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dialects that reveal Jia’s limitation in forging a linguistic style through a
negotiation between mimesis and diegesis. As Gunn (1991: 299) defines it
in the Chinese language context, “mimesis is a concept of style as imitating
conventions, as of speech.” By contrast, “diegesis is the concept of style
as having elements belonging to a shared inventory (e.g. Chinese) but
determined by an interpretation of phenomena (e.g. the adoption of a
Modern Standard Chinese to present the world of a text as a modernized
China), rather than by imitation, or mimesis, of the world portrayed in the
text (e.g. regional speech idiom of a given historical time)” (Gunn 1991:
298). In analyzing Lao She’s hallmark use of Beijing speech in his novels,
Gunn argues that “the more the local speech serves a mimetic function,
the more it specifies the environment as a particular one. . . . The more
particular the environment becomes, the more it restricts the sort of
diegesis that Lu Xun promoted, to avoid the interpretation of a story as
about a single locale” rather than an allegory of China as a whole (Gunn
1991: 114–115).
The tension between diegesis and mimesis is a dilemma that troubled
the great modern Chinese writers, such as Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mao Dun. Jia
Zhangke is similarly troubled: although he takes pains to employ mimetic,
descriptive features by peppering his films with the real-life experience of
real people speaking their real dialects, he expects the audience to view
his style as interpretive diegesis. As a result, he risks manipulating a real
community to create a fictive one. In this regard, Yiu Wai Chu’s exploration
of the “Hong Kong (G)local identity” in cinematic representation is
particularly inspiring. As Chu (2005) problematizes them, post-1997 films
that strive for an “authentic” portrayal of local Hong Kong history cast
leading actors and actresses who are not native to Hong Kong and cannot
speak a pure Hong Kong Cantonese. Using a postmodern cultural logic
and postcolonial identity politics perspective, Chu concludes that the
reconstructed Hong Kong local imaginary remains impure, hybridized,
“inauthentic,” unstable, and mixed. In a similar vein, it could be argued
180 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
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