Re-enchanting Humannature: The Poetics and Eco-uncanniness of Yan Lianke's Park no. 711 (2012)

Abstract

Ecocriticism has been emerged as a recognizable critical school in the West. If ecocriticism’s level of acceptance is continued to grow, I believe ecocritics must make rigorous effort to demonstrate the field’s power to illuminate a variety of texts and across cultures. This paper aims to examine the intersections and interactions of nature and culture as manifested in Yan Lianke’s novel Park No. 711 (711號園：北京最後的紀念). I argue that, in the novel, human actions are embodied in the transformed nature and the text articulates a kind of poetic ecology that infuses the material world with a sense of place. As Laureate of Franz Kafka Prize, Yan not only stresses the inspiration from insects, plants, objects, and materials in his creative writings, the non-human worlds are also re-historicized and re-contextualized to illuminate the interconnected nature of all entities across time and space. On one hand, the Daoist and Buddhist cosmologies, “Heaven and Human are one”, has established new meanings amidst the rapid, and often reckless, development of contemporary China; the sense of place is also re-configured accordingly on the other. Focusing on the materials of nature and nonhuman worlds – objects, animals, materials, etc., this paper examines the impact of humannature on the construction of identity and a sense of place. In the discussion, I will revisit the meaning and influence of “Heaven and Human are one” in today’s urbanized post-Socialist China, explore the significance it has posited on the understanding of modernity and ruins, and illuminate the way in which this idea has been transformed by China’s current market economy. The utopic space described in Park No. 711 evokes a sense of eco-uncanny, a discrepancy between what is seen and felt, and what is affected and imagined. The novel strives to reconcile differences between past, present, and future of contemporary China; and between the experiences of the local people. I see humannature as an idea that binds together multiple temporalities of history, a renewed human-made material condition, and a new mode of inquiry. The reflections and propositions about the power of the material and nonhuman worlds will be premised upon the theoretical ideas of David Abram, Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.