A geocritical study of Yan Lianke’s balou mountain stories: The utopian cognitive mapping in post-1949 China

Abstract

This chapter examines Yan Lianke's fictional stories set in the Balou Mountain area from the perspective of literary geocriticism. Informed by Fredric Jameson's conceptualization of “cognitive mapping” and Robert T. Tally, Jr.’s theory that the concept of utopia in contemporary times no longer refers to a concrete place or society, but a utopian impulse to re-situate humans in space and history, I focus on land, place, environment, and their dialectical relations with man as the subject matter in Yan's Balou Mountain narratives. Instead of reading Yan's Balou Mountain series as separate stories set in the same place, I read them in their totality as a continuously expanding utopian cognitive map of the post-1949 China in Yan's literature. Concentrating on Yan's 1997 novella The Years, Months, Days and 2013 novel The Explosion Chronicles, this article argues that Yan has created a convoluted web of spatialized utopian attempts, which contradict, overwrite, and nullify one another or from within themselves. Serving as test cases, these utopian cognitive maps demonstrate Yan's intellectual endeavor to find a possible way out for and through a literature at the intersections between the rural and the urban, between socialism and capitalism, between the individual and the commune, as well as between human and space, which are pivotal issues for contemporary China and for the world at large.