ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Zhang Guixing’s novels Elephants and Monkey Cup, with a focus on how Chinese characters and radicals (“graphs”) are used to examine cultural imaginings and representational strategies in Sinophone literature. The chapter concludes that Sinophone literature consistently adopts Chineseness as a target for analysis. Zhang Guixing’s novels utilize the interactions between “characters” and “graphs” to develop a dialogue with Chineseness that runs through the inner essence of his stories, plot configurations, character development, and rhetorical devices. Chinese characters were originally created based on pictograms. The character 象 (xiang) in the title Elephant Tropes (Qunxiang), refers both to elephants and to truth, while also connoting writing, imagery, and symbolism. Elephants adopts these different meanings of xiang and uses Chinese characters and symbolic techniques in the search and hunt for xiang. As a result, however, the text deviates from the China/Chineseness that is its source and object. Monkey Cup focuses on “graphs” (wen). Beginning with the tattoos of the indigenous peoples of Borneo, the novel rethinks and rewrites concepts within Chinese culture including “civil administration,” “writing on ceremonial rites and regulations,” and “writing/speaking.”
