Abstract
In 2005, Canongate Books in the UK initiated the project of "The Myth Series" as collaboration among publishing houses from all over the world, inviting well-known authors of different countries to re-write their own national myth. Chung-Ching Publishing Group in Shih-Chuan participated in the project on behalf of China, and A-Lai's latest full-length novel King Gesar, published in 2009, was among the four books of "The Myth Series, China." King Gesar represents one of the most noteworthy Tibetan poetics.The writer preserves the basic structure of the traditional story and adds more interesting characters, showing the importance and significance of modernity in this project. Not only does this novel promotes Tibet’s classics, but also serves as a criticism and testimony to the difficulties that folk literature has to face in contemporary China. A-Lai is a culturally "cross-bred" of the Han Chinese and the Tibetan. Educated in Mandarin, he writes about the Tibetan land in Mandarin for Mandarin readers, which is a strategy worth discussing. This thesis is concerned with how A-Lai alludes to the Tibetan folk literature in his works to liven up the fading national spirit. Moreover, his writing of changes and trauma portrays his homeland, which is clashed by foreign culture and modernization, and testifies to the pressure from mainstream Mandarin writing, commoditization of literature, Han-Chinese-centered civilization, and other forms of hegemony encountered by Tibet. Therefore, my study starts from why and how the epic is retold. First, I delineate that “the Myth Series” has already connoted complex context when it was transplanted into Chinese literature’s field, and is unsuitable to be examined under traditional critical framework. Instead, a new interpretation of “the Myth Series” is made possible by introducing the theory of transference of original story into the research. Second, regarding how the epic is retold, I analyze A-Lai’s works and their contexts and concerns, dividing them into my two main subjects: the allusion to tradition and the disappearance of tradition. In my analysis of King Gesar, I look into A-Lai’s metaphor of the oppositions of official/civil, center/periphery, and other operations of hegemony, presented through epic character’s modern thoughts, through the depiction of the bondage and oppression imposed on the characters by the official power establishment of monarchy together with religion, and through the plight of folk literature in the modern world. Last, I suggest that King Gesar’s protagonist, Jin-Mei, is A-Lai’s literary embodiment, which belongs to the same context as his embodiment as the young Tibetan elite “I” in his previous works. The shifting from “I” to “Jin-Mei” also implies A-Lai’s contemplation on the commitment of novelist. Based on these research results and the analysis of King Gesar, this thesis seeks to complete the studies of A-Lai by investigating “the Myth Series” and his writing strategy as a reaction to hegemony.