bright red cheeks. The sun, I said. The sun was shining so brightly a person couldn’t open their eyes. Those tree trunks, fair white and smooth, layer after layer of bark removed exposing the delicate flesh inside.[5]”

This is, “at the most, thinly veiled[6]” scene in Wandering Through a Garden, Waking from a Dream (遊園驚夢) by Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇), describing a piece of memory of a rendezvous between Madam Qian (錢夫人) and Zheng Yiqing (鄭彥青) to mimic the original love-making scene in An Amazing Dream (驚夢)[7] between Du Liniang (杜麗娘) and Liu Mengmei (柳夢梅) in The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) written by Tang Xianzu (湯顯祖) by using free association of stream of consciousness. In a modern banquet in Tianmu, Taipei, Madam Qian seems to be Wandering through a Garden and tasting An Amazing Dream[8] as it was in the Ming Dynasty. By reading this, it is possible to imagine that human still admire the things that were appreciated hundreds of years ago.

　All three stories above that are mentioned are just stories. They are all creations by the writers. To some extent, we can argue that these stories are not real, but are they not? These writers put some experience, which is mutually understandable by most people throughout the time, into words. Chu wrote about the shock from new technologies; Kawabata described the experience when using technologies, and Pai narrated the enjoyment of love-making. These are the things that most human has experienced. Hence, these concepts written by the writers are mutually comprehensible. Perhaps, the stories themselves are not the experience that all human has, but to imagine is something that all human does, and this is the mutually comprehensible experience people get from literature: the experience of imagination.

[1] Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, Vintage, 1996.

[2] Ciupek, Martin “Zehn Jahre Industrie 4.0: Es hat Klick gemacht” VDI nachrichten, 08 April 2021, <https://www.vdi-nachrichten.com/technik/automation/zehn-jahre-industrie-4-0-es-hat-klick-gemacht/>

[3] The Ivory Balls & Other Stories. Translated by Nancy Chang Ing, Mei Ya, 1970.

[4] Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, Vintage, 1996.

[5] Brown, Morgan. Bai Xianyong In Translation: Wandering through a Garden, Waking from a Dream, 2015, pp. 35-36.

[6] Brown, Morgan. Bai Xianyong In Translation: Wandering through a Garden, Waking from a Dream, 2015, pp. 36.

[7] Tang, Xianzu. The Complete Dramatic Works of Tang Xianzu. Edited by Wang Rongpei &Zhang Ling, Bloomsbury China, 2018.

[8] 白先勇. 遊園驚夢. 風雲時代出版公司, 1989, pp. 172