Writing History on the Body: Contingency, Rumor, and Realism in Feng Tang’s Tianxia luan

Abstract

This article reads Feng Tang’s Tianxia luan (2012) as a radical displacement of historical fiction in which sovereignty is no longer grounded in moral legitimacy or narrative causality, but in the negative inscription of power on the body. It argues that mutilation, loss, and corporeal deprivation function not as thematic motifs but as structuring operators of both political authority and narrative intelligibility. By foregrounding rumor, bureaucratic euphemism, and archival residues, the text replaces explanation with procedural opacity and fragmentation, thereby exposing the contingent conditions of historical “truth.” This epistemic instability extends to temporality itself: history is no longer organized by continuity but by irreversible gaps and belated effects. Tianxia luan thus articulates a poetics of contingency in which bodies, archives, and temporal disjunctions jointly produce historical experience.