Study On Pao Ge Confraternity Culture And Sichuan Modern Novels

Pao Ge Confraternity (PGC),mainly composed of grassroots vagrant, refers to the social organization featuring mutual assistance and self-protection under the special and morbid socio-historical context of Qing Dynasty. It went through several historical stages, including emerging, developing, surging, and degenerating. According to its cultural tendency and characteristics, it should possess the cultural traits and connotation. The author holds that PGC culture, emerging from a particular region and population, is a regional subcultural system which differs from the mainstream culture and even opposes to the latter, even though they share the. same origin. PGC culture is a civil and regional subcultural system covering a wide range. It is a combination of both traditional culture and civil culture factors, integrating vagrant mentality, gang culture, brotherhood culture, and bandit culture. As a result, PGC culture has its complexity:on the one hand, it has the positive values of historical righteousness and progress such as Chinese chivalrous spirit, fighting spirit and rebellious mentality, representing the plain civil ethics and class-consciousness; on the other hand, it has the negative values of limitations (backwardness) and reactionary nature (economic dependency and predatoriness). History has proved that the value effect of both positivity and negativity of PGC culture exerts profound influence on all aspects of Sichuan people’s social life in modern times, shaping their morals, values, thinking models and personalities as well as transforming their lifestyles and production modes. Therefore, PGC culture, as an important component of Ba-Shu culture, is a topic worth exploring in the current academia which shows an increasing interest in regional culture studies.In Sichuan’s literary arena, the fierce collision and fusion among traditional culture, regional culture and Western culture in modern times evokes the self-consciousness of native culture among Sichuanese writers. With either a sober mind or great enthusiasm, Sichuanese writers keep their eyes on the native culture and produce works eulogizing or criticizing their hometowns. They spare no efforts to dig the primitive vitality behind the native culture, turning Sichuan society into their art domain. Their works present the reactionary, rebellious group personality as well as the social mindset of worshipping the strong, illustrate the distinct folklores in Ba-Shu area, and reveal and criticize the evil, darkness, decay and decline in Sichuan townships under the patriarchal clan system in an all-round way. These works offer an overview of Sichuan PGC ecology due to the intertwining of several forces including PGC, warlords, bandits, bureaucrats, landlords and foreign religious groups. These works also demonstrate Sichuanese writers’ common understanding and acceptance of Ba-Shu culture (mainly PGC culture in this paper), and their individual creation and conversion on this basis, boosting the development of Sichuan modern literature. Enriching our cognition and realization of PGC culture, these works have made tremendous contributions to Sichuan’s and China’s modern literature, reflecting the unique literary value and charm of Ba-Shu regional literature.Abundant research achievements on Sichuan modern literature have been made as a result of long-term endeavors of the academia, but researches on this topic from the perspective of Ba-Shu regional culture are limited in number. Further on, there are even fewer studies proceeding from the perspective of PGC culture to explore the cultural background of text generation and the cultural generative mechanism of writers’creation as well as the deeper connection among culture, writers, and text. Some researches mention this topic only in limited chapters and very few studies devote to elaborating on it, thus lacking comprehensiveness and profundity. Therefore, from the perspective of PGC culture, this paper tries to explore the generative mechanism and historical value of Sichuan modern literature, based on novels which can best reflect the history and time characteristics. This paper focuses on Li Jieren’s and Sha Ting’s novels in an attempt to identify the close relationship between culture, writers and literary works so as to illustrate how the unique cultural characteristics and traditions of PGC shapes and constructs the writers’cultural individuality, personality psychology, moral sense, values, aesthetic taste and artistic style. On this basis, this paper also demonstrates the cultural information and spiritual connotation in the novels’texts.This paper is composed of three parts:introduction, main body, and conclusion. The main body consists of four chapters. Chapter one elaborates on PGC’s filiation, name origin, form of organization, historical evolution and social impact, introducing the formation of PGC society and its characteristics. The concept of PGC culture is clarified and the relationship between PGC culture, civil culture and traditional culture is explained. The basic connotation of PGC culture is summarized as follows:brotherhood loyalty first, reactionary spirit, national awareness, and the worship of the strong under the law of jungle. Chapter two explores the cultural psychological acceptance of Sichuan modern novelists who are faced with the collision and fusion of Chinese culture and Western culture. The focus is set on the novelists’acceptance and creation and conversion of PGC culture, trying to find the converging point of their creation and PGC culture and discuss the transformation from regional cultural resources to individual resources. This chapter also shows the detailed demonstration of PGC culture in the texts from the perspectives of PGC spirit, the worship of the strong, and PGC folklores, pointing out the historical value and status of Sichuan modern novel under the PGC culture context. Chapter three discusses the relationship between Li Jieren, his works and PGC culture. In this chapter, the shaping role of PGC culture’s existing morals, values, behavioral models in Li’s personality psychology, temperament, thinking mode, cultural character and literary thoughts is discussed. The detailed demonstration of PGC culture’s basic connotation in the texts is presented based on Li’s representative works of roman-fleuve. Three female characters (Aunt Cai, Aunt Wu, and Mrs. Huang Lansheng) in Li’s works are selected to demonstrate the influence and manifestation of PGC culture on their behavioral models, personality psychology, and value orientation. Chapter four expounds the relationship between Sha Ting and PGC culture. This chapter explores how PGC experiences and PGC culture influences Sha’s choice of literary expression. The influence of PGC background and the PGC cultural context in An County (Sha’s hometown) on the commencement of Sha’s literature career is discussed. The influence of PGC culture on Sha’s novel creation is explained from two aspects:self-conscious establishment of native depiction and natural use of satirical art. The representation of PGC culture’s spiritual connotation and the reflection of negative cultural values in Sha’s "rural novels" are analyzed from two aspects:the social cultural psychology of worshipping the strong and the root of sin in rural society.