Manuscript Modernity: Animating Pens and Brushes

This paper examines representations of bi, or pens and brushes, in print and film to reveal the ambivalent modernity of manuscript writing in modern China. Although manuscript writing did not disappear in the wake of the rise of mechanical writing in the early twentieth century, it has been romanticized as the purview of isolated, individual inscription practices that, unlike print, typewriting, and digitized writing, do not engage with mass culture. In fact, artists, writers, and filmmakers did not consider the pen to be incommensurable with other forms of mass media. In particular, pens, brushes, and other writing implements were used as metonyms for the changing nature of writing in the twentieth century, as well as for the production of cinema and its relationship to contemporary national political discourse. Drawing on representations of the bi from the eighth to the twentieth century which depict magical, enchanted, or miraculous pens and brushes, this paper reveals the bi as the means by which individual writers would articulate their relationships with history. It delineates a transition from an understanding of the bi as a manifestation of a writer’s interiority to a new understanding of these instruments as tools with which to convert the social relations of handwriting into a scene of collective labor.