Peng Yi

By examining the manuscript materials of Guo Songfen (1938–2005) linked specifically to his last work, Luojiu Hua (The Falling of All the Followers), the paper aims to focus on the creative mode revealed by the manuscripts which can be characterized as a file system that avails itself of indexes and labels of sorts. These are first made up of initial scenario comments projecting either tentative titles or the overall structure of the work and more importantly, hidden quotations or short excerpts that Guo leaves meticulous citation information. Because they are seamlessly sutured into the very fabric of the text, no visible traces of their previous lives can be discerned in a reading without the benefit of the manuscript materials. To some degree, these short excerpts are textual transplants – visibly only if we take a deeper dive into the creative process and related manuscripts – verily alien grafts, that seemingly work silently within the textual machine. What are these textual transplants sutured into the text doing there, especially in a work that deals with memory and historical and personal traumas and national displacements at the fall of the Qing empire and the onset of civil wars which will give birth to and define modern China and Taiwan? This paper aims to look at the textual transplants from the perspective of their indexing function, that is, how they serve both as links to cultural and historical memory, that is, as an archiving and accessing tool but because the transplants are often montage-like, they also become means of historical intervention, a dialectical imaging tool in Walter Benjamin’s sense, at the time of profound crisis which thinkers and writers such as Benjamin and Gou must live through. During the discussion, Daniel Ferrer’s relevant discussion of contextual memory and Eggert’s concept of the relation between archive and edition will also be employed to better understand the issues at hand. In short, we can look at these textual wedges as both an effort to solder personal memory and the collective memory, a personal wedge into the general environment and the collective and intertextual memory. On the other hand, we will see that the textual wedges also unhinge and therefore drive a wedge between the collective and our access or appropriation of it.