Owen starts with the observation that the Chinese like to meditate on the past. He identifies the Chinese civilization as historical civilization with a comparative perspective to the western civilization and its hidden truth: the structure of its own perpetuation is above all. How is the perpetuation achieved and in what form?
In the chain of remembering and being remembered that was started by no one else than Confucius, the erased root stirs the desire to know the final moral and historical truth. Even though we perform the ritual of remembrance for something that is anonymous, remembrance concerns names, circumstance, detail, site for we have to know where we stand. Like in the case of Yang Hu, “to weep for a particular man rather than for the anonymous dead, there must be a stele with writing, a mediating fragment that marks the name and a special spot on the mountain”. By being a rememberer, we join the contract that the rememberer will be remembered, outside of which “one must join the anonymous dead, name lost, perfect erasure”. The name is a nexus between the anonymous past and anonymous future. Attaching some “trace” of oneself to nature’s permanence will perpetuate the name. Yang Hu is remembered for his act, Meng Haoran is remembered for his poem about Yang Hu that later poets allude to, echo, or write in the style of him. By doing this, one joins the society with people gone, living and yet to come.
For the people gone, Wang Shouren does not let them go. He drags them back into relation to the living; he makes them his own. He writes for us, reaching out from his solitude and own eventual death to draw us into a relation to him. For the past history, the Chinese elegy is a struggle of ones own moral freedom with nature as mechanism that shows itself in poetic historical lamenting as Du Mu did as a heresy to the larger plot of historical necessity. Nature as mechanism and all common human justice are divided in the western tradition (tragedy) and united in Tian in Chinese tradition. The poetic writing is a free conquest of despair of the historical necessity. Chinese like to meditate on the past, not for utilitarian purpose to guide the presence but lament and enjoy the lament through literary creation. What is not there anymore (the things lost) can exist in literature and be appreciated but not criticized by reason. Those lost things are remembered not by its accurate existence as they were at a particular past but by their ability to stir the act of remembrance. Unable to conquer or seize the past, we interpret the past as a retrospective way of expressing the desire to know.
In “fragment”, Owen highlighted the biggest issue of Chinese poetic art concerning poetic aesthetics and theories. Following the need to remember and the practice of remembering by writing, Owen talked about remembrance as a trap for the living when too many memories crowd the present, starting by the antiquarian passion. Guided by the principles of remembrance, Owen pointed out that things preserved in memory because they are lost, and this kind of things are less likely to become a trap for the living, but an occasion for delight and merriment. Memory and transmission should be a game for the living, not a responsibility to actually preserve what is left of its material form. When transmission concerns real antiques in its material form, it could become drudgery, leading to a failure of humanity. On this light revealed the different value systems of Li Qingzhao(pleasure and remembrance) and Zhao Defu. Shen Fu’s act of writing memoir about his own repetitive interrupted pleasure is based on the need to treat terror and pain and be able to laugh at them. But when he asked for interruption to continue the repetition, he as a writer seemed to write his eternally unfinished plots back into the living world to provide material for the epicycles of their memoirs. Here Owen raises the question of the morality of writing that we could think further on.
When it comes to the poetic artifice as in Wu Wenying’s Ci poetry, memory is a favorite topic as well as the model (form) that has gone through complete reconstruction. Memory here becomes aesthetic memory. Beautiful art comes from distanced appreciation of painful personal memories. That is how the pleasure in the hurt of loss is achieved, from which comes the art of remembrance. However, the control of memory is illusory, sited in a compulsion to repeat. Here comes the question concerning the morality of writing: does writing really lead to pleasure?
It goes even darker when Zhang Dai comes into our sight, who in a desperate historical moment only felt the vanity of caring for the transmission of the past into the future. But out of the vanity comes the intensity of attachment to one’s name that makes the immortality, an identity bound to a personal past and transmitted into the future. It is an attachment that creates history, that concerns itself with the past and projects itself into the future, thus perpetually postpones death. Writing is the very enactment of attachment. With no hope for future pleasure and sociality, however, in the succession of explanations for his writing, he writes himself out of despair into a growing hope to be remembered. Ones memories become the only attachment through which one can be remembered and the memories are embodied in ones writing. Here the morality of writing comes again.
Literature is about humanity. We want to live happily and meaningfully (immortality). When we study the past literature and its author, we do not treat them only as historical object, but try to feel what they have felt through their literary works. The theory of formalism is applicable here. Although formalism comes from western literature studies, for Chinese ancient literature, form is also a useful theoretical method. Writing is the way to construct a form. Memory is itself a form that is especially attached to poetry.
Literature is itself a form to achieve spiritual pleasure and sociality, in which we form a deep connection with another or others as a society, and render it as a continuous presence that links the past and future that counts to immortality. Owen chooses extreme examples to show this either when the spiritual pleasure and sociality is at the peak or when they are endangered. Thus comes the question of the morality of writing. For a historical civilization like China, poetry writing is closely related to morality even in its pure form.
In this sense, poetry and Ci poetry should be seen as two different genres not for their textual forms but form in the formalism sense. In orthodox Chinese poetry and poetics, a fragment is an index of absence. Again with a comparative perspective, Owen discovers that western literary tradition makes the boundaries of the text absolute, while the Chinese literary tradition tended to stress the continuity between the text and the lived world. The discrepancy between the words and the fullness of circumstance and sentiment does not exist in Chinese poetic tradition.
Owen would not study Chinese ancient poetry in the framework of Chinese traditional poetic theory that is too centered on the historical lineage on the level of textual form and content. Instead, he goes deeper into the creating mind of the poets and writers through the text. For example, for Bai Juyi’s “When I Read Yuan Zhen’s Poems in a Boat”, Owen would first notice the narrative elements (in Chinese poetic criticism it would be identified as an Tu-ti Poem while the artistic form would be ignored), and then percept that it does not have the internal unity of a narrative, its fragmentariness. He further identifies the aesthetics of silence based on this, which as an unexplained poetic concept has been used over and over again without a concrete revelation. An encrusted lump is a fragment of a living world, to write about it like this is to recognize it as the concentration of value. Owen further led this to the aesthetics of silence to discover the more profound fragmentariness of the poem as a piece broken out of a living world. This means in aesthetics, fragment does not necessarily have to have a material form to be discussed in a poem to recover the past living world but can also be the poem itself to address not only the past but also the future. Remembrance points not only to the past but also to the future, “the text is permeable, joined with lived time before and after the poem”. By focusing on the text as a fragment of the surface, we are led by continuance to the whole. The whole include the surrounding lived world and the interior world of feeling beneath it.