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Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene pp 83–107Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong

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Abstract

This chapter discusses how the Maoist political attempt to master nature and human contradictorily generates the rekindled interests in mythology and fantasy through which what it means to be human has been rethought, particularly in its relation to the imaginary reincarnation of animal in human form.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 175.

  2. 2.

    Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175.

  3. 3.

    “Archetypal Theory and Criticism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 36.

  4. 4.

    C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 69.

  5. 5.

    Mark Kernan, “Myth and Dystopia in the Anthropocene,” OpenDemocracy, 5 December 2017. Accessed 4 June 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/mark-kernan/Myth-and-dystopia-in-the-Anthropocene

  6. 6.

    Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175.

  7. 7.

    Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol.1: The Way of the Animal Powers, part 1, Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 8–9.

  8. 8.

    Joseph Campbell, and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 38–39. Mystical function: awakening a sense of awe by realizing the mystery of the universe that underlies all forms; Cosmological dimension: revealing the shape and mystery of the universe; Sociological function: supporting and validating a certain social order; Pedagogical function: guiding the individual through the stage of life, on how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.

  9. 9.

    Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 40.

  10. 10.

    Campbell and Moyers, 40.

  11. 11.

    Campbell and Moyers, 41.

  12. 12.

    Campbell and Moyers, 40.

  13. 13.

    Campbell and Moyers, 41.

  14. 14.

    Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.

  15. 15.

    Heise, 25.

  16. 16.

    Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 29–59; Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover Publications, 1953), 23–43.

  17. 17.

    Frye argued that literature drew upon transcendental genres such as romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), irony/satire (winter), and comedy (spring). These four genres constitute a “central unifying myth.” He further codified these genres and uncovered their basic archetypal structures. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

  18. 18.

    Craig Chalquist, “A Folklore of Hope: Storytelling for a Reenchanted World.”

  19. 19.

    Wilt L. Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xi–xxiv.

  20. 20.

    Richard E. Strassberg, “Introduction,” in John D. Mitchell (ed.), The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China (Boston: Godine, 1973), 20–27.

  21. 21.

    Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake: A Personal Amplification,” Psychological Perspectives 50 (2007): 235–39.

  22. 22.

    Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xix.

  23. 23.

    Fan Jinlan, Baishe chuan gushi xingbian yanjiu (Study of the White Snake legend and storytelling) (Taibei: Wanjuan lou tushu, 2003), 95–129.

  24. 24.

    Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xix.

  25. 25.

    Liang Luo, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 179.

  26. 26.

    The popularity of the story of the white snake might have served to revitalize the creation myth of the Mother Goddess Nüwa, who created the Chinese from the yellow earth. Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake: A Personal Amplification,” Psychological Perspectives 50 (2007): 242.

  27. 27.

    Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 235.

  28. 28.

    Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 243.

  29. 29.

    Idema, 82. Buddhist teachings of the White Snake legend were delivered in the nineteenth-century narrative scrolls, The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak (Leifeng baojuan). For an English translation of the texts, see Idema, 9–84.

  30. 30.

    Strassberg, 24.

  31. 31.

    Strassberg, 25–26; Liang, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China, 177–207.

  32. 32.

    Tian Han, The White Snake, trans. Donald Chang and William Packard, in John D. Mitchell (ed.), The Red Pear Garden, 80–84.

  33. 33.

    Tian Han, 98–99.

  34. 34.

    Strassberg, 25–26.

  35. 35.

    Liang, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China, 204.

  36. 36.

    The Chinese flood myth emphasized the human conquest of the natural disaster and the origin of civilization rather than the flood that came to punish human sin as in the biblical or other Western flood myths. Famous classical flood myths include the story of the goddess Nüwa patching the sky with colourful stones and accumulating the reed ashes to stop the flood. See Lihui Yang and Deming An, with Jessica Anderson Turner, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 114–17.

  37. 37.

    Wilt Idema argues that later alterations of the White Snake stories may have followed the filial son prototypes of Dong Yong, Mulian, and Chenxiang, who save their mothers in Chinese folklores. See Idema, “Old Tales for New Times: Some Comments on the Cultural Translation of China’s Four Great Folktales in the Twentieth Century,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 9.1 (2012): 15–16; Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xvi–xix.

  38. 38.

    Liang, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 205.

  39. 39.

    Daisy Yan Du, “Suspended Animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In)animate Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947–1956,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11.2 (May 2017): 140–58.

  40. 40.

    Mary Ann Farquhar, “Monks and Monkeys: A Study of ‘National Style’ in Chinese Animation,” Animation Journal 1.2 (Spring 1993): 5–27.

  41. 41.

    Oksana Bulgakowa, “Disney as a Utopian Dreamer,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa & Dietmar Hochmuth, trans. Dustin Condren (Berlin: Potemkin Press, 2013), 116–17; Eisenstein, Disney, 118–25; Jay Leyda, ed. Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1986).

  42. 42.

    Sean Macdonald, Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (London: Routledge, 2016), 23. For an account of Uproar in Heaven, see Macdonald, 15–47.

  43. 43.

    Daisy Yan Du, “The Dis/Appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976,” Positions: Asia Critique 24.2 (2016): 435–79.

  44. 44.

    Du, ibid., 437.

  45. 45.

    Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67–93.

  46. 46.

    Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 86–89. Shapiro argues that ancient Chinese traditions manifest the wisdom of environmentalism. An anthropocentric Confucianism espouses human’s harmony with nature. Buddhism, a biocentric tradition, stresses reverence for the divine spark of life in all living beings, while Daoism, an ecocentric philosophy, embraces human alignment with nature’s flow of energy and “way.” Such traditions construct an understanding of nature in which humans stand not in opposition to it, but as part of it.

  47. 47.

    Li Bihua, Qingshe (Green Snake) (Hong Kong: Cosmos Book, 1986), 197–98.

  48. 48.

    Lu Xun saw the Leifeng Pagoda site as provoking thoughts on destruction and reconstruction of Chinese culture. See Eugene Y. Wang, “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic,” in Judith T. Zeitlin, Lydia H. Liu, and Ellen Widmer (eds.), Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center), 2003, 488–552.

  49. 49.

    Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2001), 107.

  50. 50.

    See, for example, Alvin Ka Hin Wong, “Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake,” in Howard Chiang (ed.), Transgender China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127–58.

  51. 51.

    Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2001), 105.

  52. 52.

    Morton, 110.

  53. 53.

    Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 252.

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  1. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng

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  1. Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Kwai-Cheung Lo

  2. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Jessica Yeung

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Ng, K.KK. (2019). The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong. In: Lo, KC., Yeung, J. (eds) Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_5

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