Space Flows In Time

Wang Anyi is one of the most important writers of contemporary China. Thestyle of her fiction, which has been discussed by scholars, including personalityposition, female consciousness, Shanghai-school tradition, urban and rural concepts,was individual. This paper argues that there is a unity of Wang Anyi’s novel’sdiversity of theme on the basis of Art Chronotope construction, and this kind ofunity is dominated by time. Time is not only an element that taking into account ofcontent and form, but also the presence of essentially, and this kind of presence isformed from the specificity and diversity of literary time constructed by her novel’sfiction. Literary time can be discussed as aesthetic object for it is subjective time,and its performance cannot be without the spatial factor among the chronotope.Time is originally abstract, intangible, successive timeliness, while literary time cansurpass the conventional one-dimensional time-sensitive in the past-now-future"and showing the form of three-dimensional specialization. As aesthetic object,literary time can reflect its characteristics only in space. In Wang Anyi’s novel, thesubjectivities of character time, space profiling of time and history of time are allincluded in spatial zed. This paper attempts to in-depth research the richness oftime-like state reflected by Wang Anyi’s novel through exploring temporarilyproperties of Wang Anyi’s fictions in different stages.This paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter analyzes Wang Anyi’sexperience and sense of time. Wang Anyi was born in1954, experienced the majorpolitical events during the process of her growing up as the daughter of the Republic,such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution and reform and openingup. Experiencing the change of time and being a witness of60’s,70’s,80’s,90’s andnowadays lead to an individual’s sense of time for her. Because of Wang Anyi’sspecial "outsider of Shanghai" identity, she has her own roots awareness and objective interpretation of Shanghai, a time configuration city. All of these ideashave affected the writing philosophy of Wang Anyi.The second chapter researches the characters’"mind time" in Wang Anyi’s"Three Love story" as her creative pre-series as the center. The timing characteristicof this awareness is an abstract of space, which reflects the relationship betweenspiritual time of human and the meaning of existence. The failure of charactersexploring the meaning of existence cause characters’ aphasia, but they still eager tofind an export of dilemma by body and desire. However, the dilemma caused by thesubject of time can’t be solved via body and desire, text only seek the end throughmetaphysical ways.The third chapter interpret the question of spatialization of time in the novels ofWang Anyi in the center of "Everlasting Regret". The book,"Everlasting Regret", isbased on the to Wang Qiyao writing the city of Shanghai, so time is profiled on thebasis of city space as the physical form of life. Wang Qiyao has such a specialexperience so that her sense of time is still, and that breaking the passage of time.The vulgar time of her life and historical time have the relationship of juxtaposition,showing the varied of heterogeneous time of literary time in space visualization.Chapter four based on Tianxiang interpret Wang Anyi’s way of dealing withhistoric of time in novel. The history showed in Tianxiang modeled Shanghai’s localhistory. Wang Anyi combining large history and little history when she processinghistorical time, and construct the authenticity of historical time and space by meansof combining grand narrative and characters’ fate.The construction of chronotope in Wang Anyi’s novels is oriented by time. Theexistence of time has a variety form in literature, and the meaning of it is showed,determined and generated by the form of space. In individual, the meaning of time isassociated with the presence of people, while in society it reflects the changes ofhistory. Whether it is the subject of personal time or the historic of time, it has no linear bound, circulating in the space, and that brings richer connotation to people.