Affective Landscapes: Vision and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Picture-Texts

Abstract

This essay analyzes the narrative structures of forms of graphic autobiography in premodern China. Focusing on three woodblockprinted picturetexts by the painter Zhang Bao (b. 1763), the poet Zhang Weiping (1780– 1859), and the official Linqing (1791– 1846), this study shows that these authors experimented with the representational and expressive affordances of landscape imagery and the printed book, to reconfigure the stories of their lives through a “language of vision.” By restructuring their life stories both formally and figuratively in spatial ways, these authors crafted multilayered but coherent images of their moral, intellectual, social, and personal identities, often against the grain of their personal and social predicaments. These imaginative interventions in the generic practices of selfrepresentation invite renewed attention to historical and cultural constructions of personal and collective identity, relations between landscape and subjecthood, and narrative structure in premodern and modern literary and pictorial texts. As narrative representation of the self in time, autobiographical writing is a privileged medium for the articulation of identity and subjecthood. This essay is an investigation of a form of autobiographical writing from China that could be thought of as graphic autobiography avant la lettre, in that it tells the life story of a single person, by substituting pictorial images for what otherwise would be the body of the narrative text. These pictorial life narratives, which seem unique in premodern forms of lifewriting worldwide, became a site of intense experimentation with new ways of imagining the self in nineteenthcentury China (fig. 1). This essay will show how these nineteenthcentury authors availed themselves, in striking ways, of the narrative and representational affordances of the pictorial image and the woodblockprinted book. In so doing, these authors expanded and reconfigured narrative models through a “language of vision,” in which landscape images and spatial figures stand central.1 As very public acts of selfimaging, these projects raise acute questions about the politics and performance of personal and collective identity in nineteenthcentury China. The strategic play with representational form in these publications frames such questions at the intersection of three lines of inquiry: the interrelation of landscape and subjecthood, temporal and spatial modes of selfapprehension and expression, and narrative structure in Chinese literary and pictorial texts. Figure 1. Above: Zhang Bao (b. 1763), Fancha tu (Images of the Floating Raft), frontispiece and first scene, 1822. Woodblockprinted book, ink on paper; 26.3 × 16.5 cm. The University of Chicago, Regenstein Library Below: Zhang Weiping (1780– 1859), Huajia xiantan (Leisurely Conversations at Sixty), frontispiece and first scene, 1840. Woodblockprinted book, ink on paper; 26.5 × 14.5 cm. The University of Chicago, Regenstein Library