the text that isn't there, or is it?

As I am presently busy closely reading - and believe me, when I say closely, I MEAN closely - the Anti-Hu Shi-campaign texts of the mid-fifties, I try to take every opportunity to read what others have had to say on the subject of Chinese Communist literary criticism. Last week I stumbled across an insightful article by Joey Bonner, entitled "Yü P'ing-bo and the Literary Controversy over Hung lou meng" (China Quarterly, no. 67, Sept. 1976, pp. 546-581). Why would I call this article insightful?

Firstly, Bonner confirms most of the suspicions I have been developing about Communist criticism in China in the 50s: yes, it wasn't just about Yu Pingbo and his detailed interest in the seating arrangements at one of the feasts held in The Dream of the Red Chamber. Yes, the introduction of Marxism-Leninism into academic literary studies wasn't merely cued to criticize people like Hu Shi and Yu, and no: Hu and Yu were not the only people the Communists could have potentially chosen to attack. Their point, most obviously, was one of grander design, of greater scheme - or, as they themselves repeatedly put it: of the 上層建築... I quote Bonner, precisely because I agree to a tantamount extent with her cause and wording: "In presenting the literary side of the controversy, it is my aim to substantiate the thesis that the debate of 1954-55 possessed a significance independent of its obvious political purpose." I could go on lauding the merits of Bonner's article, her succinct analysis of the Yu Pingbo-case and her elegant language, but this is the moment my inner buzzer sets off, because something suddenly seems vaguely strange, puzzling even, and almost incredible...

I assume - and the footnotes of Bonner's article along with some of the translated quotes confirm - that we have been reading the same texts. Not perhaps exactly the same as in identical, but definitely the same TYPE of texts. Why then, in Mao's name, do the Chinese original versions seem so unlike what the scholar Bonner has made of them?!

Now, I have been spending the greater part of the past two months reading Chinese Communist campaign texts, day in, day out nothing but Communist rambling about the evil legacy of Hu Shi's bourgeois thinking, the merits of class struggle and the "redologist" controversy over the feudalist reading of Xue Baochai's character as opposed to rebellious (if weak and self-piteous) anti-feudalist Lin Daiyu . And so far what I have come up with is a list of terms, of oppostitions, of ideologemes, and of quotes which, if strung together in a random jumble would probably render a pretty accurate example of your stereotypical 50s essay.

What I am trying to say is that I may be crazy, and I may have been reading a little too many of these texts, but I have the strong suspicion that there is a somewhat fundamental discrepancy between the SOURCE and the TEXT about the source. Maybe this is only my imagination (but then again this is what I also subtly infer the historian's purpose in life should be), but it seems to me that at times the texts people create about certain people, events, and other texts in history, are decidedly more interesting to read than the original sources these texts are based on. There, I've said it. Shame on me. But is this really cause for despair? Shouldn't some people be happy that there are other people out there who actually see the merit in the material that to most is too boring to trifle with? Isn't that the ultimate compliment to pay the writer of history?

I do not know, but I like to think that the text that isn't there, actually, literally, in what I read while I'm busy collecting data is the text that I am ultimately looking for.