Writing China: Gu Wenda, Victor Segalen and Their Steles

Abstract The problem of writing China has been about the difficulty of the West in recognizing China as a contemporaneous reality while conceiving it in terms of cultural difference. This essay examines Gu Wenda's Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry and Victor Segalen's Stèles: Records of Steles Old and New in exploration of a mode of cultural articulation that takes seriously the set of differences associated with writing China in the 21st century. Gu's very gesture of crossing the divide between the Chinese language and the English language reminds us that the idea of a monolingual and homogeneous culture is never adequate for characterizing human activities. Nevertheless, his notion of cultural boundary is limited by categories such as ‘nations’ and ‘civilizations’, and thus, it stops short of disclosing other contact zones of cultures. In contrast, Segalen brings the Chinese language and the French language into an equivocal relationship of ‘origin’ and ‘translation’ as well as exploring a non‐identitarian interweaving of cultures. This essay argues that while China's rapid incorporation into the global economic system seems to portend that the global status quo will bind us in an enclosed space of ever more sameness, be it capitalist economy, information technology or mass‐culture industry, Segalen inspires us to put into play a world in which relations remain to be made and for which differences have yet to be articulated through the enactments of spaces he demonstrates in Stèles .